The United States of America grew out of religious controversy; out of the desire of monarchs to expand their empires; out of the human longing for land, adventure, and "glysteringe gold"; even out of nations' efforts to rid themselves of surplus populations: 
"valiant youths rusting and hurtful by lack of employment," as well as thieves, murderers, paupers, and runaways-the "scums of the land." The growth of colonial America into the United States is recorded in a literature that began as reports of exploration and colonization. European explorers, traders, and settlers wrote of their hopes, rare triumphs, and frequent disasters-and thereby created a literature that is large, various, and amazingly rich. 

European Origins/European Natives 
  Early colonial writers did not think of themselves or their writings as American. English settlers in the New World did not regularly call themselves Americans until the 1760s, when they were well on their way to creating the national identity that finally emerged during the American Revolution. Before that time the colonists thought of themselves as Europeans. They worshipped as European Christians, built European houses, spoke European languages. Even when they came to identify themselves as  
Connecticut or Carolina men and women, they remained European in their ways of thought. 

  Frenchmen settled along the St. Lawrence River; Swedes along the Delaware, Dutch along the Hudson, Germans and ScotchArish in New York and Pennsylvania, and Spaniards in Florida. There were African Negroes in New England, the Middle Colonies, and throughout the South. And American Indians were every-where. All contributed to the forming of the American civilization, but the colonies that became the first United States were for the most part English, sustained by English traditions, ruled by English laws, supported by English commerce, and named after English monarchs and English lands: Georgia. Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, New England. 

The Indigenous 
  Beyond the thin line of English settlement on the Atlantic Coast a vast wilderness stretched to the distant Pacific. The immensity of the new land exceeded the wildest dreams of the first explorers. North America alone was more than a hundred times the size of England, more than three times the size of all Europe. Deep in the interior of that American wilderness lived some 2 million American Indians and a few settlers from Spain and France.  But they had little cultural impact on the first English  
colonists on the Atlantic Coast. 

 The Indians of North America had widely differing cultures. They spoke a thousand different tongues, each so distinct that the speakers of one could not understand the speakers of another. And they had no written languages. As a result, the Indians lacked the kind of unified cultural tradition that could be readily absorbed by English-speaking men and women living in small, isolated colonies on the Atlantic Coast. 

The Spanish and French 
 Nor did the culture of Spain and Spanish America have a strong influence on the early settlers of English North America. Spain had established an outpost in Florida, at St. Augustine, in 1565, the first permanent European settlement in lands that later became the United States. But Spanish civilization in North America was a dominating force only in distant Mexico and on the Pacific Coast--far from the English colonies in Virginia and New England. 

 French colonial power in the New World remained always feeble. As a resuIt, the impact of French culture on the English colonists was slight. In all the bondless and remote colonies of French North America, settlers numbered no more than 80,000 by the middle of the eighteenth century; by that time the English colonies had a population of almost 2 million.  Even as late as 1763, after more than a century and a half of French rule, no newspaper or book had ever been published in New France, but in that same period, more than 12,000 separate works had been published in the English colonies of North America. 

 The wilderness, the mountains, great distances, and great differences blocked cultural exchange. Not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Americans made their great migration westward from the Atlantic Coast, did large numbers of English-speaking people come under the strong influence of other cultures on far distant frontiers. 

 European expansion into the New World had begun with the Spanish Conquest of the lands they called "Las Indias." As a result of the Conquest, plundered wealth from the Americas--dazzling streams of gold, silver, and precious jewels--glutted Spain in the sixteenth century. Tales of looted Indian palaces, of vast silver mines, of the gleaming walls of golden cities fired the envy of other European nations, rousing them to colonizing efforts of their own. Yet the English moved slowly. England was small and poor, and the English government was beset by troubles at home--by rebellion and turmoil in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. And neither English monarchs nor English nobles were willing to risk large sums in schemes for "Western Planting," projects for settling colonists in the English lands far across the Atlantic.  

