The Puritan Thrust

does one define Puritanism? No doubt there is a How sense in which Puritanism can be found in the Middle Ages or in civilizations other than our own; but I am concerned here with thelliisi~orilexperiences from which the name derives. It began as a sneer, was taken up in self-defense, and has established itself as a convenient label. But historians have differed widely in its usage. There is one tradition which restricts it to the more" orthodox branches represented by Presbyterianism in England and Congregationalism in New Engla~d.1Bos_ '?' A ton, with a vested Uiterest ~inits own resp-ectability, has often inclined to this usage. There is another tradition ;:,'~;':,' "~:~ which extends it through the Center and Left of the movement but stops short at the Quakers.' For my own ~art, if I am looking at the movement as a whole, I can see little reason for excluding the Quakers. An enter; prise wnich began in the sixteenth century by exhorting,,, I"~ j men to prepare themselves for a miracle of grace and' ~ + ',ended by asserting the presence of the Holy Spirit in 'every individual is one movement. If it has many stopping places en route, it has a logical terminus. If one movement requires one label, and if one is not to go to the trouble of inventing a new one, I am content to apply the term "Puritan" to the whole of it. However,

11 ]

Puritanism in Old and New England

it is not the name that matters but the unity, or continuity of experience,' that underlies the labels. , t.l"""" What was it that they all shared? The formal answer is dissatisfaction within the established church-the , ,.,,n",' church established by Queen Elizabeth as the English """fJ'iA answer to the problems created by the Reformation, the middle way between Rome and Geneva. This answer is true enough but not the most revealing. A better answer is one which seizes on the religious experience from which the dissatisfaction springs. The essence of Puritanism-what Cromwell called the "root of the matter'" when he surveyed the whole unruly ,)Iock-is an of conversion which separates, "i the Puritan from the mass of mankind and endows V\J"';~ him with the privileges and the duties of the elect, The, -0 f"" , ! root of the matter is always a new birth, which brings ",,!th it a conviction of salvation and a dedication to; -)..1_ warfareagainst sin. " There "is no difficulty in discovering what this ex1\ I, "perience involved. The whole object of the Puritan's existence was to trace its course in himself and to praduce it in others. He develops it in his sermons, systematizes it in his creeds, charts it in his diaries. Of innumerable examples, let me describe the experience of Thomas ,,, , Goodwin; rather, let me summarize his own descripI.' tion.' He wrote it, of course, for edification; and, if it \ .,,' ," was not published in his lifetime, we can easily imagine how many sermons were based on it and how many students of Magdalen College, over which he eventually presided, were given the opportunity of benefiting from it. The Goodwin home, in which he was brought up,

The Puritan Thrust

had its face set in the right direction. The family stance seems to have been like that of Bunyan's Pilgrim, with the burden on his back, the Book in his hands, and the cry ringing in his ears, "What shall I do to be saved?" At six, young Thomas was warned by a servant that, if he did not repent of his sins, Hell awaited him. At seven, he had learned to weep for them and look for the signs of grace. At twelve, he thought he had more grace than anyone else in his village. At thirteen, he went up to Christ's College, Cambridge, and attached himself, as an eager learner, to the more mature laborers in the vineyard. He learned of the ministries of Perkins and Ames. He heard of famous conversions. He joined the spiritual exercises which the faculty held in their rooms. He was taught, with other students, how to test the state of his soul. This was the life which he was to try to institutionalize in Oxford under the Cromwellian government and which a profane generation was to describe as Goodwin's scruple-shop; but meanwhile he was a beginner and for many years a beginner oscillating between hope and despair. For the real experience had not yet come. '-He kept on thliildng he had it, only to find himself deceived. He could go through all the cycle of selfe.""mination, ~epentance, exa~tation, and good only to discover that the sense of assurance evaporated. fie' elect kept their assurance. The doctrine not only said so: one had only to look at them to see. But he lost his. F~r a time Arminianism offered its consolations. Arminianism was that doctrine of free will which was asserting itself everywhere as a reaction against predestination and was coming to be the distinguishing

