The Puritan Home

I

THIS year we are celebrating the third centennial of the landing of the Pilgrims, and our people are making an effort gratefully to recall the tremendous event. To do so requires considerable elfort; for to any but themselves Puritans have generally been a distasteful folk. Especially was the last century for them a time of bitter and almost continuous attack, caricature, and denunciation. Now, however, when the gaunt figures no longer walk our streets, feeling has grown kinder and aversions less clamorous. Not unwelcome now will be a dispassionate estimate of what the Puritan actually was.

To understand him, we must study him in his breeding-place, the Puritan home; for that was the most fundamental of Puritan institutions. Its effects were prodigious. It formed New England. Out of it came much of the mind and character of the entire country. Many of the older among us have felt its invigorating influence. Yet it is now in decay, where it has not altogether disappeared. Its usages are largely unknown, its strength and weaknesses have seldom been coolly studied. Often has it served as picturesque material for our novelists; but only to be held up to scorn as an oppressor of youth and a fosterer of gloom and hypocrisy.

I was brought up in it, am profoundly grateful for its discipline, and feel that I owe to it more than half of all that has made my life beautiful and rewarding. To-day I would come forward as its eulogist. And while not blind to its defects, — aware indeed that its sudden passing has been inevitable, — I would insist that American civilization will have a hard task to find a source from which to draw an inspiration so bounteous and so constructive.

To fix the worth of the Puritan home I shall endeavor first to give a clear account of the facts usually found in such homes, and then proceed to trace the setting and influence of those facts.

What was the daily current of life in a Puritan home? All recognize that its distinctive feature was its elaborate religious training. But how did that training secure its hold on the young? To be of any worth, this depictive side of my subject should be minute and well authenticated. I will base it on a description of my own childhood, and thus will show in some detail what were the assumptions, the practices, and the ideals of a typical Puritan home.

II

My father was a Boston merchant, who had come from the country and by diligence had climbed to a competence. In our home all was plain and solid. There was no luxury. Expenditure was carefully studied, and waste incessantly fought. But we had all t hat was needed for comfort and dignity, and on all that we possessed and did religion set its mark. To exhibit that ever-present influence, I trace the course of a single day. On rising I read a chapter of the Bible and had a prayer by myself. Then to breakfast, where each of the family repeated a verse of scripture, my father afterward asking a blessing on the meal. No meal was taken without this benediction. When breakfast was ended, the servants were summoned to family prayers, which ended with the Lord’s Prayer, repeated together.

Then we children were off to school, which was opened with Bible-reading and prayer. Of school there were two sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon; so that our principal play-time was between four-thirty and six o’clock, with study around the family table after supper. Later in the evening, when the servants’ work was done, they joined us once more at family prayers; after which we children kissed each member of the family and departed to bed, always however, before undressing, reading a chapter of the Bible by ourselves and offering an accompanying prayer. Each day, therefore, I had six seasons of Biblereading and prayer — two in the family, two by myself, and two at school; and this in addition to the threefold blessing of the food. No part of the day was without consecration. The secular and the sacred were completely intertwined.

Permeated thus as was every day with divine suggestion, it may be said that on Sunday our very conversation was in the heavens. On that day the labor of the servants was lightened, so that they too might rest and attend church. Many household cares were then thrown upon us children, and it was arranged that there should be little cooking. But while play and labor ceased and solemnity reigned, it was an approved and exalting solemnity; for then occurred two preaching services and a session of Sunday School.

To me the day was one of special happiness, because my father was then at home, and during almost every hour of the day was his children’s companion. We gathered about him for cheerful talk after breakfast, and after the noon dinner he usually read to us from The Pilgrim s Progress, or some other benign and attractive book. After supper the whole family assembled in the parlor, and when each one present had repeated a hymn or poem, we had an hour of music—solos on the piano by the girls, and familiar hymns sung without book by the entire company.

Toward the end of the evening my father was apt to put his arm around one of the children and draw him into the library for a half-hour’s private talk. Blessed and influential sessions these, serving the purpose of the Roman confessional! As frank as that and as peace-bringing, but freed from its formality, with no other authority recognized than a common allegiance to a Heavenly Father, the independence of us little ones guarded by the abounding wisdom, tenderness, trust, and even playfulness of our adored companion.

