Catechisms And The Puritans
9
CATECHISMS AND THE PURITANS
J. Lewis Wilson
When John Calvin wrote his Epistle of Godly Consolation to the Protector Somerset in 1548 the pastoral heart of the Genevan reformer guided him to place his finger unerringly on at least three sore spots in the church in England. “I think there very few lively preachings in the realm,” he complained, “. . . this preaching ought not to be dead but alive, for to teach, such a sort as if an infidel enter he may be wounded, overcome and taken . . . to give glory to God.” Next Calvin desired “that there be a summe resolute of doctrine that al ought to preach, the which al prelates and curates should sweare to follow.” Third he pressed on the Protector the crucial importance of a catechism “to instruct the young children and ignorant people”—a conviction hammered out on the anvil of his own experiences both of Geneva and Strasbourg. “Believe my Lord,” he appealed, “that the church of God shall never be conserved without catechism, for it is as the seed to be kept that the good grain perish not but that it may increase from age to age. Wherefore if you desire to build a work of continuance to endure long, and which should not shortly fall into decay, cause that the children in their young age be instructed in a good catechism.”1
Just over a hundred years later, and three years before his ejection in 1662, when he was rector of Acton in Middlesex, Philip Nye wrote, “It is true a forme of catechisme is mentioned in the common prayer book, but so as liberty left and taken to compose, or chuse what catechisme a man judged to be more suitable to his people for their edification; and few ministers of eminency in the land but composed a distinct catechisme, there are I believe no less than five hundred several catechismes extant.”2
In this vast collection of catechisms brought to birth in the century after Calvin, Nye delimits those written by men of the “episcopall way” so that he is thinking primarily of catechetical material prepared by those clergymen and school teachers who came to be known by the “odious name” of Puritan, or who, if more correctly described after 1640 as “presbyterian” or “independent,” were at the same time heirs of the Puritan tradition. A more cautious estimate than Nye’s is made, rather typically, by Richard Baxter, but he is none the less fully aware that a vast number of catechisms were available in the mid-seventeenth century—“scores, if not hundreds of catechisms are written in England.” Therefore when Godfrey Davies recognized “the enormous output of devotional literature” in the period which closed at 1640 he has ample reason for listing, among the most influential of these books, a Puritan catechism, Stephen Egerton’s Briefe Methode of Catechizing.3
There are at present some hopeful signs of renewed interest in the place of catechesis in the life of the church. The 400th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism produced a series of works on that historic reformation document.4 T. F. Torrance has traced the importance of catechisms of the reformed faith in the history of the Church of Scotland.5 From the Catholic side J. F. Jungmann’s Katechetik awards generous marks to Luther.6 There is certainly room for a study of the place of the catechism in religious instruction in the formative post-Reformation years in England. This paper is restricted to the Puritan use of the catechism; the terminus a quo will be 1570, the terminus ad quem 1660. This is extremely arbitrary, for some very notable Puritan work, e.g. Thomas Watson’s, appears after this date. But it is equally arbitrary to imagine that a horse and cart can always be driven between “Puritan” and “Anglican” in this particular task. A noted royalist like Charles Hoole could recommend both William Perkins and Alexander Nowell, as well as the church catechism for use in schools. None the less, the sheer bulk of material available from Edward Dering’s A Breife and Necessarie Catechisme (1572) to Richard Baxter’s Poor Man’s Family Book7 and his leadership of the “Worcester association of ministers for catechising” should indicate that this is a field of “busie puritane” endeavor which has largely been ignored. The impression left by H. R. McAdoo, for example, that the Caroline divines were virtually alone in laboring to restore the catechism in the life of the Church should be modified.8 So too should a similar judgment that the Puritans’ main support for diligent catechizing was the buttress of some ingeniously culled proof-texts. Whatever its limitations the Puritan pastoral ideal was much more deeply based and closely integrated than this superficial verdict implied.
