Pdf/87/1/132/1792338/Tneq a 00347.Pdf by Guest on 26 September 2021 ADMISSION?: a CHALLENGE Michael P

Reconsiderations: An Exchange

DID JOHN DAVENPORT’S CHURCH REQUIRE CONVERSION NARRATIVES FOR CHURCH Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 ADMISSION?: A CHALLENGE michael p. winship

EING admitted into a New England church was no easy matter B in the seventeenth century. Prospective members were expected to show that they were “sound in the faith,” as John Cotton put it, by making their doctrinal knowledge evident. More daunting, they were also expected to show that they knew faith not only intellectually but savingly, what the minister John Norton called “experimental faith,” through an account of their conversion. The 1648 Cambridge Platform called this conversion account a “relation,” or “a personal and publick confession and declaring of God’s manner of working upon the soul.” Besides being codiﬁed in the Cambridge Platform, relations were presented as normative in accounts of New England church practices by Norton, Thomas Lechford, and John Cotton.1 Normative was not the same as mandatory, of course; congregational churches could not collectively compel individual churches. “A relation of the work of conversion . . . hath been ordinarily used in most of our churches,” wrote Jonathan Mitchel in 1664 (Mitchel may have been thinking of the Presbyterian leaning churches of Newbury and Hingham as the exceptions, along with Thomas Hooker’s Hart- ford church and perhaps a few more obscure ones). Three decades later, Increase Mather remembered only Hooker’s as being an earlier Congregationalist church that did not use relations.2

1John Cotton, A Copy of a Letter (London, 1641), p. 5; John Norton, Respon- sio ad totam quaestionum syllogen a` clarissimo viro domino Guilielmo Apollonio (London, 1648), p. 13; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1853), 2:226; Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing: or, News from New England (Boston, 1867), pp. 18–25. 2Mather, Magnalia, 2:28, 103. Plymouth colony churches may have been slow to adopt relations and may have never been as stringent about them as the other orthodox

132 RECONSIDERATIONS 133

In his much-needed 2012 biography of the important puritan minister John Davenport, Francis Bremer argues that Davenport’s New Haven church was also an exception to the general practice. Accord- ing to Bremer, Davenport believed that “true understanding and the ability to make godly choices” were sufﬁcient signs of “saving grace.” Therefore, Bremer states, “evidence of godly behavior and a true profession of faith” were the sole requirements for joining Davenport’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 church. What was not required, Bremer says repeatedly, was a relation, “a personal account of how [prospective members] had experi- enced God’s grace and been born again.”3 Bremer’s novel claim opens up intriguing interpretive possibilities. Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and John Cotton were the three most prominent ministers to immi- grate to Massachusetts. Hooker heretofore has been the only prominent New England minister known to have rejected conversion narratives. Not coincidently, he chose to found the colony of Connecticut rather than remain in Massachusetts. By Bremer’s reading, disap- proval of relations might have helped spur the founding of the other orthodox puritan colony, Davenport’s New Haven, as well. The re- jection of relations by two of New England’s three most prominent ministers emphasizes just how outside the puritan mainstream the practice was. The importance of Bremer’s claim has already been recognized.4 But is that claim correct? Or can the stream of scholarly conventional wisdom continue to ﬂow placidly in its wonted course?

