CHAPTER 16: Marriage and Family in Puritan Thought
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Marriage and Family
in Puritan Thought
The common idea that typical English Puritans were solitary ascetics is as wrong as can be. The word ‘ascetics’ points to the Manichean mentality of despising physical pleasure and the body itself, and this certainly is something that two generations ago Puritans were often said to do. There is no reason to doubt that the following verse was written in full seriousness:
The Puritan through life’s sweet garden goes
To pluck the thorn, and cast away the rose;
And hopes to please, by this peculiar whim,
The God who fashioned it and gave it him.
But the picture is entirely mistaken: like Calvin before them, the Puritans affirmed the duty of appreciating the goodness and delights of the material creation, and forbade only such immoderate and disorderly enjoyment of these gifts as would steal one’s heart from the Giver. Moreover, Puritans were not solitaries; they valued their friends, cultivated their friendships, wrote affectionate letters to each other, and held no brief whatever for choosing isolation when one could join with a group of believers. Finally, nothing shows the groundlessness of imagining Puritan people as solitary ascetics more clearly than does their ideal for marriage and family.
They did not invent this ideal; it is there in the original Reformers. But in teaching and enforcing it they gave it such strength, substance, and solidity as to warrant the verdict that in the same sense in which, under God, they were creators of the English Christian Sunday, so they were creators of the English Christian marriage, the English Christian family, and the English Christian home. Their ennobling purpose, described earlier, of sanctifying all the activities and relationships that living in the world involves found very thorough expression in their teaching on home life, and while it cannot be proved that they all lived up to the standard that they set for each other, it is beyond doubt that many of them did. (The evidence is in funeral sermons, in the many brief biographies that Puritans wrote about each other, and in Puritan diaries and volumes like Richard Baxter’s Breviate [short account] of the life of Mrs Margaret Baxter, his deceased wife.) It is that standard that will occupy our attention in this chapter. In an era when marriage, even among Christians, is becoming brittle and unstable, and serial marriage through a sequence of divorces is modelled under limelight, so to speak, by top stars in the entertainment world, and casual sexual relations between adults raise no eyebrows, and teenage fornication is shrugged off as a universal and inevitable fact of life, and most children in most homes grow up in pagan ignorance of God and his law, there is much to be learned by tracking Puritan thought on marriage and the family.
1
The Puritans, like the Reformers, glorified marriage in conscious contradiction of the medieval idea that celibacy as practised by clergy, monks, and nuns is better—more virtuous, more Christlike, more pleasing to God—than marriage, procreation, and family life.
Thomas Aquinas gave teaching on womanhood that undergirded that opinion. He went so far as to opine that the birth of a girl is the result of a male embryo going wrong; that while a married man’s wife is a convenience to him, in that she enables him to procreate and avoid concupiscence (roving passion, prompting promiscuity), in all other respects a man will always make him a better companion and helpmeet than his wife, or any woman, can ever be. Furthermore, affirmed Aquinas, women are mentally as well as physically weaker than men, and more prone to sin, and are always by their nature subject to some man. Husbands may correct their wives by corporal punishment if necessary, and children ought to love their father more than their mother. It may be said without fear of contradiction that the great theologian’s oracles about the second sex make distinctly dismal reading.
Thomas’ negativism here was not, indeed, entirely his fault; not only did Aristotle, whose thought Thomas sought to claim for Christianity, take a very low view of women, but many of the orthodox Fathers, whose teaching Thomas’ method required him to follow, had been just as negative and down-putting with regard to women, and even more so with regard to sexual relations in marriage. Chrysostom had denied that Adam and Eve could have had sexual relations before the Fall; Augustine allowed that procreation was lawful, but insisted that the passions accompanying intercourse were always sinful; Origen had inclined to the theory that had sin not entered the world the human race would have been propagated in an angelic manner, whatever that might be, rather than by sexual union; and Gregory of Nyssa was sure that Adam and Eve had been made without sexual desire, and that had there been no Fall mankind would have reproduced by means of what Leland Ryken gravely calls ‘some harmless mode of vegetation’. The Fathers’ background was the decadent Graeco-Roman culture that had systematically debased marriage and sexual relations for centuries, so perhaps they, too, should not be blamed too much for views such as these. It is obvious, however, that so twisted a record urgently needed to be set straight, and this the Reformers, followed by the Puritans, forthrightly did.