When they wrote catechisms the Puritans were following, as they would have claimed, the example of the “best reformed churches.” More important they found, as Richard Greenham wrote, the “steps of catechizing” in the Scriptures and in the early Church. But when Greenham reminds his hearers of this example he also says “we have the catechisme of Cyril; of Gregory of Nyssa, the books of Augustine, of catechising the ignorant and foure bookes de symbolo ad catechumenos. Also Athanasius his synopsis of sacred Scripture: and Fulgentius. . . .”9 The Puritans knew very well, then, that they were not “innovators”; they eagerly entered a house of instruction in the faith, spacious and well furnished, in which the early church and the first generation reformers had lived before them. On the continent Luther’s small catechism had been an immediate and surprising success, a decisive factor in reformation at the “grass-roots” in the homes of German people. Luther’s achievement stimulated both friends and opponents; John Calvin was influenced by his success, as also by his enforced stay at Strasbourg and his contact there with the work of Martin Bucer; the catechisms of Trent and Canisius were a later Roman Catholic counter-balance to the influence of Luther’s work.
In the reformation period the catechisms of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Pierre Viret, Henry Bullinger, Caspar Olevian all found their way into England. Some later continental catechisms were translated or introduced by Puritan clergy; Matthieu Virel’s A Learned and Excellent Treatise was introduced (possibly translated from French) by Stephen Egerton; Thomas Sparke and John Seddon translated an English edition of the Heidelberg Catechism and John Field translated Caspar Olevian’s work on the Apostles Creed. Several of the Marian exiles also wrote catechisms—John Poynet, Thomas Becon, Edmund Allen, and notably Alexander Nowell, whose three catechisms were among the most widely influential in post-Reformation England. In Thomas Cranmer’s Catechismus (1548), the preface asks, “Surely there can be no greater hope of any kinde of persons . . . than of suche as have been from childhoode nourished and fed with the swete milke and as it were the sappe of Goddes holy worde.”10 It was this heritage, then, into which the Puritans entered.
Basic Convictions
What then were the basic convictions which guided Puritan pastors in the use of the catechism? They were not primarily theorists, whether in religion or education; many were distinguished pastors whose chief concern was to convey the message of God’s electing grace as “plainly,” convincingly, and widely as possible, to all for whom they were responsible in family, church, school, and university. For this reason the Puritan clergy pursued a never-ending search for “method,” the “means” by which the truth of God in sermon, in scripture memorizing, in catechism could be screwed into the darkened minds of Adam’s spiritual children; the way in which the “means” which God had ordained could be most effectively used so that God’s elect could be called by His Spirit, and established in the faith. This “method” was thorough and all-embracing; home and church were married, careful provision was made for school and university. Thus, at Cambridge, that “Lebanon of the Lorde” in Greenham’s words, the office of college catechist was filled with conscientious devotion by William Perkins at Christ’s, by John Preston at Emanuel, and by John Cotton and Henry Palmer. In the rapid development of schools in this century up to 1660 the Puritan ideal is set by Thomas Gataker—a school is a “little church,” and its master a “private catechist.”11
Scripture—A Repository of Heavenly Doctrine
“I serve a precise God,” said Richard Rogers of Wethersfield. God who is the source and goal of all knowledge is a God of “order,” of “method,” even to detail. His will is revealed clearly, reliably in the word of God, which the Puritans identified with Scripture. In treating the Scriptures as God’s authoritative, and indeed infallible word, the Puritans believed they shared a common reformation heritage, more especially, from Calvin. For Calvin “doctrina” could be used both for God teaching by voice or word in and through Scripture, and also for authoritative preaching and teaching in His name. From this “written proof of heavenly doctrine,” as Calvin once called Scripture, the Puritans gathered “principles of religion” for instruction by catechism. John Ball’s catechism says “the scriptures are the very word of God, the immediate and infallible truth of God, that is to be received and obeyed and believed.”
From this position some Puritans argued that only Scripture and not, for example, the Apostles Creed, should be taught in the catechism; others made the equally risky deduction that the catechism was “not the words of men.” Richard Baxter, who appears more concessive that Ball, especially to the place of “reason” in the Christian faith, was nevertheless a doughty champion of what he called “scripture sufficiency,” who defended the use of catechisms because “not all truths of scripture are of equal necessity to salvation with the greatest points” and because ignorant persons cannot “cull out these most necessary points from the rest without help.”12
Man—A “Ruinated Place”
Another basic question in Puritan religious instruction was this: “What is this man, this child who is to be instructed?” The answer might vary in some details, but the fundamental issues would be the same. Man was created in God’s image, in Adam the federal head or “public man” he has fallen, the imperfection of sin has spread as a creeping corruption to every part of his life, leaving him condemned before God’s holy law.