If Bremer’s claim is correct, it is counter-intuitive. Bremer does not provide any contemporary comment on Davenport’s alleged deviation from the norm, whereas Thomas Hooker’s was noted by both Cotton Mather and his father Increase.5 There is no record of Davenport intervening on the topic of relations when the Cambridge Platform was being written, as he did about other topics. A prominent element colonies. See George D. Langdon, Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620– 1691 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 129–31, and Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 264–65. 3Francis Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 188, 186, 185, 259. Further page references will be cited in the text. 4Walter Woodward, review of Bremer’s Building a New Jerusalem, New England Quarterly 86 (June 2013): 325. 5Mather, Magnalia, 1:349, 2:68. 134 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in the New Haven church’s contemporary reputation, unremarked by Bremer, was the strictness of its admission standards. Davenport was “the strictest man for . . . admitting of members in New England,” Robert Child wrote in 1648. Cotton Mather referred to “a more than ordinary exactness in admitting members. ...Ihadalmostsaid severely strict.” William Hubbard called Davenport’s church “careful” 6 while acknowledging that opponents would find it “overly strict.” Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Relations were acknowledged as the strictest and most severe part of the Congregational church admission process, and so it is difficult to see how Davenport’s church would have gotten its reputation in their absence. Moreover, as Bremer notes, in the only glimpse we have of the New Haven church’s admission standards in practice, relations are prominent. The process of selecting the visible saints who would found the church began, according to a contemporary manuscript, when neighbors “gave their accounts one to another of God’s gracious work on them” (p. 182). In light of New England norms, the silence of the archives, and the reputation of Davenport’s church, it might seem reasonable to infer later admission practices from the way the church was founded. Bremer, however, dismisses any such inference. He claims that these early meetings were “informal” (p. 190). Thereafter, he says, “there is no evidence that such accounts had to be delivered to the congregation for an individual to obtain membership” (p. 191). Lack of evidence that relations were the norm (if that is so) is, of course, not positive evidence that they were not. Bremer’s positive case is inferential and rests on two foundations. The first foundation is an argument about Davenport’s “understanding of the process of salvation” (p. 185). Bremer suggests that the turbulent up-and-down spirituality of many puritans, eloquently captured in the conversion accounts in the existing relations, might have been alien to him. No Davenport spiritual diary survives, although that is true of many ministers, nor does a detailed account of a conversion experience, although Cotton Mather’s biography of Davenport can be read to suggest that he was converted while barely a teenager.7

6Robert Child to Samuel Hartlib, in The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662) Held in Shefﬁeld Univer- sity Library; Prepared by Members of the Hartlib Papers Project, ed.J.Crawford et al. (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Publications, 1995), 39/2/5A-6B; Mather, Magnalia, 1:328; William Hubbard, A General History of New England: From the Discovery to MDCLXXX (1848), p. 320. 7Mather, Magnalia, 1:322. RECONSIDERATIONS 135

Bremer reinforces this foundation of his argument by stating that Davenport “never addressed himself in print to the stages of conversion” and displayed “inattention to issues of the saint’s preparation [for salvation]” (p. 185). That claim needs to be qualified. Only one, not very long set of sermons on practical divinity by Davenport was published. This set provides a slender base from which to make a broad generalization about his inattention in print, or lack thereof, to prepa- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 ration. On the other hand, Davenport coauthored a warm preface to another minister’s treatise that did focus on preparation. Davenport discusses the stages of conversion briefly in the published doctrinal profession of faith he gave while being admitted to the New Haven church. Those stages follow the normative puritan model. Conversion is a process that includes preparation. The convert is first prepared for conversion by realizing his complete, helpless, damnable corruption, “awakened and humbled by the Law . . . judging himself worthy to be destroyed for his sins, and . . . utterly destitute of all help or hope of himself.” After this awakening, if the would-be convert is among the elect, the Holy Spirit will reveal Christ in his true salvific nature.8 In short, Bremer’s foundational argument about Davenport’s understanding of the process of salvation hardly seems strong enough to bear the weight of the claim about admission expectations he erects on it. To bolster it, Bremer repeatedly draws parallels between Davenport’s and John Cotton’s understanding of conversion. But Cot- ton expected relations, which would appear to undercut the intrinsic relevance of Bremer’s argument.9

8John Davenport, The Profession of the Faith of That Reverend and Worthy Divine Mr. J. D. (London, 1642), p. 6; John Preston, The Saints Qualiﬁcation (London, 1633), “To the Christian Reader.” 9There is a tendency among New England historians to take Thomas Hooker as the yardstick by which to measure a minister’s commitment to preparation, but Hooker was recognized at the time as an extremist. See my Making Heretics: Militant Protes- tantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 70, 269 n. 18, and Paul Chang-Ha Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Its Seventeenth-Century Con- text (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 35. Ministers disagreed about the extent and severity of preparation that preceded justiﬁcation but not about preparation itself. For the preparationism of John Cotton, still sometimes overlooked by scholars, see William K. B. Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 192–99,and Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 84 n. 25. When preparationism, term and process, came under attack by radical English preachers in the 1640s, Davenport and Cotton would have clearly been on the side of the preparationists. See Anthony Burgess, Vindiciae Legis (London, 1647), pp. 84–94, and Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (London, 1648), pp. 3–4, 114–16. 136 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