The English Settlements 
 England's claim to North America had been established early.  In 1497, King Henry VII of England sent John Cabot to discover "regions or provinces of the heathen and infidel, whatsoever they be." Cabot sought what Columbus had hoped to find, a sea route to the Orient and the "land of the Great Khan." Cabot discovered, instead, North America, and he claimed it for England and King Henry. But the English failed to exploit Cabot's discovery.  For almost a century they made no attempts to colonize their  
"remote and heathen lands" in North America. Finally, Sir Walter Raleigh organized two English expeditions that sailed in 1584 and 1585 to Virginia, the Iand named in honor of Elizabeth, England's Virgin Queen. Raleigh's attempts to plant colonies in the New World were rashly planned and ill-organized, and they failed completely. Nevertheless, within a century, large numbers of Englishmen had poured into North America, and they established themselves so firmly along the Atlantic Coast that the culture of the first colonies that were to become the United States was solidly fixed as English.  

Jamestown 
 The first permanent English settlement in North America was  established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Among the members of the small band of Jamestown settlers was Captain John Smith, an English soldier of fortune. His reports of exploration and settlement, published in the early 1600s, have been described as the first distinctly American literature to be written in English. Smith filled his descriptions of America with themes, myths, images, scenes, characters, and events that were a foundation for the nation's literature. He portrayed English North America as a land of endless bounty, a land of nourishment and redemption. His vision of a new and abundant world helped lure to America the Pilgrims and the Puritans who saw themselves as people elected by God to flee from the Old World to a new Promised Iand in the America that John Smith had described as a "Paradice." 

 Smith's stirring vision of America as a land of promise and opportunity is reflected in the words of writers of the Southern and Middle Colonies who followed him. Their great contribution to American literature  came in the eighteenth century, in the Age of Reason and Revolution. Then appeared such literary aristocrats as William Byrd II and such political philosophers as Thomas Jefferson. Until that time, literature developed slowly, especially in the South. Towns were few, and farms were widely separated. The urban audience for books and newspapers was scant. And there was little of the spiritual ferment and zeal that caused a tide of religious literature to flow from Puritan New England. 

New England 
 Until the 1620s the settlement of New England had lagged behind that of colonies to the south. An attempt to plant settlers on the coast of Maine, in 1607, had failed because they were ill-supplied and unprepared for the bitter cold of a New England winter. Outposts for fishing and Indian trading had long existed on the Atlantic Coast, but they were temporarily operating only during the summer as depots for furs and fish awaiting shipment to Europe. No permanent colonies were planted in New England until the Pilgrim settlement of Plymouth (1620) and the Puritan "Great Migration" to the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628-1643). 

 The Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay were products of the Renaissance and Reformation. Few men or women understood such terms or realized they lived in times that one day would bear such lofty titles. Nonetheless, their lives had been transformed by  the rebirth of classical learning in the Renaissance and by the Protestant separation from Roman Catholicism that took place during the Reformation. 

The Ideals of the Renaissance 
 The Renaissance, which began in Italy in the fourteenth and  fifteen centuries, soon spread through western Europe, bringing the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern civilization. With the Renaissance came advances in the arts, government, philosophy, and science-discoveries about the world, the universe, and man. The arts ceased to be primarily religious, concerned with the heavenly world. Artists and their patrons began to display a growing interest in earthly nature and in earthly man and woman. 

 The most important music was now heard outside rather than inside the churches, and the great builders of the age now more frequently constructed palaces and town halls than cathedrals arid monasteries. And just as philosophy began to emphasize the pagan Greek maxim "man is the measure of all things," so sculptors began to portray the human form larger than life, dominating its surroundings. Painters began to depict the human face and form more realistically. They painted fewer pictures of eternity, heaven, and angels--more pictures of the earth and the people on it. The art of hiography grew beyond the mere recording of the lives of saints and martyrs. Drama and poetry flourished, arid great literary figures emerged:  Erasmus, Shakespeare, Cervantes.  

