Introduction

CONVERSION AT CAMBRIDGE

That to make sure of life eternal is the one necessary business that we sons of death have to do in this world, and without which all our time here is worse than lost, every enlightened mind will easily acknowledge.3

JONATHAN MITCHELL, a Harvard graduate and the successor whom Thomas Shepard chose for his Cambridge pulpit, penned these words; but every New England minister in the seventeenth century believed and preached this concept. “Converting work,” after all, was the “main Design” of the Reformed ministry, a view held by all of New England’s first- and second-generation pastors despite their differences on other subjects.4 Ministers might have preached differing theologies of conversion, but they never haggled over the fundamental point that if men were to be redeemed they had to experience a new birth.5 Conversion was, as Alan Simpson rightly concluded, the very “essence of Puritanism,” an experience that separated “the Puritan from the mass of mankind” and endowed him with “the privileges and duties of the elect.”6

For Shepard’s people and other Puritans, however, grace came in no momentary Pauline wrenching of the will during an inspiring sermon or while “taking a pipe of tobacco,” but rather emerged from a prepared-for conclusion to a lengthy regenerative process.7 Viewing conversion in this way, Cambridge parishioners had no immediate assurance of their salvation; only after a long period of intensive and prolonged introspection could they be certain of grace.8 Such acute inward searching, stemming from their knowledge of preparationist theology, came from hearing sermons, taking and reviewing sermon notes, conferring with pastors, and talking with converted laymen.

First- and second-generation ministers, because of this pronounced emphasis on preparing for conversion, required almost all candidates for church membership to recite publicly a confession of their progressive steps to saving grace. Only some women—for certain ministers used 1 Corinthians 34:14 and 1 Timothy 2:12 to forbid women in their congregation to speak before the entire church—and timid men related their confessions in private before the church’s elders. Thomas Shepard approved of public confessions and asked everyone (man or woman) seeking membership in the Cambridge church to recount before the congregation the way in which he or she came to grace. Between about 1638 and 1645, Shepard recorded in a small leather notebook the confessions of fifty-one persons applying for church membership at Cambridge. One of the few Puritans to transcribe such relations, or at least to have them survive, Shepard furnished posterity with an unusual opportunity to examine in depth the “essence of Puritanism.”9

The people who gave these confessions, although they willingly bared their innermost feelings before an assembly of their peers, were mostly unassuming laymen. In England, where many of the families resided in Suffolk, Essex, or Northumberland, almost all the men were either yeomen, tradesmen (carpenters, coopers, weavers, or glovers), or mariners. Only a little more than one-third of the people could read and write.10 After they migrated to Cambridge, their chief concern was husbandry and the improvement of their homesteads, though several of the men supplemented their agricultural income by practicing their former trades. While the exact wealth of most of these people at the time of their confession cannot be calculated, a great majority of them had sufficient means to marry. Moreover, scattered information reveals that some of them eventually attained comfortable lives and a few even acquired great riches. Those with the title “Mr.” or “Mrs.” at the time of their confession had already achieved a place among the local gentry, and others subsequently joined their rank. Of the four servants who made a relation of faith, two were obscure women, now untraceable. But the two male servants, Richard Eccles and John Stedman, quickly achieved social, economic, and political independence. Of course, church membership brought only the promise of heavenly reward and earthly propriety, but such economic successes came from secular endeavors. Elder Francis Moore, for example, was one of the less prosperous citizens in the town but held an exalted lay position in the Cambridge congregation.11

The confessors were largely a youthful group in the process of starting their own families and seeking a respectable niche in Cambridge society. Thus, none was under eighteen, but six men and eight women were younger than twenty-five. The majority—sixteen men and eleven women—were between twenty-five and thirty-five. And only five men and two women were over thirty-five at the time of their relation of faith. Therefore, as John Demos and others have shown, in New England towns the age at which people attained the privileges and responsibilities of adult citizenship, which required church membership as a prerequisite, ranged from “twenty-five to forty, with some tendency to cluster in the early thirties.”12

Nearly half of the confessions were given by women.13 Even more than the men, they led commonplace lives, devoting themselves to cooking, marketing, gardening, and raising children. Two of the women, unnamed by Shepard, performed such duties as maids. In contrast, widows Joanna Sill and Mrs. Greene both managed their own estates. But the majority were housewives, and their lot in life was not an easy one. The epitaph of the wife of a Gloucestershire yeoman might well have been written by any of the Cambridge women:

From my sad cradle to my sable chest,

Poor Pilgrim, I did find few months of rest.14

Moreover, seventeenth-century women were generally subservient to their husbands and fathers in most matters. Anne Errington was too timid to discuss her spiritual condition with her mate, “fearing he would loathe me if he knew me,” while Mary Sparrowhawk was afraid to “speak to anybody and thought also that they would not be plain with her.” Despite these extreme cases, Puritan women usually functioned independently from their men in the matter of receiving grace, and hence many of the confessions by women were as long or longer than those by men.15

These men and women lived at Newtown, Massachusetts, known as Cambridge after 2 May 1638, a town situated on the Charles River about midway between Charlestown and Watertown. Its founders selected the site about six months after the arrival of the Winthrop fleet in 1630. Deputy-governor Thomas Dudley, in a letter written in 1631 to Lady Bridget, the Countess of Lincoln, reported that “upon leaving all thoughts of a fort, because upon any invasion we were necessarily to lose our houses, when we should retire thereinto,” all the assistants resolved to “build houses at a place a mile east from Watertown . . . and by removing the ordnance and munition thither, and such as shall come to us hereafter . . . if God would, a fortified town might there grow up.”16 Although the assistants agreed to build at Newtown in the spring of 1631, only Dudley and Simon Bradstreet fulfilled the compact.17 Governor John Winthrop, having built a house at Newtown, almost moved there. However, Bostonians implored him to remain with them; and Winthrop, who was never overly fond of the Newtown location, decided not to move. Therefore, in the fall, without consulting Dudley or the other assistants, he had his servants dismantle the house and reassemble it in Boston, an action that destroyed Dudley’s hopes of making Newtown the capital of the colony and led to an acrimonious dispute between Dudley and Winthrop.18

Life in this small, compact village in the early years was calm. The eight to ten families there, who came into contact daily, devoted themselves to the distribution of land (both from the colony to the town and from the town to individuals), to defense, to the construction of roads, and to the establishment of local government. Soon the population of Cambridge increased, eventually bringing discontent into the infant community. In 1632, immigrants from Braintree, Essex—former parishioners of Thomas Hooker, an English minister silenced for his Puritanism—left Mount Wollaston, their first and temporary Massachusetts residence, and settled at Cambridge. Because colonists from neighboring towns also moved to a more attractive Cambridge, by the end of 1633 nearly a hundred families lived there. Such expansion, according to the Cambridge freemen, brought overcrowding. “Those of Newtown,” Winthrop recorded, “complained of straitness for want of land, especially meadow, and desired leave of the court to look out either for enlargement or removal.”19 Therefore, on 31 May 1636, a full two years after their first complaint to the General Court, many in the town opted for removal.20 It was their departure to Connecticut that placed Shepard, who arrived with a “company” of immigrants in the fall of 1635, in his Cambridge pulpit and many of his future parishioners in their Cambridge homes. “Myself and those that came with me,” Shepard recalled, “found many homes empty and many persons willing to sell.”21

By 1652, about a decade after Shepard’s parishioners narrated their confessions, Cambridge was fast becoming a comfortable middle-class town. Based on the Shawshine land grants of 1652, the average worth at death of the sixty (of 115) patentees for whom there are extant inventories was at least £317.22 Also reflecting a middle-class community, between 1635 and 1653 a full twenty-two persons rotated in and out of the elected positions of selectmen. Moreover, these “town fathers” were generally middle-aged and economically successful. When first elected to office, seven of them were between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, and thirteen more were at least thirty-five years old. However, none was over fifty-two.23 As to their wealth, only four had less than middle-class assets. By far the greater part of these elected officials held considerable substance and constituted the local gentry. In fact, no person of wealth on the 1652 Shawshine list for whom economic position can be assessed failed to achieve elected office. Thus, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, men in this middle-class community attained full rights of belonging, that is, marriage and children, church membership, freemanship, town grants, and office-holding. And the wealthiest from among them eventually came to bear the greatest role in local government.24

As residents of Cambridge, Shepard’s parishioners delivered their relations in the local Congregational or Independent church. If they had arrived a few years earlier, however, they would have found no church or meetinghouse in the town. Perhaps because of its meager population, Cambridge did not construct a place of worship until after the arrival of Hooker’s company in 1632. In that year, according to Thomas Prince, an early eighteenth-century historian and preacher, the town “built the 1st House for publick Worship” a church with “a Bell upon it.”25 The townsmen still had no minister and had to travel to neighboring towns in order to worship on the Sabbath. Regular services began at Cambridge only when Thomas Hooker, who came a year after his Braintree company, became their first pastor in 1633.26

A full four months before Hooker and most of his congregation left for Connecticut in 1635, Shepard and “divers other good Christians,” probably including those of Hooker’s band who remained behind, organized a new congregation at Cambridge. Wisely following the Bay Colony practices in such a matter, Shepard first sought the approval of the colony magistrates. Once given, he “sent to all the neighboring churches for their elders to give their assistance, at a certain day, at Newtown, when they should constitute their body.” , “a great assembly” gathered on the appointed day. Shepard and two others sat before the congregation on the elders’ bench. The oldest of the three led in prayer. Then Shepard prayed “with deep confession of sin” and also “opened the cause of their meeting.” After a brief ministerial discussion over how many people “were needful to make a church,” the ministers decided that seven would be a “fit number” and requested at least that many to “make confession of their faith, and declare what work of grace the Lord had wrought in them.” Shepard testified first and was followed by seven others. Then, having heard the church covenant read, they all gave their “solemn assent” to it. At the request of an elder, John Cotton, teacher of the Boston church, extended the “right hand of fellowship” to the members of the newly formed congregation. Shepard followed up with an exhortation to the “rest of his body, about the nature of their covenant, and to stand firm to it, and commended them to the Lord in a most heavenly prayer.” An elder then informed the assembly of the intention of the congregation to select Shepard for their pastor and requested that all objections to his candidacy be submitted before his ordination. Concluding the formal ceremony, the elder thanked the churches for their participation and left the Cambridge church “to the Lord.” Henceforth, Shepard’s congregation enjoyed both the official sanction of the civil government and the informal approval of neighboring ministers.27 Thomas Shepard, of course, prepared each of the confessors to make their relations of faith before this fledgling congregation, for his preaching and pastoral care brought the Cambridge parishioners to spiritual maturity.