James Ussher, whose influence on later Puritanism should never be overlooked, explains the doctrine of the imago dei as follows:
Q. Wherein was the Image of God principally seen?
A. In the perfection of the understanding and the freedom of the will.13
Because man’s fall has brought corruption to the understanding, the conscience, and the memory, the Puritans gave close attention to the effects of sin in the mind. Richard Rogers in The Garden of Spiritual Flowers writes, “This imperfection extendeth itself universally through the whole man, both soule and body, both reason and understanding, will and affections . . . nothing but blindness and ignorance concerning heavenly matters.”14 William Perkins follows this analysis almost word for word in his catechism.15 When Ussher sets out “sixe things principally” in which the corruption of man’s nature can be seen, he places first “the blindness of the understanding, which is not able to conceive the things of God, the forgetfulness of the memory, unfit to remember good things.”16 This conspicuous place given to the effects of sin in the mind, helps to emphasize the correspondingly important places given by the Puritans to systematic instruction, to “knowledge” and order in man’s spiritual restoration. As Baxter succinctly put it, “Ignorance is your disease, knowledge must be your cure.”17 Or Richard Rogers, “Man by nature being like a ruinated place, is restored by the graces of Christ: as to the soul the Lord stirres up new lights in the minde.”18
Psychology of Conversion
A third question to which the Puritans addressed themselves was this: “How does God restore such a man, separated from Him?” Basic to all their thinking was the reformation sola gratia. All the words used for this work of God’s grace—justification, repentence, regeneration, sanctification—explain the result and not the cause of God’s prior work of grace in man’s life. This grace, not a few Puritans would have claimed, like Augustine before them, was “irresistible”; but they would have resisted any charge that God treats men as blocks or stones. The reason for this is their view of God’s operation, that while He works on the will by His Spirit He enlightens the mind through “means.” John Preston indeed believed that God moved the will in a “physicall” way;19 but other leaders disagreed here, notably Richard Baxter.
But whatever disagreements the Puritans might have about the hidden work of God this is a further reason for “order,” for “method” in religious instruction. God moves the will by His sovereign grace, while He enlightens the mind through “means,” especially the preached word in church, the instruction of scripture reading, repeated sermon or catechism in home and family. This act of will is only possible through the prior work of God’s grace; it is only free if enlightened by the mind. If the “foregoing of judgment” of the understanding were lacking then the will is not free. By “order” in their lengthy sermons, by catechetical “heads of divinity,” by repetition of scripture in home and school, the strong beam of God’s word could be shone into the dark corridors of human understanding as the supreme means of conversion to God.
This close association of intellect and will, of knowledge and obedience, explains why the Puritans constantly warned against “bare knowledge.” Arthur Dent made “literal and historicall knowledge” the distinguishing mark of reprobates.20 Robert Bolton confirmed that true knowledge must be “not merely mentall swimming in the brain indeed, but not rooted in the heart.”21 “Knowledge rooted in the heart” was the aim of these divines who commended the Westminster Confession of Faith and its two catechisms to their readers. John Ball also desired those who learned his catechism to “go forward in godliness, in a holy method.”
One of the marks of “heart knowledge,” an infallible sign as it were of true conversion, was the renewing of the mind and the sanctification of memory. William Gouge’s catechism explains this:
Q. Wherein consisteth our sanctification?
A. In the enlightening of our mindes, and in reforming all our parts.
Q. What is the illumination of the mind?
A. A saving knowledge of the myesteries of godliness.22
Fortified by these conclusions the Puritan preacher believed the renewed mind to be capable of prodigious feats of memory. An oppressive boredom could sometimes result, especially for children, but equally there can be no doubt that in such memorizing exercises an ever increasing number of Englishmen found a surprising satisfaction, accumulating vast tracts of Scripture as well as a “system of divinity” in their mental furniture with incalculable results, both religious and political, as the seventeenth century advanced. If one can speak of a Puritan “theory” of religious education, these then were the foundations on which it was based.
