The New England Mind Quotes

“The Puritan was abject and mute before “Thus saith the Lord,” but once the Lord had spoken, he was ready to investigate the reasons behind what the Lord had said, and to demand of the faithful that they include such reason in their quest for salvation. They had not only to fulfill but to understand the will of God, though both tasks were equally difficult.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“as well as the textbooks used in Puritan education, make it apparent that Puritanism was, if not a rationalism, then decidedly a reasonableness. Among the attributes of God was perfect rationality as well as absolute will and infinite sovereignty, and man was created in the image of God. As”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“Hooker continues to call him “Saint,” though this use of the word was generally proscribed as a Popish corruption. But even when they were not directly borrowing Augustine’s phrases, the Puritans were speaking out of the same spirit. New England diarists had not the literary genius of the author of the Confessions and the Soliloquies, nor could the divines put autobiographies into their sermons; still at their more pedestrian pace they followed his example in relying for the demonstration of original sin and innate depravity upon an analysis of the soul.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“The soul of Puritan theology is the hidden God, who is not fully revealed even in His own revelation. The Bible is His declared will; behind it always lies His secret will. His secret purpose “hee hath”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“to go upon. In the Bible God has so spoken. He has not therein uttered the naked truth about Himself, He has not revealed His essence; His secret will remains secret still, as we witness daily in the capricious orderings of providence. The Bible contains His revealed will, tells men what is expected, but does not explain why, for even if it were explained men could never understand their relation to the whole drama of creation.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“The doctrine of predestination seems harsh and unreasonable when viewed simply as a doctrine. When we consider it as a description of experience, we see at once that just as the rewards of rank or wealth depend upon the apparent chance of birth or opportunity, and wisdom upon the accident of intellectual ability, so the achieving of spiritual illumination depends upon whether or not it is given. “The greatest number of mankind are groping in the dark, seeking an object in which to find their happiness”; those to whom He does show Himself are no whit better men than those to whom He does not appear, “so that his meer good Measure is herein displayed.” The creatures have been made like pots for the maker’s purposes:”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“He uses instrumental causes, which we can trace, but if the reason of the being of things be followed to the top, “this Will of God, is the First Cause of all things,” and we cannot understand it or trace its logic. Had God created the world “of necessity,” it would have been eternal; but since it was obviously created in time, God must have brought it forth by a free act of choice. The”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“century that the colony engineered lotteries, with clerical blessing, for the benefit of Harvard College; devoted as the founders were to that school of the prophets, they would never have regarded it a sufficient excuse for making profits out of divine determinations.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“orders everything to its right end.” Contemplation”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“without it. God must be more than the original designer of the creation, He must continuously create it anew out of His infinite stores of being. “All”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“Theorists had endeavored to confine the unconfinable within artificial distinctions. Thomistic theologians had erred by making God too rational—an error of which Anglicans like Richard Hooker were still guilty—nominalists had exaggerated His irrationality, Lutherans His mercy. The various “Calvinist” groups started from a fresh realization that to fix too narrow limits or too explicit tendencies upon the principle of the cosmos was to court disaster. The world is not governed by reason, or power, or love, but by “I am,” who is a jealous God and wreaks vengeance upon those who idolize His titles instead of worshiping Himself. Puritans reasserted the divine simplicity and warned men to guard their thinking lest they again identify God’s essence with whichever of the attributes seemed most attractive to them. They were endeavoring to reach truth about”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“Puritan thinking on the subject of the Deity always confronted the initial difficulty that in one sense thinking about Him was impossible. The Puritan God is entirely incomprehensible to man. The Puritan system rests, in the final analysis, upon something that cannot be systematized at all, upon an unchained force, an incalculable power. God can never be delineated even momentarily in any shape, contour, or feature recognizable to human discourse, nor may His activities be subjected to the laws of reason or of plausibility. He”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“The ultimate reason of all things they called God, the dream of a possible harmony between man and his environment they named Eden, the actual fact of disharmony they denominated sin, the moment of illumination was to them divine grace, the effort to live in the strength of that illumination was faith, and the failure to abide by it was reprobation. The heart of this piety was its sense of the overwhelming anguish to which man is always subject, and its appeal to anguish-torn humanity has always been”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“needed merely to look about him. “Look,” says the Puritan preacher, the doctrine is “as in nature, reason teacheth and experience evidenceth”; to deny it “is to go against the experience”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“venture to call this piety Augustinian, not because it depended directly upon Augustine—though one might demonstrate that he exerted the greatest single influence upon Puritan thought next to that of the Bible itself, and in reality a greater one than did John Calvin—nor because Puritan thought and Augustine’s harmonize in every particular. Some aspects of his work, his defense of the authority of the church and of the magical efficacy of the sacraments, were ignored by Puritans as by other Protestants.{1} I call it Augustinian simply because Augustine is the arch-exemplar of a religious frame of mind of which Puritanism is only one instance out of many in fifteen hundred years of religious history. For a number of reasons many persons in late sixteenth-century England found themselves looking upon the problems of life very nearly as Augustine had viewed them, and, for reasons still difficult to expound, the number of such persons increased during the next six or seven decades.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“Any judgment concerning what the inhabitants were able to comprehend must rest in the final analysis upon somewhat negative testimony. Still, since in the first decades there is no evidence of any extended discontent outside the Antinomians, we may conclude that the majority of the people, whether or not members of the churches, saw nothing amiss in the teachings or the methods of the clergy, paid reverence to the ideal of learning, and endeavored to the best of their abilities to come up to it.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“The arguments of Dell and Webster always come back to a fundamental Antinomianism, to the idea that grace gives not only the ability to act but all requisite knowledge, that the child of God knows the principles of eternal truth merely out of his subjective assurances.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“Cotton added, “zeale is but a wilde-fire without knowledge.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“hence the conclusion is frequently implied and often explicitly drawn that the Puritans looked upon philosophy as a sensual indulgence, upon classical authors as contemptible heathens, upon science as a work of the Devil and a hindrance to faith. Neither the friends nor the foes of the Puritans have shown much interest in their intellects, for it has been assumed that the Puritan mind was too weighted down by the load of dogma to be worth considering in and for itself.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“There was, however, one consequence of the original doctrine of regeneration that was eventually to accelerate the development of moralism: Puritans contended that regeneration was usually an ascertainable experience, that men could tell whether or not they were in a state of grace. With this conclusion they went beyond Augustine, for he would never have said point-blank that the presence of grace could be verified by external symptoms he would never have claimed that a man himself could positively know whether he had it or not, much less that a set of impartial examiners could discover the true state of his soul. Yet Augustinian theology, in other hands than Augustine’s, tends toward this deduction which the Reformation made explicit.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“Prudence doth not abate diligence, but guides it in its worke.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“It is also true that much of the preaching was given over to the inculcation of sobriety and self-control. In the early half of the century, when the tempo of religious zeal was mounting, the clergy strove continually to hold their followers in check. In New England occasional outbursts of enthusiasm, particularly the emotional excitement aroused by Anne Hutchinson, called forth still more ministerial counsels of moderation”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century

“Look,” says the Puritan preacher, the doctrine is “as in nature, reason teacheth and experience evidenceth”; to deny it “is to go against the experience of all ages, the common sense of all men.”
― Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century