Shepard was born on 5 November 1605, on the “very hour” at which a few extremist Roman Catholics attempted to assassinate James I and all the members of his Parliament. Shepard’s father, William, like most Englishmen, was horrified by the Gunpowder Plot and “would hardly believe that ever any such wickedness should be attempted by men against so religious and good Parliament.” Shepard cherished few fond memories of his English homeland. As a child, he was shuffled by his parents from relative to relative because of the plague in their hometown of Towcester, Northamptonshire. When he finally returned home, the boy found that his “dear mother” had died. Still worse, perhaps even before Thomas’s return, his father married “another woman”—a stepmother, Shepard recalled, who “did seem not to love me but incensed my father often against me.” Not even the Towcester Free School offered him asylum; there Shepard suffered under the tutelage of a crusty and cruel schoolmaster. Moreover, by the age of ten he was an orphan. Though “fatherless and motherless,” he seemed to enjoy living under the custody of his eldest brother, John, who sent him at “about fifteen years of age” to Emmanuel College, Cambridge.28

Six months before taking his Master of Arts degree in 1627, Shepard began a ministerial career destined to be a stormy one. During the first three years of his ministry, Shepard held a lectureship at Earles-Colne, Essex. Those early years were tranquil. But when he accepted a second post at Towcester, William Laud, Bishop of London and the director of a campaign for uniformity within the English church, barred him from the post for making Earles-Colne and Towcester “seditious, factious Bedlams.” Shepard remembered Laud’s words of suspension this way: “I charge you that you neither preach, read, marry, bury, or exercise any ministerial function in any part of my diocese, for if you do, and I hear of it, I will be upon your back and follow you wherever you go, in any part of the kingdom, and so everlastingly disenable you.”

Roger Harlakenden, an affluent Nonconformist, befriended his former pastor, sheltering him for six months in the Harlakenden home. It was there that the young preacher, probably while reflecting on his ostracism, first saw “into the evil of the English ceremonies, cross, surplice, and kneeling.” In 1631 Shepard became a chaplain in the family of Sir Richard Darley, of Buttercrambe, Yorkshire, a “remote and strange place” where Shepard hoped to be “far from the hearing of the malicious Bishop Laud.” After living at the Darley residence about a year, Shepard married Margaret Touteville, a relative of Sir Richard and a woman “endued with a very sweet spirit of prayer.” Shortly thereafter Richard Neile, a prominent Laudean and the Archbishop of York, forced Shepard to resign his chaplaincy at Buttercrambe. Moving to Heddon, Northumberland, Shepard preached to the “saints” of that village and to “others about and in Newcastle,” a nearby town. Shepard’s preparation of such sermons led him even deeper into Nonconformity, for while in northern England he learned “more of the ceremonies, church government and estate, and the unlawful standing of bishops than in any other place.” Consequently, Thomas Morton, the Bishop of Durham but a man of low-church sympathies, reluctantly silenced Shepard for his outspoken Puritanism. “He durst not give me liberty,” Shepard recalled, “because Laud had taken notice of me.” Undaunted, Shepard continued to preach “up and down in the country and at last privately in Mr. Fenwick’s house,” and during these trying days, the Shepards’ first child, Thomas, was born. Finally, in 1633 the harried Cambridge graduate realized that he “had been tossed from the south to the north of England and now could go no farther” and then began to hear “a call to New England.”29

After two years and one aborted voyage, Shepard, his wife, Margaret, and son, Thomas, sailed into Boston harbor in the fall of 1635. Henceforth Shepard’s life would be different. He would work as the esteemed pastor of the Cambridge church, raise three of his four surviving sons to become ministers, serve as an overseer and the unofficial chaplain of Harvard College, defend in print the Congregationalism of New England against criticism by English Presbyterians, publish several of his sermons, and, though once persecuted himself, suppress Antinomians and other Bay Colony dissidents. In short, Shepard exchanged his underground ministry in England for a position of authority and responsibility in Massachusetts. It is not surprising, therefore, that he described New England as “a land of peace, though a place of trial.”30

To understand the Confessions, it must be remembered that the most important aspect of Shepard’s life was the work he performed as a “soul searching minister of the gospel.” “Pastor Evangelicus,” Cotton Mather called him, and rightly so, because Shepard’s evangelical preaching truly aroused many of his hearers. The Cambridge pastor “awakened” Jonathan Mitchell, who later said of Shepard’s ministry: “Unless it had been four years living in heaven, I know not how I could have more cause to bless God with wonder” Nor was Mitchell’s case exceptional; “many a hundred soul,” wrote Edward Johnson, were “saved” under the ministry of Thomas Shepard. At least fifty-one such people publicly testified, while living under Shepard’s ministry, to having experienced the grace of God. But for those less certain of their salvation, or perhaps insincere about it, his fervent preaching was often disturbing. According to a tradition preserved by Thomas Prince, Shepard “scarce ever preached a sermon, but some or other of his congregation . . . cried out in agony, What shall I do to be saved? Though his voice was low, yet so searching was his preaching, and so great a power attending, as a hypocrite could not easily bear it, and it seemed almost irresistible.” The action of “one Turner of Charlestown, a man of about 50 years of age,” lends some credibility to an obviously exaggerated legend. Turner, having “led a loose and disorderly life,” heard one of Shepard’s sermons and, being “wounded in conscience,” committed suicide by drowning himself in “a little pit where was not above two feet water.” Many in Shepard’s congregation outlived their pastor, who died prematurely at the age of forty-three. “After his death,” wrote one parishioner, “I thought God might just speak to me now no more.”31

Because Shepard devoted himself to helping laymen find salvation and enter the kingdom of heaven—heaven for him being the visible church—he eschewed preaching a systematic doctrine of conversion. This subject was perhaps beyond the comprehension of some parishioners and at best provided men only with a “literal” rather than a “saving” knowledge of Christ. Only in The Sound Believer, his most systematic analysis of conversion, did he deal extensively with the theological nuances of the process. Even in that sermon, after minutely explaining the fine points of vocation, justification, and sanctification, he felt compelled to apologize to his hearers, expressing his apprehension about being “thus large in less practical matters.”32

Despite Shepard’s reluctance to expound systematically the theological basis of conversion, one can still detect such an ideological framework in his writings, circumscribing at every point his practical understanding and explanation of conversion. As shown in Figures 1 and 2, Shepard designated “several stadia or towns,” through which the “poor passenger” passed if he was to experience God’s “manner and order of working.”33

Even if a parishioner mastered Shepard’s intricate ideas on conversion, he knew only how God saved a man and not whether God had redeemed him in particular. The scrupulous person, of course, wanted more than a knowledge of God’s saving acts. Indeed, he desired a personal assurance of his own salvation. Eager to comfort and guide such ardent seekers, Shepard devoted most of his sermons on conversion to resolving two practical questions: What can I do to achieve union with Christ and thereby be truly saved? How do I know my efforts will result in genuine conversion? Accordingly, he exhorted believers to pursue diligently the divinely appointed “means” for salvation and assurance and, for further proof, introspectively search for the “signs” or “evidences” that God had performed a work of grace in their lives. Although Shepard nowhere elaborated a systematic doctrine of means, it is scattered throughout his most voluminous book, The Parable of Ten Virgins, a series of weekly sermons that Shepard preached from June of 1636 until May of 1640 on the practical side of conversion. Likewise, Shepard never systematically outlined a series of signs for identifying true grace; the signs, like the means, appeared randomly as subpoints to broader considerations in his works. In addition, because of Shepard’s pastoral commitment neither to “damp the faith of the elect” nor to “patronize the sloth of the wicked,” he often presented the signs negatively in order to expose the alleged widespread hypocrisy among New Englanders. The spiritual life of a believer—with its quest for salvation including the use of many means and signs—was obviously not an easy one. Indeed, Shepard informed his parishioners that they must live at a “high pitch,” ever seeking Christ. Hypocrites fell by the wayside, but the saints, because the Lord tied their “souls with a knot of faith and love,” persevered to the end.34

Figure 1: The First Stages of Shepard’s Theology of Conversion35

Figure 2: Shepard’s Theology of Conversion

Except for the seven founders of the church, Shepard’s parishioners had to clear an elaborate series of ecclesiastical hurdles in order to relate their confessions and join the Cambridge congregation. According to one generalized description of admission procedures in the Bay Colony, a candidate for church membership first arranged for a semiprivate interview at the home of one of the elders of the congregation. At that informal meeting the candidate declared his desire to join the church and, at the elder’s request, made “known unto them [the congregation] the worke of grace” upon his soul. If the testimony satisfied the elders and others at the assembly—for “divers of the Church, both men and women,” normally met there—one of the ruling elders formally notified the congregation of the applicant’s intention to “enter into Church-fellowship with them.” The elder made such a public announcement in order to provide an opportunity for any church member either to inform the elders of the candidate’s “unfitnesse to joyne” the church or to testify favorably on his behalf.36

Having rectified all private and all public “offences,” if any were brought to an elder’s attention, the candidate appeared in “the midst of the Assembly” with the ruling elder, who announced: “Brethren of this congregation, this man, or woman A.B. hath beene heretofore propounded to you, desiring to enter into Church-fellowship with us, and we have not, since that, heard any thing from any of you to the contrary, of the parties admittance, but that we may goe on to receive him: Therefore now, if any of you know any thing against him, why he may not be admitted, you may yet speak.” If, as sometimes happened, someone objected to a candidate’s admission, the “new offence” had to be heard before the elders. Thomas Lechford, a hostile observer of New England Congregationalism from 1638 until 1641, claimed such a practice often made joining a Congregational church a painful, see-saw procedure, which occasionally lasted a “space of divers months between a parties first propounding and receiving.” However, if nobody spoke out against the prospective member, the elder solicited the parishioners “to speak for his receiving.” Lechford again: “But when none speaketh to the contrary, then some one, two, or three, or more of the Brethren speak their opinions of the party, giving instances in some godlinesse and good conversation of his, or some other recommendation is made, and that they are willing (if the Church thereto consent) for their part, to given him the right hand of fellowship.”37

Once the members finished their character references, the elder asked the candidate to “make knowne to the congregation the work of grace upon his soule.” This confession of faith was an anxious “quarter of an houre, shorter or longer,” for many laymen.38 Sometimes relations could be terrifying. Consider the case of brother Hinsdell’s wife, a candidate seeking admittance to John Allin’s Dedham congregation. She, “being fearfull & not able to speake in publike,” fainted at the sound of her own voice. Nevertheless, after careful deliberation, the church permitted her to narrate her confession in private and simply confirm it on the following Sunday morning. Eventually, such private sessions for the timid became the standard procedure in some New England churches. Lechford reported in Plain Dealings that women often gave their relations “before the Elders, in private,” which the pastor (in the Boston church) subsequently read to the congregation.39 In fact, a provision in the Cambridge Platform of 1648 established that in “case any through excessive fear, or other infirmity, be unable to make their personal relation of their spiritual estate in publick, it is sufficient that the Elders having received private satisfaction, make relation therof in publick before the church.”40