III

Such unceasing presence in the Puritan home of the religious motive might easily have become unwholesome and enfeebling, had it not been attended by several ot her powerful influences, which diversified it and enriched the nat ure to which religion gave stability. As these supporting interests arc generally overlooked by those who censure the Puritan home, I name a few of them.

To the family tie the Puritans gave great prominence. Marriage was a sacrament, and the family a divine institution, where each member was charged with the well-being of all. In my own family there was little authoritative restriction. With father and mother we children were on terms of tender and reverential intimacy. They joined us in our games, were sharers in our studies, friendships, and aspirations. To them we expressed freely our half-formed thoughts. If one of them took a journey, one of us was pretty sure to be a companion.

In a family where there were few servants, each of us took part in household duties. There were rooms to be set in order, wood to be split, errands to be run. The older children must wait on the younger. In this way all were drawn together by common cares. Brothers and sisters became close friends. Affect ion was deep and openly expressed. With no fear of sentimentality, we kissed one another often, always on going to bed, on rising, and usually when leaving the house for even a few hours. We were generous with our small pocket-moneys, and wept when the ending vacation carried away to boarding-school a member of our group. The Puritan home cannot be rightly estimated without noting the tenacity of family affection, which its devout atmosphere directly contributed to induce.

IV

Furthermore, there was the insistence on learning, fostered by the presence of abundant books, by the studies around the centre table in the evening, by the reading aloud that went on wherever three or four could be gathered together. My father was not a college graduate, eagerly as he had desired to be. He sent his brother to Yale and accepted a business life for himself. But he more than made up the regretted loss by diligent reading, and to all his children he gave the utmost education they would accept.

I think this insistence on education was usual in Puritan families. Lavish expense was incurred for it when stringent economy was practised elsewhere.

The foundation of Harvard College in the early and poverty-stricken years of the Puritan colony was characteristic of Puritanism everywhere. It set great store on intellectual vigor and filled its homes with books. Our public libraries have done us one disservice. They have checked the habit of buying books. The libraries of my father and grandfather were considerable, containing most of the important books in history, biography, divinity, and poetry. Physical science was then just starting. Of fiction there was little; until the beginning of the nineteenth century, novelists were few.

V

There is a widespread impression that Puritanism was hostile to the Fine Arts. I believe it to be untrue, or, at most, true only with reference to the lighter, more ornamental and vivacious of the arts. In the view of the Puritan life was not meant for amusement. Whatever fostered self-indulgence or heedless gayety was certainly frowned on. But in my childhood several of the Fine Arts, notably poetry and music, were cultivated with an ardor and general approval infrequent to-day. From our family library none of the great English poets was absent. My grandfather loved Pope, my father Shakespeare and Byron, my mother Cowper. All three wrote respectable verse, as did several of the children. Most persons did. No one of us ever doubted that to be a poet or a composer of music was the highest attainment of human faculty, unless indeed that preeminence might be challenged by the minister, to whom these artistic seers were thought to be near of kin. We studied our poets, therefore, as those who brought us messages of importance. We committed their verses to memory enormously.

A clerical uncle begged that I might be named for his favorite poet, George Herbert — a rich endowment! By the time I was twelve, I knew by heart about half of all Herbert wrote, and that not to the prejudice of Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. It should be remembered that among the English poets Puritanism had rather more than its fair share, — Milton, Marvell, the Wesleys, Watts, Cowper, Montgomery, the two Brownings, — sufficient to make poetry a natural inmate of most Puritan homes. Burns’s poems were printed in America two years after they appeared in Scotland, and the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth but four years after they had been laughed at by Englishmen.

So far from any natural antagonism between the greatest of the arts and Puritanism, it may well be urged that the constant, sense of the infinite in which the Puritan was nurtured was the very soil most favorable for developing the poetic spirit. Certainly, among the friends of my youth I came upon enjoyers of poetry twice as frequently as I do to-day. The number of great writers was smaller, but the study of those few was more serious and general.

And something similar may be said of music. Few indeed were the Puritan homes where music of a high order was not cultivated. As a rule, girls were expected to master the piano. Three of my four sisters played, and played well, Bach, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn — the last especially in his sacred settings — being accounted sovereign. Mozart, Schubert, and others of a lyrical vein were, I suspect, counted somewhat too sportive and spontaneous.

