Abstract
In this chapter, Rogers-Stokes publishes for the first time many of the brooding commentaries on the looming failure of the infant godly commonwealth of Massachusetts recorded by puritan minister Thomas Shepard in the late 1630s–early 1640s. Rogers-Stokes makes the case that Shepard deliberately copied his records of trial sessions, in which people were predominantly struggling to discover their state of grace, into this notebook to support and illustrate his fears for New England—fears he felt at a remarkably early stage of settlement. These records of difficult seeking illustrated, for him, not only his own shortcomings as a minister, but a fundamental rot at the core of the godly commonwealth. Rogers-Stokes presents Shepard’s writing on his perception of heresy in John Cotton’s church in Boston, his own church in Cambridge, and in the colony of Massachusetts itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Astoundingly, Selement and Woolley dismissed the rest of the notebook’s contents: “Thirty leaves of the volume consist of sermon notes, which have not been transcribed because they have nothing to do with the Confessions.” While the pertinence of the sermon notes may be tangential, the rest of the notebook is directly related to the records of trial. George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley, eds. Thomas Shepard’s Confessions (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981): 26.
- 2.
More information on, and a specific application of, the concept of scrupulosity is found in Ross W. Beales, Jr., “The Half-Way Covenant and Religious Scrupulosity: The First Church of Dorchester, Massachusetts, as a Test Case,” The William and Mary Quarterly 31, No. 3 (July 1974), 465–480. Francis Bremer provides a concise description of declension in the later generations of puritans, as well as the jeremiads delivered in response to perceived declension, in Chapter Eleven of The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1990), particularly 160–1.
- 3.
The first serious crisis of puritan settlement in New England has traditionally been called the Antinomian Controversy; Michael Winship makes a convincing case for calling it the Free Grace Crisis based on the transparency of that name compared with “Antinomianism.” He provides an excellent study of the crisis in Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and the Free Grace Crisis in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). David D. Hall edited an invaluable collection of primary sources related to the crisis: The Antinomian Controversy 1636–1683: A Documentary History, 2nd. ed. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990).
- 4.
“The vigilance of Mr. Shepard was blest for the preservation of his own church,” said Abiel Holmes in 1800, “and of the other New-England churches, from the Antinomian and Familistical errors, which began at this time to prevail: ‘And,’ according to Dr. Mather, ‘it was with respect to this vigilancy, and the enlightening and powerful ministry of Mr. Shepard, that when the foundation of a College was to be laid, Cambridge, rather than any other place, was pitched upon to be the seat of that happy seminary.” Abiel Holmes, The History of Cambridge (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1801), 17. https://ia802701.us.archive.org/18/items/historyofcambrid00holm/historyofcambrid00holm.pdf
- 5.
Quoted in Michael G. Ditmore, “Preparation and Confession: Reconsidering Edmund S. Morgan’s Visible Saints,” The New England Quarterly 67, No. 2 (June1994), 314. Emphasis added.
- 6.
See Leslie M. Harris, “Imperfect Archives and the Historical Imagination,” The Public Historian 6, No. 1 (February 2014), 77–80.
- 7.
Autobiography, in Michael McGiffert, ed., God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994): 51, 57.
- 8.
McGiffert, God’s Plot, 48.
- 9.
McGiffert, God’s Plot, 63–64.
- 10.
McGiffert, God’s Plot, 65–66, 55, 66.
- 11.
His later parishioner, Nicholas Wyeth, expressed the same dread fear in much the same circumstance: his young son died on the voyage over, and Nicholas wondered if it was a sign from God that he should not have gone to New England. I recount his story in Chap. 5.
- 12.
McGiffert, God’s Plot, 66.
- 13.
See Ditmore, “Preparation and Confession,” 311–2 for a brief but full description of the Hooker company’s experience in Newtown.
- 14.
McGiffert, God’s Plot, p. 57.
- 15.
