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The Spiritual Labour of John Barnard: An Eighteenth-Century Artisan Constructs His Piety

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Erik R. Seeman
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Extract

John Barnard (1654-1732) was a carpenter. Not only did this Bostonian build houses, but he also constructed, throughout his life, a spiritual edifice. As a carpenter, Barnard used the tools and materials available to him and, within the architectural conventions of his day, built homes according to his individual judgment as a craftsman. Similarly, though in a less self-conscious manner, Barnard fashioned a cosmology out of the varied building blocks available to him in the religious culture of colonial Boston: sermons, godly books, pious conversation, and prayer. As is evident from his 184-page spiritual journal kept between January 1716 and October 1719, Barnard was the active constructor of a personal piety.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Summer 1995 , pp. 181 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1995

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References

Notes

1. This artisanal metaphor is similar to the Lévi-Straussian concept of bricoleur, the jack-of-all-trades who creates a discourse out of the “materials at hand,” except that the metaphor of “carpenter” foregrounds the degree to which the subject is able to marshall preexisting elements of a culture in the creation of his or her individual worldview. It should be emphasized that these metaphors do not imply self-consciousness on the part of the subject. See Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 16–33.Google Scholar For a critical evaluation of bricolage, see Derrida, Jacques, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Alan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-93.Google Scholar

2. Stout, Harry S., The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3 (see also 4, 87)Google Scholar; Elliott, Emory, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), vii, 15Google Scholar; Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E., The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeeth-Century New Enlgand (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), vii, viii.Google Scholar Though very different from one another, works that Start with the same assumption as Hambrick-Stowe's include Perry Miller, The New England Mind, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939 and 1953); Selement, George, Keepers of the Vineyard: The Puritan Ministry and Collective Culture in Colonial New England (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984)Google Scholar; and Toulouse, Teresa, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).Google Scholar

3. Godbeer, Richard, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Cohen, Charles Lloyd, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989).Google Scholar

4. Chartier, Roger, “Introduction,” in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Chartier, Roger (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1989), 4.Google Scholar

5. Much the same argument is convincingly made by Landsman, Ned, “Evangelists and Their Hearers: Popular Interpretation of Revivalist Preaching in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” Journal of British Studies 28, no. 2 (April 1989): 120-49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Tedeschi, John and Tedeschi, Anne (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).Google Scholar

7. John Barnard, MS Journal, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston, 124, hereafter cited as Barnard, Journal. Barnard's Journal was, to a great degree, sacramental, largely devoted to recording his preparations for the Lord's Supper. The Journal also contains some non-sacramental entries, primarily descriptions of unusual events, evidences of God's mercy and anger, abstracts from godly books, and notices of deaths. When quoting from his Journal, I have kept Barnard's spelling intact in order to give the reader a sense of his lack of formal learning. Italics are as they appear in the original except where noted. All other changes appear in brackets. Because the Journal is the only extant source for analyzing Barnard's piety, I will occasionally be arguing from silences in the text, a somewhat problematic but, in this case, necessary strategy. In such cases I will offer my interpretations tentatively to compensate for the lack of corroborating evidence.

8. For a breathtaking example of a cultural historian drawing broad significance from very idiosyncratic, specific sources, see Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar

9. Holifield, E. Brooks, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 197–224.Google Scholar

10. Surely, Hall overstates his case when he argues that laypeople “sought baptism for their children but rejected the Lord's Supper because it added to the risk of judgment,” Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 242.

11. Ibid., 227. Sewell mentions taking the Lord's Supper seventy-three times in his diary, on numerous occasions noting how important it was to him. See Thomas, M. Halsey, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewell, 1674-1729, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 139, 161, 258, 349, 351, 528, 779, 827, 894, 971.Google Scholar It is interesting to note that Sewell's and Barnard's life spans were strikingly similar, with Sewell living from 1652 to 1730 and Barnard living from 1654 to 1732. They were acquainted with one another, with Sewell mentioning Barnard several times in his diary: four times in Barnard's capacity as a housewright (310, 314, 561, 694) and five times in his role of deacon (487, 782, 898, 924, 1059).

12. Mather, Cotton, A Companion for Communicants: Discourses upon the Nature, the Design, and the Subject of the Lord's Supper (Boston, 1690), 85.Google Scholar

13. “Second Church of Boston Records, 1689-1717,” May 25, 1690, MHS. This was twelve years after Barnard joined the church.