 The two greatest and most destructive technical achievements of the age--gunpowder and the printing press-rapidly spread "truth" and "heresy," Christianity and paganism. Cannons and books broke down castle walls and social barriers. Firearms destroyed the effectiveness of body armor and broke the military power of feudal knighthood. Books weakened the authority of kings and priests by giving men and women new power to form their own ideas arid to defend them with learned arguments. 
 Thinkers and philosophers turned more and more from the religious concerns of the Middle Ages to the study of what was ancient and pagan, as well as what was modern and scientific. They speculated. They questioned. They argued with authorities and with tradition. After Copernicus published On the Revolution of the Celestial spheres (1543), large numbers of educated people finally ceased to believe that the earth was the center of the universe. "Scientists" had yet to appear (the word scientist was not even coined until 1840), but the invention of scientific instruments such as the microscope (1590) and the telescope (1606) quickly inspired a new spirit of scientific enquiry. 

 New machinery, powered by water wheels and windmills, ground and drilled, sawed wood and crushed ore. A sixteenth-century Englishman invented a knitting machine that was ten times faster than human hands. Ordinary men and women slowly began to escape from the ordeal of backbreaking and repetitious labor. Man now seemed better able to understand and control his environment, better able to shape his own life, even his destiny. Religion too underwent great changes. Renewed study of ancient Greek and Hebrew literature inspired a new and critical interest in the Bible and close scrutiny of its text. A new concern with  humankind arose, an interest in the achievements of living men and women. The new Humanism arid the critical spirit of the Renaissance in turn gave impetus to the Reformation, the religious revolution that dominated western Europe in the sixteenth century, bringing the rise of Protestantism and the end of medieval Christianity.  

The Protestant Reformation 
 Since its beginning movements to reform Christianity had risen often and succeeded seldom. But early in the sixteenth century religious reformers began new efforts to correct the flagrant abuses that had stained the medieval Christian Church. The reformers believed that the Church had departed fatally from the true path, that it had grown relaxed, worldly, and corrupt. Reformers protested against the authority of its spiritual leader, the pope, for whom they found no justification in the Bible. They protested against the power of its priests, many of whom they saw as ignorant and rank with corruption. Because of the reformers' relentless protests against church doctrines, their protests against the power of priests, their protests against the commands of bishops and popes, they came to be called Protestants. 

 The revolutionary changes that accompanied the Protestant Reformation struck all aspects of society. The unity of Christendom in western Europe was broken. The possibility of a single church, a single religion for all Christians, now seemed gone forever. Old religious and social patterns were changed permanently, utterly. New churches were established with new forms of worship. New political forces emerged. New social classes rose to power.  

 Among the new Protestant Christians were the Puritans and Pilgrims who came to North America. By law they were members of the Protestant Church of England, obliged to attend its services and obey its rules. Formed in 1534 by King Henry VIII, the Church of England had been established as a national church, controlled by Englishmen and free of the pope and Roman Catholicism Henry had sought to create religious independence and religious unity in the lands he ruled. But his Church of England was torn by discord stirred up by radical reformers who continued the disputes  that marked the Reformation. 

The "Pilgrims": Puritan Extremists 
 The Puritans and Pilgrims who settled in New England were extreme reformers. They believed that the Church of England's break from Rome had not gone far enough. They wanted to purify their English church still further, to purge from it any Romishe taint" that yet remained. They yearned to break their religion free from what they believed were the encrusted errors of a thousand years. They hoped to restore church worship to the "pure and unspoiled" condition of its earliest days, to recover what  William Bradford described as Christianity's "primitive order, libertie and bewtie." 

 Puritans and Pilgrims opposed the elaborate pageantry of the Church of England. They opposed church rituals that remained similar to  those of Roman Catholicism. They objected to required forms of prayer, to the veneration of images and relics. They objected to the choirs, bells, and organ music that ornamented English church services; to the decorated vestments, "robes of Rome," that ornamented English priests. Puritans even objected to the crosses and stained-glass windows that ornamented English church buildings. Such "signs and daubs," they thought, only served to seduce the eye and entice the mind away from the preacher's sermon, away from the word of God. 