Their first step was to celebrate marriage as a creation ordinance, a good gift of God to mankind, ‘instituted … in the paradise and garden of pleasure,’ as Miles Coverdale, the proto-Puritan Bible translator, makes Heinrich Bullinger say in his translation of Bullinger’s The Christian State of Matrimony (1541). Marriage, they said, is not a second-best; on the contrary, it belongs to the ideal human life as the Creator designed it.
Their second step was to define and describe marriage in biblical terms. Bullinger’s statement seems to have been archetypal both for Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552) and for later Puritan teachers as a body; it ran thus:
Wedloke is the yoking together of one man and one woman whom God hath coupled together according to his worde with the consent of them both, from thenceforth to dwell together and to spend their life in an equall partakynge of all such things as God sendeth to the intent that they may bring forth children in the feare of him, that they may avoid whordom, and that (according to God’s good pleasure) the one may helpe and comfort the other.
Modern marriage theory, like Genesis 2:18 (‘It is not good for the man to be alone’), stresses companionship as the fundamental value, and it is striking to see that a number of Puritans put this aspect of marriage first in line. Thomas Becon, the Reformer, whose mind-set was very much that of an early Puritan, had already done this in The Boke of Matrimonye (1564), specifying ‘the avoidance of solitariness’ as the first of God’s three reasons for inventing marriage that Bullinger and the Prayer Book had listed in the order, children, chastity, and the comfort of companionship. In due course the Westminster Confession endorsed this revised order, declaring in XXIV:ii: ‘Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and of the church with a holy seed, and for preventing of uncleanness.’ Puritan preachers are found pulling out the stops to proclaim the supreme blessing of togetherness in marriage, and declarations of it, quaint and quotable, abound. Here are some samples.
The wife is ordained for man: like a little Zoar, a city of refuge to fly to in all his troubles: and there is no peace comparable unto her but the peace of conscience.
Women are creatures without which there is no comfortable Living for man.… They are a sort of Blasphemers then who despise and decry them, and call them a necessary Evil, for they are a necessary Good.
There is no society more near, more entire, more needful, more kindly, more delightful, more comfortable, more constant, more continual, than the society of man and wife, the main root, source, and original of all other societies.
A good wife being …
The best Companion in Wealth;
The fittest and readiest Assistant in worke;
The greatest comfort in crosses and griefes; …
And the greatest Grace and Honour that can be, to him that hath her.
There is no such fountain of comfort on earth, as marriage.
It is a mercy to have a faithful friend that loveth you entirely … to whom you may open your mind and communicate your affairs.… And it is a mercy to have so near a friend to be a helper to your soul and … to stir up in you the grace of God.
God the first Institutor of marriage, gave the wife unto the husband, to bee, not his servant, but his helper, counsellor and comforter.
The third step was to set before marriage partners the ideal of wholehearted mutual love. Observed Matthew Henry, commenting on Genesis 2:22: ‘The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved.’ So the husband must constantly, conscientiously, and spontaneously practise love to his wife—which meant, for the Puritans, the erotic agape of a romantic marriage—and the wife must love her husband in the same way. Richard Baxter spells this out beautifully in question and answer:
I pray you, next tell me my duty to my wife and hers to me.
The common duty of husband and wife is,
1. Entirely to love each other; and therefore choose one that is truly lovely.… ;and avoid all things that tend to quench your love.
2. To dwell together, and enjoy each other, and faithfully join as helpers in the education of their children, the government of the family, and the management of their worldly business.
3. Especially to be helpers of each other’s salvation: to stir up each other to faith, love, and obedience, and good works: to warn and help each other against sin, and all temptations; to join in God’s worship in the family, and in private: to prepare each other for the approach of death, and comfort each other in the hopes of life eternal.
4. To avoid all dissensions, and to bear with those infirmities in each other which you cannot cure: to assuage, and not provoke, unruly passions; and, in lawful things, to please each other.
5. To keep conjugal chastity and fidelity, and to avoid all unseemly and immodest carriage [conduct] with another, which may stir up jealousy; and yet to avoid all jealousy which is unjust.