Ministerial compassion inspired such an accommodation, but there was also a deeper motivation. Some English clergymen, especially Presbyterians, vigorously attacked the rigorous standards set by the Bay Colony for church membership. Richard Baxter, an English Presbyterian, criticized the practice as “taking a very few that can talk more than the rest, and making them the Church.” Similarly, Robert Baillie, one of the most persuasive of the Presbyterian polemicists, asserted in his A Dissuasive from the Errours of our Time (1645) that because of the relation of faith “many thousands of people, who in former time have been reputed in Old England very good Christians,” were denied membership in New England churches. Yet John Cotton vehemently denied that charge in his rejoinder to Baillie’s pamphlet.41

Regardless of how exclusive the relation of faith actually made church membership, there was one more requirement the candidate had to meet. Having given his relation either in public or private, the person next delivered a “profession of his faith,” one that demonstrated his knowledge of Reformed doctrine and church polity. If the party was “weake,” the elders might draw out his knowledge by “questions and answers.” Then the church voted by their “usuall signe,” which was the “erection and extention of the right hand” on the candidate’s admission. If accepted into the congregation, the candidate pledged to fulfill all the obligations required in the church covenant, and with that he or she became a full-fledged member.42

Because the Confessions are the only extant records (except for two volumes of financial memoranda) for the earliest years of the Cambridge church, it is impossible to determine exactly the extent to which Shepard instituted the admission practices reported by Lechford and others.43 Shepard did staunchly defend the New England Way against English Presbyterians, coauthoring with John Allin, of Dedham, A Defence of the Answer (1644), and therefore shared the theoretical basis from which his Massachusetts colleagues derived their admissions procedures. Furthermore, the Confessions reveal that the Cambridge church followed at least three of the practices described by chroniclers of New England history. Shepard required the candidates to “declare what work of grace the Lord had wrought in them”; parishioners sometimes testified in behalf of the applicant, as in the case of Mrs. Greene; elders, and, surprisingly, other church members, probed the candidate’s knowledge with questions.44

But the Confessions also reveal that Shepard’s procedures differed somewhat from those of other Bay ministers. First, the Cambridge pastor, unlike John Cotton, permitted or perhaps required women to recite their confessions before the congregation.45 Second, Shepard did not compel candidates to relate two separate confessions (one of grace and one of faith), but allowed them to merge the two narrations into one speech. Only Henry Dunster, a theologian given to making fine distinctions, narrated in two distinct sections his formal knowledge of theology and “the Lord’s personal dealing” with him. Third, Shepard was lax in his admissions standards, a laxity which is startling in view of the alleged severity of the Bay Colony admission practices. One of the reasons Thomas Hooker supposedly moved to Connecticut was his disapproval of that strictness; for according to R. Stansby, the minister at Little Waldingfield, Suffolk, a rumor circulated in England that “you are so strict in admission of members to your church, that more then one halfe are out of your church in all your congregations, & that Mr. Hoker before he went away preached against yt (as one report who hard hym).”46

It is true that Hooker required a candidate only to give “a reason of his hope towards God” and answer “certain probatory questions” in order to qualify for membership in the Hartford church. Yet Shepard often demanded no more. Indeed, Shepard simply did not force prospective members to demonstrate that they had closed with Christ, that is, to demonstrate a personal certainty about their salvation. For example, John Trumbull could say only: “I thought yet there might be mercy,” and Shepard admitted him to the Cambridge congregation. And Mrs. Greene qualified for church membership on even flimsier grounds than Trumbull. Probably fearful and bashful, she muttered only a few sentences and concluded her relation. Shepard simply recorded that the “testimony carried it.” Hence, the congregation voted to admit Mrs. Greene because they knew from the testimony of her friends that she was deeply religious and, therefore, probably saved. Moreover, many other candidates, though they gave a longer confession or revealed a greater knowledge of the morphology of conversion than either Trumbull or Mrs. Greene, never professed to having actually closed with Christ. Shepard even warned his congregation against “extravagant, enlarged discourses of the set time of their conversion, and their revelations, and ill application of Scripture,” which he charged made “long doings, and are wearisome and uncomely.” Thus the conclusion that judgments of faith were far milder than the rigid concepts in Puritan sermons and that proof of faith might be contained in “a ‘weak’ faith, or the ‘endeavor to apprehend,’ the ‘will to believe with an honest heart,’” is borne out by the requirements at Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge. The only real difference in practice between Hooker and Shepard, and perhaps some of the other ministers of the Bay, was procedural. Hooker examined his Hartford candidates in the privacy of his study. Shepard required his parishioners to relate their confessions before the entire Cambridge congregation, expecting their didactic qualities to “be of special use unto the people of God.”47

Some Puritan scholars argue that Thomas Shepard’s standards for church admissions were strict because of an incident involving Richard Mather and the founding of the second church at Dorchester. As part of a council appointed by the General Court to oversee the gathering of new churches, Shepard interviewed the would-be members of the Dorchester congregation, found them wanting, and refused to approve the church’s formation. Although contrary to Shepard’s charitability, this particular case was a special matter. The founders of a church, Shepard believed, had to be of highest merit. In a letter to Richard Mather, Shepard warned his colleague of the many false-hearted professors already discovered that spring of 1636 and cautioned him to be “wary and very sharp in looking into the hearts and spirits of those you sign yourself unto, especially at first.” Regardless of Shepard’s willingness “with a spirit of love” to “cover and pass by” many weaknesses, he could not allow persons without proper preparation to establish a new church.48

All these similarities and differences between Shepard and the New England Way over ecclesiastical procedures again point to the value of the Confessions. But not only do these spiritual autobiographies shed new light on the practical workings of church polity, they offer fresh insights into other aspects of American Puritanism. One of the few documents from colonial New England that reveals the layman’s knowledge of theology, the Confessions provide a view of Puritanism “from the bottom up.”49 The laity’s view of Shepard’s theology, the role of parental piety in their lives, and their quotation of the Bible, as shown in Appendix I, are all documented in their relations of faith.50 Details relevant to their daily lives—such as sea voyages, conditions at Cambridge, and their “sins”—are also to be found there. Finally, from the standpoint of understanding human behavior, the many personal revelations made in the Confessions yield enough information to formulate conclusions about the psychological make-up of Puritans. And if such studies are to be made, the data in the Confessions provide an unusually rich source.

EDITORIAL PROCEDURE

Shepard’s manuscript of his Confessions is in a leather-bound volume measuring 5¾ by 3⅞ inches and ¾ inch thick, of ninety-eight leaves, which is in the possession of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Thirty leaves of the volume consist of sermon notes, which have not been transcribed because they have nothing to do with the Confessions. Three of the fifty-one relations preserved in manuscript have been previously printed: Edward Hall’s confession is in Lucius R. Paige’s History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630–1877, with a Genealogical Register (Boston, 1877), 252–254; Henry Dunster’s confession is in Jeremiah Chaplin’s Life of Henry Dunster, First President of Harvard College (Boston, 1872), 257–265; and William Manning’s confession is in William H. Manning’s The Genealogical and Biographical History of the Manning Families of New England and Descendants (Salem, Mass., 1902), 92–95. But what follows is the first edition of the entire set of Confessions.

We have transcribed the Confessions from photocopies of an enlarged reproduction of the manuscript owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society and from the same magnified copy held at Harvard’s Houghton Library. However, the original manuscript has been regularly consulted, because there were several either minutely written or scribbled passages that could be transcribed only from the original. Moreover, the reproductions owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society and Houghton Library do not have one of the confessions (number 50), an omission probably made because the first part of the confession was lost. Samuel A. Tannenbaum’s The Handwriting of the Renaissance (New York, 1930) served as one paleographic guide to deciphering Shepard’s crabbed handwriting, an example of a hand in transition from the Gothic secretary to the Roman italic style.

There are almost as many editorial policies as there are editors. We have adopted the practice of Samuel Eliot Morison, in his 1952 edition of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, and of Michael McGiffert, in his 1972 edition of Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography and Journal, in completely modernizing the capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Thus euil became evil, woorke became work, and honour became honor. Shepard’s many abbreviations—such as h: for hence, h^r for heart, n^r for nature, rec: for received, X^t for Christ, engh, for enough, or Jer: for Jeremiah—have been spelled out. Only names, because of the possibility of editorial error, have been bracketed with a suggested full-length spelling, Mr. S., for example, becoming Mr. S[hepard]. Paragraphing follows Shepard’s, although often an editorial judgment has had to be made in order to determine whether several slash marks were Shepard’s period or paragraph indicator; in such cases determinations were made on the basis of the context. Illegible words, damaged pages, or editorial interpolations have been noted with brackets; a question mark within the brackets indicates a suggested transcription of a poorly formed word. Crossed out words, phrases, or passages have been omitted.

Only the first few confessions were numbered by Shepard. To make for easier identification, we have numbered all fifty-one, putting numbers not written by Shepard in brackets. To enable scholars more easily to locate passages in the original document, the pages in the manuscript have been indicated by bracketed arabic old-style numerals throughout the text. Each confession has been given a separate set of footnotes, in each case starting with the number “1.” For the many references to biblical passages that appear in the footnotes, the abbreviations for the books of the Bible listed in the Chicago Manual of Style have been followed. In many cases Shepard inserted arabic numerals in his text to indicate a series of points. But he often omitted some of the numbers in the series. We generally have not attempted to determine where the missing numbers belong, but have let the text stand as written.

Shorthand was well developed in the seventeenth century. (See William Matthew’s introduction to Thomas Shelton’s A Tutor to Tachygraphy, or Short-writing [1642] and his Tachygraphy [1647], published [Los Angeles, 1970] by the Augustan Reprint Society.) But Shepard did not use it; hence the Confessions confronted its editors with at least one special problem. In a few instances, distracting redundancies appear, probably a result of the speed at which Shepard had to take down the relations. In John Sill’s confession, for example, Shepard wrote:

Now going on in the vse of meanes he thought

y^t wⁿ any duty was pformed, he thought

someth. in the duty was a misse.

We dropped the second “he thought” in an attempt to make the text more intelligible without, in our opinion, impairing its accuracy. Most of the other redundancies were simple repetitions, such as I I or w^c w^c.

All of our editorial revisions might suggest that much of the so-called “flavor” of the documents has been lost. But the true flavor is in the manuscript itself; no trick printing could capture it. And few people, including Puritan scholars (even those trained in paleography), have the time to travel to Boston and absorb that true flavor. A facsimile edition might do, but because of the problems involved with Shepard’s handwriting, punctuation, and abbreviation, few could read it. It has seemed wisest, therefore, to render the Confessions into their most readable form, attracting thereby the widest possible audience.

1. The title that appears at the top of the first page of Shepard’s manuscript reads The Confessions of Diverse Propounded To Be Received & Were Entertained As Members. Possibly because of the clumsiness of this title, the work is almost always referred to simply as the Confessions of Thomas Shepard.

The Society has also published a number of other “confessions.” One is in “The Commonplace Book of Joseph Green (1675–1715),” edited by Samuel E. Morison (Transactions, 1937–1942, xxxiv, 241–244). Four more are recorded in “The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth,” edited by Edmund S. Morgan (Transactions, 1942–1946, xxxv, 426–444). Finally there are twenty-one in The Notebook of the Reverend John Fiske, 1644–1675, edited by Robert G. Pope (Collections, Volume xlvii).