 And the English radicals objected not only to the doctrines and practices of their church, they also objected to its organization. The Church of England was controlled by the English monarch and a hierarchy of priests and bishops. That organization, the Puritans and Pilgrims believed, had no sanction in the Bible. It served only to rob the people of their right to practice their "true" religion. Angered by "corrupt priests forced on them by distant authorities, congregations of English reformers drew up public lists of the most notorious. "ale house haunters" who "diced and danced"; "Dumme Doggs" too ignorant to preach; "Destroying Drones" fit only to mumble set prayers taken from a book; "dunghill knaves" who played at cards; a "Rousey, Ragged Rabblement of Rakehells" who fathered bastard children and would not repent. All such things the reformers saw as signs of corruption at the heart of their English Church, signs of its departure from the commands of the Bible. 

The Place of the Bible in New England Life 
 The Pilgrims and Puritans were "People of the Book." They believed that the Bible, all of it, was the revealed word of God. Therefore the Bible, not kings, not popes, not bishops, should rule the lives of men and women. Devout Pilgrims and Puritans of every social class read and reread the Bible. They argued about its meaning, used it as a guide to religion, civil government, business and commerce. The Bible showed them how to live and how to die. It gave them rules for courtship, marriage, and warfare. It told them what to do at births, how to cure the sick, how to curse the wicked, how to bury the dead. It even furnished rules for dress and table etiquette. 

  Their Bible was the Geneva Bible, the work of English scholars who lived in Geneva, Switzerland, the center of Protestant learning and theology in Europe. First published in 1560, the Geneva Bible was the most widely read and the most accurate English translation of its time. And it became the Bible of English-speaking Protestants throughout Europe and the colonies of the New World.  

The "Separatists" 
  The Geneva Bible came to America with the Pilgrims, who established themselves at Plymouth in New England in 1620. That small band of religious dissenters had fled first from their homes in England to Holland in 1608.  They had wanted to break completely away from the Church of England, to end all ties with a church they believed to he fatally mired in "Romanism" and corrupt beyond redemption. Their fervid desire to separate entirely from "that masse of old and stinkinge workes," their English church, brought them the name "Separatists." And their pious refusal to bend to the will of their English king and the laws of his English church stirred the religious and civil persecution that finally drove them from their English homeland. 

  Holland had long been a haven for religious refugees, and when the English Separatists arrived, the Dutch welcomed them as devout and hardworking people. But the Separatists soon grew dissatisfied with their life in "Dutch exile." Sinking in poverty, fearing they would lose their identity and be swallowed up in the dominant Dutch culture, they decided to leave Holland on a pilgrimage to America. 

The Plymouth Settlement 
  When the Separatists--who now thought of themselves as "Pilgrims"--came to the New World, they were sorely tested. The colony they established at Plymouth was small and weak. Half of the original 102 settlers died of starvation and sickness in the first year. Their leaders were largely uneducated and unfamiliar with the harsh life of a wilderness frontier. The winters were unexpectedly cold. Food was scarce: the colonists knew little of growing crops in America; they brought no draft animals, had no plows, and their farmland was poor-covered with thin and rocky soil. Because they lacked experience with firearms, they were inept as hunters. Of fishing they knew even less: in their first month they caught only one cod although the sea around Cape Cod teemed with them.  Plymouth failed to become a profitable seaport for shipping and traders: its harbor was too shallow for large, seagoing vessels, and no river gave easy access into the interior and the lucrative Indian trade. But most  important, the Pilgrims' deliberate separation from the English church and government deprived them of spiritual and financial help from their English homeland. As a result, the Plymouth Colony, although it was the oldest, remained one of the poorest of the New England colonies. And finally, in 1691, it was absorbed by the large and prosperous Massachusetts Bay Colony that had been established at Boston, some thirty-five miles to the north.  

The Massachusetts Bay Colony 
 Like the Separatists at Plymouth, the Massachusetts Bay Puritans believed that the Church of England retained too many Roman Catholic creeds and rituals, that English priests and bishops had too much authority and too little respect for the teachings of the Bible. And like the Separatists at Plymouth, the Puritans came to New England to establish a colony based on Bible law.  But unlike the Separatists, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay believed that the English Church was not wholly beyond reform. They believed that it could be purified of its errors, and thus, when they migrated to the New World, the Puritans came not as Separatists but as official members of the Church of England.  

