Another English paper...this one was actually kinda fascinating to write.

Response 2

The Puritans and Pilgrims were religious groups that traveled to the New World to establish utopian societies based on their interpretation of Scripture, a large part of which included dwelling on the characteristics of God. One particular characteristic of God that was prominent in Puritan and Pilgrim literature is that God is a strict disciplinarian; that is, He punishes those that profane His name, persecute His followers, and those of the believers that stray from righteous living.
William Bradford, the man who coined the term “Pilgrim” in application to those who came across from England to the New World on the Mayflower in order to escape religious persecution, was self-educated and deeply religious. He governed the Pilgrims in Massachusetts until the last five years of his life. During his time as governor, he wrote a history of the journey to the Americas and of the development of the colony. Within this history were accounts of affliction given by God, according to Bradford, as punishment, one of which occurred on the journey across the sea and was specifically a punishment for persecuting the Pilgrims and cursing God’s people and, through that, cursing God.
“And I may not omit here a special work of God’s providence. There was a proud and very profane young man...and he would always be contemning the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations...and if he were by any gently reproved, he would curse and swear most bitterly. But it pleased God before they came half seas over, to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner...and it was an astonishment to all his fellows, for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him.” (pg 59)

Later on, as the colony grew in prosperity and numbers, they shrank in unity and began displacing themselves from the general populace, striking out on their own in a kind of pompous independence that prompted Bradford to say “And this, I fear, will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord’s displeasure against them.” (pg 75) Bradford figured that their pride would lead God to discipline the Pilgrims in order to bring them either back to the fellowship or to destroy them completely.
Very little is known about Anne Bradstreet’s early life except that she came from a Puritan family and got married young to a Puritan man who took her with him to the Americas only a year after they were married. Anne was very much of the mindset common to Puritans about the character of God as a disciplinarian when it came to His followers: punishment in order to save and restore. Late in life, Anne wrote a short testimony to her children of God’s dealings with her throughout her life, and mentioned several times that God had to bring her out of her sin into righteous living through trials. Before she was married, “About 16, the Lord laid His hand sore upon me and smote me with the smallpox. When I was in my affliction, I besought the Lord and confessed my pride and vanity, and He was entreated of me and again restored me.” (pg 111) A while after Anne and her husband had moved to the Massachusetts Bay colony, she again came under God’s discipline. “After some time I fell into a lingering sickness like a consumption together with a lameness, which correction I saw the Lord sent to humble and try me and do me good...” (pg 111) Near the end of her life, she finally came to this conclusion:
“Among all my experiences of God’s gracious dealings with me, I have constantly observed this, that He hath never suffered me long to sit loose from Him, but by one affliction or other hath made me look home, and search what was amiss; so usually thus it hath been with me that I have no sooner felt my heart out of order, but I have expected correction for it, which most commonly hath been upon my own person in sickness, weakness, pains, sometimes on my soul, in doubts and fears of God’s displeasure and my sincerity towards Him; sometimes He hath smote a child with a sickness, sometimes chastened by losses in estate...If at any time you are chastened of God, take it as thankfully and joyful as in greatest mercies, for it ye be His, ye shall reap the greatest benefit by it.” (pg 112)

A slightly younger contemporary of Anne Bradstreet’s was a Puritan minister’s wife named Mary Rowlandson. At the age of 40, her town was attacked by Native Americans and she was captured and subsequently held hostage for eleven weeks, enduring many hardships and outright cruelties at the hands of the Indians. She, like Anne Bradstreet, also believed that any trial in a believer’s life were meant to show them where they were going astray, to chastise them, and then return them to fellowship with God. Early in her account of her captivity, she quotes Psalm 46:8, specifically giving God the credit for the hardships. “Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he has made in the earth.” (120) She recounts what her thoughts were at the time;
“I then remembered how careless I had been of God’s holy time; how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent, and how evilly I had walked in God’s sight; which lay so close unto my spirit, that it was easy for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut off the thread of my life and cast me out of His presence forever. Yet the Lord still showed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as He wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.” (pg 122)

At one point in her captivity, Mary becomes hopeless and depressed, but one of the Indians, back from a raid on some colonial town, finds a Bible within his loot and offers it to Mary in a rare gesture of kindness. In her account of the captivity, she recalls how the Bible helped her remember that the trial was from God as punishment but also was given to her in order to purify her and redeem her, and that she would yet be brought back and the trial would cease.
“...There was no mercy for me, that the blessings were gone, and the curses come in their room, and that I had lost my opportunity. But the Lord helped me still to go on reading till I came to Chap. 30, the seven first verses, where I found, there was mercy promised again, if we would return to Him by repentance; and though we were scattered from one end of the earth to the other, yet the Lord would gather us together, and turn all those curse upon our enemies.” (pg 124)

Rowlandson even went so far as to believe that God had not wiped out the Indians yet because He was preserving them to use as a tool to inflict trials on the Puritans in order to keep the Puritans in the way of righteous living. “But now our perverse and evil carriages in the sight of the Lord, have so offended Him, that instead of turning His hand against them [the Indians], the Lord feeds and nourishes them up to be a scourge to the whole land.” (pg 130)
Puritan and Pilgrim literature expressed many different characteristics of God, but one of the chiefest was the discipline that He would exact upon His disciples and unbelievers alike; upon the disciples to return them to a life of righteousness should they chance to stray, and upon unbelievers in order to show them His power and protect His children. Near the end of her account, Rowlandson quotes Hebrews 12:6, a verse that very effectively sums up the Puritan view of God’s purpose as a disciplinarian: “For whom the Lord lovth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every Son whom he receiveth.” (p 134)

Works Cited

The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 7th ed. Vol. 1. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Print.