14. Lovelace, Richard F., The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1979), 127-28.Google Scholar

15. Barnard, Journal, 122.

16. Mather, Companion for Communicants, 91, 92. See also Mather, Cotton, The Retired Christian; or, The Duty of Secret Prayer (Boston, 1703), 33 Google Scholar; Mather, Increase, Practical Truths Tending to Promote the Power of Godliness (Boston, 1682), 117-59Google Scholar; Mather, Increase, The Blessed Hope, and the Glorious Appearing of the Great God Our Saviour, Jesus Christ (Boston, 1701), 115-16.Google Scholar

17. Hall, , Worlds of Wonder, 156-61.Google Scholar

18. Barnard, Journal, 6, 7. An excellent discussion of religious despair in cultural context is Michael MacDonald, “The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 1 (January 1992): 32-61.

19. Barnard, Journal, 110; see also 150 for another Statement on the inherent impurity of the visible church.

20. See Holifield, , The Covenant Sealed, 76 Google Scholar; see also 4-26, 75-108, 169-96.

21. Barnard, Journal, 110. Compare this with Mather's similar formulation that “a Sacrament is a Sign and Seal,” Mather, Companion for Communicants, 2.

22. Mather, Companion for Communicants, 4, 3-4; Barnard, Journal, 110.

23. Miller, Perry, The New England Mind, 410-16Google Scholar; Levin, David, “Introduction” to Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good, by Mather, Cotton (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1966)Google Scholar; Lovelace, , American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 162-67.Google Scholar

24. Mather, Bonifacius, 27; see also 19.

25. Barnard, Journal, 7, 23.

26. Mather, Bonifacius, 37, 39, 63.

27. Barnard, Journal, 3.

28. Ibid., 18, 168.

29. Lovelace, , American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 136 Google Scholar; Holifield, , The Covenant Sealed, 222 Google Scholar; Mather, , Companion for Communicants, 60 Google Scholar, quoted in Holifield, , The Covenant Sealed, 222.Google Scholar

30. See Mather, , Practical Truths, 117-59Google Scholar; Mather, , The Blessed Hope, 115-16Google Scholar; and Hall, M. G., ed., The Autobiography of Increase Mather (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1962), 316-18.Google Scholar

31. Mather, , Companion for Communicants, 141.Google Scholar

32. This is similar to Hambrick-Stowe's use of Samuel Sewall to suggest the “popular belief in the literal presence of Jesus Christ in the meetinghouse during the Sacrament.” See Hambrick-Stowe, , Practice of Piety, 125.Google Scholar

33. Barnard, Journal, 23, 52.

34. Ibid., 21, 59, 107, 157, 126.

35. Lovelace, , American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 138.Google Scholar

36. Sabean, David Warren, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 41.Google Scholar Though the parallels are striking, I do not think that Sabean's model can be applied to New England in toto because it gives local elites too much power in determining religious culture. According to Sabean, local officials coerced the peasant to attend communion so he would have to “reconcile himself to domination” (59). In New England, the Situation was much the opposite, with ministers like Mather virtually pleading with the laity to get them to attend the Lord's Supper. A more analogous case is that of Nehemiah Wallington, the artisan described in Seaver, Paul S., Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), 36.Google Scholar

37. Middlekauff, Robert, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, asserts that Cotton Mather's attention to individualistic spirituality “implies a recognition that his culture by the early years of the eighteenth Century had relegated religious experience to a private realm” (319). Perhaps a more accurate assessment would be that Mather himself relegated religious experience to a private realm while some godly laypeople continued with a corporate vision of the church.