The second of Bremer’s foundations is his claim that “in the New Haven church, Davenport appears to have been more concerned with doctrinal purity than with personal statements of religious experience” (p. 189). Bremer grounds his assertion in four short passages about church admission that Davenport issued over a twenty-five-year pe- riod. These passages talk variously, among other things, of the need for demonstrating faith, a good “conversation,” and obedience. For Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Bremer, what is significant is that even though the passages vary in their requirements, none explicitly mentions relations or experiences. Immediately after citing those extracts, Bremer declares that there is no evidence that relations were required in the New Haven church. But even given the evidence Bremer supplies, it seems questionable whether this second foundation can bear the weight of his claim any better than does the first. One of the passages, from Davenport’s treatise Another Essay for the Investigation of the Truth, refers to the need for prospective members to demonstrate “regeneration visibly manifested” (p. 189). Regeneration means the process of conversion “whereby a man of a limme of the divel is made a member of Christ,” as the great puritan William Perkins put it. When Davenport speaks of making the process of conversion visible, he certainly could be referring to relations.10 That relations are indeed what Davenport is referring to is indicated by a further passage from Another Essay that Bremer neither cites nor discusses. In it, Davenport is explicit about the need for a relation or, as Bremer puts it, a personal statement of religious experience. Davenport first says that the requirement for church membership is “visible saving Faith in Christ, in the lowest degree.” He then ex- pands: “Let them that are to be admitted into membership shew how Faith was wrought and how it works in them, in the lowest degree; then the Church will have some ground for Charitable judgement concerning their fitness for regular Church membership.”11 It is hard to read this passage about demonstrating the process of conversion without concluding that relations for Davenport are normative, as one would expect. The issue becomes, then, not why Davenport rejects the normative use of relations, since there is no evidence that he does, but why he frequently fails to mention them where it might seem appropriate.

10William Perkins, The Workes, 3 vols. (London, 1613–18), 1:271. 11John Davenport, Another Essay for the Investigation of the Truth (Cambridge, 1663), pp. 27–28. RECONSIDERATIONS 137

Here there are parallels with John Cotton that are very much to the point. We know that relations were used at Cotton’s church, and we know from a published letter that he regarded them as normative.12 Yet, like Davenport, he rarely mentions them explicitly in his surviving publications. In another similarity with Davenport, Cotton’s expressed expectations for church admission vary from place to place in his writings. Those two similarities are bound together. Cotton Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 was not changing his mind about church admission standards from publication to publication, any more than Davenport was. For both ministers, when expectations are not mentioned, they are present by implication. For example, in Cotton’s catechism Milk for Babes, he sets out a threefold requirement for church membership that makes no mention of relations. Applicants must make “confession of their sinnes and profession of their faith, and of their subjection to the Gospell of Christ.” In The True Constitution of a Particular Visible Church, the admission requirement is twofold, confession of sins and profession of faith. In The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared, the stated requirement is simply a “profession of faith.” In Of the Ho- liness of Church Members, Cotton explains that churches must only accept applicants who “profess their repentance, and faith in Christ and subjection to him in his ordinances: and do not scandalize their profession, with an unchristian conversation.”13 The implicit presence of relations is made explicit in another treatise, The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England. Cotton twice gives the admission requirements as faith and repentance. A third time, he presents a similar pair, confession of sins and faith. But this time he is open about what is hidden within these terms. In order that the church may know that the confession of sin is truly “penitent,” the applicant must give a relation. He “declareth also the grace of God to his soul, drawing him out of his small estate into fellowship with Christ.” After citing relations, Cotton also explains how “subjugation,” which he notes as a separate requirement elsewhere, is subsumed in the category of “faith.”14