The Catechism and Pastoral Ideals
These basic religious and theological beliefs, which provide a reason for Puritan religious instruction, and for the distinctive features which it developed, also shaped pastoral ideals, in which the use of the catechism had a close relationship with preaching, with the discipline required in observing the sacraments, and in the nurture and support of family religion.
Preaching and the Catechism
Stephen Marshall once claimed that “preaching is the chariot on which salvation comes riding into the hearts of men.”23 Against this exalted picture of Puritan preaching opponents inveigh against the “Geneva fashion” with a “poor fellow in a black gown bawling at his auditory.” Puritan preaching did become at times, especially after 1640, factious or downright obstreperous, artificially contrived or embittered by partisanship. In spite of this, there was at the heart of the Puritan tradition a very high conception of the place and importance of preaching, gained more especially from Calvin. The influence of a long succession of distinguished preachers in the Puritan “Gilead” at Cambridge, men like Lawrence Chaderton, William Perkins, Paul Baynes, John Preston, Richard Gibbes, and Thomas Goodwin, was reflected in the preaching brotherhood in towns and villages, even to the “dark corners of the land.” But for all this the Puritans were too conscientious in their pastoral task not to know, or at worst to discover, that preaching alone could be relatively ineffective. Luther had said as much long before: “Otherwise things will remain as they have been, daily going to church and a coming away again. For no one thinks that it makes any difference except for the time it takes. No one expects to learn anything there. A man listens to preaching three or four years and does not learn enough to give answer concerning one article of the Creed: this I know from daily experience.”24 Josias Nicholls in a parish of four hundred people found “tenne in a hundred” who knew elementary points of Christian doctrine. William Perkins prefaced his catechism with a blunt and downright estimate of the religious ignorance of his hearers, part of which has a singularly modern ring “that ye know more than the preacher can tell you.”25 Richard Baxter’s words on this subject are even better known when he began catechizing at Kidderminster.
The Puritan preachers knew, therefore, that preaching alone without some form of “familiar personal instruction” frequently failed. Richard Greenham dreaded that his people at Dry Drayton should come before him with” uncatechised hearts.” One of John Ball’s aims in writing his catechism was that his hearers should have a body of divinity into which they could “fit” the doctrinal points gleaned from his sermons. The Westminister divines also saw clearly the close relationship between the catechism and the sermon. One of the more turbulent spirits of the “presbyterian” party in 1656, Zachary Crofton hoped fervently even at the eleventh hour for “catechising to be setup” so that men could “profit by the word.”26 William Perkins advised that if there was a response to preaching there should be further instruction by catechism, for a “sermon to such persons is like a great loaf set before a child.”27
The Catechism and Discipline
When John Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541 from his enforced exile in Strasbourg he asked in particular two conditions: that he might use a catechism, and institute ecclesiastical discipline.28 These two, catechism and discipline, were linked in the Puritan ideal. In post-Reformation England “discipline” is capable of different and conflicting shades of meaning; it could mean to establish “presbyterian” order, as it did for Walter Travers and as James I feared it meant for him; in the confused and apocalyptic atmosphere of the commonwealth to “pray for discipline” meant almost to hope for the kingdom of God; much more often the term meant for the Puritans worthy standards for baptism and the Lord’s supper, and for admission to the membership of the church.
The majority of Puritans retained and defended infant baptism, but insisted that it should be public. The congregation must share reverently in the sacrament. The covenant sealed in baptism must be “improved” by catechizing, by family instruction. Richard Baxter laid the responsibility for this instruction on parents, in relation to the promises made in baptism. Children were given names “suitable to the work,” for they were to “suck piety and godliness in with their mother’s milk.” As for the minister it was not sufficient to preach the word openly from the pulpit; his pastoral charge demanded that he instruct the family by every means available. When parents brought their children for baptism he must require an account of their faith, otherwise he “seal to a blanke and so profane the sacrament.” When Thomas Manton wrote of “improving your baptism,” as the Larger Catechism also does, he was speaking of a continuing task of discipline and instruction which lasts through life; and in which the catechism had a decisive role.
