Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England byDavid D. HallReview by: Charles L. CohenThe American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 1283-1284Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2163674 .

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United States 1283

extends only to about 1650, except for a look ahead at the Puritan legacy.

Delbanco's argument is centered on conflicting no- tions of the nature of sin: sin as stain and as corruption, sin as deprivation, as alienation from God, and, by extension of religious meditation, sin as a mental exercise focusing on religious truth and as an intro- spective exploration of the nature of the self. John Cotton's emphasis on the mysteries of grace is con- trasted with Thomas Shepard's emphasis on "an acutely heightened sensitivity to the invasive and cha- meleon nature of sin" (p. 163). For Delbanco, the fact thatJohn Cotton's side lost was the source of enormous impoverishment, ideological and psychological.

To this argument about the early years of New England is grafted a secondary and much more spec- ulative argument about Americans as immigrants. Del- banco identifies Americans as immigrants with the "extraordinary tenacity .. . with which Americans have clung to the belief that their lives can be radically renewed" (p. 251). Joan Didion, Saul Bellow, and Ger- trude Stein are invoked, and the presentation becomes not so much argued as suggested. Because Delbanco is not satisfied to provide, as he ably does, "a contribution to the history of what the Puritans called affections" (p. 1), the importance of the book is decreased rather than increased. He hoped this decidedly secondary thesis would make his study a contribution to an understanding of "the ideological origins of contempo- rary culture" (pp. 3-4); he might have chosen to call it "The Puritan Origins of the American Self," if that title had been available to him. Perhaps because of the intertwining of the theses, the relationship of some of the extensive evidence to the arguments was clear, to me, only in retrospect.

The sympathetic portrayal of John Cotton in this book increases the Boston minister's significance sub- stantially and is thus in keeping with much recent scholarship. Delbanco does not, however, take advan- tage of the notion of Jesper Rosenmeier in his "New England's Perfection" (William and Mary Quarterly, 1970)-a work that Delbanco cites-that Cotton taught distinctive concepts on the role of the Holy Spirit in conversion and the consequent nature of the regener- ation. Perhaps Rosenmeier's thesis did not fit into Delbanco's schema.

EVERETT EMERSON

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

DAVID D. HALL. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1989. Pp. 316. $29.95.

During the past decade or so, students of American Puritanism have turned increasingly from examining high doctrine to exploring the Saints' spirituality. Now David D. Hall extends that concern with personal experience in a major study of New England's popular

religion that reconstructs the ways of all New Eng- landers, not just the devout, tracking their beliefs and practices to the influence of Reformed Protestant te- nets, folk wisdom, and the transatlantic book trade. In Europe popular religion flourished outside the church, a counterculture traducing elite standards, but Hall disputes the relevance of applying that model to New England, where the people's faith derived substantially from the clergy's creed and existed comfortably beside it. Ministers directed their congregants without domi- nating them; villagers listened closely to their preach- ers but mediated clerical concerns through studying the Bible, reading sacred and profane literature, gaug- ing prodigies, heeding conscience, and, in extremis, joining a dissident sect. Hall also challenges the notion that God engaged but a restricted few. Although only a minority of settlers became zealous Saints, many others accepted the ideal even if they failed to meet it, and unknown numbers of "horse-shed Christians" wor- shiped contentedly as spiritual also-rans. One of Hall's many achievements is his careful description of New England as a religious culture organized around the elders' Protestantism yet exhibiting various devotional styles, substantial lay autonomy and degrees of dissent.

New Englanders fashioned their piety by sifting through Scripture, gaping at extraordinary events that disclosed God's will, pondering their worthiness to take the sacraments, and smoothing over anxieties about salvation through ritual, all the while, Hall maintains, tacitly negotiating the extent of ministerial control. The Bible's paramount authority elevated the importance of reading, which took on devotional significance: learning words revealed the Word. Families taught their children to read, which resulted, Hall argues, in the majority being literate. Such widespread literacy reinforced clerical pronouncements but also nurtured dissent by both encouraging individuals to peruse the Good Book on their own and exposing them to secular works hawked by merchants with pecuniary motives. Churchgoers leavened theology with the lore of won- ders gleaned at pulpits, bookstores, and country fences. Eager to gloss portents orthodoxally but unable to win an interpretive monopoly, ministers criticized the pub- lic's fascination with portents, claiming it encouraged fanciful speculation, yet advertised them anyway as tokens of divine judgment. Lay people voiced their spiritual experiences in the preachers' idiom, but, if overly legalistic sermons engendered confusion or doubt about assurance, discontented individuals might shun the Lord's Supper, join the Quakers, or toy with witchcraft. By dramatizing themes of sin and repen- tance, however, fast days, confessions, and executions helped mitigate doubt ritually. Most colonists did feel a special fellowship within the meetinghouse and strove to secure its benefits for their progeny; parents avid to have their offspring baptized were instrumental in instituting the Halfway Covenant. After setting down the elements of popular religion, Hall uses Samuel Sewall's diary to illustrate that faith in operation. Lit- erate, credulous, and obsessed with preserving himself

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1284 Reviews of Books

and his family from harm, Sewall embroidered dogma to suit his spiritual ends. In sum, New England's lay faith merged Reformed precepts with popular con- cerns to uphold a moral community and protect loved ones by invoking divine power through both official and extraecclesiastical means. Ascendant throughout most of the 1600s, the system began unraveling at the end of the century but recrudesced during the Great Awakening and resonated into the nineteenth century.

