Another "A Christmas Carroll"

REioyce, reioyce, this day is come

Saluation vnto Christendome:

All that will heare their blest Redeemers voyce,

Let them all with mirth reioyce, reioyce.

The Sauiour of the world is borne,

To ransome vs that were forlorne:

He left the Heauens, and came to vs on earth,

And from a blessed Virgins wombe had birth.

Here a mighty mystery well was wrought,

whose depth no man can gather;

A Mayden-mother pure, a Sonne forth brought,

and no man was the father:

God aboue, with peace and loue,

The sinfull world possessed

With heauenly treasure, past all measure,

Who is euer blessed.

He this day to Grace a feast,

sent his Sonne to be a Guest:

Let vs then, like thankfull men

giue entertainment to him:

And let vs still with heart and will,

our best of seruice doe him:

Himselfe for vs he hath giuen,

to draw vs from earth to heauen.

Therefore for all his paine,

let's giue him our selues againe.

TO wipe away our sinnes great summes,

Gods Sonne and heire in person comes;

He left his glorious and Immortall throne,

and vnderneath his Fathers curse did groane:

Downe from the heauens to the earth he came,

to honour vs he tooke our shame;

He suffer'd death that we might liue thereby,

and through his merits reigne eternally.

Seeing he hath with his precious blood

wash'd cleare our foule offences,

How can we render any thing

that may be recompences,

Since we may not any way

giue any thing worth taking;

Or all that can be done by man,

no satisfaction making:

Let vs doe as Dauid sayes,

giue him honour, laud and praise.

Let Christmas day put vs in minde,

that Christ was borne this day:

Let's entertaine him here, that we

may entertaine him aye.

That we all with one heart and desire,

amidst the Celestiall Quire

All honour and praise may sing,

to Christ our heauenly King.

John Taylor the Water Poet, wrote this along with The Complaint of Christmas, a pamphlet about the Puritan ban on Christmas (Father Christmas visits England and decides to try again another year). More about him from Bartleby.com:

John Taylor, the Thames waterman, also resorted to publication by subscription, and, in his case, his whimsical personality, added to the amusement afforded by the rough wit and boisterous humour of his effusions, secured a large number of patrons. Before starting on one of his eccentric journeys, he would circulate a quantity of prospectuses or “Taylor’s bills,” as he called them, with the object of securing subscribers for the account of his travels to be afterwards published. In this way, he obtained more than sixteen hundred subscribers to The Pennyles Pilgrimage (1618), a record of his journey on foot into Scotland. On the strength of this list, he had 4500 copies printed, but nearly half the subscribers refused to pay, and he castigated the defaulters in an amusing brochure entitled A Kicksey Winsey, or, A Lerry Come-Twang, which he issued in the following year. He also worked off copies of his publications by “presenting” them to various people, not forgetting to call on the morrow for “sweet remuneration.” But, notwithstanding king James’s dictum, as reported by Ben Jonson, that he did not “see ever any verses in England equal to the Sculler’s,” Taylor cannot be accounted as anything more than a voluminous scribbler, possessed of irrepressible assurance and facile wit of a coarse vein. He had, however, the saving grace of acute observation of men and manners, and this has given his productions a certain value for the student of social history. The term “literary bargee” befits him much better than his own self-styled title “the water-poet”; and his unrelenting satirical persecution of Thomas Coryate shows him in an unamiable light. In 1630, he gathered into one folio volume, which he called All the Workes of John Taylor the Water-poet, sixty-three of his pieces in prose and verse; but, before his death, in 1653, the number of his publications had exceeded one hundred and fifty.

Banned in Boston: Christmas

Movies and books have been "Banned in Boston"--but Christmas? Matt Swaim and I will discuss the official ban of Christmas in Boston and Massachusetts for more than 20 years on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning after the 7:45 a.m. Eastern break (6:45 a.m. Central time). This site describes the background:

Outlawing the celebration of Christmas sounds a little extreme, but it happened. The ban existed as law for only 22 years, but disapproval of the Christmas celebration took many more years to change. In fact, it wasn't until the mid-1800s that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region.

The Puritans who immigrated to Massachusetts to build a new life had several reason for disliking Christmas. First of all, it reminded them of the Church of England and the old-world customs, which they were trying to escape. Second, they didn't consider the holiday a truly religious day. December 25th wasn't selected as the birth date of Christ until several centuries after his death. Third, the holiday celebration usually included drinking, feasting, and playing games - all things the Puritans frowned upon. One such tradition, "wassailing", occasionally turned violent. The custom entailed people of a lower economic class visiting wealthier community members and begging, or demanding, food and drink in return for toasts to their hosts' health. If a host refused, there was the threat of retribution. Although rare, there were cases of wassailing in early New England. Fourth, the British had been applying pressure on the Puritans to conform to English customs. The ban was probably as much a political choice as it was a religious one for many.