6. To help one another to bear their burdens (and not by impatience to make them greater). In poverty, crosses, sickness, dangers, to comfort and support each other. And to be delightful companions in holy love, and heavenly hopes and duties, when all other outward comforts fail.
It should by now be clear that, in Edmund Morgan’s words, ‘the Puritans were neither prudes nor ascetics. They knew how to laugh, and they knew how to love.’ The realism of their affirmations of matrimonial affection stemmed from the fact that they went to the Bible for their understanding of the relationship—to Genesis for its institution, to Ephesians for its full meaning, to Leviticus for its hygiene, to Proverbs for its management, to several New Testament books for its ethic, and to Esther, Ruth, and the Song of Songs for illustrations and exhibitions of the ideal. Milton ceremoniously sets forth the fruit of their biblical researches, first in his differentiating of the two genders, then in his hymnic invocation of wedded love, and finally in his declaration of the spiritual good that such love can bring. Here, first, is the differentiation:
Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;
For contemplation he and valour formed,
For softness she, and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, she for God in him.
Now the invocation:
Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source
Of human offspring, sole propriety
In Paradise of all things common else.
By thee adulterous lust was driven from men
Among the bestial herds to rage, by thee
Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure,
Relations dear, and all the charities
Of father, son, and brother first were known.
Far be it, that I should write thee sin or blame,
Or think thee unbefitting holiest place,
Perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,
Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced.
And finally the maturation:
Love refines
The thought, and heart enlarges, hath his seat
In reason, and is judicious, is the scale
By which to heavenly love thou mayest ascend.
The Puritans understood wedded love very thoroughly; that is clear from such passages as this, in which Daniel Rogers, son of John Rogers of Dedham, depicts what today would be called falling in love:
Marriage love is ofttime a secret worke of God, pitching the heart of one party upon another for no known cause; and therefore when this strong lodestone attracts each to the other, no further questions need to be made but such a man and such a woman’s match were made in heaven, and God hath brought them together.
Rogers recognises that this ‘pitching’ of the heart does not always happen, but stresses as all the Puritans do that steady affection on both sides is in every case a matter of divine command. Therefore, said the Puritans, in choosing a spouse one should look, not necessarily for one whom one does love, here and now, in Rogers’ heart-pitched sense (such a person, if found, might still not be a suitable candidate for a life partnership), but for one whom one can love with steady affection on a permanent basis. Loving actions of all sorts, including physical mating, will ripen and deepen this affection, and lead to a warmth of conjugal love such as Thomas Hooker, the Cambridge Puritan who went to New England, pictures in his sermons when he wants to illustrate the covenant love of God for his people. Here, wishing to exhibit the sacraments of the gospel as love-tokens from the Lord, Hooker delineates the wife:
As a wife deales with the letters of her husband that is in a farre Country; she finds many sweet inklings of his love, and shee will read these letters often, and daily; she would talke with her husband a farre off, and see him in the letters. Oh (saith she) thus and thus hee thought when he writ these lines, and then she thinkes he speaks to her againe; she reads these letters only, because she would be with her husband a little, and have a little parley with him in his pen, though not in his presence: so these ordinances are but the Lord’s love-letters.
And here, highlighting God’s constant love and care for those who are his, Hooker delineates the husband:
The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at table, walks with her when he travels and parlies with her in each place where he comes.
That the Husband tenders his Spouse with an indeared affection above al mortal creatures: This appeareth by the expressions of respect, that all he hath, is at her command, al he can do, is wholly improved for her content and comfort, she lies in his Bosom, and his heart trusts in her, which forceth al to confess, that the stream of his affection, like a mighty current, runs with full Tide and strength.
While insisting that love for the Lord must come first, and that human loves are only in shape so long as they feed into it and do not divert us from it, the Puritans expected and indeed directed that wedded love should be ardent and robust. Though self-controlled, they were uninhibited people, and as they could be, and often were exuberant in expressing love for their God, so they believed that they should be with their spouses. William Gouge condemns
the disposition of such husbands as have no heat, or heart of affection in them … a disposition no way warranted by the Word. The faithful saints of God … were no Stoicks, without all affection: nor did they think it a matter unbeseeming them, after a peculiar manner to delight in their wives (witness Isaaks sporting with his wife:) for this is a privilege which appertaineth to the estate of marriage.