In almost every family there were seasons of song in which all were expected to join. The meagre conditions of that primitive day could not afford the many concerts that we now enjoy. Populations were not large enough for that. But it is worth noting that, in Puritan New England, the first scholarly Journal of Music, and the first carefully trained orchestras — the Musical Fund and the Germania — found strong support. My father was by no means rich, but he supplied us children with season tickets each winter to the symphony rehearsals of the Germania Society.

It is true that to several of the arts — painting, sculpture, and the drama — Puritanism was unfriendly. But the grounds of this aversion were historical and not to be explained by any supposed sourness of disposition. The first and the last pieces written by Milton were dramatic, and the eulogies of Shakespeare by him and by Marvell are among the warmest in our language.

But there came a change. By the time of the great migration, 1640 to 1650, the English stage had reached such a pitch of degradation that it became necessary to close the theatres; and when t hey were again opened, on the coming of Charles II, they exhibited an indecency unparalleled before or since. No wonder that the horror of that foulness became fixedly associated in Puritan minds with the theatre itself, and that, even as late as my childhood, self-respecting people pretty generally kept away from stage-plays. No doubt that absence encouraged the very vices against which it protested, and the Puritans lost an ingredient of character of utmost worth in training the imagination. But when an art has been so captured by the forces of evil, abstention from it becomes a necessity, and confidence in it is only slowly established.

In less degree a similar defense may be offered for the Puritan attitude toward painting and sculpture. Representations of the saints in stone and glass did not then merely stir æsthetic emotions of beauty, such as we experience to-day. They excited, and were intended to excite, feelings closely akin to idolatry. Mourn, as we must, over the image-breaking which, during the Civil War, damaged the loveliness of many cathedrals, it is only fair to recognize it as a stage, perhaps a necessary stage, in the emancipation of the English mind. Since sculpture was employed at that time almost exclusively to further superstitious ends, it naturally bred repulsion in men of clearer faith. They felt the dangers against which the Second Commandment warns. Personal busts were not counted objectionable, nor painted portraiture. Something like a dozen contemporary portraits of Milton are known, and ancestral portraits were fairly common in Puritan homes. Except for these, Puritan walls were generally bare. Pictures were rare and expensive, and distasteful associations connected with their superstitious use did not readily pass away.

On the other hand, Puritans were strong in the arts of design. Their furniture, silver, china, and the many articles of comfort and beauty for the home, were admirable. They are sought to-day as superior in taste to those of later years. There is solidity in them, durability, freedom from caprice, and an expression of that sober rationality everywhere characteristic of the Puritan genius. On entering an old Puritan home, I have often wondered how a family of modest means could acquire furniture of such excellence. They apparently bought slowly, either went without or got the best, and provided for their children no less than for themselves. For temporary convenience to accept an article of inferior workmanship or design was reckoned a kind of moral obliquity. Standards of quality had been established in most things, from which individual fancy did not readily depart. Such standards give quiet dignity to Puritan architecture, making the three or four types of Colonial house worth preserving. For adaptation to climate, wise use of accessible materials, inner convenience obtained at low cost, for modest stateliness and freedom from discordant lines, Puritan domestic architecture deserves high praise.

It has seemed worth while to examine thus minutely the artistic attitude of the Puritans because it has generally been so grossly misrepresented. Since these lovers of purity and righteousness held themselves aloof from the debauched representative arts of painting, sculpture, and the drama, they are charged with an indiscriminate hostility to all beauty, their exceptional devotion to the nobler arts of poetry, music, and the home being quite overlooked.

It is true that, even in these regions, Puritan taste was severe. Whatever a Puritan loved must be rational, thorough, and marked with deliberate purpose. These are fundamental qualities in all the arts. But they are best attended by a light touch, spontaneous gayety, and superficial grace. Hence arise two types of beauty: the one intellectual, where the beautiful object is an embodiment of law and is stripped of all that is not called for by its purpose; the other, exuberant, expressing freedom, play, ornament. In the former Puritan art is strong. On the latter it looks askance. Because the latter, the easier and prettier, is at present in favor, Puritans are apt to be denied all sense of beauty.