12Lechford, Plain Dealing, p. 19; Cotton, Copy of a Letter, p. 5. 13John Cotton, Milk for Babes (London, 1646), p. 11, The True Constitution of a Particular Visible Church (London 1642), p. 4, The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (London, 1648), 2nd pag., pp. 26, 39,andOf the Holiness of Church Members (1650), p. 19. 14Cotton, The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England (London, 1645), p. 55. 138 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Doubtless, Cotton could have explained elsewhere how requirements like subjugation and repentance were implicit when he mentioned nothing but faith, and doubtless, were he pressed further to explain how a candidate was to manifest those requirements, he would have replied, “with a relation.” That is the logic of the Cambridge Platform. It first says that the admission requirements are faith and repentance. It then identifies a relation as the vehicle for demon- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 strating those requirements. It concludes by equating the actions of making a relation and showing faith and repentance: “A personal and publick confession and declaring of God’s manner of working upon the soul is both lawfull, expedient and useful. . . . [T]herefore we must be able and ready on any occasion to declare and shew our repentance for sin, faith unfeigned, and effectual calling.”15 Applicants did not give a relation for the sake of giving a relation; they did so because New Englanders regarded a relation as the most reliable way of determining if applicants’ professions of faith and repentance were likely to be genuine. Davenport’s statements on admission requirements, like Cotton’s, are read most straightforwardly in the aggregate as demonstrating that he conformed to New England norms and expected relations. Without some signal to the contrary, New England Congregational- ists would have regarded relations as implicit in all of the examples that Bremer offers. “Regeneration visibly manifested” is a clear-cut example—the process of conversion, regeneration, is made visible by describing it. A “profession of faith . . . [that] has blessedness annexed to it,” another statement Bremer quotes, is a way of saying “saving faith.” Cotton Mather once described the admission requirement as “a probable and a credible profession of a saving faith,” while making clear that it involved the communication of experiences. On the other hand, for us to view Davenport’s various pronouncements about admission requirements as demonstrating definitively that he did not require relations, as Bremer argues they do, they would have to have embodied a statement to that effect, such as survives from Hooker.16 Although Davenport is the only New Haven minister Bremer con- siders in his discussion of relations (perhaps understandably, since Bremer is writing a biography of Davenport), Davenport is not the

15Mather, Magnalia, 2:226. 16Mather, Magnalia, 1:328, 2:244; Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (London, 1648), pt. 3,p.5. See also Baird Tipson, “Samuel Stone’s ‘Discourse’ against Requiring Church Relations,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46 (1989): 786–99. RECONSIDERATIONS 139 only one relevant to it. Like Davenport, the church’s teacher, Nicholas Streete, was an impassioned critic of a 1662 Massachusetts synod’s conclusion that baptismal standards needed to be loosened. Around 1665, while Davenport was still the church’s pastor, Streete wrote a manuscript, “Errata Synodolia,” attacking those conclusions. The manuscript includes a section that elaborates on what Streete calls the evil fruit of the synod. Streete selects some examples of this evil Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 from a letter by an unnamed Connecticut minister. One example is a rising discontent about “relations” in the minister’s congregation. “The great question,” dissidents were asking him, “is where is the [scripture] Rule for churches to require such a thing?” Questioning relations, Streete was saying, was one ill effect of the synod’s disrup- tion of New England’s settled church order. That is not a point he would have had any reason to make had relations not been required in New Haven—and, of course, there is no evidence that relations were not required. Three quarters of a century later, it was claimed that the then minister of the New Haven church, Joseph Noyes, expressed un- happiness when people who brought their written relations to him did not credit him for their conversion or did not credit him sufﬁciently.17 Relations were used at the founding of the New Haven church; Davenport indicated that they continued to be expected, as did his co-minister; their use is mentioned in the eighteenth century; and Bremer presents no contemporary or later source claiming that Dav- enport did not expect them. It is reasonable to assume that the early New Haven church followed the expressed New England Congrega- tionalist norm of using relations as a standard part of its admissions process.

17Mather Family Papers, box 11,folder18, pp. 2 and 3, American Antiquarian Soci- ety, Worcester, Mass.; Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in America (Boston, 1743), p. 159. Privately communicated written relations were in- creasingly the practice by the end of the seventeenth century. See James F. Cooper Jr., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 137–38.

Michael P. Winship is E. Merton Coulter Professor of History at the University of Georgia. His most recent book is Godly Repub- licanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Harvard University Press, 2012). 140 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