It wasn't just Massachusetts: anywhere in New England where the Puritans influenced the culture, Christmas was not celebrated. The Puritans were bringing their non-celebration customs from England. Christmas was just too Catholic for them. Misspell and mispronounce the word and you have the key: Christ Mass. The celebration of the Incarnation and Eucharist are too close for Puritan comfort.

The Puritans thought Christmas was unscriptural and that the Papists had just taken over a pagan holiday (there are some Christian denominations that are opposed to the celebration of Easter too for the same reasons). The fact that in England, Catholic recusants still celebrated the Christmas season with prayers, Mass, and parties, irritated the Puritans too:

In addition to this association with immorality and the concept of misrule, another of the central objections to the feast for the stricter English Protestants between 1560 and 1640 was its popularity among the papist recusant community. Within the late medieval Catholic church, Christmas had taken a subordinate position in the liturgical calendar to Easter. Its importance, however, had been growing and was further enhanced by the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century, for whereas, as John Bossy has recently pointed out, the more extreme Protestants had little time fox Christ's 'holy family', reformed Catholicism laid great stress on this area. The Tridentine emphasis on devotions to the Virgin Mary in particular elevated the status of the feast during which she was portrayed as a paragon of motherhood.

Certainly, English recusants seem to have retained a deep attachment to Christmas during Elizabeth I's reign and the early part of the seventeenth century. The staunchly Catholic gentlewoman, Dorothy Lawson, celebrated Christmas 'in both kinds... corporally and spiritually', indulging in Christmas pies, dancing and gambling. In 1594 imprisoned Catholic priests at Wisbech kept a traditional Christmas which included a hobby horse and morris dancing, and throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Benedictine school at Douai retained the traditional festivities, complete with an elected 'Christmas King'. The Elizabethan Jesuit, John Gerard, relates in his autobiography how their vigorous celebration of Christmas and other feasts made Catholics particularly conspicuous at those times and, writing on the eve of the Civil War Richard Carpenter, a convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, observed that the recusant gentry were noted for their 'great Christmasses'. As a result, by the 1640s many English Protestants viewed Christmas festivities as the trappings of popery, anti-Christian 'rags of the Beast'.

Christmas had been a great feast in Merry Old England with specific festivities after the Advent period of fasting and repentance. As Ronald Hutton showed in his book, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700, the ritual year began--just as the Church year does today--with Advent and the Christmas season. During the coldest and darkest days of the year, the Christian people of England prepared and then celebrated the coming of the Light of the World, both "corporally and spiritually". 

In both England and New England, it was not until the nineteenth century that celebrating Christmas became both accepted and common. The Victorians, especially Charles Dickens, revived the festivity of Christmas, but unfortunately focused it all on one day, December 25, forgetting about the season. In the U.S.A., the Civil War led to the revival of Christmas, with thoughts of home and family--and Ulysses S. Grant proclaimed Christmas Day a federal holiday in 1870.

Puritans Ban Christmas; Royalists Rebel Against Rebels

In this Christmas 2011 issue of the BBC History Magazine, Mark Stoyle, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, describes how and why the Puritans banned Christmas once they had control of Parliament and how Royalists and others fought the ban:

As the year 1645 limped towards its weary close, a war-torn England shivered beneath a thick blanket of snow. A few months earlier, parliament’s New Model Army, led by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, had routed the forces of Charles I at the battle of Naseby. Although that defeat had struck the king’s cause a mortal blow, the royalists still refused to surrender, and the bloody Civil War which had divided the country ever since 1642 continued to rage.

Under constant pressure from the armies of both sides to supply them with money, clothing and food, few Englishmen and women can have been anticipating a particularly merry Christmas. Yet, for those who lived in the extensive territories which were controlled by the king’s enemies, there was to be no Christmas this year at all – because the traditional festivities had been abolished by order of the two Houses of Parliament sitting at Westminster.