~"~rlel1ceJ

",orks,

Puritanism in Old and New England

mark of the official piety at the time Goodwin was a student. For a time this Arminianism seemed to square with his experience. If the human will was not enslaved bv sin but free to choose, he ought to expect the sense of a~surance to /luctuate. But in his heart he knew that Arminianism was wrong because the holy youths do not fall away. They persevere, showing that God has indeed seized them. At this point he faltered in his pilgrimage and surrendered, as he tells us, to his characteristic sin. If salvation eluded him, success was well within his reach. The holy preachers like Dr. Sibbes, the holy converts like Mr. Price, the holy tutors, and the holy students could go on brooding over their consciences. Thomas Goodwin would stick to a fashionable style and make his mark. He explains that he was saved from the consequences of this depraved decision by the real experience. It came to him, of course, through the medium of a sermon: the normal means employed by God to hammer the harde;;eaneart. The text was "Defer not thy repentance." As he describes it, the characteristic features of the experience emerge. He is completelYJ'_~.~~iys>for this is a i ;";','" '"J~ivine.J?E.~~_~~!.~~()'1.,,~ou.1.which is incapable. of \" ,- h~'lSJ!.self. He is show'!3!!.!1'inc~pabl~_b)'a revelatIon 0\",", , 0,uAofhis unworthiness which distinguishes the real thil)g '" .,,,-,,,.u~ from'pre~ious illusions. He compares the light shed by :'YA"'i, ",' grace ";pon the state of a natural man's soul with the """;'"L"light of the sunpiercing into the depths of a filthy1 ':"U'-C dungeon to reveal a /loor crawling with vermin. Alr ~ ways before, when he wept for his sins, he had kept some feeling of human merit. Now he knows he has none; that the natural man~ even when seemingly a
J

The Puritan Thrust

good man, is only a beautiful abomination, for the natural man has had no merit since Adam's..disobedi. ,,'nce, and Hell is his just destination. Then, in the mIdst' of this horror, comes the act of mercy: the voice that says to the dead soul, "ArISe' and live." Goodwin compares himself to a traitor'~hom a king has pardoned and then raised to the posi tion of friend and favorite. But, if the favorite has tremendous privileges, he also has tremendous duties. His life must be an endless war againsi:--tlle-sin-;hichdishonors his sovereign and an endless effort to be the means of producing in others that experience which has freed himself. I could, of course, have chosen better-known personages than Thomas Goodwin, for there is almost no famous Puritan who has not left some account of this experience, even though it is only, as in Cromwell's case, a few haunted lines written to a cousin in the midst of his travail.' I chose Goodwin because he is typical,' because ~.is\Vrjtil}g deliberately. for imitation, and because he illustrates one of the chara~t~ri~tTc weaknesses of the Puritan character-its want of 1)r0pori:,on:'-' .... ----- ..... -..... --.-. . However Puritans differ, they all have something in common with Thomas Goodwin. They separate the world of nature from the world o(grace. They insist that the natural man cannot grow in grace; he has to I be reborn. They explain the rebirth as a vivid personal experience in which the individual soul encounters y tile wrath and redemptive love of God. I t is an experience for which the church may prepare a man, and after which it may claim to guide him, but which in its )< essential nature is beyond the church's control. They (5)

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Puritanism in Old and New England

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The Puritan Thrust

liberation of the church from centuries of superstition was intended to have this result. ' They lived, however, in a society which obviously thought otherwise. When the Puritan looked around him in Elizabethan England, he saw two kinds of wickedness: the wickedness of people who were living without any benefit from religion and the wickedness of people who had embraced t~e wrong religion. The first class had always been a considerable section of mankind in the most Christian centuries. In this century of religious confusion, social disturbance, intellectual speculatIOn, and fierce acquisitive energy, godlessness confronted the Puritan in every walk of life. He met it on the Elizabethan roads, in those rogues and vagabonds who ,exemplified the modern problem of poverty. He met It In the underworld of the overgrown capital. He heard it in the announcement of businessmen that clergymen ought not to meddle with a merchant's business. Ordinary humanity in its alehouse; the crowd that thronged the Shakespearean theater; the intellects released from Christian tradition; the court with its worship of beauty, wit, honor, power, and fame-all seemed dedicated to the proposition that men are created withou t a soul to be saved or damned. Some insight into this world~or at least into its less sophisticated reaches~is provided by a list of thirty-two popular .err<Jrs~i!,h-'~iIliam Perkins, a founder of the Puritan discipline, catalogued for the instruction of the ignorant." It is a comprehensive indictment of the profane, the cheerful, the sUj>erstitious, the, free-enterprisers, and the people who thought it enough to be good