Puritan preachers made constant use of Proverbs 5:18–19: ‘May you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.’ The Puritans did not, indeed, equate wedded love with the ramifications of sexual desire, as is so commonly done today. Milton, who is consciously the mouthpiece for Puritan humanism throughout his poetry, states this very carefully through the angel Raphael, who thus admonishes new-created Adam as Adam seeks to bring into lucid focus his first overwhelming experience of loving Eve. Says Raphael:
But, is the sense of touch, whereby mankind
Is propagated, seem such dear delight
Beyond all other, think the same vouchsafed
To cattle and each beast; which would not be
To them made common and divulged, if aught
Therein enjoyed were worthy to subdue
The soul of Man, or passion in him move.
What higher in her society thou find’st
Attractive, human, rational, love still:
In loving thou dost well; in passion not,
Wherein true Love consists not.
Yet mating, though not the whole nor the heart of the matter, is a necessary and important expression of wedded love, which would be maimed and stunted without it. Accordingly, the preachers would stress that there must be no holding back on either side at this point.
2
It will not have escaped the reader that all the Puritan views noted thus far were mainly, if not wholly, thought out from the male standpoint. The reason for this was partly cultural: women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had domestic roles and were neither emancipated nor in most cases educated beyond the minimum of being able to write and to use figures. Partly, too, the reason was historical: the low estimate of women that Aquinas and medieval theology as a whole shared, and the low estimate of marriage implied by the celibacy system for all the ‘religious’ (priests, monks, nuns), took some living down, and though it might seem sad it can hardly be thought strange that for some time after the Reformation women’s perspectives on things were not seen as important by comparison with men’s. From the Puritans’ own point of view, however, the main reason for thinking out the ethics and spirituality of marriage in male-leadership terms was their belief that male leadership is in fact biblically prescribed, an exegetical conclusion that nearly everyone held from the second to the twentieth century. There were four arguments, all seen as confirming the rightness of male leadership as adumbrated in Milton’s ‘he for God only, she for God in him’.
The first argument was taken from the story of creation: the man was made first, then the woman, and the woman was made to benefit the man as a suitable helper for him.
The second argument was taken from the story of the Fall: the woman was first in the transgression, and God decreed in judgement that henceforth her husband should rule over her.
The third argument was taken from Paul’s statement (1 Cor 11:3; Eph 5:23) that the man is the head whom the wife is to obey, as Christ is the Head whom the church is to obey.
The fourth argument was based on the words ‘does not nature itself teach you?’ (1 Cor 11:14); it was really an appeal to the hierarchical principle embedded in the then current cultural consensus, rather than to the Bible itself.
But the presupposition of functional subordination of wives, which for the Puritans was a closed issue, was their clear belief, also biblically based, that men and women are equal before God. Robert Bolton is strong on this.
Soules have no sexes, as Ambrose saith. In the better part they [husband and wife] are both men. And if thy wives soule were freed from the frailty of her sexe, it were as manly, as noble, as understanding, and every way as excellent, as thine own.… Let the husband then be so farre from … contemning his wives worth … that out of consideration that her soule is naturally every as good as his own (sic); only the excellence of its native operations, something damped, as it were, and disabled by the frailty of that weaker body, with which God’s wise providence hath clothed it upon purpose, for a more convenient and comfortable … serviceableness to his good; that I say, hee labour the more to entertaine and intreat her with all tendernesse and honour, to recompence, as it were, her suffering in this kinde for his sake.
Sibbes observes:
For the most part women have sweet affections to religion, and therein they oft go beyond men. The reason is, Religion is especially seated in the affections: And they have sweet and strong affections. Likewise they are subject to weakness, and God delights to show his strength in weakness.
This is affirmation of a kind that women never receive in (for instance) Hindu and Islamic contexts.