From Charles’s beleaguered wartime capital in Oxford, the royalist satirist John Taylor – by now in his mid-60s, but nevertheless one of the king’s most indefatigable literary champions – issued a cry of anguish at this assault on England’s time-honoured customs. All of the “harmless sports” with which people had long celebrated Christ’s nativity “are now extinct and put out of use… as if they had never been,” Taylor lamented in his pamphlet The Complaint of Christmas, and “thus are the merry lords of misrule suppressed by the mad lords of bad rule at Westminster”.

So why had the parliamentarians decided to wage war on Christmas – and how did those, like Taylor, who were determined to defend the traditional celebrations, fight back?

The attack on the feast of Christmas had deep roots. Long before the Civil War began, many zealous Protestants, or ‘Puritans’, had been troubled both by the boisterous nature of the festivities which took place at Christmas and by the perceived association of those festivities with the old Catholic faith. During the early 1600s, most English Puritans had been prepared to tolerate Christmas. Following the rebellion of the Presbyterian Scots against Charles I in 1637, however, all this was to change.

Read the rest here. There were even riots in protest against the Puritan ban:

Worse was to follow in 1647 – despite the fact that, on 10 June that year, parliament has passed an ordinance which declared the celebration of Christmas to be a punishable offence. On 25 December 1647, there was further trouble at Bury, while pro-Christmas riots also took place at Norwich and Ipswich. During the course of the Ipswich riot, a protestor named ‘Christmas’ was reported to have been slain – a fatality which could be regarded as richly symbolic, of course, of the way that parliament had ‘killed’ Christmas itself.

In London, a crowd of apprentices assembled at Cornhill on Christmas Day, and there “in despite of authority, they set up Holly and Ivy” on the pinnacles of the public water conduit. When the lord mayor despatched some officers “to pull down these gawds,” the apprentices resisted them, forcing the mayor to rush to the scene with a party of soldiers and to break up the demonstration by force.

The worst disturbances of all took place at Canterbury, where a crowd of protestors first smashed up the shops which had been opened on Christmas Day and then went on to seize control of the entire city. This riot helped to pave the way for a major insurrection in Kent in 1648 that itself formed part of the ‘Second Civil War’ – a scattered series of risings against the parliament and in favour of the king, which Fairfax and Cromwell only managed to suppress with great difficulty.

English Recusants and Christmas

This article, "Lords of Misrule: The Puritan War on Christmas 1642-60" from History Today contrasts Puritan and Recusant views of Christmas in 17th century England:

During the seventeenth century, as now, Christmas was one of the most important dates in the calendar, both as a religious festival and as an important holiday period during which English men and women indulged in a range of traditional pastimes. During the twelve days of a seventeenth-century Christmas, churches and other buildings were decorated with rosemary and bays, holly and ivy; Christmas Day church services were widely attended, gifts were exchanged at New Year, and Christmas boxes were distributed to servants, tradesmen and the poor; great quantities of brawn, roast beef, 'plum-pottage', minced pies and special Christmas ale were consumed, and the populace indulged themselves in dancing, singing, card games and stage-plays.

Such long-cherished activities necessarily often led to drunkenness, promiscuity and other forms of excess. In fact the concept of 'misrule', or a ritualised reversal of traditional social norms, was an important element of Christmas, and has been viewed by historians as a useful safety-valve for the tensions within English society. It was precisely this face of Christmas, however, that the Puritans of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England found so objectionable. . . .

In addition to this association with immorality and the concept of misrule, another of the central objections to the feast for the stricter English Protestants between 1560 and 1640 was its popularity among the papist recusant community. Within the late medieval Catholic church, Christmas had taken a subordinate position in the liturgical calendar to Easter. Its importance, however, had been growing and was further enhanced by the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century, for whereas, as John Bossy has recently pointed out, the more extreme Protestants had little time fox Christ's 'holy family', reformed Catholicism laid great stress on this area. The Tridentine emphasis on devotions to the Virgin Mary in particular elevated the status of the feast during which she was portrayed as a paragon of motherhood.

Certainly, English recusants seem to have retained a deep attachment to Christmas during Elizabeth I's reign and the early part of the seventeenth century. The staunchly Catholic gentlewoman, Dorothy Lawson, celebrated Christmas 'in both kinds... corporally and spiritually', indulging in Christmas pies, dancing and gambling. In 1594 imprisoned Catholic priests at Wisbech kept a traditional Christmas which included a hobby horse and morris dancing, and throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Benedictine school at Douai retained the traditional festivities, complete with an elected 'Christmas King'. The Elizabethan Jesuit, John Gerard, relates in his autobiography how their vigorous celebration of Christmas and other feasts made Catholics particularly conspicuous at those times and, writing on the eve of the Civil War Richard Carpenter, a convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, observed that the recusant gentry were noted for their 'great Christmasses'. As a result, by the 1640s many English Protestants viewed Christmas festivities as the trappings of popery, anti-Christian 'rags of the Beast'.