DID JOHN DAVENPORT’S CHURCH REQUIRE CONVERSION NARRATIVES FOR CHURCH ADMISSION?: A RESPONSE franics bremer

welcome the opportunity to respond to Michael Winship’s critique Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 I of my discussion of New Haven church admission standards as presented in Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, A Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Though we have covered some of this ground in comments he generously provided while I was working on the Davenport biography, he is one of the most insightful scholars currently working in this field, and hopefully our exchange in these pages will inspire others to investigate the questions at issue. Winship assumes, as I did in previously published works, that the requirement of an account of personal conversion was generally required for admission to the puritan churches of New England in the early decades of settlement.1 In fact, when I began to look into what John Davenport required of members of his New Haven congregation, I fully expected to find evidence such as Winship describes. I did find that the sharing of personal experience was likely part of the informal process whereby neighborhood groups of townsmen selected those whom the community as a whole would choose as the foundation stones or pillars of the church. But I found no evidence that such relations were expected of those who sought to join the church once the church covenant had been drawn up. I included those findings in my biography of Davenport, and they are the focus of Winship’s challenge. My inquiries into church practices in New Haven led me to question just how extensive the use of relations was in New England admission practices. I pursued more broadly the issue of how believ- ers were tested and the use of “conversion narratives” for this and other purposes and tried to decipher what the puritans meant by the various terms they used to discuss what was expected of members. That investigation was not directly relevant to my biography of John Davenport but will appear in a forthcoming essay that examines whether such narratives (as typified by the “confessions” in Thomas

1I took that position myself in The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards, rev. ed. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995). RECONSIDERATIONS 141

Shepard’s congregation) were required or generally utilized. Without anticipating too much of that piece, I would like to directly address Winship’s comments regarding “John Davenport’s Church Admission Standards.”

Winship believes that conversion narratives must have been re- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 quired in the New Haven church because Increase Mather remembered “only [Thomas] Hooker among the earlier Congregationalists as having a church that did not use relations.” However, in his Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline, Hooker offered his assessments about how membership should be determined and claimed that the views he expressed in the volume represented not just the practice of Hartford but the “joint judgment of all the elders upon the [Con- necticut] river: of New Haven, Guilford, Milford, Stratford, Fairfield; and of most of the Elders of the churches in the Bay.”2 Hooker might have been overstating the case, and there were likely individual varia- tions on how the judgment of these elders was implemented, but the statement should at least cast doubt on whether the Hartford church was the only one in which narratives were not required. Winship claims further that Hooker was “the only prominent New England minister known to have rejected conversion narratives.” However, Samuel Stone, his colleague in the Hartford church, was quite emphatic about the fact that conversion narratives were not to be required. The central proposition of a manuscript he prepared on church membership was that “A competent knowledge and blameless life are qualifications sufficient to render a man worthy of admission into a church without a particular relation of the order and manner of his conversion.” “There is,” he further stated, “no divine precept binding everyone to make a relation of the manner and order of his conversion before his admission into a visible church.”3 And in this

2Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (1648), preface. Some historians have assumed that Hooker’s claim that these practices were universal in Connecticut and New Haven was an exaggeration because they accept the (unproven) idea that New Haven used conversion narratives as a membership test. Since all of the evidence I have been able to ﬁnd makes it unlikely that New Haven used such a test, it is likely that Hooker was describing the situation as it was. He also indicated that not all of the Bay elders followed the practices he described, but that is a subject for a later essay. 3Stone’s manuscript was edited and published with an introduction by Baird Tip- son, “Samuel Stone’s ‘Discourse’ Against Requiring Church Relations,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46 (1989): 786–99. It is hard to explain why Tipson’s edition 142 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY regard, it is at least suggestive that, at the formation of the New Haven church, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone traveled from Hartford to assist in the ordination of John Davenport and extend the right hand of fellowship from the Hartford church. What I argued in Building a New Jerusalem was that there was no evidence that relations were used to determine admission to the

New Haven church under John Davenport’s leadership. Winship chal- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 lenges this claim. A few of his points can be dealt with easily. He contends that “a prominent element in the New Haven church’s contemporary reputation, unremarked by Bremer, was the strictness of its admission standards,” and he cites Robert Child and Cotton Mather (hardly a contemporary) for this reputation. He then argues that since “relations were acknowledged as the strictest and most severe part of the Congregational church admission process,...itisdifﬁcult to see how Davenport’s church would have gotten its reputation in their absence.” While this assumption serves his purpose, there are other conceivable ways in which the bar for admission might have been set high—by requiring more doctrinal precision, for example. But was the New Haven church that strict? There is little evidence that its practice in admitting members was more restrictive than that of other congre- gations. In the ﬁrst decades of colonization, when it appears that a bare majority of heads of families were church members throughout New England, 64 percent of New Haven men were members.4 One of my arguments was that Davenport appeared not to have devoted much attention to the process whereby one came to recognize one’s salvation, the so-called morphology of conversion, which Edmund S. Morgan and others saw as laying the pattern for conversion narratives.5 Winship disputes my assertion that Davenport never paid much attention to the process of conversion and seems to be stating that in questioning Davenport’s attention to preparation for

