Puritanism
By: Gabriel Rise
This article is about who were the Puritanism in the middle age America. Puritanism is historic creed of certain Englishmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of whom migrated to America, where they lived their creed, and sought to maintain it against the transforming influences of environment and internal change; the second, democracy, is the creed of certain icolonial Americans who waged a war of liberation, and created a new political constitution, at the close of the eighteenth century. Both are systems of ideas; and both are historical, that is, referred to a certain place and a certain period in past time.
The nature of their historical anchorage is, however, different. Puritanism is a sect, identified by the group of its adherents. Democracy, in the specific American sense here intended, is the self‐ justification of a nation, finding authentic expression in public documents, and identified with the birth and development of a state. In identifying a historical creed such as puritanism it is not possible to subordnate either the doctrine or its adherents. Shall we say that ‘puritanism’ is what the puritans believed, or that the ‘puritans’ were those who believed in puritanism? If we are wise we shall refuse to accept either horn of this dilemma. A school (sect, cult, or party ) exists when a group of historical persons, independently identifiable in time and place, are associated through adherence to a common belief independently identifiable in the realm of ideas. This equal independence of doctrine and adherents being understood, it does not greatly matter with which the exposition begins. The historical fact is the union of the two: the fact that certain historical persons held a common and characteristic body of doctrine.
Every historical creed will have stricter meanings, together with a limitless range of approximations. The adherents are identified by the name which they adopt, or by which they are ‘known’ to their con temporaries and immediate posterity. But the doctrine may be abstracted from this historical setting, discovered in other times and places, and then named by analogy, as when one discovers ‘Christians’ before Christ Extended meanings are further multiplied by the complexity of the creed itself. Puritanism is a system of beliefs; and the name may be confined to the integral system, or extended to any of its parts, great or small. All beliefs have degrees of particularity and generality, and these also afford options of definition. All beliefs have degrees of purity and impurity. They develop in a subjective setting and an objective environment, both of which enter into and adulterate them. Again, doctrines and systems of doctrines have degrees of centrality. It will not do, perhaps, to identify a sectarian doctrine with all of the beliefs of all of its adherents. Puritanism, one is tempted to say, does not include what the so-called puritans believed about the cure for gout. Yet this statement is no sooner made than doubted, when one reflects upon the therapeutic implications of sin and prayer.
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