When a man chooses a wife—and it is assumed that the man will do the choosing, or at least, if I may put in this way, the chasing—he needs to pray much, and think hard, and get his value system very straight and clear. That a Christian should only marry another Christian is axiomatic, but other qualities, over and above a shared faith, will be needed for well-ordered wedlock. Beauty of mind and character matter more than beauty of face and body, and to marry where beauty of mind and character is lacking is a sure recipe for disaster. A character estimate, therefore, ought to be the first step in considering a possible life-partner, and such Scriptures as Proverbs 31 and 1 Peter 3:1–7 will suggest the questions to ask. The Puritans would certainly have thought it hazardous to formulate one’s hopes as did the seminary student who a quarter of a century ago, in discussing the Puritan position, declared: ‘I want a Brigitte Bardot who can lead a Bible class’ (Bardot = Monroe = Madonna, etc). Looking for a sign, on the model of what Abraham’s servant did, is another spiritually stupid mistake. Gataker knew a man who ‘would test any woman on whom he had cast his roving eye … by asking her, in sermon time, where the minister’s text was. If she not only told him the text, but offered him her Bible, she was the woman who was to be his wife.’ To Gataker this seemed both irreverent and asinine, and it is hard to quarrel with his verdict.
How should a character estimate be made? The wise way to form an opinion about possible partners is to find out their reputation, watch how they act in company, how they dress and talk, and note whom they select as friends. (‘The report, the looks, the speech, the apparel, and the companions … are like the pulses that show whether we be well or ill’—Henry Smith. ‘Choose such a companion for thy life as hath chosen company like thee before’—Robert Cleaver.) For a realistic assessment, couples wondering about matrimony need ‘to see each other eating and walking, working and playing, talking and laughing and chiding too; or else it may be, the one shall have with the other lesse than he or she looked for, or more than they wished for.’ Other things being equal, partners should be of similar age, social position, wealth, and intellectual ability, and should have secured their parents’ goodwill towards the match. Also, they should be able to see that an affectional bond is growing between them, based on the conviction that God has given them to each other to glorify him by their mutual love and service. The good sense of all this is obvious, and calls for no comment save that this careful, prayerful blending of human and divine wisdom, seeking the will of God through discernment of personal and circumstantial fitness in all its relevant forms, was the mark of Puritan decision-making in all matters of importance across the board.
The procedure in England for getting married consisted of (1) espousals, a contract to marry corresponding to the modern engagement, but more binding, inasmuch as sexual relations with a third party during the espousal period were classed as adultery; (2) publication of the banns (an announcement that the contract exists) on three successive Sundays in church; (3) execution of the espousal contract by vows of entry into actual marriage, taken before witnesses as part of a special service; (4) celebration of the event with feasting and fun, ordinarily at the home of the groom; (5) sexual intercourse. The Puritan pastors accepted this frame and sought to make the most of it in spiritual terms, preaching sermons of advice to the couple both at the espousals (which they structured as an act of worship, with psalm-singing and prayer) and also at the wedding itself, and putting into print manuals of various kinds that the partners could have with them for their future guidance. Samples of the wisdom contained in these are the regular urging, prompted by Deuteronomy 24:5, that newly-weds avoid prolonged absences from each other for at least the first year of marriage while they work on their relationship, and the pleading of William Whateley (known as ‘the Roaring Boy of Banbury’) that couples starting out together should not be required to live in either of their parents’ homes.
Some marriages, even among Christians, unhappily break down; as they do today, so they did in the Puritan period. English law at that time recognised only declarations of nullity and judicial separation from bed and board, but Puritan thinkers generally agreed that divorce with right of remarriage was biblically permitted after adultery by one’s spouse, and most Puritans followed Perkins in regarding desertion, broadly interpreted to cover all behaviour that nullified the matrimonial relationship in practice—‘malicious desertion’, when ‘they require of each other intolerable conditions’, ‘long absence’, cruelty, diseased conditions, and insanity are specified—as ground for the same grant, with equal rights for men and women. Perkins’ clearly articulated position was in fact that of Zwingli and Bucer, for which John Hooper had argued in 1550 and which Cranmer had incorporated into his never-enacted code of canon law, Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, in 1552. Luther, Calvin, and Beza did not commit themselves so far, merely allowing, unspecifically, that deliberate desertion could entitle the innocent party to divorce and remarry; and that was more than English law countenanced, as we saw, though Scottish and New England law embraced the principle of divorce for both adultery and desertion. But Perkins was at this point, as Knappen expresses it, ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’.