All through this period out of the mouths of more than two or three episcopal witnesses we learn that confirmation was “miserably neglected.” Whitgift noticed this general carelessness in 1591; William Nicholson can still report “negligence” in 1661. In between two of the Laudian bishops, Richard Niele and John Cosin, required far greater care; the latter indeed wished that children should be at least fourteen to sixteen years old before they were confirmed. Not all Puritans, however, would have agreed that this “ceremony” should be done away. Baxter, for example, in spite of his own miserable personal experience at confirmation, opposed mainly its abuse and negligence. This Puritan concern for discipline, for worthy membership of the church and celebration of the Lord’s Supper, can be readily traced in their catechism. In 1583 Hopkinson wrote in the preface to his catechism, “But especially I have laboured to lead them into the right use of the Lord’s supper, a special confirmation of God’s promises in Christ, a matter also miserably neglected and lightly accounted of to the ruine and downfall of many thousands soules.”29 The subtitle of Perkins’ work expresses the same desire: “The Foundation of Christian religion gathered into sixe principles: As it is to be learned by ignorant people that they may be fit to hear sermons with profit, and to receive the Lord’s supper with comfort.” A letter to the Westminister Assembly from London ministers (1643) focuses these two issues even more sharply; it asked for “the distinction of people who come to the sacrament” and for “catechising.” For all the severity of some Puritan excesses the words of Baxter in pleading for the restoration of “the ancient and truly Christian discipline” should still be weighed, for they express the Puritan ideal: “ . . . to be against discipline is tantum non to be against the ministry; to be against the ministry . . . against the church; and to be against the church is near to being absolutely against Christ.”30
Family Religion
“If ever we would have the church of God to continue among us we must bring it into our households and nourish it in our families.”31 Richard Greenham’s words here were faithfully repeated by succeeding generations of Puritan clergy, reminding their people that the home is a “little church,” a microcosm of the large fellowship, in which the husband was by divine arrangement both head and priest, and in which “family order” was to reinforce the preached word and public ordinances. In a Paul’s Cross sermon in 1578 John Stockwood regretted that his advice on family religion would be considered “precise,” and “strange doctrine” and that a man “powerfull in instructing his children and household in the wayes of the Lord . . . would be as rare upon earth as a blacke swanne.”32 It would appear that the Puritans turned increasingly to the home as a bastion for religious instruction and influence when their overt and more public efforts to change the character of the Elizabethan church had been crushed. Certainly in the period 1580–1595 many pens were busy with detailed instructions for the “godly order of family government.” Robert Openshawe prefaced his catechism with an appeal “to those who were wont to ask how you should spend the long winter evenings” to “turn . . . to singing of psalms and teaching your household and praying with them.”33 Neglect of “family duties” soon became for the Puritans the mark of an unregenerate life, for which the Westminster divines “overdid” in desiring that the ultimate penalty should be excommunication. The discipline of the Lord’s Day has to be seen, at least partly, in this context; that one of its purposes was to devote the day following attendance at church to “family duties.”
Accounts of “family instruction” in English homes in this period are too numerous, too widespread to be discounted, even the transformation of a town like Malden in Essex. Of George Gifford’s ministry at Malden, Strype says: “He was much valued there for the good reformation he had made in that market town by his preaching, where very notorious sins reigned before his coming . . . others had by his diligence been nourished and strengthened in grace and virtue (as the inhabitants had set forth to the bishop at large); that in his life he was modest, discreet and unreprovable; that he never used conventicle but ever preached and catechised in the church.”34 The transformation of Kidderminster under Baxter and his assistants is another permanent example to bear witness to Puritan achievement in family religion.35
Theological Development
The basis of early Elizabethan catechisms taken over from the Reformation was the Apostles Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. Calvin’s Institutes, for example, followed the order of the Apostles Creed. The early Puritans Edward Dering, Richard Greenham, Robert Openshawe, George Gifford, William Wood, Edmund Chapman, and others took over this pattern, as had Alexander Nowell. The retention of the Apostles Creed pressed these men toward a Christo-centric pattern of catechetical instruction. Edmund Chapman does not hesitate to declare there was “no other cause” which moved God to give his only begotten Son “but his owne love, mercy and compassion.”36 William Wood says “the favour purchased unto mankinde by Christ extendeth also to me.”37 Toward the turn of the sixteenth century there is a significant change in emphasis in the