Shepard did not marry Joanna Hooker until October 1637—a year and a half after his wife Margaret’s death. This was an unusually long period of widowhood for the time, when men and women usually remarried within a few months of their bereavement. We cannot know what caused this delay. Without any hard evidence to explain it, I speculate that the foreboding Shepard felt about his work in Massachusetts may have caused him to postpone remarrying, perhaps thinking he would leave Newtown to join the Hookers in the Hartford colony. Date quoted by J. A. Albro in his introduction to Thomas Shepard, The Sincere Convert and The Sound Believer (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1999): cxxxvii.
- 16.
Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996): 32n, 48–49, 46.
- 17.
While most of the houses were quickly filled by new settlers who became new members of the newly constituted church under Shepard in February 1636, fears of another blow to the town lingered, eventually resulting in the General Court’s Shawshine land grant to inhabitants of Cambridge. The grant was parceled out to 113 inhabitants of the town on July 9, 1652. Edward J. Brandon, ed., Records of the Town of Cambridge (Formerly Newetowne) Massachusetts, 1630–1703 (Baltimore: Clearfield Company, Inc., 2002): 96–98.
- 18.
In the ideal Congregational church, the teacher preached the sermon and was responsible for explicating scripture, while the pastor led the people in prayer and took the lead in visiting the people and counseling them.
- 19.
Dunn and Yeandle, eds., Journal, 58.
- 20.
Dunn and Yeandle, eds., Journal, 61. Scholars have debated whether this was when the practice of requiring a relation of faith for membership was begun, as the profane “confessed their sins” before being received. Edmund Morgan’s well-thought out argument that Cotton introduced the relation was presented in Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: Cornell University Press, 1963), particularly Chap. 4, and held sway for three decades. Baird Tipson was representative in accepting Morgan’s hypothesis in his pivotal article “Invisible Saints: The ‘Judgment of Charity’ in the Early New England Churches,” Church History 44, no. 4 (December 1975), particularly pp. 465–6. Michael G. Ditmore successfully challenged it throughout his “Preparation and Confession.”
- 21.
Ditmore, “Preparation and Confession,” 14. In that same month, December 1633, immediately after Winthrop recorded the unexpected conversions at Boston, he recorded the first stirrings of trouble from Roger Williams, pastor at Salem. Williams sent Governor Winthrop and his assistants a copy of a treatise he had written claiming that King James, who had first granted the settlers in America their land, had no right to do so, as he was not truly a Christian king but an antichrist (as was his son, the current Charles I). This position—a treasonous stand that could endanger the entire colony—was strongly condemned by the government and the other ministers of the colony. A few months later, in March 1634, Hooker made his first appeal to the government for permission to remove with his congregation. Both issues would resurface in the fall, as Hooker reiterated his request in September and Williams pursued his plan to send the king his treatise in November. When Shepard arrived in October 1635, Williams was once again before the General Court in Boston for his treason, and the first members of the Hooker congregation set out from Newtown. So we can imagine Shepard landing in Boston at a time of some religious confusion and even potential crisis. A respected minister in Newtown was leaving with almost his entire congregation, devastating the town, a respected minister in Salem was becoming more and more unorthodox in his views, and the assistant governor was a polemical figure.
- 22.
See Winship, Making Heretics, Chap. 5 for a granular account of the spread of heretical ideas in Boston and Shepard’s early and constant warnings about it.
- 23.
John Winthrop’s descriptions of the Crisis always note that “the Church of Boston” was the prime mover in challenges to the government and religious orthodoxy, such as its March 1637 demand that Boston church members be allowed to attend civil court sessions that dealt with “cases of conscience before the church.” No other towns’ churches are recorded as joining with Boston in its heretical demands, and it was “the church of Boston” alone that “tendered a petition” on Wheelwright’s behalf, “justifying” his outrageous sermon in which he said that all the ministers of the colony “walked in a covenant of works … and called them antichrists, and stirred up the people against them with much bitterness and vehemency.” The polling place was moved from Boston to Newtown because of the concentration of heresy in Boston, and when “those of Boston” tried to delay the casting of votes while they read a lengthy petition in defense of Wheelwright, the delegates who had traveled there from other towns at last revolted, “the people crying out for election,” and carried the day. JJW, pp. 116–119.