It should be noted, however, that no Puritan would have approved Knappen’s phraseology; for Puritan pastors, a world of easy divorce would have been more, not less, a wilderness, morally and spiritually, than the world they knew. Chapter XXIV:vi of the Westminster Confession reflects their perspective on divorce when it declares:
Although the corruption of man be such as is apt to study arguments unduly to put asunder those whom God has joined together in marriage: yet, nothing but adultery, or such wilful desertion as can in no way be remedied by the church, or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient of dissolving the bond of marriage: wherein a public and orderly course of proceeding is to be observed.…
In England, at any rate, no such course of proceeding existed, and it is clear that the Puritans did not see this as a bad thing. Their business, after all, was to help couples build marriages that would last, and all their efforts were directed to this end; and they did in fact offer a great deal of wisdom on maintaining love and goodwill, honour and respect, peace and contentment, common purposes and shared commitments, in the married state.
3
When the Puritans said ‘family’, they had in view not only parents and children, but also servants (all homes save the poorest had at least one live-in servant), elderly relatives being looked after (there were no retirement homes or geriatric hospitals in those days), and sometimes other residents too—in short, an extended as distinct from nuclear family. It was with reference to such human units that John Geree wrote, in his 1646 tract The Character of an Old English Purtaine, or Nonconformist: ‘His family he endeavoured to make a Church, both in regard of persons and exercises, admitting none into it but such as feared God; and labouring that those that were born in it, might be born again to God.’ To the Puritans, family life was enormously important, for ‘a family is the seminary of church and state and if children be not well principled there, all miscarrieth.’ So ‘keep up the government of God in your families: holy families must be the chief preservers of the interest of religion in the world.’
The Puritans crusaded for a high view of the family, proclaiming it both the basic unit of society and a little church in itself, with the husband as its pastor and his wife as his assistant—subordinate indeed in the chain of command, but a key figure in the ongoing pastoral process nonetheless. As head of the family, the husband must be treated with respect before the children and guests. (That was why William Gouge directed that the wife should not call her husband ‘ducks’, ‘chicks’, ‘sweet’, or ‘pigsnie’, when others were present, but should address him as ‘Master so-and-so’, using his surname as his professional peers would do.) It was the husband’s responsibility to channel the family into religion; to take them to church on the Lord’s Day, and oversee the sanctifying of that entire day in the home; to catechise the children, and teach them the faith; to examine the whole family after each sermon, to see how much had been retained and understood, and to fill any gaps in understanding that might remain; to lead the family in worship daily, ideally twice a day; and to set an example of sober godliness at all times and in all matters. To this end he must be willing to take time out to learn the faith that he is charged to teach.
I do therefore desire, that all masters of families would first study well this work [the Westminster standards] themselves, and then teach it their children and servants, according to their several capacities. And, if they once understand these grounds of religion, they will be able to read other books more understandingly, and hear sermons more profitably, and confer more judiciously, and hold fast the doctrine of Christ more firmly, than ever you are like to do by any other course. First, let them read and learn the Shorter Catechism, and then the Larger, and lastly, read the Confession of Faith.
Gaius Davies summarises Puritan ideals of child-rearing admirably.
The preachers stressed that love is the fountain of all parents’ duties. But children should not be spoilt; parents must not, like apes, kill their young ones with hugging. The example of parents is the greatest stimulus to holiness, especially that of the mother, whose influence during the child’s early years is greater.
… Education should begin as early as possible, and though it should be thorough, godliness is more important than learning, and schoolmasters must be chosen with this in mind. The aptness or gifts of children should be noted, that they might be trained for a suitable calling. The claims of the Christian ministry should be remembered, and where the ability exists, a son should be exhorted to enter it.
… The child’s first instruction in religion should be adapted to its age, so that the child receives it with delight. Thus the seeds of godliness would be planted early. The Puritan attitude to children thus differed from that of some moderns, who expect a child’s conversion to be a dramatic experience.
And Davies’ concluding comment on the preachers is just.
To these men godliness was to be shown in the daily round and the common task, more than anywhere else. Holiness was not to be sought by withdrawing from daily duties, whether to a spurious asceticism or in search of esoteric experiences. ‘Pure religion breathing household laws’ was with them not a poet’s vision, but a practical programme and, in many cases, a realized ideal.