catechisms of Stephen Egerton, Thomas Cartwright, and John Ball. These men modified or abandoned the earlier framework and gave central place in their catechetical instruction to the decrees of God. Nonetheless there were influential men right up to the Westminster Assembly who followed the older order, e.g. Herbert Palmer.38 It has been sometimes pointed out that in his definitive edition of the Institutes in 1559 Calvin placed the decrees within the context of the work of salvation and the work of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s life. The early Elizabethan Puritans scarcely touched this issue at all. Dering warns of the dangers of investigating what Calvin had once called a “labyrinth.”39 Greenham gives a similar warning. In Matthew Virel’s catechism, extensively used in England, the issues of “predestination” are considered toward the end of the catechism, under salvation.40
An illuminating sidelight on subsequent development is given by Elnathan Parr, whose catechism wrestles with the influence of Theodore Beza, balances this against the views of other reformers, follows the doctrine of God by the doctrine of creation and providence, and finally rejects Beza’s rigid supralapsarianism after several pages of wordy debate.41 With Stephen Egerton and John Ball the decrees of God follow the doctrine of God in both catechisms. The immense influence of both men, and above them of William Perkins, must have done much to promote a wide acceptance of this pattern among Puritan clergy. Taken over by James Ussher and by the Irish Articles, this form was decisive, though modified, at the Westminster Assembly. Even at Westminster, however, a small but highly respected group of “Amyraldians,” of whom Edmund Calamy was the most influential, pled for some recognition of the more liberal Calvinism associated with John Davenant at Dort and Moise Amyraut on the continent.42
In the conflicts and vicissitudes through which the Reformation cause passed in the century after Calvin it was inevitable and indeed necessary to seek greater precision and clarity for these polemical battles. But this process has both gains and losses. With increased systematization the evangelical warmth and lively faith in a gracious God of the first reformers tended to be lost in careful logical precision. Also it has to be asked whether the tools of this systematization were drawn from Scripture or from the heady but alien air of current philosophy. Because it was the Puritans who were most deeply attracted to the “new logic” of Petrus Romus, it is not surprising that some of their catechisms show most clearly the tendency to “dichotomise” associated with Ramean logic, e. g. William Gouge. Stephen Egerton’s twenty-fifth edition has stuffed in a new section on the “communicable” and “non-communicable” attributes of God, which does not appear in his earlier editions.43 Paul Baynes admits when he introduces the dichotomy of the “active” and “passive” obedience of Christ that he is following “later writers.” The earliest reference in a catechism to the “covenant of works” and the “covenant of grace” appears to be in Thomas Cartwright,44 though the chief architects of the developed covenant theology were William Ames and William Perkins, and John Ball and John Preston. Ezekiel Roger’s catechism uses the less ambiguous phrase “covenant of nature.” B. B. Warfield claimed that this developed doctrine of the covenants was the “architectonic principle of the Westminister Confession.” Important as the covenant had been for Calvin, it had never taken the position of a single dominating principle, and he certainly never taught a “covenant of works.”
One of the main issues in the debate with William Barrett in Cambridge in the latter part of the sixteenth century concerned the doctrine of assurance. Puritan catechisms, at this stage, show a double tendency; to ground assurance in works or subjective signs: and to be more aggressively confident and less guarded than the New Testament requires. Charles Simeon told evangelicals of a later age of that Calvinist who “looks on statements like that of Paul’s possibly becoming a castaway as a dog looks on a hedgehog: he knows not what to do with it.” William Perkins gives a formidable list of inward signs to test the reality of repentance; similarly Stephen Egerton discusses “works” as a mark of assurance; pragmatic Puritans sought the “evidences” from William Laud at his execution. There were, however, distinguished Puritans who labored to redress this balance, from the inwardness of signs to a “willingness to follow Christ in all conditions,” and to those “conveyances” by which Christ “reveals himself to us, the word and the sacraments, and the communion of the saints.”
Assessment
In an assessment of Puritan catechisms there is both credit and debit. First theologically: those familiar with the massive theological work of B. B. Warfield on Westminster Assembly45 will remember that he regards the Confession and Catechisms as the ripest fruit of Reformed scholarship, the precise and carefully defined confession of the Reformed faith after a century of conflicts, with its polemical sharp edges well turned outward toward opponents in the Roman Catholic church. The long list of translations of the Shorter Catechism at British Museum into the languages of many nations bears eloquent witness to the enormous theological influence of this catechism for over 250 years.