2. Ms. Caldwell, now Assistant Professor of English at Brown University, is presently completing a monograph to be entitled The Puritan Conversion: The Beginnings of American Expression, which she hopes will be published soon.

3. In the preface to Thomas Shepard’s The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied (1660) in John A. Albro, ed., The Works of Thomas Shepard (Boston, 1853), 11, 5; hereafter cited as Works.

4. Increase Mather, A Call from Heaven (1679) as quoted in David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1972), 249.

5. See James W. Jones, The Shattered Synthesis: New England Puritanism before the Great Awakening (New Haven, 1973), for an analysis of the ministerial differences over conversion.

6. Alan Simpson, Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago, 1955), 2.

7. James Kendall Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England” 1630–1649, 2 vols. (New York, 1908), 1, 275–76; Perry Miller, The New England Mind from Colony to Province (Cambridge, 1953), 56.

8. Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, 1966), 20, 56. Not every clergyman in first-generation New England preached a theology of preparation. John Cotton of Boston rejected the idea of “any saving preparations in the heart.” So did the Antinomians, who charged that preparationist theology was salvation through works. Shepard kept Antinomianism from gaining a foothold at Cambridge. See, ibid., 19–20, 139.

9. There are a few other extant relations from the early history of New England; one of them is in “The Commonplace Book of Joseph Green (1675–1715)” edited by Samuel E. Morison and published in the Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, xxxiv (1943), 241–44; four more are recorded in “The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth,” edited by Edmund S. Morgan and published in ibid., xxxv (1951), 426–44; and there are twenty-one others scattered throughout The Notebook of the Reverend John Fiske, 1644–1675, edited by Robert G. Pope and published in the Collections of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, xlvii (1974). John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, both missionaries to the Indians of New England, recorded several native confessions; for further information see Neal Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., xxxi (1974), 49–50. John Rogers published nearly forty relations, all given by his parishioners in Ireland, in his A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653); for an analysis of their content, see J. H. Taylor, “Some Seventeenth-Century Testimonies,” Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society, xvi (1941–1951), 64–77.

10. William Andrews, Jane Champney, Edward Collins, Gilbert Crackbone’s wife, Henry Dunster, Richard Eccles, Ellen Greene, Jane Holmes, Richard Jackson’s maid, William Manning, John Sill, John Stedman, and John Trumbull testified as to their literacy, and Christopher Cane, Richard Cutter, Robert Daniel, and Edward Hall left books in their wills. Of course, Nathaniel Eaton, William Ames, and John Jones, because of their connection with Harvard, were literate. These people—including two servants, two Harvard graduates, several modest farmers, and five women—span the social and sexual spectrum. On literacy in colonial New England, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974).

11. Prosperity also eluded Deacon Thomas Cheseholm and Edmund Frost, but Elder Richard Champney owned considerable property, enough to place him among the wealthiest citizens of early New England (Middlesex County Wills nos. 4371, 8567, 15347). In contrast, both Thomas Shepard, who at his death possessed a velvet cape and a box full of gold, and Jonathan Mitchell, a holder of much land, indicate that Cambridge ministers lived on a gentlemanly scale (Middlesex County Wills no. 20288 and Edward J. Brandon, ed., The Records of the Town of Cambridge [formerly Newtowne], Massachusetts, 1630–1703 [Cambridge, Mass., 1901], 96).

12. John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970), 148. Emory Elliott found that throughout “the second half of the seventeenth century the average age at marriage was between twenty-six and twenty-eight years for men and between twenty-four and twenty-six years for women, with marriage ages for first marriages of both sexes often reaching into the middle thirties”; see his Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton, 1975), 30–31.

13. On women in colonial society, see Eugenie A. Leonard, Sophie H. Drinker, and Mirian Holden, The American Woman in Colonial and Revolutionary Times, 1565—1800: A Syllabus with Bibliography (Philadelphia, 1962); Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607—1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); and Laurel Thatcher Ulrick, “Virtuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” American Quarterly, xxviii (1976), 20–40.

14. As quoted in Wallace Notestein, The English People on the Eve of Colonization, 1603–1630 (New York, 1954), 77.

15. Shepard ms, passim.

16. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols. in 6 (Boston, 1853–1854), 1, 228; Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, 1, 54; Dudley to Lady Bridget, 12 March 1630/31, in Alexander Young, comp., Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, from 1623 to 1636 (Boston, 1846), 320. Gf. J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Johnson’s Wonderworking Providence, 1628–1651 (New York, 1910), 90.

17. Richard Saltonstall intended to build a house at Watertown, and the town assigned him a lot for that purpose; but he went to England in the spring of 1631 and did not return. Increase Nowell remained at Charlestown, William Pynchon at Roxbury, Roger Ludlow at Dorchester, and William Goddington at Boston. John Endicott and Samuel Sharpe, because they had declared their intention to return to England, were originally free from the agreement. See Lucius R. Paige, History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630–1877 (Boston, 1877), 7–8.

18. Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, 1, 84–85; Paige, History of Cambridge, 7; Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649 (Chapel Hill, 1965), 31–32.

19. Paige, History of Cambridge, 2–5, 10–11, 8–18; Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, 1, 124. On the availability of land in colonial New England, see Kenneth Lockridge, “Land, Population, and the Evolution of New England Society, 1630–1790; and an Afterthought,” in Stanley N. Katz, ed., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development (Boston, 1971), 466–91.

20. Their departure to Connecticut involved more than a desire for land; for one interpretation of their other reasons see Perry Miller, “Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut,” in his Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), especially 16–18, 23–26. See also Michael McGiffert, ed., God’s Plot, the Paradoxes of Puritan Piety: Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard (Boston, 1972), 89, n. 6.

21. McGiffert, God’s Plot, 64. For a list of those who came with Shepard, see Paige, History of Cambridge, 35–36.

22. Brandon, ed., The Records of the Town of Cambridge, 96–97. Some adjustment upward from the £317 must be made for the common practice of parents transferring land to their offspring before parental demise. Thus these inventories, especially the lowest ones, do not always represent the full accumulation of a lifetime.

23. Selectmen thirty-five and over were William Andrews 35, Thomas Beal 47, John Bridge 45, Thomas Brigham 37, Nicholas Danforth 45, Edward Goff 44, Richard Hildreth 35, Richard Jackson 52, Thomas Marret 50, Edward Oakes 40, Herbert Pelham 44, John Russell 45, and John Stedman 40. Selectmen under thirty-five were George Cooke 28, Joseph Cooke 27, John Cooper 31, Thomas Danforth 28, Thomas Parrish 25, Roger Shaw 33, and Edward Winship 25.

24. Of the ninety identifiable persons included in the 1652 Shawshine grant, only two, both orphans, were under twenty-six years of age. Many of the grantees were under thirty. The average lifetime of these ninety people was seventy years. One hundred first-generation couples, of whom nine were childless, produced 526 offspring. Only fifty-two of these died before age twenty-one, which left the population doubled.

25. Prince, Annals of New England, 2 vols. (Boston, [1755]), ii, 75. Volume one (Boston, 1736) appeared under the title of A Chronological History of New England. Prince cited a manuscript letter, the author of which he did not identify, as the source of his information. See also Brandon, ed., The Records of the Town of Cambridge, 4.

26. Jameson, ed., Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, 90. Cf. Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, i, 111.

27. Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, i, 173–74.

28. McGiffert, God’s Plot, 37–40.

29. Ibid., 46–55; Albro, “Life of Thomas Shepard,” Works, i, lxxxv–xci.

30. McGiffert, God’s Plot, 70.

31. Nathaniel Morton, The New England’s Memorial (1669) (Plymouth, Mass., ed., 1826), 144; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), 2 vols. (Hartford ed., 1820), 1, 343, 69, 75; Jameson, ed., Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, 107, 201; John Erskine, ed., Six Sermons by the late Thomas Prince, A.M. (Edinburgh, 1785), 60; Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, ii, 55; Morgan, ed., “The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth,” 438. John Preston, Shepard’s Cambridge University mentor, greatly influenced Shepard’s development. In his autobiography, Shepard wrote of Preston: “he spake and the secrets of my soul were laid upon [i.e., open] before me.” Moreover, while listening to another of Preston’s sermons, Shepard experienced a sense of assurance about his salvation. McGiffert, God’s Plot, 41–42, 45.

32. Shepard, “Ten Virgins,” Works, ii, 17, 122; Shepard, “The Sound Believer,” Works, i, 170.

33. Shepard, “The Sound Believer,” Works, i, 170. The figures were derived from a study of all of Shepard’s sermons.

34. Shepard, “Ten Virgins,” Works, ii, 521, 563–66, 78–86, 119, 169–71, 375–78, 560; Shepard, “Theses Sabbaticae,” Works, iii, 119–21.

35. Note the dichotomies associated with the logic of Petrus Ramus. See Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, 111–153; Keith L. Spunger, “Technometria: A Prologue to Puritan Theology,” Journal of the History of Ideas, xxix (1968), 115–122, and The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (Urbana, 1972); Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); and David L. Parker, “Petrus Ramus and the Puritans: The ‘Logic’ of Preparationist Conversion Doctrine,” Early American Literature, viii (1973), 140–162.

36. Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing or News from New England (1642), J. Hammond Trumbull’s edition (Boston, 1867), 18–20. On New England admission practices, see [Thomas Weld], A Brief Narration of the Practices of the Churches in New-England (1645), reprinted in the Congregational Quarterly, xvii (1875), 261–62; Jameson, ed., Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, 217–18; John Cotton, The Way of the Churches of Christ in New-England (London, 1645), 52–65; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, 1965), 88–89; and Robert A. Rees, “Seeds of Enlightenment: Public Testimony in the New England Congregational Churches, 1630–1750,” Early American Literature, iii (1968), 23.

37. Trumbull, ed., Plain Dealing, 20–22.

38. Ibid., 22–23. In some churches the members testified in behalf of a candidate after he gave his confessions. See [Weld], A Brief Narration, 261. For information on the origins of the relation of faith, see Morgan, Visible Saints, 93–105.

39. Ola E. Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill, 1630–1783 (New York, 1952), 45; Trumbull, ed., Plain Dealing, 22–23, see n. 13. John Cotton insisted that women relate their confessions in private, because an “open confession” was against the “apostle’s rule, and not fit for woman’s modesty.” See Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, 1, 107.

40. Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York, 1893), 223.

41. Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (New York, 1976), 99; Trumbull, ed., Plain Dealing, 151, n. 252; Cotton, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648) in Larzer Ziff, ed., John Cotton on the Churches of New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 263–64. On the debates over the severity and exclusiveness of admission practices in New England, which allegedly resulted from requiring a confession of faith, see Walker, Creeds, 107, n. 4; Trumbull, ed., Plain Dealing, 21, n. 12, 22, n. 13, 151, n. 252; and Ray P. Stearns and David H. Brawner, “New England Church ‘Relations’ and Continuity in Early Congregational History,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, lxxv (1965), 25, n. 31.

