Success: The Puritan Highroad to Hell

Abstract

A LL Calvinistic preaching is popularly conceived of as smelling rather badly of brimstone. But, as Dr. Perry Miller' has recently reminded students of American literature, it is a mistake to think that the early New England preacher devoted most of his energy to frightening his congregation into heaven by vivid descriptions of damnation. The few sparks of ministerial hell-fire that lit up a seventeenth-century Puritan congregation showed the faces of the elect as gloomy rather than terrorstricken. Not that the concept of hell was not real and dreadful. Only such a rare and lofty thinker as the Rev. Charles Chauncy, scholar and president of Harvard College, saw that hell, in its essence, was not so much a place of torture as the withdrawal of God's love.2 For most of the ministers, however, hellwas a definite, loathsome place-a bottomless pit, a stinking lake, an unquenchable fire, where millions of damned creatures shrieked in their agony. Occasionally these preachers devoted a few paragraphs of their sermons to reminding their listeners of this unpleasant fate of the unelect. In some modern collections and histories of American literature these