The Puritans & Pietists

A Londoner in 1662 could be fined for missing his parish church, and two thousand ministers lost their livings in a single day for refusing to use one prayer book. Which service a man attended was a matter for the law.

Start by throwing out the cartoon. "Puritan" was an insult before it was a label, and the picture most of us inherited, sour people in tall hats hunting for joy to forbid, comes mostly from writers three centuries later. The people themselves were pastors, farmers, poets, and mothers who believed the Reformation had done only half its work. Luther and Tyndale had opened the Bible. The question left was whether it had opened you.

So this becomes the century of the examined heart. Richard Baxter came to Kidderminster, a rough weaving town of a couple thousand souls, and set out to visit every family in it, sitting in kitchens, catechizing children, praying with the parents. He kept it up for years, and the church had to build galleries for the crowds. His Reformed Pastor (1656) is still the plainest book ever written on what a shepherd actually owes his people.

Their spirituality was homemade and daily. The father led family worship at the table, a psalm, a chapter, prayer, which is where most Puritan children learned the Bible. John Owen wrote the era's hardest and most useful book on sin, with a sentence people still quote: "Be killing sin or it will be killing you." And the Sabbath, which the cartoon makes a day of gloom, they defended as the week's delight, the one day the shop was shut, the family was together, and God had their whole attention.

Then the state pressed on the conscience. When the monarchy returned in 1660, the Act of Uniformity gave every minister until St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1662, to accept the revised Prayer Book without reservation. Close to two thousand refused. They walked out of pulpits they had filled for decades and out of the houses and salaries that came with them, into a life of fines, spies, and jail, and they went knowing exactly what it would cost.

One preacher had been jailed even before that. John Bunyan, a Bedfordshire tinker with almost no schooling, was arrested in November 1660 for preaching without a license and told he could go home the moment he promised to stop. He would not, and he stayed twelve years. He made shoelace tags in his cell to send money home to a wife and four children, one of them a blind daughter named Mary, and later wrote that parting from her felt like pulling the flesh from his bones. He also wrote. In 1666 came his testimony, Grace Abounding; in 1678, a dream about a man with a burden on his back, The Pilgrim's Progress, which for two hundred years sat beside the Bible in English-speaking homes.

North of the border the cost was blood. Scottish Covenanters had sworn in 1638 to keep the church's worship under Christ alone; after 1660 their outdoor gatherings were outlawed, and preachers held services on the moors with lookouts posted on the ridges. The years around 1680 to 1688 are still called the Killing Time: Richard Cameron cut down at Airds Moss in 1680, James Renwick executed in 1688. Local memory adds the two women of Wigtown, tied to stakes in the tidal flats in 1685, a story the monuments keep, though some historians question the details. What is not in question is that people died on those hills rather than let a king tell them how to worship.

Across the Atlantic the same convictions were building a society, with all the mixture that implies. Plymouth's Pilgrims had come in 1620 to advance the gospel in remote parts of the world, as Governor William Bradford put it; Harvard was voted into being in 1636 so the churches would not be left an unlearned ministry; Anne Bradstreet wrote real poems about grief, marriage, and a burned house. And then in 1692 the same colony hanged nineteen neighbors at Salem on evidence no court should ever have heard. It is fair to say it plainly, and fair to add that in 1697 Judge Samuel Sewall stood up in Old South Church while his written confession of guilt was read aloud over him.

Meanwhile Germany was a graveyard. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) had killed perhaps a third of the population in some regions, and the churches that survived it were often precise about doctrine and cold about God. Philipp Jakob Spener, a Frankfurt pastor, began holding meetings in his house, where he went over his sermons and passages of the New Testament with those who came. In 1675 he set out his case in Pia Desideria: get the Bible into ordinary hands, let believers meet in small groups, train ministers for godliness and not only for argument, and preach to the heart. Same fire as the Puritans, another language.

His student took it further. August Hermann Francke, teaching at the new university in Halle and pastoring a poor parish next door, opened a school for beggar children in 1695 with a handful of coins someone had dropped in the poor box. It grew into an orphanage (1698), then schools, a hospital, a pharmacy, and a Bible press that put Scripture into German homes at prices working families could pay. In 1706 two young men trained in that atmosphere, Ziegenbalg and Plütschau, sailed for Tranquebar in India, the first Protestant missionaries most historians count.

Then a Saxon estate caught fire. Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, a nobleman shaped by Halle, let refugee Moravian families, spiritual descendants of Jan Hus, three hundred years after his burning, settle on his land in 1722. They named the village Herrnhut, "the Lord's watch," and promptly fell to quarreling over doctrine and leadership. On August 13, 1727, at a communion service in the Berthelsdorf church, the quarrel broke and the community came away one; they said the Holy Spirit had visited them, and never explained it any other way. Two weeks later, 24 men and 24 women divided the clock into hours of prayer. The church's historian J. E. Hutton writes that the watch “is said to have lasted without interruption for over a hundred years.”

Within five years the praying village started sending. In 1732 Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann left for the slave plantations of St. Thomas in the Caribbean; Greenland followed in 1733; before long Moravians were in Suriname, South Africa, and Labrador, a community of a few hundred producing missionaries at a rate no state church came near. At the same time the Huguenots scattered by Louis XIV in 1685 were carrying their trades and their family Bibles into England, Holland, Prussia, the colonies, and the Cape. Persecution kept behaving like a seed dispersal.

So the era ends with the spring wound tight. Isaac Watts had just given the English church new songs to sing (1707). Halle was printing Bibles and training preachers. Herrnhut was praying around the clock. And in 1735 a nervous young Anglican named John Wesley boarded a ship for Georgia, hit an Atlantic storm that terrified him, and watched a group of Moravian passengers sing calmly through it. He asked himself, in his journal, who would convert him. The answer to that question is the next era.