THE PURITANS OF MASSACHUSETTS
The Puritans were English Protestants who sought religious freedom in the American colonies. Unlike the Separatist Pilgrims, they stayed within the Church to "purify" the Anglican Church of England. They believed the English Reformation had not gone far enough in reforming the doctrines and structure of the church. Their demands led to persecution in England, and wealthy Puritans formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony and received a charter from King Charles l in March of 1629. As the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the only English chartered colony whose board of governors did not reside in England, the settlers were able to maintain their Puritan religious practices free from interference. The Puritans first settled in Boston, Massacusetts. In a sense they became Separatists just as the Pilgrims.

The first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the devout Calvinist and Puritan John Winthrop.
On his way to America aboard the Arbella in 1630, he wrote the stirring speech, A Model of Christian Charity.

Referring to Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14), John Winthrop called the new Massachusetts Bay Colony they were about to form a city upon a hill, "that all eyes would be upon us." This speech is the premium expression of the Covenant Theology of the Puritans, a Reformation doctrine which held that God bound himself in an agreement with a nation and its people. The Puritans believed that if they lived the Christian Way of the Bible, that Providence would bless their land and their people. They were urged to perform good works in order that their society might fluorish and that they might avoid God's judgement. Thus the government legislature was drawn strictly from adult male church members.

The central event in the lives of Puritan society was the Sunday gathering in Church for instruction, worship, and fellowship. The sermon was the dominant form of communication among the Puritans. As the Puritans had a passion to know and do God's will, the sole source for the sermon was the Bible. The Puritans preached a Covenant of Grace, that sinners were totally dependent on God's divine mercy. Famous ministers included the Reverends John Cotton and Richard Mather, and later Cotton Mather, a descendant of the first two.

Education was a key component of the Puritan community. Elementary education was a parental responsibility, but soon, settlements with fifty or more families were required to appoint a schoolmaster, and communities with 100 families were required to set up a grammar school on the English model. The study of the Bible was integral to education. As the universities of England were closed to the Puritans, the only way they could obtain a supply of learned ministers for their Churches was to establish a college of their own. The Massachusetts Bay Colony approved a grant in 1636 to open a college in new Cambridge, and the college was opened in 1638 and named after its first benefactor, the Reverend John Harvard, who died at age 30 and left Harvard half his fortune and a library of 400 volumes.

In 1643 the English colonies decided to cooperate and form the United Colonies of New England, which included the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; the Separatist Pilgrims who had first settled in Plymouth in 1620, and who were absorbed into the Royal Colony of Massachusetts in 1691; Connecticut, founded in 1636 by the Puritan Reverend Thomas Hooker; and New Haven, founded in 1638 under the leadership of Reverend John Davenport and Governor Theophilus Eaton, and later absorbed into Connecticut by a new charter in 1662. Missing of course was the religiously tolerant colony of Roger Williams in Providence, Rhode Island.

Their passion for righteousness unfortunately led to intolerance towards others, such as towards the Pequot Indians and the Quakers. In a time of colonial expansion, the Puritans engaged in war against the Pequot Indians. In May of 1637, the Puritans surrounded the Pequot village on the Mystic River in Connecticut and, after setting the village ablaze, massacred over 500 Pequots, in the name of divine retribution. The Quakers were particularly persecuted by the Puritans for their intransigence, and, as corporal punishment was of no avail, four were hung, one being Mary Dyer in Boston on June 1, 1660. Herein lay the great irony: the Puritans came to America to escape religious persecution, yet King Charles ll ordered them to stop hanging for religious reasons!

The Puritan experiment was never viewed the same after the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, which left 20 dead based on "spectral evidence." The episode began in February of 1692 when the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem village, began experiencing fits which local physicians diagnosed as bewitchment. The two girls claimed they were being tortured by the spectres of two women. A Caribbean Indian slave named Tituba, who belonged to Reverend Parris, was implicated as the source of the forbidden magic. Others were named in confessions, and accusations began spreading throughout the area. The Governor Sir William Phips then established a special court to try the cases. Before it was over, over 140 people had been indicted, fifty had confessed, twenty-six had been convicted, and nineteen had been hung, and one man was crushed to death. The disquieting episode came into question after the Governor's own wife was implicated, and the special court was dissolved through the pleas of ministerial leaders such as the Mathers.

Nonetheless, in the long term, the Puritan way has had a profound effect on the American mind. Known as the Protestant Ethic, the American way of "never wasting precious time" persists to this day. Puritanism is an American heritage one can treasure, for it provided an ideal for individual excellence through worship of God our Creator, hard work, and a strict code of ethics.


REFERENCES
1 Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible of 1611. Original Text, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts.
2 Morison, Samuel Eliot. Oxford History of the American People. Oxford University Press, New York, pages 61-74, 1965.
3 Noll MA. A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. WB Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, pages 40-53, 1992.
4 Noonan JT. The Lustre of Our Country, The American Experience of Religious Freedom. University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1998.
5 Middleton R. Colonial America, A History. Third Edition, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, England, pages 83-84, 173-181, 2002.


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