The Sabbath World (24 page)

There are four main points of English Sabbatarian theology. First, the Sabbath was to be kept on Sunday, not on Saturday—though it was stressed that the day had been transferred from Saturday to Sunday by biblical authority, not at the whim of the Church. According to Hooper, when Paul called for Christians to give alms to the poor on Sunday in First Corinthians, he made Sunday the Sabbath. (Saturday Sabbatarianism does make the occasional appearance in Puritan thought, but these inklings were dismissed as Judaizing and yielded churches only in the seventeenth century, with the advent of the Seventh-Day Men and the Baptist movement.)

Second, the Fourth Commandment is moral, therefore still binding; its only ceremonial aspect is the injunction to keep the Sabbath on the seventh day, a time that was deemed more suitable to Israelites than to Puritans. The word
moral
may be too mild to convey the enormity of the goodness that the Sabbatarians ascribed to the Sabbath. For the Puritans in particular, the morality of the Sabbath lay in its being rooted in the nature of things, part of the law that God embedded in the universe at Creation. One theologian, Richard Greenham,
went so far as to claim that the Fourth Commandment was the only one given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In
Theses Sabbaticae
, Shepard explained that God’s “moral law,” the Ten Commandments, was written first upon the heart of man in “his primitive and perfect estate.” After mankind’s fall, however, God had it written down in stone.

Third, the Sabbath is a social and personal discipline. It is a means—for the Puritans, the chief means—of sustaining the order and holiness of a sanctified life. The Puritan Sabbath included a vigorous menu of spiritual exercises. It entailed extensive preparation beforehand; the good Christian was to quit work at midday on Saturday to get himself and his family and his servants ready for the Sabbath, and to predispose their hearts for grace. This labor included, among other things, conducting a tally of sins committed during the week, and repenting for them. The day itself involved public worship, reflection and study, and acts of mercy or charity toward the poor. The goal of all these Sabbath activities was to achieve a prelapsarian purity, “to bring ourselves back into that estate, from whence we are fallen, and as it were to recover our first footing,” wrote Nicholas Bownde in
The Doctrine of the Sabbath
(1595).

Fourth, however, and most important for a Puritan, the Sabbath was the only day on which ordinary people could fully bask in the glory of the Word. For at the heart of the Puritan quest for grace lay a search for the Word, uncorrupted and unmediated and free of High Anglican rhetorical flourishes, and Sunday was the day of the Word’s dominion. It was preached in sermons—Puritanism’s highest literary form—sung in psalms, read in Scripture, meditated upon in private, and discussed in public in appropriately godly conversations.

Though the Word was to be kept plain, its dissemination did not lack for theatricality. Puritan preachers roamed the English countryside, teaching the Bible to anyone who would listen and cultivating an aura of rustic simplicity. According to the historian William Haller, who draws his observations from the work of the seventeenth-century Puritan biographer Samuel Clarke, anyone who met the
minister John Carter and his wife, for instance, “would say, they had seen Adam and Eve, or some of the old Patriarchs.” Haller continues, evocatively: “They lived and dressed as plain as Jacob and Sarah, and had only utensils of wood, earth, pewter, and brass, no plate. The wooden salt-dish had grown black with age and use. The ‘house was a little Church.’ Thrice a day the scriptures were read and the children and servants catechized and instructed. All comers were welcome. There was always a ‘wholesome, full, and liberal diet … and all fared alike: He and his wife did never think that his children and servants and poor folk did eat enough.’” It was a merry saying among the godly that “if they would be a Cow or a Horse or a Hog or a Dog, they would choose Master Carter for their master.”

Puritanism was as much a style as a theology, and it is in its style that we can discern its leveling nostalgia, its urge to wipe away the distortions of human history. The Puritans would have said they were fleeing the present time of weakness for a Great or Strong Time. David D. Hall, a cultural historian, calls the Puritan style “the new protestant vernacular.” He describes the fashions in vogue among the settlers of New England: “Psalm-singing replaced ballads. Ritual was reorganized around the celebration of the Sabbath and of fast days. No town in New England had a maypole; no group celebrated Christmas or St. Valentine’s day, or staged a prelenten carnival. New England almanacs used numbers for each month instead of names deemed ‘pagan.’” When parents named their children, they chose biblical names: John, Joseph, Samuel, James, and Timothy for boys and Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, Abigail, Rebecca, and Ruth for girls.