38. Barnard, Journal, 21, 57, 61, 64.

39. Ibid., 75, 15; see also 4, 5, 13, 21, 74.

40. For the links between Puritan religion and family, see Mary Macmanus Ramsbottom, “Religious Society and the Family in Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1630-1740” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1987); Moran, Gerald F. and Vinovskis, Maris A., “The Puritan Family and Religion: A Critical Reappraisal,” in Religion, Family, and the Life Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America, ed. Moran, and Vinovskis, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 11–58 Google Scholar; and Hall, , Worlds of Wonder, 128-30, 152-56, 229-34.Google Scholar

41. Barnard, Journal, 90. Hall emphasizes this point in his portrait of Sewell. See Hall, , Worlds of Wonder, 217-19, 229-34.Google Scholar

42. Barnard, Journal, 90, 81.

43. Ibid., 101.

44. This contrasts with the eulogies Cotton Mather wrote for women, in which he focused on the exemplary piety of “vertuous” women. Some of Mather's most significant eulogies of this sort include Eureka; or, A Vertuous Woman Found (Boston, 1703); Monica Americana: A Funeral-Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Mrs. Sarah Leveret (Boston, 1705); and Victorina: A Sermon Preach'd, On the Decease, and at the Desire, of Mrs. Katharin Mather (Boston, 1717).

45. Barnard, John [Jr.], “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3d Ser., 5 (1836): 178.Google Scholar

46. On the effects of a patriarchal social System on conjugal relations, see Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982), 106-25.Google Scholar

47. Barnard, Journal, 132, 140.

48. Barnard, Journal, 153, 89. For a similar point on the importance of pious friends, see Cohen, , God's Caress, 173-74.Google Scholar

49. See, for example, Mather, , Bonifacius, 64.Google Scholar One excellent discussion of Hutchinson is Gura, Philip F., A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), chap. 9.Google Scholar

50. Barnard, Journal, 13.

51. For an application of that axiom to the nineteenth Century, see Johnson, Paul E., A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), chap. 6.Google Scholar

52. Barnard, Journal, 14, 15. See also 158-59 for a similar incident.

53. For an excellent discussion of this tendency among Puritans, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, chap. 2, esp. 77-80. Perhaps the best example of the implications of this providential worldview appears in Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (Boston, 1684).

54. Barnard, Journal, 154.

55. Ibid., 115.

56. Ibid., 67, 68, 73, 65.

57. Vinovskis, Maris A., “Angels' Heads and Weeping Willows: Death in Early America,” in Religion, Family, and the Life Course, ed. Moran, and Vinovskis, , 209-31.Google Scholar

58. Barnard, Journal, 33.

59. Ibid., 8, 94.

60. Ibid., 167, 67.

61. See Hambrick-Stowe, , Practice of Piety, 157-61Google Scholar, for the importance of devotional reading and study for Puritans.

62. The historian who pays most careful attention to the gap between the printed word and lay interpretations thereof is Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xxii-xxiv, 27, 33-61. For a more theoretical account of the interaction between readers and texts, see Suleiman, Susan R. and Crosman, Inge, eds., The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), esp. 106-19.Google Scholar

63. Barnard, Journal, 124, 89, 124.

64. Hall, , Worlds of Wonder, 32 Google Scholar. For the importance of reading to one pious laywoman, see Lacey, Barbara E., “The World of Hannah Heaton: The Autobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Connecticut Farm Woman,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 45, no. 2 (April 1988): 288-90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65. Mather, , Bonifacius, 77.Google Scholar

66. See Street, Brian V., Literacy in Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 4.Google Scholar

67. Mather, Cotton, A Midnight Cry: An Essay for Our Awakening Out of that Sinful Sleep (Boston, 1692), 65; Barnard, Journal, 74.Google Scholar

68. Mather, , Midnight Cry, 28, 57. Google Scholar

69. Lovelace, , American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 65 Google Scholar; see also 66-72, 245-47; and Middlekauff, , The Mathers, 320-49.Google Scholar

70. Mather, , Midnight Cry, 21.Google Scholar

71. Silverman, Kenneth, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 303.Google Scholar

72. Quoted in ibid., 303.

73. Mather, Cotton, Shaking Dispensations: An Essay Upon theMighty Shakes, which the Hand ofHeaven Hath Given (Boston, 1715), 42–48.Google Scholar Other millennial sermons by Cotton Mather include Things to be Look'd For (Cambridge, Mass., 1691); and Things for a Distressed People to Think Upon (Boston, 1696).

74. Hall, Michael G., The Last American Puritan: Increase Mather, 1639-1723 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 325 Google Scholar; see also 76-78, 274-75; and Middlekauff, The Mathers, 179-87.

75. Mather, Increase, A Dissertation Concerning the Future Conversion of the Jewish Nation (London, 1709), 1, 24-27.Google Scholar Increase Mather's earlier chiliastic sermons include The Day of Trouble is Near (Cambridge, Mass., 1674); and The Mystery of Israels Salvation Explained and Applied ([London], 1669).