42. Trumbull, ed., Plain Dealing, 23–25, 28–29. The origins of New England’s Congregational polity have been debated since John Cotton’s day; for the most recent developments in the argument see Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1933); Morgan, Visible Saints; Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston, 283–85; Stearns and Brawner, “New England Church ‘Relations’ and Continuity in Early Congregational History,” 13–45; David D. Hall’s introduction and bibliographical note in the Harper Torchbook edition (New York, 1970) of Miller’s Orthodoxy; and Hall, The Faithful Shepherd, 78–86.

43. See Stephen P. Sharpies, ed., Records of the Church at Cambridge in New England, 1632–1830 (Boston, 1906). Paige published excerpts from the financial records in his History of Cambridge, 253ff.

44. Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, 1, 173.

45. There is no indication that Shepard recorded the confessions in private with the intention of reading them before the congregation, as was the common procedure for women candidates. He copied them into his notebook chronologically, mixing the relations of men and women throughout, and made no notations as to any of them being given in private. Unfortunately, there is little evidence in the Confessions to indicate that the relations of faith were actually given in public; only Henry Dunster said: “Dear brethren and sisters in Christ I account it no small mercy that the Lord hath called me to give an account to [you] of that faith and love I bear to Christ and His church and people.” And Mrs. Greene seems to have given her relation in public, for she seems (like brother Hisdell’s wife, of Dedham), to have panicked and was able to utter only a few sentences. Cf. Walker, Creeds, 107.

46. R. Stansby to John Winthrop, 17 April 1637, in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th Ser., vii (1865), 11. See Morgan, Visible Saints, 106–8, and Miller, “Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut,” in Errand, 31–33.

47. Thomas Hooker, Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (1648), as quoted in Morgan, Visible Saints, 107; Frank C. Shuffelton, Thomas Hooker, 1586–1647 (Princeton, 1977), 227; Shepard, “Ten Virgins,” Works, ii, 631; Pettit, The Heart Prepared, 8.

48. B. Richard Burg, ed., “A Letter of Richard Mather to a Cleric in Old England,” William & Mary Quarterly, xxix (1972), 91–92; Pettit, The Heart Prepared, 101; Albro, “Life of Thomas Shepard,” Works, i, cxxvii–cxxx. For a full description of the Dorchester episode, see B. Richard Burg, Richard Mather of Dorchester (Lexington, Kentucky, 1976), 29–34. See also Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, i, 177, and Morgan, Visible Saints, 100–101.

49. Jesse Lemisch, “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up,” in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1967), 3–45. Although for reasons different from those of Lemisch and in some cases before he published the above essay, many historians have focused their attention on the lives of common men. On seventeenth-century New England, the most notable among such studies are: Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn., 1963); Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649 (Chapel Hill, 1965); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); Philip Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (New York, 1970); Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town, the First Hundred Tears: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970); and Richard P. Gildrie, Salem, Massachusetts, 1626–1683: A Covenant Community (Charlottesville, 1975).

50. Shepard’s parishioners frequently cited biblical passages to support their religious experiences. They took encouragement from the prophets, especially Isaiah and Jeremiah, as well as Psalms, Exodus, and Genesis. Nevertheless, they quoted New Testament books more often than Old (318 citations to 226). Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Romans, and Revelation received particular attention. They also quoted the Bible in a wide-ranging fashion, failing to cite only six of twenty-seven New Testament books and eleven of thirty-nine Old Testament books.

51. This pagination is from the original manuscript of the Confessions owned by the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

52. Jose Glover (d. 1638) was the rector at Sutton in Surrey from 1628 until 1636, when he resigned with the intention of moving to New England. By 1638 he completed his preparations for emigration, which included the transportation of the first printing press to Britain’s North American colonies. Glover died at sea, but his wife, Elizabeth (who three years later married Henry Dunster, president of Harvard College), five children, and Stephen Daye—the printer Glover engaged to operate his press—all arrived safely in 1638 and settled at Cambridge.

53. Jer. 7:4.

54. Matt. 16:26; Luke 9:25; Mark 8:36.

55. Thomas Jenner (1607–ca. 1676) studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and preached at Heddon in Northumberland County before emigrating to Roxbury, where he became a freeman on 8 December 1636. He succeeded, in 1638, Joseph Hull as the minister at Weymouth but not without some controversy, according to Winthrop: “Divers of the elders went to Weymouth, to reconcile the differences between the people and Mr. Jenner, whom they had called thither with intent to have him their pastor.” Although the congregation had the “good success of their prayers,” before 1641 Jenner did “not like the place” and moved to Saco, Maine. And in 1650 he returned to England, served as minister at Coltishall, Norfolk, 1652–1658, and wrote Quakerism Anatomized and Confuted (Dublin, 1670).

56. Thomas Shepard—silenced when a lecturer at Earles-Colne, Essex, in 1630 by William Laud and later, in 1632, while at another post in Buttercrambe, Yorkshire, by Richard Neile, Archbishop of York—preached about a year at Heddon, Northumberland, before Thomas Morton, Bishop of Durham, ended Shepard’s official ministry.

57. Matt. 18:11; Luke 19:10.

58. 1 Pet. 2:7.

59. Gen. 4:13–14; Matt. 27:3–5; 1 John 3:12.

60. Matt. 18:11; Luke 19:10.

61. Matt. 5:4, 6; Isa. 61:2, 3; Luke 6:21.

62. Matt. 18:11; Luke 19:10.

63. Mark 9:23.

64. 2 Thess. 1:7–8.

65. Matt. 19:26; Mark 10:27; Luke 18:27.

66. Luke 9:62.

67. Prov. 22:3; 27:12.

68. Isa. 66:2.

69. 1 Chron. 22:16.

70. Matt. 5:4.

71. Isa. 55:1.

72. Matt. 5:6.

73. Isa. 40:29.

74. Matt. 18:11; Luke 19:10

75. Matt. 5:6.

76. Eph. 2:7; Col. 1:27; 2:2–3.

77. James 1:22–23.

78. 2 Pet. 1:19.

79. Isa. 50:10.

80. John 1:16.

81. See note 1, p. 33.

82. Sill either went to Heddon to hear Thomas Shepard preach or, if it was after Shepard’s ejection from there, heard him in the Newcastle area, which was only five miles from Heddon. See note 5, p. 33.

83. Matt. 11:28.

84. Rom. 6:14.

85. Ezek. 36:26.

86. Col. 3:1.

87. Samuel Hieron (1576–1617) attended King’s College, Cambridge, and took orders about 1600. He became an eminent preacher at London—probably where Joanna Sill expected to hear him preach—but soon accepted a post at Modbury in Devonshire, where he remained until his death. He published numerous works, perhaps including an anonymous pamphlet printed in Holland in 1607 entitled A Defence of the Minister’s Reasons for Refusal of Subscription to the Booke of Common Prayer.

88. One usage of “falling” at this time was to pass suddenly, accidentally, or in the course of events into a certain bodily or mental condition or into some external condition or relation, such as falling into an acquaintance with a Leveller. See The Oxford English Dictionary (London, 1933).

89. Robert Jenison (1584?–1652) studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1607. He subsequently acquired a D.D. and seems to have acted for a time as domestic chaplain in the family of Henry, sixth earl of Kent—probably the position he held when he came to London to preach in Samuel Hieron’s absence. In 1622 he became a lecturer at All Saints in Newcastle, Northumberland, where he remained until he was suspended for Nonconformity in 1639. During the English Civil War, he regained his former position.

90. Matt. 11:21–24.

91. Ps. 139:1.

92. See note 1, p. 33.

93. Jer. 15:6.

94. Matt. 18:11; Luke 19:10.

95. Matt. 9:12–13; Mark 2:17; 1 Tim. 1:1.5; Luke 5:32.

96. Matt. 25:11.

97. Shepard first wrote “tho shee neglected dutyes” but subsequently inserted “did not,” forgetting to cross out the ed on neglected. For readability the “ed” has been dropped.

98. Matt. 25:8.

99. Hos. 14:3.

100. Isa. 28:16.

101. Lam. 3:39.

102. Luke 1:45.

103. John 6:37.

104. Matt. 5:6.

105. Song of Sol. 1:3.

106. For Thomas Shepard’s reaction to Eaton’s behavior see Michael McGiffert’s God’s Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety, Being the Autobiography & Journal of Thomas Shepard (Amherst, 1972), 68–69, 92–93, 211.

107. Hos. 2:6.

108. Amos 4:12.

109. Amos 4:9.

110. Gen. 27:34–41.

111. Luke 11:24–26; Matt. 12:44.

112. Acts 8:14–24.

113. William Ames (1576–1633) studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he became a convinced Puritan, refusing to wear the surplice in the college chapel and, theologically, adopting predestination and covenant theology from the Reformed traditions of Calvin, Luther, and others. Forbidden by the Bishop of London to preach at Colchester, he emigrated to Leyden. In Holland, Ames refuted Grevinchovius, an Arminian minister, served as a professor and pastor, and wrote several theological tracts—among them his Medulla Theologiae (Amsterdam, 1623), a work highly acclaimed by some New England ministers.

114. John 6:44.

115. Rev. 3:20.

116. John 14:21.

117. Rev. 2:4.

118. 1 Sam. 12:22.

119. Matt. 13:18–23; Mark 4:3–8; Luke 8:5–8.

120. Possibly John Cotton (1584–1652), a Cambridge graduate and minister at St. Botolph’s Church at Boston in Lincolnshire, who came to the Bay in 1633 and became the teacher of the church at Boston.

121. Ezek. 36:26; 11:19.

122. John Wilson (1588?–1667), a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, preached at Sudbury in Suffolk County from 1618 until 1630, when he emigrated to Massachusetts and became the pastor of the First Church at Boston.

123. Rom. 8:28–33.

124. Jer. 31:18.

125. Rom. 8:15.

126. Isa. 30:21.

127. Prov. 11:25.

128. Matt. 20:15.

129. Mark 3:1–5; Matt. 12:10–13; Luke 6:6–10.

130. John Rogers (1572?–1636), a Cambridge graduate and the author of The Doctrine of Faith (London, 1627), which reached a seventh edition in 1638, served as the vicar of Dedham in Essex from 1605 until his death, although suspended for Nonconformity between 1629 and 1631. He was reputed to be “one of the most awakening preachers of the age.”

131. See note 3, p. 59.

132. Isa. 64:8.

133. Mark 5:25–34; Luke 8:43–48; Matt. 9:20–22.

134. Hos. 2:14.

135. Hos. 2:23; Exod. 33:19; Rom. 9:15.

136. Isa. 56:8.

137. Matt. 23:37.

138. Isa. 30:7.

139. Isa. 64:8.

140. Isa. 30:15.

141. Isa. 43:22–25; 44:21–23.

142. Isa. 45:22.

143. Isa. 42:16.

144. Isa. 46:12.

145. Isa. 27:4–5.

146. Acts 4:12; 1 Thess. 5:9; Heb. 5:9; 2 Pet. 3:15; 2 Tim. 2:10.

147. Hos. 14:3.

148. John 1:12.

149. John 1:14.

150. John 7:37.

151. 1 John 2:15.