 Religion was the primary but not the sole concern of the Puritans. They were a worldly people. They did not practice a cloistered devotion, a pious withdrawal from human society and its sins. Instead, they made a conscious effort to apply God's rules in the everyday world. They wanted to bring religion out of the church and the monastery and into life on the farm and in the town. Nor  were their lives devoid of worldly pleasures. They wore gaily-colored clothes. They heartily enjoyed games, celebrations, and feasts with "strong waters." And even though they were isolated colonists living in a wilderness, they had a surpassing esthetic sense that still shines forth in their architecture. 

 Yet their strict piety and their literal application of the Bible to all aspects of life won them the reputation of being gloomy and solemn, indifferent to beauty and fun, devoted only to rabid dissent and militant zeal. Their enemies said they hated joy, that they were "drunk on religion" and "intoxicated with God." Because of their ceaseless efforts to "purify" the English Church, to purge it of each "taint and relic" of corruption, they earned the name "Puritans." And for their attacks on the church hierarchy, at whose head stood their king, they suffered the royal hatred and government  persecution that drove them to seek a haven, a New Jerusalem, on the barren coast of New England. 

The Influence of Martin Luther and John Calvin 
 The religious doctrines of the Puritans and Separatists had been strongly shaped by the teachings of two great religious leaders, the "precious, shining lights" of the Reformation: Martin Luther (1483-1546), a German monk who was a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg; and John Calvin (1509-1564), a French theologian who lived and taught at Geneva, Switzerland. Luther and Calvin asserted that all men have the right and the obligation to read and study the Bible, for it alone is the word of God. Luther's doctrine of the "priesthood of all believers" argued that priests should not be considered a privileged class, separate and more holy than ordinary men and women. All true believers are equally endowed with grace. And although ministers should be men great in learning, men who can teach the true meaning of the Scriptures, they are no more divine than any other devout man or woman. 

"Calvinism" 
 From Calvin's great work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536-1559), the New England colonists derived their basic theological doctrines: of total depravity, that the disobedience of Adam and Eve, the original sin, had stained all mankind, even unborn generations, leaving them "corrupt and prone to evil"; of limited atonement, that Jesus' sacrifice had earned God's forgiveness, or grace, but only for a limited few, the elect; of irresistible grace, that salvation is given only by God, that it can not be earned by even the most pious believer; nor can it be spurned by the vilest sinner; of perseverance of the saints, that those chosen by God will remain in a state of grace, among the elect, to the end of their lives, when they will be taken to heaven; and of  
predestination, that God at the beginning of time had predestined all events and had chosen those who would be saved in heaven, and all who would  be lost in hell.  

 To modern eyes, such doctrines may seem harsh, even cruel. And John Calvin has been described as a man whose intellect was locked in ice while his heart burned with vindictive fires. Yet, his teachings were received with joy and comfort by the English Puritans and Separatists. John Cotton, the famous New England preacher, recorded that before going to bed at night he would customarily "sweeten his mouth with a bit of Calvin," for Calvinism, although stern and unrelenting in its logic, it was nonetheless heartening and optimistic to its believers. 

 Calvinism affirmed that the universe is controlled by neither satanic evil nor absurd chance. The universe, however it might seem to mortals, is stable and divinely just, for it is controlled wholly by God. All things originate with God. He is everywhere. He causes every birth, every death, bountiful harvests, storms at sea, the falling of a single leaf, the movement of the smallest mote of dust. The entire universe and all events within it testify to God's existence and His power. All is for the best, all is just, and all men and women, rich or poor, are equal in God's sight. Special privileges that could be bought by the rich, the pardons and indulgences sold to give remission of sins and to ensure salvation, are worthless, for God alone can forgive the sins of man. Even kings, with all their power and wealth, have no greater chance for heaven than the most miserable pauper-indeed, the worldly lust of kings for pomp and glory suggests that they have less chance than those who are simple paupers but true believers.  In the rigor of its beliefs and in the tenacity' of its believers, Puritanism was akin to Judaism. The idea of that kinship was wonderfully appealing to devout New Englanders. It helped confirm their conviction that they, like the Israelites in the Old Testament, were a chosen people, a people specially favored by God. That self exalting belief the New Englanders justified, in part, by finding strong likenesses between the Israelites and themselves. Like the Old Testament Jews, the New World Puritans were certain that they worshiped the one true God; like the Jews, the Puritans had fled from oppression and had suffered for their religious ideals. And just as Moses had led the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, Puritan leaders had brought their followers out of bondage in the Old World. Therefore the journey to the New World was not just a migration. It was a new Exodus, ordained by God and foretold in the Bible, just as the Bible promised the creation of a New Jerusalem, in America. There, surely, God's people would be delivered from evil; there, at long last, God's will would be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Central to a belief that they were a special people was the New Englander's "covenant theology." Like many pious Christians, they' believed that when God created the earth and all creatures, He made an agreement, a covenant, with Adam. That first agreement was a Covenant of Works. It provided that Adam would enjoy eternal life in the Garden of Eden. In return, Adam was to be obedient, to do "good works." When Adam disobeyed, when he committed that original sin, he broke the Covenant of Works. And for that most terrible act, Adam was cast out of Eden and condemned, with all his descendants, to live first in a world of labor and misery arid then to  suffer death and eternal damnation in hell.  

