God's Bridge Falling Down: "Another Approach" to New England Puritanism Assayed

Abstract

IN a recent article, Edmund S. Morgan has suggested approach to New England Puritanism, calling for a by town and by church study of the section, for an examination of every known individual in a town, to discover how much land he owned, where he lived, how much he paid in taxes, whether he belonged to the church, how many children he had.' There should be no argument with Morgan's method.2 Advocates of one school of thought or another regarding New England Puritanism and the section as a whole have long drawn generalities from generalities; Morgan would have generalities built upon specifics. But he goes beyond method. He tucks into his methodological argument figures reflecting the proportion of communicants to the whole congregation in the mid1770's and writes that these suggest a strange paradox: that the nonmembers may have had more religious scruples than the members. Persons accepting halfway membership in one New England church, as against full communion, he muses, evidently had scruples against accepting the privileges which the more easygoing full members held out to them.