152. Isa. 45:22.

153. Rev. 21:6; 22:17.

154. Matt. 11:28.

155. Matt. 5:3.

156. Col. 1:135 1 John 3:14 in the Geneva Bible.

157. 2 Thess. 1:8.

158. 1 Thess. 5:7–8; Eph. 5:18.

159. 1 Pet. 5:5.

160. Henry Langley (1611–1697), a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently a Presbyterian leader, became the rector of St. Mary, Newington, Surrey, in 1643. Stedman lived in Surrey County while employed by Jose Glover, minister at Sutton, and may have heard Langley preaching in the area around 1637—before he officially received the St. Mary’s appointment—or in the Oxford vicinity.

161. Job 1:6–12; Rev. 20:7.

162. Ps. 92:12; Isa. 44:4; Lev. 23:40.

163. Note 1, p. 59.

164. Cotton consistently warned his parishioners against relying on a “covenant of works” for an assurance of their salvation. Instead, he exhorted them to be “in the spirit,” for when God calls “any to fellowship with Christ immediately you are in the spirit, Romans 8.” But when Anne Hutchinson and other laymen adopted and, more importantly, propagated Cotton’s mysticism, a controversy erupted which disrupted Massachusetts for two years before Stedman’s arrival in 1638. For further information on Cotton’s antinomianism, see George Selement, “John Cotton’s Hidden Antinomianism: His Sermon on Revelation 4:1–2,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 129:278–94 (1975). See Emery Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill, 1962) for a very readable narrative of the controversy, and The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, ed. David D. Hall (Middletown, Conn., 1968), for the documents produced by what was, indeed, a crisis in a relatively new society.

165. “Mother-in-law” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a synonym for “stepmother.” See The Oxford English Dictionary (London, 1933).

166. Acts 9:6; 22:10.

167. See notes 1 and 8, pp. 59, 74, 75.

168. Hos. 14:8.

169. 2 Tim. 3:6.

170. 2 Tim. 1:12.

171. Thomas Weld (1595–1661), a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, came to New England in 1632 and became the first pastor of the church at Roxbury. During the Antinomian Controversy, he actively opposed the dissenters and participated in their trial. In 1641, he returned to England with Hugh Peter as agent for the colony and remained there, serving from 1649 until his death as the rector of St. Mary’s Church in Newcastle.

172. Jer. 3:14–22; 31:22.

173. 1 John 5:7–8.

174. Gen. 38:18, 25.

175. Mark 1:40, 41.

176. Richard Rogers (1550?–1618), a graduate of Christ’s College, Cambridge, preached at Wethersfield in Essex County from 1577 until his death, although periodically he was suspended for Nonconformity. Rogers was a prominent figure in the Puritan movement; his Seven Treatises, published in 1603, has been called the “first important exposition of the code of behavior which expressed the English Calvinist, or, more broadly speaking, the Puritan, conception of the spiritual and moral life.” See William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938), 36.

177. Luke 12:31.

178. William Greenhill (1591–1671), a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, and author of several religious tracts, held livings at New Shoreham, Sussex and Norwich, Norfolk, encountering trouble at the latter place for refusing to read The Book of Sports (London, 1618). He subsequently, about 1633, moved to London and became the afternoon preacher to the congregation at Stepney, while Jeremiah Burroughes ministered in the morning; they were called the “Morning Star” and the “Evening Star” of Stepney.

179. Matt. 5:5–6.

180. Ezek. 16:6.

181. 1 Cor. 6:9–10.

182. Matt. 11:28.

183. Isa. 35:2.

184. Heb. 4:16.

185. Ps. 36:9; Jer. 17:13–14; Rev. 21:6.

186. 1 Kings 4:25; Zech. 3:10.

187. Matt. 4:8–9.

188. Ps. 64:5–7.

189. Exod. 14:25.

190. Rev. 3:17.

191. Rev. 7:14.

192. John 1:14.

193. Ps. 45:2.

194. Isa. 63:9.

195. Rev. 17:9.

196. Phil. 4:19.

197. John 13:4–17.

198. Num. 22:24–26.

199. John 21:7.

200. John 13:19.

201. Ps. 140:7.

202. Possibly Isa. 45:8 or 1 Kings 8:35–36.

203. Matt. 25:1–13.

204. “Boote” at this time could mean “advantage” or “profit.” See The Oxford English Dictionary (London, 1933).

205. See the confession of Nathaniel Eaton, pp. 54–57.

206. Ps. 124:7.

207. Mark 16:7.

208. Isa. 35:4.

209. Gal. 5:6; 6:15.

210. Matt. 7:16–20; 12:33; Luke 6:44.

211. 2 Chron. 33:1–20; 2 Kings 21:1–18.

212. Rom. 14:23.

213. Ezekiel Culverwell (d. 1631), educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, served as the rector of Great Stambridge, 1592–1609, and later as the vicar of Felstead in Essex. In 1623 he published A Treatise of Faith (London), which in 1633 reached a seventh edition.

214. Rom. 8:28.

215. Ps. 50:15.

216. Thomas Hooker (1586?–1647) received both his degrees from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and from 1609 to 1618 was Dixie fellow there. About 1620 he became rector of Esher, Surrey, and six years later the lecturer at St. Mary’s, Chelmsford, when William Laud silenced him in 1630. He went to Holland in 1631 and to New England in 1633, preaching at Newtown until his removal to Hartford in 1636.

217. See note 1, p. 59.

218. Acts 3:8–9.

219. 2 Kings 21:1–18; 2 Chron. 33:1–20.

220. Isa. 1:18.

221. Matt. 11:28.

222. See note 1, p. 65.

223. Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38.

224. Zech. 3:2.

225. Ps. 41:11.

226. Prov. 18:10.

227. Isa. 43:2.

228. Exod. 14:13; 2 Chron. 20:17.

229. Ps. 73:26; 119:57; 142:5; Lam. 3:24; Ps. 16:5.

230. Matt. 25:14–30.

231. John 6:37.

232. Luke 12:19.

233. Isa. 50:10.

234. Job 30:26.

235. Rom. 7:15, 17, 19, 20.

236. See note 7, p. 79.

237. Matt. 7:24–27; 16:18; Luke 6:47–49.

238. Rom. 14:23.

239. Isa. 56:3.

240. Gen. 22:1–18.

241. Peter Bulkeley (1583–1659), a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, immigrated to New England in 1636. After a short residence at Cambridge, he moved “further into the Woods” and helped settle Concord, accepting a position as teacher in their newly established church. He remained active in Massachusetts affairs, participating in the Synod of 1637, which dealt with some ninety Antinomian “errours,” and published The Gospel Covenant (London) in 1646.

242. Gen. 17:2–3.

243. See note 1, p. 59.

244. Rev. 10:1. John Cotton preached a series of sermons on Revelation in the late 1630’s and early 1640’s. Shepard took notes on his earliest and unpublished sermons—the notes are in the same book as the Confessions. Cotton’s later sermons on the Apocalypse were published; for the details, see Everett H. Emerson’s John Cotton (New York, 1965), 95–105. See also note 8, pp. 74, 75.

245. John 5:2–9.

246. Mai. 3:6.

247. Perhaps Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-Way to Heaven, which went through some twenty-five editions.

248. For books written on repentance see Robert Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1824), iv under “Repentance.”

249. Luke 15:7.

250. Ps. 8:1 or 113:4.

251. 1 Pet. 1:17–19.

252. Song of Sol. 113.

253. Isa. 11:1–9.

254. Exod. 20:9; Deut. 5:13.

255. Probably this is Richard Rolle’s The Arte or Crafte to Lyve well and to Dye well (n.p., 1503), but there are several books with slightly varying titles that may have been the volume Trumbull read. See Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica, iii, under “Dying,” iv, under “Living.”

256. 1 John 2:1.

257. 1 John 2:3–5; 3:24.

258. Obadiah Sedgwick (1600?–1658), a graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, and author of several religious treatises, received his first preferment in 1630 as the lecturer at St. Mildred’s Church, Bread Street, London. Because of his Puritanism, he had to accept a different pastorate—he became the vicar at Coggeshall, Essex, in 1639—but at the opening of the Long Parliament he regained his lectureship at St. Mildred’s.

Possibly Trumbull heard John Sedgwick (1601?–1643), Obadiah’s younger brother and also a graduate of Queen’s College, who preached for a short while sometime in the 1630’s at St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, London.

259. Matt. 26:69–75; Mark 14:66–72; Luke 22:55–62; John 18:25–27.

260. Matt. 19:30; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30.

261. Prov. 12:28.

262. John Carter (1554–1635), the author of A Plaine and Compendious Exposition of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (London, 1627), studied at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and became vicar of Bramford, Suffolk, in 1583. Although he performed his pastoral duties with zeal, many in his congregation resented his Puritanism. His bishop, therefore, transferred him to the rectory of Belstead, also in Suffolk, in 1617.

263. See note 1, p. 65.

264. Deut. 5:27.

265. Gen. 17:15–21; 22:1–18.

266. Matt. 5:20.

267. Matt. 5:4, 6.

268. George Phillips (1593–1644), the author of A Reply to a Confutation of Some Grounds for Infant Baptisme (London, 1645), graduated from Caius College, Cambridge, in 1617 and accepted a pastorate at Boxted in Essex. By 1629 Phillips resolved to go to Massachusetts, and in April 1630 he sailed on the Arbella—and was one of the signers, and perhaps author, of The Humble Request, which was dated on the eve of their departure and printed the same year. After a short residence at Charlestown, he became the minister of the newly formed church at Watertown, drafting its covenant, where he remained until his death.

269. Probably Daniel Dyke’s The Mystery of Self-Deceiving; or, A Discourse of the Deceitfulness of Man’s Heart (London, 1615).

270. Ezek. 11:19; 36:26.

271. Ps. 16:6.

272. 2 Thess. 1:7–8.

273. Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety attained extraordinary popularity; although the date and place of its first publication are not known, it reached a third edition in 1613, an eleventh in 1619, a twenty-fifth in 1630, a fifty-ninth in 1735, and a seventy-fifth in 1842. And its influence transcended the English-speaking world: the work was translated into French in 1625, German in 1629, Welsh in 1630, Polish in 1647, Romansch in 1668, and in 1665 an edition for Indians came off New England’s Cambridge press.

274. William Perkins (1558–1602), the author of An Exposition of the Symbole or Creeds of the Apostles (Cambridge, 1595) and numerous other theological tracts, graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow upon receiving his M.A. in 1584. Although he maintained his fellowship until 1594, churning out book after book, Perkins still had time to preach and lecture in the area. Thomas Goodwin, a prominent member of the Westminster Assembly, recalled that when he went to Christ’s College in 1613 “the Town was then filled with the discourse of the Power of Mr. Perkins his Ministry, still fresh in Mens Memories,” though Perkins was already ten years in the grave.