 Pilgrims and Puritans literally believed that all humankind was stained by Adam's fall. They rhymed it for their children's schoolbooks:   "In Adam's fall,  We sinned all."  But they also believed that after condemning Adam and all his descendants, God had later relented. He had made another agreement, this time a Covenant of Grace with Abraham. Under that Covenant of Grace a special few, the "seed of Abraham," were chosen to escape eternal damnation and be taken to heaven. And the Puritans believed that they were among that special few, the elect, that they were, as Edward Taylor put it, "Encoached for heaven" with hearts "Enfired with holy flame'."  

The "Covemant" Certainty 
 The certainty that they were a special people in covenant with God created great cohesion among Puritans and Separatists. As men and women "covenanted to cleave together in the service of God," they took a vital interest in each other's spiritual and public lives. And they found great strength in community, in what a later age would call "togetherness." Their solidarity was most evident at their religious services, where they joined together to listen to sermons. And they remained a close-knit people in their  
everyday lives. They worked and played together. They stood and voted together at town meetings. Families ate from a common bowl at meal tables, where they sat close together on benches-individual chairs did not become common until the eighteenth century. They even slept together, entire households in a single room--servants, masters, children--two, three, even four to a bed. 

The Puritan Ethos 
 The Puritans' strong sense of unity and their religious ideas were not new. Christians had long emphasized their dependence upon one another; their duties to one another; just as they had long believed in the omnipotence of a single God and in His direct intervention in the lives of all humankind. The great Puritan achievement was not the creating of a new religion or a new way of life, for Puritans were not innovators but conservatives who wanted to return the church to its original forms, to its early simplicity. Instead, the Puritans' contributions to religion came from the example of their unrelenting quest for religious independence, from the strength of their faith, and from their devotion to preaching, to hearing the word of God expounded by their ministers. 

 Puritans set an example to the Christian world by their absolute dedication to their religion. They withstood persecution of all kinds: They suffered the seizure of their worldly goods; they underwent torture, burning, hanging, mutilation; and still they kept their faith-indeed, their suffering only made their faith more strong. In withstanding persecution, in rejecting the authority of popes, kings, and bishops, the Puritans fostered a tradition of independent congregations, of men and women free to choose their own ministers and set their own doctrines. And that Puritan dedication to  self-determination helped establish the independence and freedom that Americans have long cherished as their greatest possessions. Puritans also established a strong tradition of preaching, a tradition whose abiding force is unmistakable in modern America, where sermonizing evangelists who can stir the generosity of audiences have taken revivalism out of the narrow world of canvas tents and sawdust floors and brought it into the vast and moneyed universe of television. 

The Sermon 
 The importance of the sermon in early New England is still evident in New England's two greatest artistic achievements: its literature and its church architecture. Sermons were by far the most popular literary form of the time. Of all the books published in the entire history of colonial New England, nearly half dealt with religion, and most of those were collections of sermons. That dominating interest in sermons is also visible in the design of early churches-New Englanders called them "meeting houses." They had no lengthy naves, no long aisles for grand religious processions.  Neither were they decorated for ornate rituals that would capture the eye and fire the emotions. 