VI

Such, then, was the constitution of the Puritan home, such its central religious ideal, and such its three supporting influences — education, family affection, and the nobler Fine Arts. In dealing with so controversial a subject, I have thought it safest to record the actual facts of a personal experience. The subject is one which readily lends itself to picturesque treatment, whether of eulogy or scorn. Both of these I would avoid. On the basis of sifted fact I would ask a dispassionate estimate of the training which fashioned New England’s character during three centuries. My experience, I think, is fairly representative, though late. My life began in 1842, when the Puritan regime was drawing to its close. But on both sides my ancestry was purely Puritan and American for nine generations, my father a deacon of an Orthodox church, four of my uncles Orthodox ministers.

Living, too, as I did throughout my boyhood, as much in the country as the city, I caught the Puritan traditions of creed and practice where they lingered longest. The habits of the many other Puritan homes familiar to my boyhood did not differ materially from mine, except in the matter of temperament. Wherever the head of the house was sombre, disappointed, or unapproachable, I have found an atmosphere far removed from that of my cheerful surroundings. A bad temper will spread gloom anywhere, and spread it the more readily when life is regarded as a serious business. I would not assert that Puritanism is an antidote for every infelicity of temper. I merely maintain that it provides ample room for men of good-will, and I think it unjust to hold a special faith responsible for evils incident to all mankind. Out of a happy experience I am certain that Puritanism was no check on well-made parents, but that it helped them to lead an honorable, richly fed, and lovable life, with great, contentment and blessing to all around them. Yet while acknowledging myself fortunate in the well-governed temper of my companions, I cannot fail to see how that companionship was fostered by the desire on their part to imitate the patient bounty of t he Father of us all.

VII

In turning from this description of the Puritan home to emphasize its worth, I would put forward prominently the literary power its training gave. Puritan children, we have seen, were likely to read or hear six passages of the English Bible every day. That book, without regard to its religious value, is acknowledged to be the consummate masterpiece of our language. Here are primitive folk-lore, national history, personal anecdote, racy portraiture, incisive reflection, rapturous poetry, weighty argument, individual appeal, the whole presenting a wider range of interests than any other book alfords. Throughout our version, too, runs a style of matchless simplicity, precision, animation, and dignity — a style exquisitely changing color to match its diverse subject-matter. What schooltraining in English can compare with the year-long reading of this volume?

Literary taste cannot well be directly taught. It comes best unconsciously, while the attention is given to something else. The Puritan child went through his many Bible-readings with a religious aim, the extraordinary beauty of the literature affecting him incidentally as something which could not well be otherwise. In that holy hush it was most naturally incorporated into his struct ure.

I understate the case, however, in saying that the matchless English was daily read. Almost every week considerable portions wore committed to memory. Before I was fifteen I had learned half the Psalms, the whole Gospel of John, three of Paul’s Epistles, and large sections of Job and Isaiah. And this personal study was undertaken, not in obedience to commands, but because frequent contact with noble thought begets of itself a desire for more intimate acquaintance. Any man with half an ear, living in the company of musicians, is sure to think music beautiful and important. Just so the Puritan youth was drawn, not driven, to the study of the Bible through association with the biblically minded. Before he was aware what processes were going on, he found himself in possession of something priceless. He understood good English, and pretty generally spoke it.

VIII

Of the doctrines which the Puritans derived from their sacred volume, or read into it, I have no need to write at any length. Their general tenor is well known, and this paper is not a treatise on theology, but an exhibit of Puritan methods of domestic training. Still, since that t raining was based on certain religious conceptions, I must briefly summarize these. But it should be borne in mind that there was much diversity among the Puritans, and never any such thing as a Puritan Church or creed. Each little group of believers had an independent existence, and formulated for itself its understanding or creed about things divine and human, changing this whenever it could be brought into closer conformity to the mind of the majority. During my life my country church has rewritten its entire creed three times.

The distinctive feature of Puritan religion is the stress that it lays on personality, the duty of preserving it and keeping it clean. A person is the one sacred being in the universe to whom all else is subservient. God Himself is a person, having intelligence, will, love and aversion, communicability and, above all, righteousness, or respect for other persons. He is no mere abstract mind, force, love, or law. Behind all these there is a He, their possessor and director. We too are persons, made in God’s likeness and therefore able to have thoughts about Him which are true, however inadequate. Human relationships are our best clue to an understanding of Him and his government. Indeed, so near is God to man, that a finite person, perfect within his human limits, would be the fullest possible revelation of God and a fit object of worship. Loyalty to such a being saves us from sin and vicariously redeems the sinner. Vicariousness is a principle throughout the personal universe. The modern Socialist finds that my wrongdoing afflicts my group and by it must be healed. Individualistic Puritanism puts perfect manhood, the suffering Christ, in the place of the redeeming group.