describe the new creature in the language appropriate to a special destiny: he is the elect, the chosen, the favorite, the peculiar people,' the saint. They' extol the liberty of the new creature, by whi"ch they mean the gift of eternal life, and the freedom which the regene~ate may claim on earth under Divine law. It is the ,duty of the saint to search out that law and live by it, and, no matter how much they differ, they are agreed about one thing. It demands ~lplin!,:-' The discipline i of self-trial~the perpetual self-acciisation of the Puritan dianes;tlie discipline ofse1f~denla:r,=-th" massive pr~ hibitions of the Puritari"cod~;thediscipline which ' Milton found in Cromwell when he said he could conquer the world because he had first conquered hims.elf.9 In later generations what they were talking abo~t could be confused with respectability; but in these days it was a holy violence under compression. Finally, '0.' ,.''A they derive this view of life from the(SC~ which >< ,', ~(",')j, they regard as the sole source of authority~the com- ; plete rule by which men must live~though we shall i see later how some regenerate spirits contrive to escape from this initial limitation. 1,<, _UI(~I' '''\ This doctrine of salvati~~as a logical development, on English soil, of the IProtestant d~ of ~) ~n,justificationh faith, and the all-sufficiency of the Scriptures. Whether it stems, as older historians w-;;;Con'tentto say, from Calvinism or, as we now ''',';:'r~)end to say, from ,Rhineland Protestantism,", it is ", ~.,,,' ehough to recognize that, in the opinion of those who held it, the whole movement of history which we call the Reformation, and which they regarded as a Divine

I
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Puritanism in Old and New England

citizens. Here are some of the items in this sYllabus of
errors:

The Puritan Thrust

settled, but the complexion which it finally acquired was thoroughly frustrating to the Puritan. He believed c ',' '. " in the total depravity of nature; he was told that men were not so fallen as he thought they were. He believed ,,!' that the natural man had to be virtually reborn; he was told that he could grow in grace. He believed that the sermon was the only means of' bringing saving ~n?wledge and ~hat the preacher should speak as a dYing man to dYing men. He was told that there were many means of salvation, that sermons by dying men to dYing men were often prolix irrational and socially disturbing, and that what they had to' say that was worth saying had usually been better said in some set form that could be read aloud. He demanded freedom for the saints to exercise their gifts of prayer and Rrophec)" only to be told that the needs of the community ~er,:, better met by the forms of common prayer. He felt instinctively that the church was where Christ ~welt in the hearts of the regenerate. He was warned that such feelings threatened the prudent distinction between the invisible church of the saved and the visible church of the realm. He insisted that the church of the realm should be judged by Scripture, confident that ,Script~re upheld him" and prepared to assert that nothing which was not expressly commanded in Scripture ough t to be tolerated in the church. He was told that God had left much to the discretion of human ;eason;, th~t this reason was exercised by public authorit)" which In England was the same for both church and state; and that whatever authority enjoined in its large a.rea of discretion, ought to be loyally ob:yed. ObVIOusly what we have here is a reconstruction of a "'- ,I,
11,1

"Drinking in the alehouse is good fellowship and shews a good kind nature, and maintains neighbourhood." "Howsoever a man live, yet ifhe call upon God on his death bed, and say Lord have mercy upon me, and so go away like a lamb, he is certainly saved." "Merry ballads and books, such as Scogin, Bevis oj Southampton, etc., are good to drive away time and remove heart qualms." "A man may go to wizards, called wisemen, for counsel; because God hath provided a salve for every
sore,"

"Every man must be for himself and God for us all." "A man may make of his own [property] whatsoever he can." "If a man be no adulterer, no thief, nor murderer, and do no man harm, he is a right honest man." This last seems an innocent sentiment until we recall that from Perkins' point of view this man is simply a beautiful abomination so long as he remains an \l!Iconverted soul. --This~~r~!le.;.at_~ world would not be allowed to flaunt its wickedness if religion were rightly understood. But what was the official religion? The Puritan found himself confronted by that Anglican piety which had developed side by side, and in conflict with his own, within the framework of the Establishment erected by Queen Elizabeth. The famous settlement of the first year of her reign had left a great deal un-