275. Perhaps [John Hart], The Burning Bush Not Consumed (London, 1616).

276. Matt. 7:13–14; Phil. 4:22.

277. Matt. 7:13, 14.

278. Matt. 13:45–46.

279. Rom. 7:24.

280. John 12:15.

281. Heb. 6:18–19.

282. 1 John 3:1.

283. 1 John 3:1.

284. Zeph. 1:12.

285. Exod. 20:9–10; Deut. 5:13–14.

286. 2 Pet. 1:10.

287. 2 Kings 20:1–6.

288. 1 Pet. 2:24.

289. Matt. 11:28.

290. Isa. 1:18.

291. Matt. 13:45–46.

292. Eph. 5:16; Cor. 4:5.

293. Ps. 110:3.

294. Hos. 2:19.

295. Jer. 18:22.

296. Isa. 64:11, 12.

297. Isa. 27:9.

298. Matt. 19:27; Luke 5:11; Mark 1:18.

299. John 13:33–38; 16:16–20.

300. Exod. 20:4–6.

301. Ps. 34:8.

302. Rom. 7:13.

303. Jer. 31:13; Isa. 57:18

304. Isa. 42:16.

305. Prov. 13:4.

306. 2 Cor. 5:14–15.

307. James 1:27.

308. James 2:10.

309. Rom. 8:13.

310. Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680), a graduate of Catherine Hall, Cambridge, and the author of several religious treatises, became a lecturer at Trinity Church, Cambridge, in 1628. In 1634 he resigned his position, being dissatisfied with the terms of conformity, but continued to preach in London until he moved to Holland in 1639, accepting the pastorate of the English church at Arnheim. At the beginning of the Long Parliament he returned to London and in 1643 became the foremost Independent at the Westminster Assembly.

Hamlet may have heard John Goodwin (1594?–1665), a graduate of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and pamphleteer, who preached in several Norfolk towns and after 1632 at St. Stephen’s in London, where he remained until he was ejected in 1645 for his rigid Independency.

311. See note 9, pp. 104, 105.

312. Hos. 10:11.

313. Rom. 5:10; 2 Cor. 5:19.

314. Lev. 26:21.

315. Luke 23:46.

316. 1 Tim. 1:15.

317. Luke 12:20.

318. John Shaw (1608–1672), a graduate of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and author of several religious tracts, in the 1630’s held lectureships at Bramptom, Derbyshire (1630–1633), Chumleigh, Devonshire (1633–1636)—a post subsidized by London merchants with Puritan sympathies—and All hallows-on-the-Pavement, Yorkshire.

319. John 13:29–31.

320. Ezek. 44:1–2.

321. 1 John 2:12.

322. Jer. 10:23.

323. Rom. 6:23.

324. Matt. 9:12–13; Mark 2:17; 1 Tim. 1:15; Luke 5:32.

325. Matt. 5:3.

326. Samuel Whiting (1597–1679), a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and author of a few religious pamphlets, was the minister at Lynn, Norfolk, and Skirbeck, Lincolnshire, but after two prosecutions for nonconformity he immigrated to New England, where he became the preacher at Lynn from 1636 until his death.

327. Matt. 5:6.

328. Isa. 30:18.

329. Isa. 55:1.

330. Isa. 54:8.

331. Isa. 55:7.

332. Jonathan Burr (ca. 1604–1641), a graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, preached at Rickinghall, Suffolk, before coming to New England in 1639. Although there was some question about his orthodoxy in regard to “familism,” Burr became Richard Mather’s assistant at Dorchester in 1640.

333. Isa. 9:9; 16:6; 23:9; 25:11; 28:1, 3.

334. Ps. 130:1.

335. Exod. 40:34–38; 1 Kings 8:10–11.

336. Mic. 6:8.

337. 2 Cor. 5:19.

338. Isa. 43:24–25.

339. Isa. 40:29.

340. Ps. 18:36.

341. Rom. 3:24.

342. 1 Pet. 5:6.

343. Exod. 39:32, 42–43.

344. Isa. 38:14.

345. Isa. 1:18.

346. There were at least four Smiths who published sermons which might have appealed to Crackbone: Henry Smith (1550?–1591), John Smith (1563–1616), Miles Smith (d. 1624), and Samuel Smith (1584–1662). See The Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1917) for information about their lives and publications.

347. Ps. 86:11. Although the Plymouth church sang from Henry Ainsworth’s The Book of Psalmes (Amsterdam, 1612) until 1692, the Bay churches relied on The Whole Book of Psalmes: collected into English meeter by T. Sternhold, J. Hopkins, and others (London, 1562)—often bound with the Geneva Bible—until Richard Mather and others composed The Bay Psalm Book (Cambridge, Mass., 1640), which nearly every congregation in Massachusetts adopted.

348. Matt. 3:11; Luke 3:16.

349. Exod. 34:6.

350. See note 3, p. 50.

351. Isa. 26:3.

352. See note 1, p. 59.

353. Rev. 6:2; 19:11. See note 12, p. 105.

354. Isa. 38:14.

355. Eccles. 12:13.

356. There are no identifiable Rodwells in England or New England at this time; therefore, he was not a college student or author and must have been one of her friends or a layman in an English congregation. If, however, Shepard erred and should have written “Rockwell,” there were several Englishmen—all laymen without a college education—by that name who subsequently came to New England. See James Savage’s A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, 4 vols. (Boston, 1861).

357. Matt. 25:1–13.

358. Matt. 25:10–12.

359. Perhaps Gen. 25:5–6.

360. 1 Tim. 1:15.

361. Matt. 9:13; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:32; 1 Tim. 1:15.

362. Luke 4:18.

363. Matt. 11:28.

364. John 6:37.

365. Jer. 2:13.

366. See note 8, p. 98.

367. Hos. 6:1.

368. Ps. 147:2; Isa. 11:12; 56:8.

369. See the confession of Nathaniel Eaton, pp. 54–57.

370. Nathaniel Rogers (1598–1655), a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and son of John Rogers (see note 1, p. 65), preached at Becking, Essex, and Assington, Suffolk, before coming to Massachusetts in 1636. He participated in the Synod of 1637 and the next year joined John Norton at Ipswich, serving as one of their pastors until his death.

371. Ezekiel Rogers (1580–1660), a graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and son of Richard Rogers (see note 1, p. 82), served as chaplain to Sir Francis Barrington, who appointed him to the benefice of Rowley in Yorkshire. After preaching there for about twenty years, he was silenced for nonconformity and, therefore, in 1638 immigrated to New England. Although urged to settle in New Haven, Rogers preferred to be one of the founders of Rowley, where he preached until his death.

372. Matt. 15:28.

373. See note 7, p. 79.

374. Jer. 32:27.

375. Isa. 35:4.

376. Exod. 3:5.

377. Exod. 34:7.

378. John 13:31–32.

379. John 6:44.

380. Matt. 24:44; Luke 12:40.

381. Num. 35; Josh. 20:2; 21:13, 21, 27, 32, 38.

382. Hos. 14:3.

383. Isa. 38:14.

384. 1 Pet. 5:6.

385. John 20:25–29.

386. See note 1, p. 33.

387. Thomas Morton (1564–1659), a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, had a long and prestigious career in the Church of England. Although he held many different posts, he probably spoke with Jane either while he was Bishop of Lichfield, 1618–1632, or Bishop of Durham, 1632–1659. Morton was a man of Low-Church inclinations who took no active part in Laud’s campaign for uniformity, and he had no sympathy for Roman Catholicism, publishing several tracts against its doctrinal and ecclesiastical views.

388. See note 3, p. 50.

389. Heb. 13:5.

390. Ezek. 39:29.

391. Rom. 9:21.

392. Ps. 25:11.

393. Matt. 8:8.

394. Exod. 33:19; Rom. 9:15.

395. Isa. 40:29.

396. Edmund Frost (d. 1672) came to New England in 1635 with his wife and child. He became a freeman the following year and a ruling elder in the Cambridge church before 1640—a position he still held in 1658.

397. Ps. 42:5, 11.

398. Matt. 9:13; Mark 2:17; 1 Tim. 1:15; Luke 5:32.

399. Isa. 1:18.

400. Matt. 16:18.

401. Isa. 41:17.

402. Isa. 40:29.

403. John 6:68.

404. Gen. 1:2.

405. Matt. 10:29–31.

406. Gen. 3:14–15.

407. Matt. 7:20–23.

408. Dunster is warning the people against one of the “errours” of Antinomianism, which allegedly taught that there “is a testimony of the Spirit, and voyce unto the Soule, meerely immediate, without any respect unto, or concurrence with the word.” See John Winthrop’s A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines (London, 1644) in The Antinomian Controversy, 230. See also note 8, p. 74, 75.

409. Mark 11:24.

410. 1 Cor. 7:14.

411. Matt. 19:14; Mark 10:14; Luke 18:16.

412. 1 Cor. 11:20–34.

413. James 2:14–17.

414. Matt. 18:15–17.

415. “Connixt” or “connexed” meant “connected.” See The Oxford English Dictionary (London, 1933).

416. 1 Pet. 1:15–16.

417. Rom. 6:6; Eph. 4:22; Col. 3:9.

418. Heb. 8:10.

419. Exod. 20:13–14; Matt. 5:21–22, 27–28.

420. 1 Cor. 15:25.

421. Matt. 25:41.

422. Phil. 3:20–21.

423. Ps. 40:10.

424. There are many Hobarts, Hubbards, or Hubberts—all obscure—whom Dunster may have heard or heard about (the text is not clear as to whether he actually attended a sermon), but it was probably William Hubbock (1560–ca. 1631), who took his B.A. from Oxford in 1581 and M.A. from Cambridge in 1586. Hubbock’s sermons were “powerful” enough to bring him before the Archbishop of Canterbury in about 1590. But he was not silenced and subsequently became a chaplain at the Tower of London, lecturer at St. Botolph’s, London, and after 1598 the rector of Nailstone, Leicestershire, a county not far from Dunster’s Lancashire.

425. Rev. 2:5, 16; 3:3.

426. John Preston (1587–1628), one of the most influential Puritan preachers of his generation and a prolific writer, secured—after using his influence at court—the lectureship at Trinity Church in 1624.

427. See note 4, pp. 126, 127.

428. Gen. 3:5, 22.

429. See Ps. 85:8.

430. Rom. 1:21–32; Gal. 5:19–21.

431. Rom. 9:32–33.

432. Ps. 40:1–2.

433. Ps. 40:6.

434. Ps. 40:7.

435. Heb. 8:10.

436. Ps. 40:12.

437. John Dod (1549?–1645), a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, and the author of numerous religious tracts, preached at Hanwell, Oxfordshire, until John Bridges, Bishop of Oxford, suspended him for Nonconformity in 1604. Dod moved north, preaching for a time at Fenny Compton, Warwickshire, and then at Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire, until in 1611 Archbishop Abbot silenced him. In 1624 he managed to obtain a position at Fawsley, Northamptonshire, where he remained until his death.