76. Mather, Increase, A Discourse Concerning Faith and Fervency in Prayer, and the Glorious Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ (Boston, 1710), 83.Google Scholar

77. Barnard, Journal, 59.

78. This tendency also set Barnard apart from Samuel Sewell, who was very concerned with the millennium. See Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 222-23.

79. Godbeer, , Devil's Dominion, 99.Google Scholar Much the same point is made by Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 134. For more on Cotton Mather's demonology, see Middlekauff, The Mathers, 159-60; Silverman, Life and Times ofCotton Mather, 88, 135; and Lovelace, American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 130, 192-97. A good example of Mather invoking the seemingly independent power of Satan may be found in Cotton Mather, Silentarius: A Brief Essay on the Holy Silence and Godly Patience (Boston, 1721), 7-8, 11, 26.

80. Mather, , Midnight Cry, 10.Google Scholar See also Mather's story about devils, “of whom doubtless there are many present,” who visit a congregation. Ibid., 43.

81. Barnard, Journal, 64; see also, 18, 47, 158.

82. The quote refers to Cotton Mather; see Lovelace, , American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 80.Google Scholar For Increase Mather's understanding of conversion, see his Autobiography, 279-80.

83. Miller, , New England Mind, 282 Google Scholar; Stoddard as quoted in ibid; Stoddard as quoted in Thomas A. Shafer, “Solomon Stoddard and the Theology of the Revival,” in A Miscellany of American Christianity: Essays in Honor of H. Shelton Smith, ed. Stuart C. Henry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1963), 357.

84. Stoddard, Solomon, Three Sermons Lately Preach'd at Boston (Boston, 1717), 85, 86.Google Scholar

85. Barnard, Journal, 131. The first definition of “collecf” in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (1989), is “to gather into one place or group,” clearly an active definition. This sense of the word goes back at least to 1573.

86. Stoddard, , Three Sermons, 87 Google Scholar; Barnard, Journal, 131.

87. Barnard, Journal, 131; Stoddard, , Three Sermons, 89 Google Scholar, emphasis added; Barnard, Journal, 131.

88. Sommerville, C. John, Popular Religion in Restoration England (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1977), 94–96.Google Scholar

89. For two essays showing the importance of English books and London book merchants in American markets, see Botein, Stephen, “The Anglo-American Book Trade before 1776: Personnel and Strategies,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. Joyce, William L. and others (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 48–82 Google Scholar; and Elizabeth Carroll Reilly, “The Wages of Piety: The Boston Book Trade of Jeremy Condy,” in ibid., 83-131. For more general works on the relationship between English and European religion and American religion, see Foster, Stephen, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Hall, David D., The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972).Google Scholar

90. Barnard, Journal, 68.

91. Beveridge, William, Private Thoughts Upon Religion, Digested into Twelve Articles, with Practical Resolutions form'd Thereupon, 2d ed. (London, 1709), 60.Google Scholar Note that this may not have been the exact edition that Barnard read, there having been eight editions of this work printed by 1715.

92. Ibid., 65; Barnard, Journal, 68.

93. Beveridge, , Private Thoughts, 52, 53 Google Scholar; Barnard, Journal, 68.

94. Barnard, Journal, 145-46. Barnard Condensed this passage from Flavel, John, Pneumatologia: A Treatise of the Soul of Man (London, 1685), 248-50.Google Scholar

95. Moran and Vinovskis, “The Puritan Family and Religion: A Critical Reappraisal,” 38. See also Stannard, David E., The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19–22, 84.Google Scholar

96. Barnard, Journal, 174. This passage was copied from Flavel, , Pneumatologia, 464-65.Google Scholar

97. Barnard, Journal, 177, emphasis added; Hall, David D., “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600-1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. Joyce, and others, 23–24 Google Scholar; Steele, Richard, A Plain Discourse Upon Uprightness, Shewing the Properties and Privileges of an Upright Man, 2d ed. (London, 1672), ix Google Scholar; Barnard, Journal, 177; Steele, , Plain Discourse, 22.Google Scholar

98. As in Mather, Bonifacius, 19-20, 27.

99. Steele, , Plain Discourse, 58 Google Scholar; Barnard, Journal, 127, 116.