The Meeting House 
 New England meeting houses were built as simple lecture halls. Their interiors were starkly plain. They had conspicuous pulpits closely surrounded by pews and benches for the congregations. The center of attention was not the altar but the pulpit, not the priest and his rituals but the preacher and his sermon. Pews and pulpits were placed so the preacher could be seen and heard. And where preachers could preach and congregations could hear the powerful word of God, what need was there for elaborate altars, or statues, or stained-glass windows? Such "artifacts of the devil" would only cloud the mind and block the light of God's truth. 

 Listening to sermons was considered an essential Christian act. Calvin had declared that "true preaching and reverent hearing of the gospel" were indispensable for a "true church." Devout Puritans believed that a sermon was "the chariot on which salvation came riding into the hearts of men." In no better way could the soul be prepared to receive grace and qualify for heaven. Therefore, ardent worshipers came to sermons at every opportunity, traveling from distant farms and villages, through storms and bitter weather, trudging for hours in "Holy Walking" to hear words that would make their souls "tender for God."  Ministers strove to rouse men and women from doubt and apathy and to "Shake Hell" with forceful preaching directed to the human intellect. As a result, their sermons were lengthy exercises in logic, more like legal documents than works of literary art. Ministers were advised not to "pinch"  their congregations with scanty preaching, and the ministers complied. They seldom spoke for less than two hours. They preached regularly on Sunday and Thursday, and on all special occasions: at notable deaths and births, on election days and at army musters, when criminals were hanged, when crops failed, when storms rose and ships sank. Sermons were fundamental religious exercises and much more. In that day before newspapers and the electronic news media, sermons were a public forum, a source of news and informed opinion. 

Puritan Education 
 Because they were devoted to sermons and to Bible study, the Massachusetts Bay colonists placed great emphasis on education. They wanted to maintain a learned clergy, and they wanted congregations that could understand both their preachers and their Bible. As a result, New England Puritans were remarkably bookish and literate, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony soon became the cultural center of the English colonies in the New World. The first college in English North America, Harvard, was founded at Cambridge in 1636. The first colonial press was established in 1638, also at Cambridge, where the first American book to be published in English was printed in 1640. The first colonial newspaper appeared in Boston in 1690. It lasted only one issue, but in 1704, the first continuing newspaper, The Boston News-Letter, appeared and marked the real beginning of journalism in the colonies. 

 The written expression of religious ideas became New England's great contribution to American literature. Sermons and numerous biographies of New England's worthies, such as Cotton Mather's life of William Bradford, were created to serve as moral lessons, to encourage piety and holiness. Diaries emphasized the importance of the individual's spiritual health and the need for constant self-examination. Poems by poets as distinct as Michael Wigglesworth, Anne Bradstreet, and Edward Taylor were filled with expressions of devotion and faith. Even gory tales of Indian captivity, such as Mary Rowlandson's Narrative, were read as lessons that showed how true Christians could be delivered from red-skinned agents of satanic evil. 

 Religious ideas were expressed in a biblical style of writing. It was meant to be simple and useful, like New England churches scoured free of needless decoration. All "silken language" was to be shunned, as were long Greek and Latin quotations. Writing was to be as clear as fine glass, free of distortions, free of the "quiddities" and "quirkes" of dull scholars.  Preachers were warned not to "shoot over the heads" of their congregations but to compose sermons with an "admirable plainesse" so that the minds and hearts of even the ignorant and the skeptical could be pierced by divine truth.  Preachers who used "swelling words," who provided spiritual meals with "more sauce than meat," were rebuked for offering a mere "blubber-lipt ministry."  

 Devotion to the simple style is apparent in the stark lessons of the New England Primer; Plain and simple language brightens the ungarnished diaries of Puritan stalwarts such as John Winthrop and Samuel Sewall. The Pilgrim, William Bradford, declared that he would write the history of Plymouth Plantation in "a plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things." And the creators of the Bay Psalm Book defended their unpolished translation of the Psalms by announcing: If therefore the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect, let them consider that God's altar needs not our polishings . . for we have respected rather a plain translation than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any paraphrase and so have attended conscience rather than elegance. . To such Puritans, the human desire for rich, artistic embellishment found easy expression only privately-as in the metaphysical poetry of Edward Taylor-or publicly in complex theological disputes and in the death's heads, ornate symbols of human mortality, that they carved upon their  
gravestones.  