Puritan religion is thus essentially personal religion. The Spaniard is highly religious. So is the Russian, the Hindu, the very English people from whom the Puritans came out. But the religion of all these is preeminently social, embodying a group-consciousness and largely concerned with the performance of sacred ceremonies. Puritan religion is experienced, not performed. It needs no church, no ritual, no priest. Each believer stands face to face before God, responsible to Him alone, and through his witnesses — conscience, right reason, the Bible ‘as spiritually discerned’ — is directly instructed what to do. Obligation is minute and perpetual. All things arc full of duty. Each situation in life presents a best way of acting, expressive of God’s will, and a worse way, expressive of our childish and temporary will. We are incessantly tempted to some partial good through stupor, slackness, caprice, or bodily allurement.

Human life is a daily strife with sin, and drill in duty, bringing home to us the futility — the suicide, even — of following any other will than that of our exacting Father. The restrictions, the disappointments, the sufferings of our existence here become comprehensible when viewed as preliminary education for a perfected existence hereafter. A wise father sets his child tasks somewhat beyond his powers. Our athletic trainers fill our sports with difficulties and dangers, and forbid us to shrink from bodily harm. Just so God plans his world. He makes it a preparatory school for those destined ever to remain individual persons, unmerged in anything so meaningless as universal being. The consequences of such discipline, either in enlargement or shrinkage, go on forever.

I hope the brevity of this statement still does sufficient justice to the Puritan faith. Possibly I have over-rationalized it through the attempt to give unity to a complex body of doctrine. Wise beliefs are seldom free from incongruities. At almost every point, too, the utterance of some eminent divine can be quoted, giving to this or that doctrine a coloring different from that given here. I have said that Puritanism held no authoritative creed. Its fellowship was based on general consent, with room left for individual divergence. A faith that included Princeton and Andover, Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins, permits no exact formulation. But I believe my sketch will be sufficient to show where lay the strength of Puritanism and to make plain its hold on the realities of life. It fitted its followers to fight Indians, endure the hardships of New England, found a democracy, and send forth throughout the land a sturdier folk than any other single stock can boast.

IX

But, if Puritan religion was able to give weight to character, dignity to speech and bearing, promptitude to duty, and such excellence to educational and political institutions that the world has taken pattern from them ever since, why did it decay, and why, even in the days of its power, did it awaken animosity? Because each human excellence involves some special limitation, danger at least, and the unavoidable limitations of Puritanism are peculiarly obnoxious to the common man. They stifle him and make him after a time clamor for ampler air. One needs to be already strong before he can draw strength from Puritanism. For it looks on all things sub specie œternitatis, and takes altogether seriously the saying that in God we live and move and have our being. In the disorderly and changing world, the Puritan is ill at ease. Things of earth are of slender consequence compared with those of Heaven, and are to be dealt with only as they prepare us for the divine life. In this extreme idealism there is danger for weak natures. They are apt to grow morbid about themselves, about others, and even about God.

The miseries at tending too great selfconsciousness are widely felt and are peculiarly difficult to cure. To be constantly analyzing our motives, in order to be sure that they are not the promptings of a temporary impulse but the veritable voice of God, is safe for not many men, for still fewer women. Of course, we should know what we are doing. Blind action is as disastrous as excessive introspection; but not being painful, it escapes with less censure. The wise man keeps control of himself while still looking without more than within. So long as we inhabit this complicated planet, we must give it a large share of our attention and enjoyment. How large that share shall be and what proportion it should bear to spiritual interests can, fortunately, never be determined. The difficult task of keeping the two on terms of mutual aid is for each one of us an important part of life’s discipline.

