"National and Provinciall Churches Are Nullityes": Henry Dunster's Puritan Argument against the Puritan Established Church

Abstract

Cotton Mather had a problem. With his Magnalia Christi Americana, he was writing in defense of the New England Way that his grandfather (Richard Mather) and father (Increase Mather) had crafted. In writing a section of biographies of early figures in the Bay Colony, Mather had come to describe Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College. The problem was that Dunster did not fit Mather's picture of a univocal testimony from the founding generation. Mather acknowledged that Dunster “was the president of our Harvard College in Cambridge, and an able man.” However, a shadow lurked over Dunster's legacy. Mather could barely bring himself to admit it, but Dunster had to leave Harvard for “wonderfully falling into the errors of Antipaedobaptism.” That is, Dunster had developed strong, theologically motivated opposition to infant baptism, one of the key practices for Puritan New England. Dunster's contrasting testimony on the issue of baptism—which was still debated in Mather's day—posed the problem. How could he be harmonized into the larger picture Mather was describing? Mather decided to side-step the issue by describing Dunster as “Psaltes” (“The Psalmodist”) and devoting the majority of his biographical sketch to praising Dunster's work on the revision of the Bay Psalm Book, which was still being used at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Through a stance of praising the positive in Dunster's contribution (his psalmody) and eliding the problematic (his opposition to infant baptism), Mather attempted, ironically, to bring even a strong critic into the harmony of early New England he was attempting to describe. Mather hoped to accommodate Dunster's story to the New England Way rather than reject it wholesale.1