of Stone’s “Discourse” did not raise red ﬂags about how common conversion narratives were in seventeenth-century New England. One explanation is that Boston area practice has always been considered to deﬁne the New England norm. 4The estimate for New England as a whole is from David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 99–100. The estimate for New Haven is from Bruce Steiner, “Dissension at Quinnipiac: the Authorship and Setting of A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion,” New England Quarterly 54 (1981): 31–32. 5Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea: (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 85. RECONSIDERATIONS 143 conversion, I am questioning his commitment to the notion of conversion. He points out that there was only one set of sermons on practical divinity that Davenport published, providing but a slender base for my conclusion. But there are numerous manuscript notes of sermons in England, New Haven, Cambridge, and elsewhere that I discuss in my book that also buttress my conclusion. I do not deny that, like virtually all other New England puritans, including Cotton, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Davenport was a preparationist. My point was that as someone who did not spell out preparatory steps in his sermons, he would likely not have expected his listeners to discuss such steps in seeking admission to the church. To support my contention, I do suggest that Davenport may have been one of those puritans who could not clearly distinguish the steps to election in his own life in the way captured in some extant narratives. Winship questions this, stating “Cotton Mather’s biography of Davenport can be read to suggest that he was converted while barely a teenager.”6 But, as I pointed out in Building a New Jerusalem (p. 186), when William Hubbard, researching his history of New En- gland, asked Increase Mather, Davenport’s ally in the 1660s struggle over membership and the individual who received many of Daven- port’s papers after the latter’s death, “to send me by this bearer a few words concerning Mr. Davenport’s conversion if you know anything about it,” Mather had nothing to tell.7 At the heart of the difference between Winship and myself is the issue of how puritans believed regeneration was manifest. If I gave the impression that Davenport did not wish to limit membership to those who might charitably be considered to be regenerate, I apologize for that, for I believe that the New England puritans did, like the Congregational churches in the Netherlands, wish to restrict membership to the godly. The point that I intended to make was that there were two (if not more) ways to determine if one was a saint. One, presumably used in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge congregation, went beyond prior puritan practice and involved asking applicants to

6I would like to suggest that in general historians should be cautious in placing too much reliance on Cotton Mather’s description of New England’s early history. While he undoubtedly had access to written records and oral traditions that have been lost to us, he also had an interest in promoting a version of the story that supported the positions he found himself taking and that highlighted the contributions of his ancestors, in particular John Cotton and Increase Mather. 7William Hubbard to Increase Mather, 29 June 1683, Boston Public Library, MS Am 1502 v.5 no. 16. 144 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY describe the path they had taken to reach assurance. Surprisingly, many of the “confessions” Shepard recorded are notably hesitant in describing the applicant’s assurance. Another approach, which I contend was Davenport’s, was similar to that employed by earlier groups of puritans, and it involved look- ing at the applicant’s life and listening to his or her profession of faith on the assumption that the fruits of a regenerate soul would be Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 manifested in this fashion. As historians Raymond Phineas Stearns and David Brawner explained regarding the admission of members to the semi-Separatist London congregation formed by Henry Jacob, “To recognize a saint was, at once, a difficult and easy task: difficult because one could never be sure; easy because the criteria for determining the probability of sanctification were both abundant and clearly established. To put the matter crudely, we can be reasonably sure that Henry Jacob could tell a saint when he met one.”8 Or, as the clergyman Samuel Craddock expressed it, “A man that hath the spirit may know the spirit in another by the spirit.”9 Such criteria are virtually impossible for modern scholars to judge or measure, especially because the puritans never claimed that the ability to sense a fellow saint was infallible. They all recognized that every congregation contained hypocrites, but Craddock was far from alone in his confidence. Winship seems to discount the value of judging possible saints by a profession of faith and an examination of behavior, in part because he seems to view a profession of faith as a mere catalogue of doctrines. But Davenport himself, as I explained in Building a New Jerusalem, rejected those, “like Catholics, who take faith as a simple intellectual assent to certain revealed truths.”10 We need to take seriously the puritan belief that regeneration did not merely enhance one’s rational qualities but implanted in the soul an appreciation of the essential truth of the scriptures and of doctrine that was evident to fellow saints. In essence, to quote the words of the popular hymn, “they will know we are Christians by our love.” The more I have investigated