For all this the question raised once by Horatius Bonar ought to be weighed, “whether the church gained . . . by the exchange of the Reformation standards for those of the seventeenth century. The scholastic mould in which the latter are cast has somewhat trenched upon the ease and breadth which mark the former; and the skilful metaphysics employed at Westminster in giving lawyer-like precision to each statement have imparted a local and temporary aspect to the new which did not belong to the more ancient standards. Or enlarging the remark, we may say that there is something about the theology of the Reformation which renders it less likely to become obsolete than the theology of the Covenant . . . by the adoption of the biblical in preference to the scholastic mode of expression, they have secured for themselves a buoyancy which will bear them up when others go down.”46
There were many difficulties in such a vast confusion of catechisms, an untidy situation frowned on by William Laud and his associates, the weaknesses of which were recognized by some of the Puritans themselves. Thomas Cranmer had warned of the dangers of a multiplicity of catechisms, the Puritans at Hampton Court pressed for a new catechism for the whole church (the articles on the sacraments by John Overall were subsequently added to the church catechism), and the divines at Westminster sincerely desired to establish one catechism and one confession of faith for both England and Scotland. But even after Westminster the spate of catechisms continued. Philip Nye was not entirely satisfied with the work of the divines, Richard Baxter prepared Poor Man’s Family Book47 for his people, and Zachary Crofton continued to use John Ball’s earlier work.
It has also been suggested by Christopher Hill that the Puritan use of the catechism was a temporary measure, a substitute tool for religious education, not to be compared with preaching because of its very formal and artificial method of learning, which could be readily dropped once the general standard of religious education had been raised. There may be some supporting evidence for this, that as the Puritans gained in influence they preferred preaching and tended to neglect the catechism, and that in this gap the Caroline churchmen Henry Hammond and George Herbert and the men associated with Archbishop Laud exerted a decisive influence. Richard Baxter, however, strenuously rebuts the usual Laudian charge that the “presbyterians” were prepared to “down catechising.” Nor can Laud’s attempt to “restore the catechism” be relieved entirely from the struggle for power in the church; when, for instance, Richard Sibbes’ “lecture” at Cambridge is put down because “students are taken away from catechising” we are left to conclude, in spite of this official reason, that catechizing would be a safer and less influential course even for a moderate and politically unself-conscious Puritan like Sibbes.
Against the view that the Puritans regarded the catechism as a temporary measure, two facts need to be faced. First, that they do not appear to have considered the catechism an artificial and formal method of religious education, soon to be discarded. There are very plain and very frequent hints that they did not wish to tie their people to the bare words of the catechism, and this was certainly one reason for resistance of Laud. They were concerned for “heart knowledge” and not for the repetitions, as they would have put it, of “parrots or popinjays.” Again the most significant and possibly the most effective of all Puritan attempts in catechizing took place immediately before the Restoration in the achievement of Richard Baxter and his associates at Kidderminster and in the wider Worcestershire Association. Baxter’s Reformed Pastor was originally prepared as direction for his fellow-minsters of Worcestershire, at the commencement of their united labors in this work, to use his words, of “familiar personal instruction.” It is in Baxter’s work that Puritan ideals reach in great measure, their fulfillment and their crown.
One aspect of this ideal can be finally noted. Not infrequently a Puritan catechism is dedicated by its author, if not to the lay patron under whom he survived, then to the people whom he served. So the multiplicity of catechisms has to be seen, in one sense, as an expression of a conscientious pastoral ideal, to communicate the “principles of religion” in a particular local situation, to use the labors of other “godlie” ministers if these were available and suitable, to change them where necessary, but never to be bound by them; above all to marry the pulpit and the home, the instruction of the word with family piety, the preaching and teaching office of the “painful” minister for the good of his flock. Beyond any limitations we have noticed this ideal of Puritan pastors can be traced, to labor diligently in church and home, in school and university for reformation both in doctrine and life; as Baxter once said to his Worcestershire brethren, “A Reformation that must be wrought by their own diligence, and unwearied labours, by earnest preaching, catechising, personal instructions, and taking heed to all the flock, whatever pains and reproaches it should cost them.”