Hall's arguments occasionally need elaboration. He details the dynamics of the booksellers' world and of family devotionalism incompletely, and he neither fully explains why New England's popular religious culture declined around 1690 nor suggests what supplanted it. His evidence for a widespread ability to read is sugges- tive, not definitive. Nevertheless, he provides the most authoritative treatment yet of both the pervasiveness and the quality of New England's religiosity. Puritan- ism permeated village life despite never capturing everyone's allegiance, and it sustained spirits against life's crosses even while plaguing some with despair. Historians have overdrawn the strictness of Reformed piety, Hall shows; overwhelmingly, believers died con- fident in their salvation. Puritanism's appeal, one may suggest, grew from a practical flexibility, underappre- ciated until now, that allowed adherents choices of how to empower themselves in and by the faith. Rendering this sensibility sensibly, Hall has accomplished a won- der.

CHARLES L. COHEN

University of Wisconsin, Madison

CLYDE A. HOLBROOK. Jonathan Edwards, the Valley and Nature: An Interpretive Essay. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press or Associated University Presses, Cranbury, NJ. 1987. Pp. 151. $29.50.

The success of Perry Miller lay in his creation of topics and a methodology for other historians, litterateurs, and theologians, and, although Clyde A. Holbrook usually deems Miller "surely mistaken" or "carried away in his claim," (p. 75), Holbrook's book is yet another ripple in the sea of literature that Miller inspired. More theologian than historian or litterateur, Holbrook in his five chapters argues that "nature contributed far more to Uonathan] Edwards's philoso- phy, theology, and ethics than has usually been allowed by his interpreters" (p. 11). Born, reared, and em- ployed lifelong as a minister in the Connecticut Valley, Edwards was prima facie "much affected by nature," where he found "secret places in the woods by himself for religious exercises" and discovered that "God's excellence, wisdom, purity, and love appeared in ev- erything about him." Edwards's teleology, however, was not solely the result of his geographical, cultural, and intellectual isolation but rather part of a "similar tendency common in Britain in the same period," as evidenced by the writings of Francis Hutcheson, Henry

Needler, Bulstrode Whitelocke, and Vicenius Knox (pp. 22-24).

From this historical context in chapter 1, Holbrook adeptly employs Edwards's writings to analyze his views on natural philosophy, including such theories as the Great Chain of Being, philosophical idealism, and Neoplatonism, as well as the principles of polarity, deformity, consent, excellency, harmony, proportion- ality, and analogy. Edwards's search, however, for these "'naked ideas' had stripped nature of its remark- able diversity and effectively anatomized it.... [T]he nature of the Valley seems to have become only a distant memory for Edwards" (p. 54). The same is true of Holbrook's essay, for only theologians, philosophers, and the most rarified of intellectual historians will venture further than this first chapter into the analysis of Edwards's idealistic phenomenalism.

Simply put, the idealistic phenomenalism described in chapter 3 holds that "all existence is perception," and the "universe was 'a coexisting and successive' set of perceptions connected by the 'wonderful methods and laws of the deity"' (p. 57). Holbrook's explanation of how Edwards accepted or rejected the related ideas of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Hobbes is more complicated, as is his sorting of the "lively debate" among commentators from Perry Miller to Bruce Kuklick over who influenced whom (p. 56). Beyond these difficulties loom the nuances of causation, perception, existence, consciousness, exter- nality, atomic theory, universals, and, above all, the principle of "duplicity" to reconcile the doctrine of the Incarnation with Edwards's idealistic epistemology.

Litterateurs, especially those writing on typology, will enjoy chapter 4 on the "three forms of what is loosely called typology that appear to have been favored by Edwards" (p. 76). Again one of Perry Miller's views is amended (p. 81), and others, such as those of Bruce Kuklick and Norman Fiering, are confirmed (pp. 88, 96). Above all, the focus is on what Edwards's typology did to nature: "The Valley's beauties and order stand condemned, having done their work in inspiring im- ages and types that far excelled anything that they possessed in their own right" (p. 97).

In "Nature, Morality, and Holiness," Holbrook's final chapter, many of the concepts in previous chap- ters, ranging from the Great Chain of Being to the principle of consent "writ large over all of God's creation," are brought to bear on Edwards's ethical theory (p. 103). British thinkers like Berkeley once again appear to highlight similarities and differences with their Connecticut counterpart. In the end, for Edwards, "true virtue was not simply a higher kind of morality on a scale of ethical achievement, it was ... transformed consciousness" (p. 122).

In sum, Holbrook's book is not for everybody, but it will interest Edwardsean scholars, intellectual histori- ans, and theologians. It is well grounded in primary sources, attentive to the secondary literature, cogently argued, and gracefully written. Unfortunately, the footnotes rely on a dreadfully obscure abbreviation

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