The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 by Robert Middlekauff Page B

in the next decade, Mather reluctantly admitted that perhaps he had been mistaken about the visibility of grace. His admission came almost fifteen years after the Cambridge Synod had decided to ignore the entire issue. But in 1657 and 1662, when successive synods took up the question, the time for a reassessment and for candor had arrived. In Defense of the Answer of the Synod of 1662 , Mather declared that grace might not work itself into men's actions. 54 Still its "being and truth" might be present even though its "exercise" was not. 55 And hence it was simply impossible to decide one way or another about those adults who had been baptized as children, but who had then failed to convert as they reached maturity. Perhaps they had grace, perhaps they did not, but in either event the Church could not attain certainty. All it could know was that they remained in the covenant and in the Church unless they were cast out for some notorious sin. Once these adults declared their belief in Christ and owned their covenant, their children too should receive baptism. Presumably the children of these children too would qualify as they were born. 56
In the 1630's when the founders gave their ecclesiastical theory practical form, they had not realized the implications of having

 

Page 56
two methods of qualifying for Church membership. They had assumed that membership itself had its own integrityit was one no matter whether a person qualified through birth to regenerate parents or through a relation of his own conversion experience. This assumption was challenged, first quietly in one church and another as the baptized grew up unconverted but still presented their own infants for baptism. By the time of the Synod of 1662, its opponents were openly arguing that there were not just two methods for qualifying for Church membership, but that there were two kinds of membership. Those who experienced grace and told about it publicly were one kindpersonal, immediate members in John Davenport's phrase; and those who came in by virtue of their parents' sanctity were anothermediate members, Davenport called them. 57
Mediate members faced a great responsibilitythe obligation to experience the Holy Spirit working within themselves, and a dreadful penalty if they did notthe disannulment of their "mediate" covenant. In effect, as Davenport described their plight, they cut themselves off from the Church which did not have to take any formal action against them. And, of course, in cutting themselves off, they did the same for their children who must then go through life unbaptized and without hope, unless they felt and described God's grace working within themselves. 58
Davenport and his leading supporter, the young Increase Mather, son of Richard, possessed a hard streak of perfection-ism that experience had softened in most of the founders. Every Puritan divine of the first generation wished to close the gulf between the invisible and visible Church, but most had learned with Richard that tests of saving faith did not provide the means of closing the breach. Davenport's confidence in the churches' ability to identify the faithful never slackened. The Israelites had required that circumcised children covenant for themselves after they came of age, and so should we, he argued. Richard Mather, denying that such action constituted a new covenant, insisted that it involved only a renewal of the one covenant God had ever extended to men. Davenport hoped that the Church would attain the purity of the New Jerusalem before Christ's Second Coming. Richard shared those hopes but denied that they would be realized. The Church, he said, must be holy at the end of the world, but even then there will be hypocrites. The par-

 

Page 57
able of the foolish virgins suggested as muchthose without will, without faith, will be excluded from the glorious marriage chamber, that is, from Heaven, at the end. 59
Yet he remained certain that the Church would endure if it