The Puritans viewed all life-activities, whether deliberately chosen or circumstantially—which meant for them, providentially—imposed, as callings (vocations) from God: particular callings, as distinct from God’s general calling of mankind to repentance in the gospel and his effectual calling of the elect to faith through the secret work of the Holy Spirit in and with the gospel. The concept of particular callings was basic to Puritan ethics, and on it, as on so many matters, the seminal writing was that of Perkins. In A Treatise of the Vocations (1602), setting off from 1 Corinthians 7:20, where Paul directs Christians to stay in the calling wherein they were called, Perkins defines a particular calling as ‘a certaine kind of life, ordained and imposed on man by God, for the common good’ and insists that Christians should each seek a lawful calling for which they are gifted by God and in which they may work to his praise. With this all later Puritans agreed.
Now, to the Puritan mind, marriage and family life constituted a calling in this sense: the domestic calling of the husband and father, and the entire calling of the wife and mother. Most people, declared the teachers, were called to marry, and were made aware of this by discovering the inconveniences and frustrations of living single; then the married were called to have children, as God’s way of maintaining the race and, within the race, the church; and parents were called to teach their children obedience to God and to themselves (the Puritans did not expect to see the first without the second); while the children were called, and were to be taught that they were called, to learn this twofold obedience from their earliest days. Fulfilment of vocation was the formula for the sanctifying of home life, and this could prove to be a full-time job. ‘The private vocations of a family and functions appertaining thereto, are such as Christians are called unto by God,’ wrote William Gouge, and he continues:
This is to be noted for satisfaction of certaine weake consciences, who thinke that if they have no publike calling, they have no calling at all … a conscionable performance of household duties in regard to the end and fruit thereof, may be accounted a publike worke. Yea, if domesticall duties be well and thoroughly performed, they will bee even enough to take up a man’s whole time … So a wife likewise, if she also be a mother and a mistris, and faithfully endeavour to doe what by virtue of those callings shee is bound to do, shall find enough to doe. As for children under the government of their parents and servants in a family, their whole calling is to be obedient to their parents and masters, and to doe what they command them in the Lord. Wherefore if they who have no publike calling, bee so much the more diligent in the functions of their private callings, they shall be as well accepted by the Lord, as if they had publike offices.
Gouge is evidently speaking of, and to, those whom we might call ladies and gentlemen of leisure, who had learned the Puritan doctrine that for an able-bodied person not to have a ‘publike calling’, i.e., one that contributes to the well-being of the community, is sinful laziness. Concentrate on fulfilling your domestic calling properly, says Gouge, and you will find your hands full enough.
It is often thought that Puritan family life, both in principle and in practice, was harsh, regimented, legalistic, and tyrannical, but that is not true. What is true, however, is, first, that the Puritans ‘accounted religion an engagement to duty, that the best Christians should be the best husbands, best wives, best children, best Masters, best servants, best Magistrates, best subjects, that the doctrine of God might be adorned not blasphemed’, and, second, that Puritan teachers thought humane family life, in which Christian love and joy would find full and free expression, could not be achieved till the ordered pattern they envisaged—the regular authority-structure and daily routine—had been firmly established. Their passion to please God expressed itself in an ardour for order; their vision of the good and godly life was of a planned, well-thought-out flow of activities in which all obligations were recognised and met, and time was found for everything that mattered: for personal devotion, for family worship, for household tasks, for wage-earning employment, for intimacy with spouse and children, for Sabbath rest, and whatever else one’s calling or callings required.
The Puritan pastors knew that it is always hard to achieve a properly proportioned life-pattern of the kind described, and that many do not even try to achieve it, but live at random and haphazard, constantly intending to put their lives in order some day and never actually getting round to it. The preachers complained of this in their own era; they would find cause for much louder complaints could they inspect family life in the modern West. Facing situations in our secularised society in which parental careers disrupt the nuclear family so that children suffer, some of today’s Christian teachers labour to reverse the priority, insisting that family concerns must have precedence over work in the world, not vice versa. But the Puritan way would be to recognise both public and domestic callings as God-given, and hence to seek a pattern of living that by shrewd and disciplined use of time meets both sets of claims. Is there not wisdom for us in the Puritan way? Surely the question bears thinking about.
1.Kenneth Hare, ‘The Puritan’ cited from Gordon S. Wakefield, Puritan Devotion (Epworth Press: London, 1957), p 1.
2.The evidence for Thomas’ views is collected and summarised by C.H. and K. George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation 1570–1640 (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1961), pp 261–264, 280–283.
