Perry Miller

Errand Into The Wilderness

1. Errand Into the Wilderness 2. Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut 3. The Marrow of Puritan Divinity 4. Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia 5. The Puritan State and Puritan Society 6. Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening 7. The Rhetoric of Sensation 8. From Edwards to Emerson 9. Nature and the National Ego 10. The End of the World Index

The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature

On May 8, 1847, The Literary World—the newly founded vehicle in New York City for the program of “nativist” literature—reviewed an exhibition at the National Academy. The magazine had just undergone an editorial revolution and the new management was endeavoring to tone down the strident nationalism of the first few issues; still, the exuberant patriotism of the reviewer could not be restrained, for he had just beheld two exciting landscapes of Staten Island painted by J. F. Cropsey.

The Contribution of the Protestant Churches to Religious Liberty in Colonial America

While endeavouring to formulate these remarks I have come to suspect that there may possibly lurk in the title of my paper a misleading implication. The word “contribution” would seem to connote on the part of the Protestant churches a deliberate and concerted effort toward the triumph of religious liberty. Those of us who today prize ecclesiastical freedom would like to feel that our colonial ancestors of their own free will and choice undertook the march to liberty. Liberal-minded historians in particular are prone to sing the praises of this individual or that church for furthering this advance; they are inclined to gloss over or to apologize for the men and the institutions that hindered it.

The End of the World

5 T TTE find it hard to comprehend how men in medieval towns ja/~ could go cheerfully, as evidently they did, about their daily Wv g business when constantly before their eyes, sculptured on the fronts of their churches and cathedrals, were extended terrifyingly realistic scenes of the last judgment. Still harder to comprehend is that they could live, as certainly they did, with any degree of cheer when they all, learned or unlearned, could see no scientific reason why the awful blow should not fall at any moment. In their physics, the universe was not self-sustaining. Motion was given by God and all movement was propelled by Him, so that clearly He might at any moment call a halt. Then the trumpet would sound, motion would cease, the moon turn to blood, the stars fall like withered leaves, and the earth would burn to the accompaniment of horrible thunders and lightnings. In the midst of this scene, the dead would rise: out of the flames would speak absolute justice and by the lurid light of universal conflagration, speedily and unerringly, the one supreme court of law would pronounce sentence on each and every transgressor. In this cosmic setting, village gossips and usurers would get their just deserts. It would be not only the last, but also the finest show on earth, because it would be the perfect combination of aesthetic and moral spectacle. The elect would discuss it endlessly down the vistas of eternity and jubilantly extol this ideal mixture of destruction and retribution. The ecstasy of the anticipation sounds in the very cadences of the Dies Irae:

The Religious Impulse in the Founding of Virginia: Religion and Society in the Early Literature

T HE settlement of Virginia, so historians tell us, was a mercantile adventure, a purely business proposition. Behind it lay no organized religious interest as in Maryland or Massachusetts Bay, no Utopian expectation as in Pennsylvania, not even so vague a dream of philanthropy as created Georgia. It attracted no clique of intellectuals like the Puritan clergy, yet somehow, in its first tumultuous years, under the rule of a jointstock company and amid administrative confusion, it produced a literature. If we include in this literature, as legitimately we may, not only documents written in the colony but those produced in England by persons no less vitally concerned in the project, we can gather a small but substantial body of expression. Historians have treated this literature, most of it propaganda, much of dubious accuracy, a large part merely rhetoric, as possessing value only for documentation; literary critics cull out a few gems, and are condescending toward the remainder. I venture to suggest that there is an aspect to the material that has been overlooked: the men who wrote for and about Virginia, precisely because they were not dogmatists or visionaries, gave expression to a kind of averageness of the age that is worth serious study. Actually, if we take all this literature in review, put aside for the moment its utility as source material and regard it as an index, often an unwitting or inadvertent revelation, of what ordinary men, financeers, investors or planters, assumed were the cosmological conditions under which the enterprise was perforce conducted, then the Virginia literature becomes one of the most eloquent, even poignant, episodes in the emergence of the modern spirit. A great theme, vaster in conception than any of the writers could have framed by himself, elevates even the most ephemeral of these productions into a realm of universal meaning, and the philosophical student may, if he asks the right ques-

Solomon Stoddard, 1643–1729

The town of Northampton was settled in 1654, by pioneers coming up the valley from Connecticut. The physical tasks of the first years kept them from forming a church, but in 1659 they called Eleazar Mather to be their parson, who came with his bride Esther, daughter of the Reverend John Warham of Windsor. Mathers were either long or very short lived; Eleazar died on July 24, 1669, leaving Esther a widow of twenty-five, with three children and an estate of £524, of which £60 were in books, and Northampton went in search of a new pastor. In the forthright New England of the seventeenth century there was a method in such situations so frequently observed that it might almost be called a custom. When a minister died, after a town had invested in him to the extent of land and a house, and the widow was of marriageable age, they summoned a young bachelor to the pulpit. A few months after Eleazars death, Solomon Stoddard, eight years out of Harvard, came by invitation to exhibit a sample of his preaching; on March 18, 1670, he married Esther Mather. She bore him twelve children and in her old age, though very “lame of the Sciatica,” she still was spinning “at the Linen-wheel”; she outlived her husband by seven years and died in 1736 at the age of ninety-two.

The New England Mind: From Colony to Province.

A careful examination of the Puritan mind and the intellectual development of seventeenth-century New England.

The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas@@@The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860

It is part of the Online Library of Liberty web site http://oll.libertyfund.org, which was established in 2004 in order to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. To find out more about the author or title, to use the sites powerful search engine, to see other titles in other formats (HTML, facsimile PDF), or to make use of the hundreds of essays, educational aids, and study guides, please visit the OLL web site. This title is also part of the Portable Library of Liberty DVD which contains over 1,000 books and quotes about liberty and power, and is available free of charge upon request.