The first meeting house in Boston, built in 1632, had mud walls and a thatched roof, as did the Puritans’ first homes. Literacy in New England was high (though many could not write, writing and “doing sums” being a more advanced stage of education). For Puritans, who put so much stake on the Bible, reading was fundamental to Christian education. Mothers were initially the chief teachers of reading and writing in the home. Soon every New England town had its grammar school for boys, while less formal “dame schools” watched over the education of the girls.
In an astonishing act of daring, the Puritans, even in the first decade of their colony, founded a college, which would soon take the name of Harvard. Patterned after Cambridge University, from which most Puritan ministers had graduated, Harvard College faithfully reflected the Puritan community. The “rules and precepts” of 1646 stipulated that every student “shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life.” The Bible was to be read twice a day, with all students expected to be “ready to give an account of their proficiency therein.”
Harvard, though designed for the training of ministers, also offered education in the classics of antiquity, Renaissance languages, Aristotelian physics, and natural and moral philosophy. When a site for the infant college was selected across the Charles River from Boston, the town was called Cambridge, in memory of the Puritans’ English past and with large hopes for their American future.
The Puritans had left England to escape bishops and cleanse themselves of an impure worship. In Massachusetts Bay, the Puritans intended to recreate the New Testament church, to fashion what they had hoped the Church of England would turn out to be. They came not for freedom of religion in the abstract but for their freedom of religion in particular. They never intended to found a colony where all religious dissidents of whatever persuasion, or none, would flock.
Far from it, they did their best to keep “the New England Way” consistent, pure, undefiled. To do this, education was not enough; they sometimes had to purge, sometimes persecute, sometimes even hang.
Orthodoxy was never as complete as the clergy and the magistrates would have wished. From the beginning Baptists and Quakers lived in and around the colony. Banishments and hangings only slowed their growth.
In addition, many Puritans, like all Europeans of the time, practiced magic, followed astrological charts, and kept ancient superstitions alive – much as people do today. Such popular religion did not reject Puritan orthodoxy; it merely supplemented it. The supernatural world could not be confined to the prayers of the clergy or the explicit promises of Scripture. Signs and portents, visions and wonders, fortunes told and illnesses strangely cured, private rituals to ensure the fertility of fields and marriage – these lived side-by-side with Puritan orthodoxy.
Most troublesome were people who directly challenged Puritan orthodoxy. One such challenger, Roger Williams, a Baptist, argued that (1) the Puritan churches could not claim to be part of the Church of England while trying all the while to transform it; (2) the civil government had no business enforcing church rules or punishing its detractors; (3) all Puritan settlers were trespassers because they had not purchased the land from Indians.
Williams presented a bill of indictment so threatening that the General Court of Massachusetts determined in October 1635 that “the said Mr. Williams shall depart out of this jurisdiction within six weeks.”
But where to go, with winter approaching, with a pregnant wife and a 2-year-old daughter? Williams eventually struck out on foot, walking south through January’s bitter cold, until he crossed the Bay Colony’s boundaries. For fourteen weeks, he wrote, “I knew not what neither bed nor bread did mean.” He accepted meager fare from the Narragansett Indians, whose language he had learned and whose confidence he had won.
At last, Williams came to Narragansett Bay, where he bought some land from the natives and named his settlement Providence, “in a sense of God’s merciful Providence unto me in my distress.” And so the colony of Rhode Island was born, one open to those of any religious persuasion or none.
Maranatha!
(mar-uh-nath-uh – “Our Lord Comes”)
Pastor Steve can be reached at PastorSteve@MaranathaBibleChurch.org