Difference between revisions of "The Visible Saints"

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The Visible Saints The History of a Puritan Idea by Edward S Morgan Morgan's historical writings greatly enhance our understanding of such complex aspects of the American experience as Puritanism, the Revolution, and the relationship between slavery and racism Visible saints were people who appeared to be godly Christian people who would go to heaven when they died. Strict Puritans in colonial days only allowed visible saints to worship with them because they thought that the church of England was irreverent for allowing everyone to worship in the same way. They were revered because they were open about their beliefs, and they influenced Father William Joseph Chaminade. (Source: Wikipedia The Puritans began a movement in the 16th century to purify the Church of England, or Anglican Church, by eradicating perceived remnants of Catholicism. Visible sainthood was central to this purification campaign. Puritans believed that individuals could prove in their daily lives that they were part of God’s chosen, or predestined, to receive salvation. Wholesome living and financial success would be visible signs of being one of God’s elect, otherwise referred to as sainthood. When it seemed England would not accept their reforms, many Puritans turned to America, where they created a “new” England full of visible saints..

Edmund S. Morgan takes issue with this assumption. The practice of testing prospective church members for actual inward "signs" of saving grace, he argues, originated neither with the Separatists in England and Holland nor with the Pilgrims in Plymouth, but in the Bay Colony itself. Furthermore, the Massachusetts Puritans did not at first insist upon these tests, but gradually came to require them over a period of years. It was not until the mid-163o's, when the "Great Migration" to New England was well under way, that they committed themselves to a degree of purity hitherto unknown in English Puritanism, and so launched a new era in Puritan ecclesiology as well as a new phase in the history of Congregationalism. The emigrants to Massachusetts, Mr. Morgan insists, were the first 394

  BOOK REVIEWS 395 Puritans to restrict membership in the church "to persons ... who had felt the stirrings of grace in their souls, and who could dem- onstrate this fact to the satisfactions of other saints." The practice then spread to the churches of Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, eventually finding its way back to England. In presenting his argument, the author provides impressive documentary support for the view that the Separatists in Holland did not contribute to this development, mainly because their talents were directed toward defending the principle of Separa- tion. What is more, the Separatists of Plymouth, if we may rely on William Bradford, did not require a testimony of grace until at least 1648, and did not fully incorporate the requirement into their church discipline until 1669. Whatever the Massachusetts Puritans may have learned from Plymouth, either through Deacon Samuel Fuller in 1629 or by later contacts, they did not learn to apply tests of saving faith to prospective church members. Quite to the contrary; it was probably the Bay Colony men who taught their Plymouth brethren the rigors of admission procedures. "It was the other Puritans, remaining within the Church of England," says Mr. Morgan, "who mapped the route from sin to holiness and explained the way God carried a saint along it." Indeed, well before the settlement of Massachusetts, two genera- tions of nonseparating Puritan divines had devoted themselves to the intricacies of the conversion process. Concerned with the indi- vidual rather than with the church, "they wished to trace the natural history of conversion in order to help men discover their prospects of salvation; and the result of their studies was to estab- lish a morphology of conversion, in which each stage could be distinguished from the next, so that a man could check his eternal condition by a set of temporal and recognizable signs." So long as these Puritans remained in England, however, they never asked for a narrative account of the "stages" as a requirement for church membership. Under Elizabeth and James I, anyone born into an English parish could qualify for communion upon coming "of age." All the established church required was a "profession" of faith, a promise to lead the moral life, and knowledge of ecclesi- astical discipline. After William Laud achieved prominence, first as Bishop of London and later as Primate of all England, seven- teenth-century Puritans were never in a position to demand more. Yet the ideal of a "pure" church had long been the ultimate goal

The Pilgrim Fathers, or Pilgrims, were part of a church congregation of religious separatists led by pastor John Robinson, church elder William Brewster and William Bradford. Separatists were a group of Puritans who advocated total withdrawal from the Church of England. The Separatists wanted the freedom to worship independently from English authority. Their quest for religious freedom took the Pilgrim Fathers to Colonial America where they had set their sights on New England which they had read about in a book called 'A Description of New England'. The author of the book was John Smith, famous for founding the first colony in Jamestown. Morgan posits and develops a revisionary main thesis: the practice of basing membership upon a declaration of experiencing saving grace, or "conversion," was first put into effect not in England, Holland, or Plymouth, as is commonly related, but in Massachusetts Bay Colony by non-separating Puritans. Characterized by stylistic grace and exegetic finesse, "Visible Saints" is another scholarly milestone in the "Millerian Age" of Puritan historiography.

Betlock, Lynn. "New England's Great Migration". Retrieved 28 April 2008.

2.Jump up ^ Hopley, Claire. "The Puritan Migration: Albion’s Seed Sets Sail". Retrieved 5 December 2008.
3.Jump up ^ Roscoe Lewis Ashley (1908). American History. New York: Macmillan. p. 52. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
4.Jump up ^ Barnette, Mic. "East Anglian Puritans 1629-1640". Puritans to New England.
5.Jump up ^ Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home, (2007).
6.Jump up ^ Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (2005).
7.Jump up ^ Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (1991).

Further reading[edit]

Adams, James Truslow (1921). The Founding of New England. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Robert Charles Anderson (1999). The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society. Three volumes.
Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. "Migrants and Motives: Religion and the Settlement of New England, 1630–1640," New England Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Sep., 1985), pp. 339–383 in JSTOR
Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (1991) excerpt and text search
Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1988) excerpt and text search
Breen Timothy H., and Stephen Foster. "Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Migration," William & Mary Quarterly 30 (1973): 189–222 in JSTOR
Cressy, David. Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (1987),
Dunn, Richard S. Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717 (1962).
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), comprehensive look at major ethnic groups excerpt and text search
Rutman, Darrett B. Winthrop's Boston (1965).
Thompson, Roger. Mobility and Migration: East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629–1640, (1994) online edition