438. Nehemiah Rogers (1593–1660), a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1618 and the author of several expositions on biblical parables, became the preacher at Messing, Essex, in 1620. Rogers was a friend of William Laud and an uncompromising royalist.

439. See note 8, p. 98.

440. Mark 9:42.

441. Mark 9:43–44.

442. Gen. 24:63.

443. Isa. 55:6.

444. James 4:4; Rom. 8:7.

445. Eccles. 12:1.

446. Matt. 10:32; Luke 12:8; Rom. 10:9; 1 John 1:9; Prov. 28:13.

447. “Hoverly” at this time meant “lightly” or “slightly.” See The Oxford English Dictionary (London, 1933).

448. Acts 2:37.

449. Francesco Spira (d. 1548), a civil lawyer and resident of Venice, Italy, accepted the doctrines of the Reformation—particularly justification by faith—and witnessed for the Protestant religion to his family and friends for about six years. But under pressure from the Roman Catholic officials Spira publicly recanted in 1548. After reflecting on his “apostacy,” he was unable to live with himself, becoming convinced that he was damned, and soon died in extreme anguish. Protestants, of course, found the story an undisputable testimony to the truth of their religion and, therefore, published many accounts of it. See the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books (London, 1964), 227:670–72, and Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney, National Index of American Imprints through 1800 (Worcester, 1969), 1:42–43.

450. Samuel Stone (1602–1663), a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1623, ministered at Stisted, Essex, until he was suspended for Nonconformity in 1630. Through the influence of Thomas Shepard he obtained the lectureship at Towcester in Northamptonshire, where he met Thomas Hooker. Stone and Hooker came to New England in 1633 and preached at Newtown before moving to Hartford in 1636. After Hooker’s death, in 1647, Stone remained the only minister of the Hartford church until his death.

451. Isa. 59:1–2.

452. Rom. 7:23–24.

453. Isa. 38:14.

454. Zech. 13:1.

455. Num. 21:9; 2 Kings 18:4; John 3:14.

456. Isa. 64:8; Jer. 18:6; Rom. 9:21.

457. Isa. 55:2.

458. Isa. 55:1.

459. John 5:1–9.

460. Rom. 7:24.

461. Probably Ezekiel of Yorkshire. See note 7, p. 148.

462. Exod. 31:14–15.

463. Matt. 11:28.

464. Matt. 5:11.

465. Ps. 119:93.

466. John 20:25–28.

467. Neh. 1:11.

468. James 4:6.

469. Jer. 7:26; 16:12.

470. Gen. 17:1.

471. James 4:8.

472. Ps. 81:10.

473. Exod. 14:13.

474. Matt. 11:5; Luke 4:18; 7:22.

475. Isa. 1:18.

476. John 8:44.

477. Exod. 20:15.

478. Exod. 5:1–23.

479. Matt. 16:24.

480. Num. 21:9; 2 Kings 18:4; John 3:14.

481. Isa. 45:22.

482. Isa. 55:6.

483. Heb. 9:27.

484. Luke 6:37.

485. Not identified.

486. Matt. 25:1–13.

487. See note 7, p. 112.

488. Matt. 11:28.

489. Matt. 25:14–30.

490. Isa. 38:1–5.

491. Isa. 38:14.

492. Rev. 14:12.

493. Isa. 62:5.

494. Ps. 147:3.

495. John 13:8.

496. John 13:8.

497. John 13:30

498. Jer. 3:5.

499. Matt. 25:14–30.

500. Mark 14:34.

501. See note 7, p. 112.

502. See note 7, p. 79.

503. Richard Mather (1596–1669), who studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, but did not earn a degree, came to New England in 1635 after being suspended from his ministry at Toxeth, Lancashire, and forbidden to preach. Mather settled at Dorchester, where he preached and wrote until his death. One of his most important works was A Platform of Church Discipline (Cambridge, Mass., 1649).

504. Phil. 3:8.

505. Rev. 3:17–18.

506. Rev. 22:17.

507. 2 Cor. 5:19.

508. Jon. 4:4, 9.

509. Matt. 11:28.

510. Jer. 31:18.

511. Isa. 43:5; Gen. 26:24.

512. See note 8, p. 98.

513. Matt. 25:1–13.

514. John 13:8.

515. See note 7, p. 79.

516. John 19:37.

517. Matt. 25:31–46.

518. Luke 22:42.

519. See note 3, p. 50.

520. Lam. 3:40.

521. Ps. 38:2; 45:5.

522. Not identified.

523. 2 Cor. 5:17.

524. 2 Chron. 32:26.

525. Rom. 8:14–15; Gal. 4:6.

526. Jer. 31:3.

527. Matt. 10:42; 18:6, 10, 14; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2.

528. Acts 10:42; 2 Tim. 4:1; 1 Pet. 4:5.

529. John 3:3; 1 Pet. 1:23.

530. Prov. 28:9.

531. 2 Thess. 2:10.

532. Ezek. 18:25, 29.

533. 1 Chron. 16:29; 2 Chron. 20:21; Ps. 29:2; 96:9.

534. Rom. 2:5.

535. Matt. 5:4, 6.

536. Rom. 11:26; Isa. 27:9; 59:20.

537. Isa. 29:17; 35:1–2, 6–7; 41:19; 43:19–20; 51:3.

538. Ezra 10:2–3.

539. John Davenport (1597–1670), who received a B.D. from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, disclaimed any Puritan leanings when he accepted, in 1624, the Vicarage of St. Stephen’s on Coleman Street in London. But by 1623 he had definitely joined the Puritan wing of the church, and when William Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury, Davenport resigned his post, moving to Holland in 1633. Through the influence of Theophilus Eaton, Davenport’s lifelong friend, he decided to immigrate to New England. Davenport, therefore, returned to England and sailed with Eaton and others on the Hector in 1637. After a short residence at Boston, Davenport helped establish a new colony at New Haven, where he preached for over thirty years.

540. Job 9:4.

541. Matt. 12:25; Mark 3:24–25; Luke 11:17.

542. 1 Sam. 15:23–26.

543. Isa. 43:13.

544. Isa. 65:17; 2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21:1.

545. 1 Cor. 2:9.

546. Probably at Ipswich, Suffolk.

547. Ezek. 16:5–6.

548. Robert Selby (dates unknown) received his B.A. from Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1577 and served as the rector of Bedfield, Suffolk—about four miles from Ipswich—from 1584 until around 1610.

549. Song of Sol. 2:16.

550. Jeremiah Burroughes (1599–1646), a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a prolific writer, preached at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk—about sixteen miles from Ipswich—from about 1624 until 1631.

551. Nicholas Danforth (d. 1638) came from Framlingham, Suffolk, in 1634 and settled at Cambridge. He became a freeman on 3 March 1636 and served as both a selectman and deputy before he died.

552. Gal. 6:7.

553. There is no record of a Mr. Rogers being assigned to a post at Colchester, Essex—a town about twenty miles from Ipswich—at this time. There are, however, several of the Rogers name who preached within an eighteen-mile radius of Colchester that may have supplied pulpits there occasionally: Daniel of Wethersfield, Essex; John of Dedham, Essex; Nathaniel of Assington, Suffolk; Nehemiah of Messing, Essex; and Timothy of Pontesbright or Chapel, Essex. All of them were of the Puritan persuasion except Nehemiah, a friend of William Laud. See notes 1 (p. 65), 6 (p. 148), 2 (p. 166), and The Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1917) for further information about their lives and publications.

554. Col. 3:1.

555. Exod. 20:5; Deut. 5:9.

556. Probably Richard Eccles’s question.

557. Eph. 2:13.

558. John 3:3.

559. This could be the question of Nathaniel Sparhawk, Robert Sanders, John Sill, John Stedman, John Stansby, or Edward Shepard.

560. Probably Christopher Cane’s question.

561. Matt. 3:10; 7:13.

562. Perhaps Elizabeth Luxford’s question.

563. James 4:8.

564. Probably Edmund Frost’s comment. See note 11, p. 152.

565. John 15:5.

566. Sir, or Dominus in Latin, was often prefixed to the last name of a person with a Bachelor of Arts degree. For further information, see Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 32.

567. Ps. 90:8.

568. See note 9, pp. 104, 105.

569. Isa. 24:5, 17–18, 22; Zech. 9:11.

570. For information on catechisms used in New England, see Wilberforce Eames, “Early New England Catechisms,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 1176—182 (1898), and for background information on English practices, see Leonard T. Grant, “Puritan Catechizing,” Journal of Presbyterian History, 46:107–27 (1968).

571. Zech. 9:11.

572. John Archer (d. 1639) preached at All Saints’, Hertford, Hertfordshire, from 1631 until his death. He may have been the John Archer who graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1626. See John Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1922), 1:37.

573. Eph. 2:1.

574. See note 4, pp. 126, 127.

575. Matt. 22:11–12.

576. This confession is not in the photocopies owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society and Houghton Library of Harvard University. It has been transcribed from the original manuscript of the Confessions owned by the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

577. Ps. 35:6.

578. Matt. 10:15; 11:24; Luke 10:12.

579. See note 4, p. 134.

580. Ezek. 18:31–32; 33:11.

581. Perhaps the question of John Fessenden or John Furnell.

582. Hugh Peter (1598–1660), a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, left England about 1629, when William Laud became Bishop of London. He accepted a pastorate with the elder William Ames at Rotterdam, Holland, before coming to Massachusetts, where in 1636 he succeeded Roger Williams as the pastor of the church at Salem. In 1641 he returned to England as one of three agents for Massachusetts.

583. Rom. 7:9.

584. Rom. 8:1–8.

585. Matt. 19:26; Mark 10:27; Luke 18:27.

586. Gen. 25:25–34; 27:1–41.

587. Edward Norris (d. 1659)—probably the Edward Norris who graduated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and preached at Anmer in Norfolk—came to New England in 1639. He was soon chosen to assist Hugh Peter as teacher to the church at Salem, where he remained until his death.

Ames may have heard John Norton (1606–1663), who graduated M.A. from Peterhouse College, Cambridge, in 1627 and declined both a good benefice and a Cambridge fellowship because of his Puritanism. Immigrating to Massachusetts in 1635, he preached at Ipswich until 1656, when, after a three-year struggle with the Ipswich congregation, he succeeded John Cotton as the teacher of the First Church of Boston.

588. Rev. 22:17.

589. See Matt. 9:12–13; 18:11.

590. John Miller (d. 1663), a graduate of Caius College, Cambridge, in 1628, came to Dorchester, Massachusetts, about 1635. He preached at Rowley, probably assisting Ezekiel Rogers, from 1639 until 1641, when he accepted a pastorate at Yarmouth.