The Puritan Sabbath, for the pious Puritan, did not consist of long, throttling hours of enforced inactivity. Underneath its carefully choreographed plainness, the day crackled with high drama and sensual joy. It’s just that all these things happened inside the soul, not out in the world. Sinners entered the presence of God on this day of “state and royal majesty, when all his saints compass his throne and presence,” Shepard wrote, and repent the “soil” and “decays” of the week before. And they were to lie with Jesus, “in the bosom of his sweet
mercy,” the whole day long, and he would rest with them, tenderly, lingeringly.

Puritans disapproved of the theater as a cultural institution because it distracted from the greater drama of the struggle for redemption. But nonetheless, on the Puritan Sabbath, mimetic rules applied. It was necessary to follow the letter of the law, in part because God commanded it but also in order to re-create the requisite atmosphere. Shepard called for the New England Sabbath to begin at sundown, as it does in the Old Testament. At that point, all work was to stop. He made use of traditional Christian definitions of work, distinguishing between servile works—labor done for worldly gain, profit, or livelihood, in order to acquire and purchase the things of this life—and works of preservation that made life tolerably comfortable. There was to be no “buying, selling, soweing, reaping”; nothing that could be done the following day, including bringing in the harvest or setting sail or cleaning house. But one was permitted “to rub the ears of corn, to dress meat for the comfortable nourishment of man,” or “to pull a sheep out of a ditch, to quench fire in a town, to save corn and hay from the sudden inundation of water, to keep fire in the iron mills, to sit at stern and guide the ship.”

All this not working and not playing certainly made the day quiet. “Sweet to the Pilgrims and their descendants was the hush of their calm Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath—sign and token to them, not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal rest to come,” Alice Morse Earle wrote in a nineteenth-century paean to the early New England Sabbath. “No work, no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was seen except the necessary care of patient cattle and other dumb beasts, the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the morning, a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead.”

Biblically inspired though it may have been, the Puritan Sabbath had a rigor all its own, particularly in New England. On Saturday night, the pious New England Puritan would gather the members of
his family and household together and catechize them. On Sunday they went to the meeting house, called there at 9
A.M.
by the blowing of horns or conch shells or the beating of drums. There they sat through two services, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a break in the middle of the day for lunch. Sermons were known to last for as long as four turnings of the hourglass. The Puritans chose not to heat their meeting houses, nor did they build backs on their pews. Some women brought coal foot stoves in the wintertime, and some towns had a noon-house, a low, stablelike building nearby, in which they built a fire, and where people who came from far away could eat and rest and warm themselves. Should a churchgoer nod off to sleep, he might be woken by a tithing man, a member of the congregation appointed to wander the building with a long staff. The staff had a knob on one end and a foxtail hanging from the other, and the tithing man would either rap the sleeper on the head or slap the fur against her face until she woke up.

How else would the Puritans have enforced such demanding religious discipline? The first Puritan colony in Massachusetts had no written code of laws; it was governed by magistrates interpreting the Word of God. But, by 1635, several Puritan ministers had begun to draft some. The very first code of laws—never actually adopted—was called Moses’ Judicials, and it pursued the long-cherished aim of creating a holy commonwealth. Citing the tale of the wood gatherer in Numbers, who was put to death for violating the Sabbath, Moses’ Judicials called for capital punishment for Sabbath-breaking. Later, Thomas Shepard was drafted to help write more reasonable laws, and in 1648 the General Court published
The Book of General Laws and Liberties
.

These were the blue laws, so called either because of the blue paper on which an early history of Connecticut was written and in which the laws were outlined, or, more likely, because
blue
meant rigidly moral in eighteenth-century slang. The laws made Sabbath church attendance compulsory; outlawed the denial of the morality of the Sabbath; prohibited Sabbath-breaking; and strictly punished acts
of Sabbath burglary, which was rampant, given that houses often stood unattended all day long while their owners went to church. Other states soon followed Massachusetts’ lead.