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I,ll

Puritanism in Old and New England

Catholic tradition within the framework of a national Protestant church. As stated here, it is derived from Richard Hooker, who was writing at a time when most Anglican bishops still subscribed to tha: theology of predestination whose implication~ the PUrItans were rigo-rously pursuing. But t.~e EstablIshment had clearly . refused to take this path, and before long they ad?pted the.Arminianismjwhich was much more congenIal to them. . The effect of these tendencies on the pUrItan can easily be imagined. Such a church had misconceived the "root of the matter." At best, it was a halfway house between a corrupt and a pure church; at worst, it was barely distinguishable from Rome. It was not run /' by saints; it was not organized for t~e ~roductlon of saints' and it did not repress the world s WIckedness. Wh~t were the elect to do? The first thing they could do was to organiz-"" using every available means for the infiltratio~-OfEnglish life and the converSlOn of authority to their point of view. They had plenty of opportunities both in the early days, when the character of the setclement was relatively undetermined, and later. The powers which could be brought to bear on dissidents in this society were limited even when fully deployed. Aristocracy imposed its shelter be.twe~n the individual and the state; so did corporate bodIes hke the ~niversities, the Inns of Court, the commercia.l companies and the municipalities. Above all, Parhament i was o;en to the efforts of the Re!ormers, and, thoug.h the sovereign's disfavor for any mterference WIth hIs ecclesiastical supremacy was ob,:ious enough, th~re were hopes that he might see the lIght. Could he resIst
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The Puritan Thrust

the plain word of God? So for three generations Puritans o':ganized, with a base in the universities, a grip on the press, a connection in the country houses and the counting-houses, and a party in Parliament. It was an advancing frontier of preachers, converts, and patrons, checked by many features in the social topography but .,}ways pushing forward to its goal-the completion of a half-finished Reformation. Naturally, one asks what made people receptive to such a demanding view of life, and naturally there have been suggestions that this doctrine of salvation was somehow connected with the aspirations of social classes. We have been told, with varying degrees of crudity and subtlety, that Puritanism was the ideology of the bourgeoisie." On that subject there are two simple observations to be made. First, Puritanism never offered itself as a~l:!.l!t. ,,-doctrin,,_of_~al~,,~io'!.. and it addressed itself neither directly nor indirectly to social classes but to man as man. Second, its attractions as a commitment were such that it made converts in all Cl;,ss~s-among aristocrats, country gentry, businessmen, intellectuals, freeholders, and small tradesmen. Earls were linked with tinkers in the fraternity of converted souls. However, some of the preachers' seed fell on stony ground, and some fell on ground in which it would never have germinated without artificial stimulants. High society and slum society were, on the whole, stony ground. So also were the field laborers, for the reasons that Baxter, who knew his parish as well as any clergyman in England, pointed out." Puritanism was the religion of a Book, and, without opportunity to master the Book and to engage in mutual criticism

, I,

Puritanism in Old and New England

and edification around it, it was hard to make any progress. Weavers at their looms, tradesmen in their shops, and yeomen farmers in their homes could be organized, but not so easily the peasant in the field. I' The fertilized ground was the ground which for one \" ,",' reason or another was out of sympathy with official ,,:'.-,' ';0" olicy: noblemen out offavor at court and r~ady to play ,"1(\ 1';'1." ,,'with Puritanism as a weapon or a consolatIOn; co~ntry ~. gentry having a hard time making ends meet durmg a " r:. century of inflation; city men irritated by royal or episcopal regimentation or casting their eyes on church lands' self-made men in rural industry who smarted unde; the snubs of neighboring gentry; rural craftsmen for whom there was either no church at all or some country tippler mumbling a prayer between visits to the alehouse; and Englishmen in all classes when the strongest national prejudice-fear of popery-swept across them and it looked as though safety lay m embracing the other extreme. Genuine Puritans, as I have defined them, were never more than a small minority, but there was plenty of discontent on which they c()uld feed, and the movemen t grew with the years as the country headed toward a crisis in the relations between king and Parliament. The growth of a constitutional opposition to the Stuart monarchy ~ad a separate origin from the Puritan movement, but It naturally ,,, :,eM'furnished the Puritan with his best hope of procuring a reform of the church. However, the more persistently the Puritan organized, the clearer it became that his attempt to remodel the church would be resisted to the limit of the government's capacity. Elizabeth had administered the first
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The Puritan Thrust