It is often charged that Puritanism was lop-sided, other-worldly, over-emphatic in the care of one’s own soul; and that through this tendency it exposed its followers to self-deception and hypocrisy. That there was danger in this direction is obvious. But danger that leads to such high results is worth while. I believe the danger grossly exaggerated; and it is only fair to remember that the Puritan world was a far less interesting, a less spiritual place than it has become since the rise of modern science and the study of the conditions under which mind and morals are planned to coöperate.

On account, too, of its slender comprehension of the relation between persons, Puritanism has been badly shaken and now looks a good deal out of date. Its insistence on personality and the eternal worth of the individual, we have already seen. Self-respect might be called the central Puritan virtue. Certainly the omnipresent sense of sin that brooded over Puritanism concerned itself far more with personal stain than with social damage. Society, with its obligations, is something almost accidental. God has seen fit to create a multitude, each a person, and has called on us, as we respect ourselves, to respect others. Equality is the highest point reached by Puritan sociology, with democracy as its natural expression. But the thought of our time has taken a lurch in a different direction. Individualism, the liberal creed for at least (our centuries, is now disparaged, Socialism is exalted. Instead of viewing society as formed by the addition of individuals, we now incline to look upon society as primordial and an individual as its derivative. Socialism, though by itself no less false than its opposite, has at least shown that a single detached person, complete in isolation, is inconceivable. We exist in relations and are essentially conjunct. But while society and the individual are mutual factors, meaningless apart, I think Puritanism drew attention to that side of the dual fact which is the more important for human welfare. The initiation of action is an individual function. Too often it is forgotten that society has no central consciousness. That is lodged in individuals, who alone, therefore, have the power to criticize, on which power all progress is dependent. Without personal goading, society remains blind and inert. It cannot reform itself. A Garrison, a Phillips, a Mrs. Stowe, a Whittier, a Lincoln must first appear, before American slavery is overthrown. While then the meagre Puritan conception of personality was destined to perish and to carry with it a pretty large superstructure, it trained strong men as the equally one-sided philosophy of to-day cannot. Socialism begets enthusiastic followers. Leaders are fashioned where honor is paid to personality.

If the Puritan notion of personality, however, was too small for man, it was doubly belittling when applied to God. Yet He, too, was imagined as an individual, contrasted, on the one hand, with physical objects, and on the other, with human beings. He easily became pictured as an old man in the clouds, trying, not very successfully, to manage his obstreperous world. It is true, such concrete representation has its uses and is unhesitatingly employed by the Psalmist and most religious teachers. Stated baldly, it seems irreverent to speak of God as a hen. But when we read that ‘He covers us with his feathers and under his wings we may trust,’ how true and comforting is the comparison !

Just so with the Puritan humanization of God. If we are to speak to Him in prayer, hear his voice in duty, find Him our supporting companion in privation and sorrow, the object of our gratitude in happiness; if, indeed, we are sincere in our hopes of individual immortality, we must detect in our own personality something too precious to be lacking in Him whom we worship. Only to a person will love go forth. The danger is that personality may become an empty form, excluding all contents. As in ourselves, it should be an organizing principle, rich in relations and powers, and capable of the utmost self-diversification. But for the Puritans the world was somewhat aloof from God. They knew Him as its original and arbitrary creator, but not as its present indwelling life, as

In like manner the human body, with its multifarious joys, instincts, invigorations and seductions, was looked on, not as a temple of God, but as a prisonhouse of the Spirit. No monotheism, however, can be permanent which ignores the massive truths of polytheism. Puritanism tried to and failed.

No doubt I magnify these faults by abstract statement. Practical life usually finds its way to facts, even through restrictive theories. And it would be unfair not to recognize the enlarged scope offered to Puritan thought about God by the doctrine of the Trinity. According to this, God presents Himself to us in three contrasted ways, — as the ground of all existence, as perfected

While, then, I believe that American civilization owes more to Puritanism than to any other single agency, I have no desire to see it reëstablished. That is plainly impossible. We must rethink its problems in our own terms and even remould its beautiful home-training, if we would not be blind to what the world has learned since the Pilgrims landed.

Each age has what may be called its holy passions. Those of Puritan times were rationality, order, duty regarded as personal loyalty; those of to-day, humanitarianism, social service, scientific pursuit of ever-developing truth. These later ideals, though slenderly regarded by the Puritans, are quite as needful as their own in the fulfillment of Christ’s moral law. Through them the spirit of Puritanism acquires a richer significance.