Enforcement of these rules was never quite as draconian as one might think from the horror stories promulgated even at the time. It is doubtful, for instance, that a man was ever actually put in the stocks for kissing his wife on the Sabbath. The court’s most common response to Sabbath-breaking was admonishment. On the other hand, people were flogged, branded, put in stocks, and made to pay steep fines for breaking the Sabbath. The harshest punishments were for Sabbath burglary and other crimes committed on the Sabbath. But even if the actual penalties didn’t always meet the standard of severity called for in the law books, the matter did not lack for attention. The court records brim with arrests, fines, and admonishments for everything from catching eels on Sunday and riding too “violently” to wringing out one’s laundry and sitting under the apple tree with one’s beloved. Walking, traveling, or visiting on the Sabbath could result in a fine. Failing to go to church almost certainly would.

A decade later, thanks in part to these laws, the Sabbath had become an entrenched American institution, kept even in towns filled with converted Indians. Though the actual number of American Puritans was never large, the Puritan Sabbath—enshrined in law by vigorous, literate leaders and bolstered by the Sabbatarianism that held sway in England in the seventeenth century—dominated the American Sunday until the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least in the northern half of the country. (Puritanism never found a foothold in the South.) Nonetheless, as soon as the Puritans passed their Sunday laws, and even before they did, the courts found themselves embroiled in battles over civil and religious liberty. The dissenter Roger Williams began his long career of annoying Bay Colony leaders by opposing their right to punish Sabbath-breakers. He was later exiled from Massachusetts and went on to found the colony of Rhode Island, the first to enshrine in law freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. A powerful splinter group called the Antinomians, led by Anne Hutchinson, derided laws enforcing Sabship
and behavior as “legalistic.” A wave of Quakers came to New England in the late 1650s and fell afoul of the Sabbath laws by refusing to appear at Sunday public-worship services and holding their own meetings instead.

The Sabbath laws were among the most divisive of Puritan policies, and may well have provided the most ammunition, over the centuries, for the enemies of Puritanism. By the nineteenth century the Sabbath laws were a symbol of the Puritans’ indifference to, and even intolerance for, individual pleasures and religious freedoms, as well as their will to compel worship rather than allow it to emerge from natural feelings. The laws were so controversial, even as they were being written, that you have to wonder what blinded the Puritan fathers to the inevitable repercussions. Why did they not worry about backlash? What was in their minds?

They were thinking of the Bible, of course. It stood before them as the text of reality, more real than life itself. It was not just
a
but
the only possible
model of society. Consider the biblical terms that Thomas Shepard uses when he justifies the use of state power to enforce a narrow notion of Sabbath rest. “Children, servants, strangers who are within our gates,” he wrote, in a direct echo of the Fourth Commandment, “are apt to profane the Sabbath; we are therefore to improve our power over them for God, in restraining them from sin, and in constraining them (as far as we can) to the holy observance of the rest of the Sabbath.” And if parents must keep their children from breaking the Sabbath, then how much more must the state keep its citizens from doing the same? Puritan political theory was nothing if not patriarchal. As Shepard wrote, invoking Nehemiah: “And if superiors in families are to see their gates preserved unspotted from such provoking evils, can any thing be but that the same bond lies upon superiors in commonwealths, who are the fathers of these great families, whose subjects also are within their gates, and the power of their jurisdiction?”

Historical hindsight makes it all too easy for us to see why some people might be oblivious to the larger blessings of the day. For one thing, the Puritan Sabbath had its morbid side. To be a Puritan was to
live in a perpetual state of unfulfilled and unfulfillable expectation, for to the Calvinist death was certain, but redemption could never be. The Puritan Sabbath, like the Puritan diaries, was a tool of anxiety management. It allowed the Puritan to master his fear of the passage of time, and of death. You died for a day, and if you did it right, you got a taste of eternal rest. You prepared for the Sabbath as you prepared for heaven, Shepard said in the
Theses Sabbaticae
.