- 24.
See Introduction. John Winthrop recorded the event and stated that “The reason was, for that most of them (Mr. Mather and one more excepted) had builded their comfort of salvation upon unsound grounds, viz., some dreams and ravishes of spirit by fits; others upon the reformation of their lives; others upon duties and performances, etc.” Dunn and Yeandle, eds., Journal, 93.
- 25.
Dunn and Yeandle, eds., Journal, 314.
- 26.
These were the inextricable role of scripture in interpreting the actions of the Holy Spirit, the reasonableness of expecting potential converts to exhibit godly behavior in the world as they sought the Lord, and how that godly behavior could be interpreted as a potential sign of grace (but not as a good work to be rewarded with grace).
- 27.
Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 25.
- 28.
Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 28–9. Emphasis added.
- 29.
Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 29.
- 30.
Dunn and Yeandle, eds., Journal, 112–3.
- 31.
Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, p. 33.
- 32.
McGiffert, God’s Plot, 67.
- 33.
It also contains the notes of a later person who somehow came into possession of Shepard’s notebook.
- 34.
For instance, Michael P. Winship refers to Shepard writing this note “grimly to himself” in Making Heretics, 222.
- 35.
McGiffert, God’s Plot, 76. McGiffert includes this piece of writing without any comment other than the note under which he groups a few pieces of Shepard writing from this notebook: “The following material consists of notes written by Shepard in the mss. of the Autobiography.” But this list is not related to the Autobiography. Indeed, Shepard’s suspicion had been growing against Cotton since early in 1636, when they exchanged increasingly hostile letters after Shepard accused Cotton of inciting Familism and other heresies with his preaching. Winship describes this exchange in Making Heretics, 64–69.
- 36.
I’m grateful to Dr. James Cooper and Dr. Kenneth Minkema for their collaboration on reading and interpreting this previously unpublished manuscript. Personal email, March 18, 2018.
- 37.
Edmund S. Morgan, “New England Puritanism: Another Approach,” The William and Mary Quarterly 18, no. 2 (April 1961), 241–242.
- 38.
Morgan, “New England Puritanism,” 241–242.
- 39.
“The second and third generations may have been equally religious; but they may have become so uncertain of their own ability to distinguish true conversion from false, and they may have become so certain of the damnation awaiting those who participated unworthily in the Lord’s Supper, that they were inhibited from joining the churches…” Morgan, “Letters to the Editor,” The William and Mary Quarterly 19, no. 4 (October 1962), 644, 3.
- 40.
Emphasis added.
- 41.
Thomas Shepard, The Sincere Convert and The Sound Believer (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1999): 46–55. Shepard’s verdict on these unbelievers is damning: “And now come and see the greatness of this sin. 1. It is a most bloody sin; it is a trampling under foot the blood of the Son of God. (Heb. x. 21.) 2. It is a most dishonoring sin; [by] rejecting him thou dost break all those laws of God in an instant, and so dost dishonor him. 3. It is a most ungrateful sin; it is despising God’s greatest love, which the Lord takes most heavily. 4. It is a most inexcusable sin; for what have you to cast against Jesus Christ? O, my sins are great, thou wilt say. But take Christ, his blood will wash from thee all they sins… 5. It is a most heavy sin. What sin will gripe so in hell as this?” Shepard, The Sincere Convert, 53–4.
- 42.
Shepard, The Sincere Convert, 196–7. Shepard reiterates this in The Parable of the Ten Virgins, saying, “Hence there is nothing on God’s part, nor yet on your part, that can keep you from him. No sins, no wants, unless it be your will. … Therefore now, whoever will shall have him, let him take him.” To the objection “I dare not,” because of sin, Shepard replies “O close with him to take sin away; because sick, therefore receive him.” Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1997): 135–6.
- 43.
Shepard, The Sincere Convert, 202. Emphasis added. See this message that a person with true faith will obey “God’s call, command, beseechings to come in” repeated in “The Sound Believer” across pages 229–235.
- 44.