Religious Intolerance 
 For all its lofty fervor and sense of divine mission, American Puritanism often showed the same intolerance its believers had fled England to escape. Puritan New England never developed the open-mindedness and lenient traditions found in colonies to the south. But what the modern age may see as intolerance, the Puritans saw as a necessary defense against the intrusion of false belief. Puritans objected not so much to different religions as they did to the practice of different religions in their midst, in the New Jerusalem they had struggled so hard to build for themselves in New England. In warring against nonconformity and change, the Puritans struck at religious and social deviants of all kinds, at Anglicans, Roman Catholics,  Baptists, and Quakers, at dancing masters and wig makers, at whores, actors, profiteers, and radical democrats. But it was all to no avail. For change was unavoidable and came relentlessly. 

Winds of Change: The Devolution of Puritanism 
 Well before the end of the colonial period, the power and the unity of New England Puritanism had greatly declined. Puritanism had attacked the authority of kings and priests; it had shattered ancient laws and social traditions. Now Puritanism in turn was beset by dissenters who attacked its authority and upset its laws. Political radicals agitated successfully against the power of the Puritan upper class. New and divisive religious sects sprouted in the New England soil, and their members would not be silenced. New religious leaders spoke out against strict Calvinism in favor of a milder, a more congenial Christianity-evident in the writings of Roger Williams and John Woolman. 

 Besieged by change, the Puritan ministers of New England lost the political power they once had used so effectively. Dissension went unchecked. By 17OO, only seventy years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the civil government ceased to require religious conformity from unwilling citizens; once-powerful church authorities could no longer force men and women to submit to church rules. Yet, Puritanism declined not only because its enemies grew strong but because its defenders grew weak and divided.  

 As the first generation of Puritan "saints" died off, their piety and faith died with them. Their children and grandchildren were not content to sacrifice everything to preserve old dreams of a Bible commonwealth, old faith in a divine mission. Preachers spoke out bitterly against the decline of religious fervor and the rise of vanity, disobedience, and false belief.  They spoke against the wearing of luxurious clothes and elaborate wigs, against young fops who wore hats in church, against good for nothings who defied their betters, against the growing tendency of Christians to return to the pagan celebration of Christmas.    
  
 But preachers could no longer command from New Englanders a religious fidelity like that of the Puritan "First Comers." Religious and social unity steadily gave way to diversity. The American tradition of pluralism, of contending factions, rose as a tide, and Puritanism more and more came to resemble a small island sinking in a turbulent sea of change. Even the efforts of Jonathan Edwards, whose writings were the last great statement of the Puritan ideal in America, could not halt that change and regenerate the faith. 

The Puritan Legacy 
 But if Puritanism waned as a religious and social force, it remained hard impressed on the American mind. Puritanism had spoken for the preeminence of the individual, for freedom from oppressive governments, and for the value of learning and education. It led Americans to examine their beliefs, their world, and each other. It gave ordinary men and women a sense of purpose. It encouraged them to scrutinize issues in religion and in government and to speak out. It helped to create in Americans a sense of duty to their God, their nation, and their fellow men and women. It taught them to labor to be good and to judge others by their lives, not their birth. At its height, Puritanism served as the dominant force in the creation of American literature. And even in its decline, the ideas of Puritanism profoundly shaped the way Americans thought, helping to bring the revolutionary glories of the American Enlightenment and the artistic triumphs of the Age of American Romanticism. 
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William Bradford’s “[History] Of Plymouth Plantation” 
1) Identify examples of God’s “special providence.” 
2) Explain the necessity for democratic principles in the “Mayflower Compact.” 
3) Identify inferences of Calvinism in the “History.” 
4. Discuss the treatment of “minorities” or dissenters in Plymouth Colony. 
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Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan” 
1) Reconstruct Morton’s defense. 
2) What in his essay suggests a “minority report” regarding life in the English colonies? 
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