8Raymond Phineas Stearns and David Holmes Brawner, “New England Church ‘Relations’ and Continuity in Early Congregational History,” Proceedings of the Amer- ican Antiquarian Society 75 (April 1965): 24. 9Samuel Craddock, quoted in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, with a new introduction by Peter Lake (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992), p. 142. 10John Davenport, The power of Congregational churches asserted and vindicated in answer to a treatise of Mr. J. Paget intituled The defence of church-government exercised in classes and synods (London, 1672), pp. 15–16. RECONSIDERATIONS 145 these issues, the more I have come to believe that many of us have been too quick to insist on sharp distinctions between terms such as “profession,” “confession,” “narrative,” and “relation,” which were often conflated by puritans. Winship overstates the significance of the parallel I see between the views of conversion expressed by Davenport and Cotton in that he seeks to prove that Davenport must have required narratives because Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Cotton did. Yet did Cotton? In reviewing Cotton’s writings, Winship fairly cites cases in which Cotton stipulated a confession of sins and yet a profession of faith was all that was required. Cotton stated in The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England that an applicant must declare the grace of God to his soul, which Winship sees, reasonably, as a reference to a relation. But he then jumps to the conclusion that such a relation is implicit in the statements where Cotton does not describe one as being required. Perhaps the strongest argument that Winship has at his disposal is the quotation from Davenport’s Another Essay, a 1663 tract in which he was defending restricted membership against those who wished to broaden it through what has become known as the Halfway Covenant. Davenport stated that those who were to be “admitted into membership show how faith was wrought and how it works in them.” Winship finds it “hard to read this passage . . . as meaning anything except that relations for Davenport are normative.” Yet it is arguable that the clergyman’s point was that showing the fruits of grace may have been considered a way of demonstrating how faith had been wrought in the soul.

In the end, I make inferences from the evidence and so does Win- ship. My conclusion regarding the church admission practices in New Haven does rest largely on the fact that there is no speciﬁc evidence that relations were used to test membership once the pillars of the church drew up the covenant and established the church. But my judgment is, I believe, also consistent with an understanding of who John Davenport was and the religious outlook he evidenced. Through- out his career, he was more eager to draw people into the church than to bar them, unless they were clearly unworthy.11 He accepted

11I would like to thank Michael McGiffert for discussions of how Davenport’s approach focused on conversion by command and the self-exclusion of those not blessed to accept the invitation. 146 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY that “in visible churches sometimes hypocrites are mixed.” Trying too hard to exclude them might discourage those who possessed a weak but real faith.12 In his earliest sermons, at Hilton Castle in Northumberland, Davenport asserted that “every man is bound in conscience by the commandment of God to approach the grace of God offered in the sacrament.” He rejected the arguments of those who were too quick to close the doors of the church, asking his lis- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/87/1/132/1792338/tneq_a_00347.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 teners, “Did not our Savior converse with publicans and sinners? . . . Who stands more in need of the physician than the sick? Who desires more the surgery than the wounded? Who wants comfort more than the helpless distressed?”13 In The Knowledge of Christ (1653), the most evangelical of his published sermons, he wrote “Grace excludes none for its fellowship unless you exclude yourselves.”14 I welcome Winship’s contribution to these pages, which has led me to revisit the subject as I ﬁnalize a broader work on lay participation in the shaping of the puritan movement, and I apologize if I am leaving some of his points to be dealt with in a broader piece. It is important that we constantly reexamine our understanding of the past and challenge old orthodoxies and new interpretations. I hope that our exchange will prompt others to share what their research may reveal about church membership.

12Davenport, The power of Congregational churches, p. 18. 13The Hilton Castle sermons are contained in “John Davenport, Sermons and Writ- ings, 1615–1658,” Yale University, GEN MSS 202, and discussed in my Building a New Jerusalem, pp. 43–47. 14John Davenport, The knowledge of Christ indispensably required of all men that would be saved, or, Demonstrative proofs from Scripture that cruciﬁed Jesus is the Christ wherein the types, prophesies, genealogies, miracles, humiliation, exaltation, and the mediatorial ofﬁce of Christ are opened and applyed : in sundry sermons on Acts 2:36 (London, 1653), p. 87.

Francis Bremer is Editor of The Winthrop Papers and Professor Emeritus of History at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. In addition to the volume on which this exchange focuses, he has written a variety of books on New England’s puritan founding fathers and mothers.