checks when the tendencies of the movement became plain. Once Puritans began to argue that church and :J' k " , stat..e...l1lustbe separated in England to the extent of' v", j put~ing ,the church on its scriptural basis, they ran into Klc,':' unflmchmg resistance. This was to separate the in- ',c,,") separable; to make the head of the state a member of ~ome sort of Presb~terian church; and to place the state, m the final analysIs, at the mercy of the interpreters of I the Divine Will. However much they might protest that the monarchy had nothing to fear and everything to gain '::: _ ; I,! , from a partnership with a scriptural church, Elizabeth (II "0;"0 I knew better and suppressed them. Her successor, James i D': 0 I I, who had had his own experience of Presbyterianism ;""C c f?llowed suit with that mixture of hard words and half~ )v.tl,nl;':Jrhearted action that served him as a policy. Charles I put Archbishop Laud in charge. By 1630, when a wit was asked by a puzzled inquirer what the Arminians held-Arminianism being the badge of the Laudian p"rty-he ~as .able to repl,~, "All the best bishoprics and deanertes m England. 14 By that time too the partnership of king and bishop was "going it al~ne." Parliamentary government had been suspended after three unworkable Parliaments, and all the means of coercion were being marshaled against the Puritan allies of the constitutional opposition. 1.'he reaction of the Puritans to this prolonged expertence of frustration varied with the individual. It was their d~y to ~earch for the Will of God, which meant. scanning his commanas-i,,'Scripture; or applying to Scrtpture such ~~n_as grace had restored, or fol- _ / lowing the lead of the spirit which dwelt in their hearts. What was the duty of a regenerate soul under an un-

i 13 J

Puritanism in Old and New England

regenerate government which persisted in maintaining ",a corrupt church? One reaction came early. It was noth'ing less than the fragmentation of the movement-the earliest symptoms of that process of fission which was ))",,1- to run through the whole history of pUrItanIsm. The first impulse of the movement had been to thInk In terms of a national church, directed by the elIte but embracing all members of the community: some English counterpart to the reformed churches of Scotland or the Continent. This continued to ~e th~ hope,of the majority and eventually expressed Itself In Engl~~h Presbyteri~ the !,uritanism of th,e ~Ig"t. But ~n ;;th~~s frustration precipitated a potentialIty Inherent,In the idea of election: the tendency to ~':!late t~e ehte from the mass ,and to substitute for the traiIiftOnaIldea ~h;-;~~h"~oextensive with society the idea of a church as a covenant~,<iJ:l2.cly,Q[_sai'!ts; Thiswas that press~re "", to identify the :,isible a.nd the InvIsIble church whIch 'figures SO promInently In the Center and Left of the
Puritan movement.

The Puritan Thrust

fort~nate in their leadership. After beginning by redUCIng the ch~rch. to a voluntary association, they ended by reducIng It to a collection of individuals, each of whom had separated from the other's corruptions. And so the Reformation achieved one of its logical possibilities, with the individual becoming a church in himself. '[he .same impulse carried only part way rejected ~eparatlon and continued to think in terms of an ?rthodoxyifi1Po~ed.on the c.ol'J,munit-t; but the eccleST.: astlcal medIum would be an association of covenanted .l.. churches, each composed of individuals who could gi~e satisfactory evidence of their conversion. A succession of distinguished figures in this tradition als()_fi1jg~at!,d t,'.',_r..~_I'J"_eth.erla,llc!.~, to work out there, so far as Eng:' Itsh and Dutch authority permitted, some of the impli- , catIOns of what we have come to call1'.ons_~~~tirlg Congt:~gatlOnahsm." ' In this of fragmentation were being etched "out in the years of opposition. On the Right, thefuture T \res~y~erians; in the Cent_erl. the future Congrega- I ~Ionalists; on the Left, t~e_Separatil1g Congregationai::-! tg~. In England, where all plans for the (utur~ of church --'' -gove:nment had to be subordinated to the struggle for surVIval of a preaching ministry, the distinctions might be blurred. Abroad, where the tasks of organization had to be faced, they emerged more sharply. Ii ,So tIJ~ firstresl'Q.n~e...!QJr~~the fragmentaI tlon of the, fi1o~.!":ent, and another is tlle-aedsTOft-lo ) mjgwe. But what of those whoremained? Ouiihf they' to rebel? Puri tans had never though t so. When an Elizabethan Puritan had his right hand cut off by the execu-

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The impulse might be carried s.ome way or all ,the way. Carried to its fullest extent, It meant separat~on: the duty to separate from the polluted mass of mankInd. So little groupS of saints peel off from the national church under the leadership of a minister to meet surreptitiously in each other's houses, to migrate to the Netherlands if England is made too uncomfortable for them and' to experience, wherever they go, the perplexi;ies as well as the privileges of their strange adventure. Along this route, hovering between separation , and some sense of communion with the church they , had left, went the Pilgrim Fathers;'Others were less l(