Shepard, The Sincere Convert, cxvii. This was one kind of passivity; the Antinomians actually practiced another by claiming direct revelation from God. They did nothing to provoke this revelation, and it was an example of God turning them to himself. “By crying up Christ, they destroyed the use of faith to apply to him.”
- 45.
Shepard, The Sincere Convert, cxlviii, cxlix.
- 46.
“O the hope of Israel, the savior thereof in the time of trouble, why art thou as a stranger in ye land, as one that passeth by to tarry for a night?”
- 47.
Stansby also quotes Revelation 3 at the end of his record, which may tie to notes Shepard made in the NEHGS notebook on nine sermons on Revelation, by John Cotton and by Shepard himself. These are on Revelation 4:1–2 and 9–11, 5:12, 17 and 5:13; 6:1–2, 3–4, 7–8, and 9–11.
- 48.
“Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove: mine eyes were lift up on high: O Lord, it hath oppressed me, comfort me.”
- 49.
Shepard, The Sincere Convert, 76–77.
- 50.
Mary Gookin noted that “I heard and lost what I heard to wounding of my heart many a time,” and Isabell Jackson repeatedly grieved that she had spent so much time with means “and got no more good” from it.
- 51.
Full text in McGiffert, God’s Plot, 77–9.
- 52.
Emphasis added. Within Shepard’s voluminous published sermons, he essays the sad status of churches in Europe which have been deprived by Christ of their liberties, then turns to New England: “And for ourselves, what shall I say? I cannot but bless God, [and] rejoice to see many precious, holy ones … but I must profess, and cannot but mourn for others, men that were eminent under bondage, but never worse than here; as if the Lord should say, Look, here be your eminent ones; look, and fear, and mourn, you ministers of my house; here be the people you had thought had been converted.” The Works of Thomas Shepard, Vol. III (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1853): 295. https://books.google.com/books?id=JYF-cp2Q5WMC&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q&f=false
- 53.
McGiffert, God’s Plot, 74–79. He puts this first, taking it out of order as it appears in the notebook.
- 54.
Albro in Shepard, The Sincere Convert, cxliii, cxliv, cxlv.
- 55.
See Lori Rogers-Stokes, “Deacons’ Account Book, 1638–1704,” New England’s Hidden Histories, http://www.congregationallibrary.org/nehh/series1/CambridgeMAFirst
- 56.
While Shepard would eventually decide to remain in Cambridge, he did send his son Samuel, born in 1641, to live with his Grandfather Hooker. Albro in Shepard, The Sincere Convert, clii–cliii.
- 57.
Flip the book over and we see the first page has just one mysterious line: “how can this be agt xtians wn only agt earth.” This is followed directly by a page with the statement: “if it was
theymy world I would not desire any should love it but wn this [] now let every one then love it”; running up the side of the page near the binding is the admonition “Let nothing content her but the Lds presence to be ever neare him yn sin will be ever bitter:/.” At the bottom of the page, written upside-down is the cryptic note “sin bec. Longe stand.” - 58.
Patricia Caldwell opens the final chapter of her book with a consideration of this final page before the “confessions,” saying “Shepard was obviously thinking of the prophecy in 3d Isaiah, after the return of Judah from exile [and] it may be that he was planning a sermon based on that text. But turning the page, the reader encounters the first of the fifty-one confessions Shepard recorded at Cambridge that we have been discussing here; thus the line from Isaiah seems to express some hope of his that such a collection of religious experiences could itself be a foundation, not only of this particular church but of the future glory of an exiled people restored.” It’s very surprising to see this argument advanced when the title written above this opening line is “Causes of N: E: want of life;”—a distinctly non-hopeful opener. Caldwell herself goes on to note in this concluding chapter that the records, difficult as they are, would have failed to gratify the hope she assigns to Shepard. Why Caldwell saw the original notebooks but, first, failed to take into account all of Shepard’s negative commentaries and, second, continued to rely on the transcriptions, is unclear. Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 187.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rogers-Stokes, L. (2020). The Shepard Context. In: Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50845-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50845-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50844-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-50845-6
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)