3.Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: the Puritans as They Really Were (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1986), p 41.
4.Bullinger, op cit, fol. 1.
5.Op cit, fol. 3.
6.John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde Government (1598), p 125.
7.John Cotton, A Meet Help (1694), p 15.
8.Thomas Gataker, A Wife Indeed; cited from Ryken, op cit, p 42.
9.Thomas Gataker, A Good Wife God’s Gift (1637), p 166.
10.Thomas Adams; cited from C.H. and K. George, op cit, p 268.
11.Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory; cited from Ryken, op cit, p 43.
12.John Downame, The Plea of the Poor (1616), p 119.
13.‘The rise of romantic marriage and its validation by the Puritans…represents a major innovation within the Christian tradition’ (Herbert W. Richardson, Nun, Witch, Playmate: the Americanization of Sex, Harper and Row: New York, 1971, p 69). ‘The conversion of courtly love into romantic monogamous love was…largely the work of…Puritan poets’ (C.S. Lewis, ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,’ in Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1938, p 75).
14.Richard Baxter, Works, IV:234 (The Poor Man’s Family Book, 1674).
15.Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family (Harper and Row: New York, 1966), p 64. See further Ryken, op cit, chap 3 ‘Marriage and Sex’, pp 39–54.
16.John Milton, Paradise Lost, IV:296–299, 750–761; VIII:589–592. ‘Scale’ means ‘ladder’.
17.Daniel Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (1642), p 148. L.L. SchŸcking, The Puritan Family (Schocken Books: New York, 1970), p 25, describes Rogers as ‘one of the most generous-minded writers that has ever treated the problems of marriage, and one endowed with quite exceptional delicacy of feeling.’
18.Thomas Hooker, The Soules Humiliation (1638), pp 73f.
19.Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption (1659), p 137.
20.Thomas Hooker, A Comment upon Christ’s Last Prayer (1656), p 187.
21.William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1634), p 366.
22.John Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII:579–589.
23.Robert Bolton, Works (1631–41), IV:245f.
24.Richard Sibbes, Works, VI:520.
25.Gaius Davies, ‘The Puritan Teaching on Marriage and the Family’, Evangelical Quarterly, XXVII.1 (January 1955), p 19.
26.Thomas Gataker, A Marriage Praier (1624), p 16.
27.Henry Smith, Works (James Nichol: Edinburgh, 1866–67), I:15.
28.Cited from Davies, art cit, p 20.
29.Dod and Cleaver, op cit, p G:6.
30.Examples, over and above printed espousal and wedding sermons, include Dod and Cleaver, op cit; William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie (1590); Matthew Griffith, Bethel: or, a Forme for Families (1634); William Whateley, Care-cloth: A Treatise of the Cumbers and Troubles of Marriage (1624); William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1634); Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1673), Part II: Christian Economics (Works, I:394–546).
31.‘As the young Bees do seek unto themselves another Hive so let the young couple another house…that whatsoever come, they may never fall into that unhappiest of all unhappinesses, of either being tormentors of their parents or tormented by them’ (Whately, Care-cloth, preface, p x).
32.Perkins, Works (1616–18), III:690, 688, 683–684.
33.M.M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago University Press: Chicago, 1939), p 461. In England prior to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 there was no legal procedure for divorce and remarriage save the passing of a special Act of Parliament in each case, a device that was first used in 1669.
34.Wakefield, op cit, p x.
35.‘Mr. Thomas Manton’s Epistle to the Reader’, The [Westminster] Confession of Faith (Free Presbyterian Publications: Glasgow, 1973), p 8. The Geneva Bible’s note on Genesis 17:23 says: ‘Masters in their houses ought to be as preachers to their families, that from the highest to the lowest they may obey the will of God.’ The thought of the husband and father as spiritual instructor to the household recurs constantly.
36.Baxter, Works, IV:229. Baxter wrote The Poor Man’s Family Book (1674) and The Catechising of Families (1683) as resources for the instructional side of family government.
37.Richard Baxter, cited anonymously in ‘Mr. Thomas Manton’s Epistle to the Reader’, op cit, pp 9f.
38.Davies, art cit, p 29.
39.Ibid, p 30.
40.Perkins, Works, I:750.
41.Gouge, op cit, pp 10f.
42.Geree, loc cit.