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Puritanism in Old and New England

tioner for writing a pamphlet which the government had found seditious, he raised his hat with his left hand to cry, "God save the Queen !"" Whell Charles I suspended parliamentary government in 1629, it was still far from dear that God ever intended his saints to take up arms against constituted authority. Evenin. 1642, when king and Parliament faced each orner in civil war, there were still some Puritans who would have held aloof if they had not been harried into parliamentary garrisons by a royalist rabble." But by that time the bulk of them had been converted to the duty of resistance, and the neutrals could hardly be surprised if they found themselves hustled on the streets because their dress and deportment marked them out as fellow-travelers of the Puri tans in arms. This transformation of the loyal subject into a subversive, if not inevitable, was not surprising. Hobbes reflected the feelings of most contemporaries in the 1630's when he observed that men who placed their duty to God before their duty to the state were poor security risks." Macaulay summed up the feelings of posterity when he seized on that quality in the Puritan's experience-his election-which made all terrestrial distinctions pale before the distinction between those who had looked on God's face and those who were lost in darkness." Like the Reformers everywhere, the Puritan had taught himself the duty of passive obedience to the state so long as the state seemed likely to reform the church. Like them, he became a rebel after the state had frustrated him and a better prospect offered itself. In this English situation he could reach his decision by one of two routes. The first was to
( 16

The Puritan Thrust

adopt the argument pleaded by his parliamentary allies: that under the EnglIsh constitution, in a crisis between kmg and Parliament, a.right resided in the Parliament to resist a conspiracy which had seized control of the r?ya~ government." This was an argument which took hIm mto the nature of political authority in general and of the English constitution in particular, for which nothmg m hIS Puritan experience had especially prepared hIm, except the conviction that the truth must ~Ieon the Parliament's side because that was where the mterests of religion lay. The second route was more direct, and it was to have an ominous future. It consisted in persuading himself that the ordinary duties of obedIence .had bee? set aside by an extraordinary call to the samt.s. ThIS was a doctrine which could be m~oked to Justify any violence until the embattled samts were dazed by the ruin they had caused. So far I have been attempting to sketch the nature o~ the Puritan thrust as it developed in opposition. I(t ~hat ~se ~~I;'!~ ... t~~.R~lTitanmake ofl'o",eI}.]ust as it IS pOSSIbleto say that all Puritans shared a conversion experience, so it is possible to say that the Puritan ";; ". ",', thrust carried aIL!'!!!'i!2!!~i_ll_~ determined effort to """ 'N-1')'l" er~ct ~.h(2!LS()!!'.'!'!'.I1i.tY.:' 21 They"di~~';;--s~nse -~f'"J' n l , mISSIOn to comple,te that tremendous process which AI , God had begun WIth the Reformation-the liberation 'f, "fc(, 1-,. of hjschurchJrom ce.'!.~~,~_9L~~..ti..~iQ.~~ir.;C~~~or: They throw themselves into this crusade with aiI--'th~ , , i, intense ardo~ of which the elect areCiP"able. But what :~"~-'':I/ ~'~_nfl can be predIcted about the shape of their holy com- ",.., , ~unlty ,;hen the opportunity comes to embodr, the VISIonm mstltutlons? Only this-that the grand-obJe~t

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Puritanism in Old and New England

"""" will be the regeneration of fallen man. Human history is ,;, the field in which God gathers his elect, and the suc.,,,'~ess of the holy community will be measured by the of sain,ts-by that miracle of rebirth within 'l -1,',', ,. p~oduction the human sOfulwhichh(hormsthhegreat end of all Pluritan striving and rom w ic all ot er good t h ings wi l flow, Beyond this affirmation of faith and purpose, all else is uncertain. As they face the problems involved in creating a political order fit for saints to live in, they will endeavor to discover the Will of God. But what will (~~::e fi~o~?~~e:~~~:;:~ta~nn~~~:~a~L~~~h~~o:~~' / Th-~t-i~-;-ne-pos~ibf~answer":""typified by M.~~achusetts_ \._ and Ri.gtI_k~~I1.&..!'lIr.i~ani~l11in~l1gl,md. Does he want: a s~rat,ion, oi5.h',u_,rch,an,A_s.!~.~e,t,o pro,tect the purity, ( oLt:!l~lI.!'!.ch_!,nd the peace of the stat~? That is an- " (other answer-typified by _Rh24"J~lan_d and the~.l1g\Jish~~t:i'.t.i~ts. Does he want a democratic republic, . in which the government of the state will be modeled on the government of the democratic congregation? That is another answer-typified by the party to be known as Levellers in English history. Does he want a dictatorship of saints to inaugurate the millennium? That will seem a very exhilarating possi bili ty amid the wreckage of the English Civil Wars. However, all this lies in the future, while the job in hand is to escape from, or to destroy, the regime which frustrates them all.
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