The celebration of Christmas thus became just one facet of a deep religious cleavage within early seventeenth-century England which, by the middle of the century, was to lead to the breakdown of government, civil war and revolution. When the Puritans took control of government in the mid-1640s they made a concerted effort to abolish the Christian festival of Christmas and to outlaw the customs associated with it but the attempt foundered on the deep-rooted popular attachment to these mid-winter rites.

Read the rest here.

William Palmer wrote The Life of Mrs. Dorothy Lawson, which Father Philip Caraman excerpted in his collection of primary sources The Years of Siege: Catholic Life from James I to Cromwell, describing her rigorous devotional life in contrast to her celebration of Christmas:

In this time of mirth and joy for his birth who is the sole engine and spring of true comfort, she unbent the stiffness of her brow a little, and dispensed with her accustomed rigour in so small a relaxation that I want a diminutive to explain it, unless I deem it that in quantity which philosophers call atoms or indivisibles in quality. . .

She had in a room near the chapel a crib with music to honour that joyful mystery, and, all Christmas, musicians in her hall and dining chamber to recreate her friends and servants. She loved to see them dance, and said that if she were present, greater care would be taken of modesty in their songs and dances.

More on the Puritans against Christmas from an earlier edition of History Today. Perhaps Mrs. Lawson's musicians performed William Byrd's Carroll for Christmas Day, "This Day Christ Was Born" or played this galliard for dancing?

All You Need to Know: Figgy Pudding

As I've posted before:

The Puritans banned Christmas during the Interregnum (the period between the fall and execution of Charles I until the restoration of Charles II)--and didn't understand why people keep breaking the rules, steaming their puddings and roasting their geese!

This is surely one instance that supports H.L. Mencken's definition: Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Conflict over Christmas marked the relations between Parliament and the Court of Charles I before the English Civil War and the capture and execution of Charles I. The Puritans knew what the word ChristMAS means--and that the celebration of the Catholic Mass was at the center of the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. They also thought all the other festivities and feasting centered around Christmas were "Popish" and "Papastical," very bad things to be! Once they had the power, if Parliament proclaimed the fourth Saturday of December was to be a day of fasting and the fourth Saturday of December happened to be December 25, Christmas Day, the day of fasting trumped the day of feasting and celebration. Even if Christmas Day fell on a Sunday, there was to be no special commemoration. The Book of Common Prayer was banned and the Church of England, like the Catholic Church, gone underground. Celebrating Christmas was an act of rebellion against the rebels who had become the rulers of England!

This year, the English Historical Fiction blog tells you all about figgy pudding, starting off with Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and the Cratchit's pudding:

"Hallo!A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper [boiler]. A smell like washing –day! That was the cloth [the pudding bag]. A smell like an eating house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered—flushed, but smiling proudly—with the pudding. like a speckled cannon ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top." "Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage..."

Not for the Faint of Heart: Blessed Hugh Green

Hugh Green was born in 1584 of Protestant parents; he took his degree at Cambridge in 1605, but then converted to Catholicism and went to Douai to study for the priesthood in 1610. He tried his vocation as a Capuchin, but left that order and was ordained in 1612.

In England he served the Catholics of Dorchester and was given refuge by Lady Blanche Arundell of Lanherne. The Mad Monarchist offers this profile of Lady Blanche, who certainly did not blanch at danger!:

Lady Blanche Arundell was a monarchist I wish I knew more about, but from what I do know she was my kind of girl. The Lady Blanche was born in 1583, the sixth daughter of Lord Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester and Lady Elizabeth Hastings a well respected, Catholic and staunchly royalist family. On May 11, 1607 she married Lord Thomas Baron Arundell of Wardour who, went King Charles I of Britain raised the royal standard at Nottingham was quick to cast his lot with his monarch. While her husband was away at the front Lady Blanche Arundell showed her own heroism when Wardour Castle, Wiltshire, came under attack by the forces of Parliament. With only herself, her children, a handful of maid-servants and 25 men she resolved to defend the castle, her home and family against 1,300 Roundhead troops, including artillery, led by Colonel Edward Ludlow and Sir Edward Hungerford. For eight grueling days Lady Blanche defended the castle against the hopeless odds until she was finally forced to capitulate. However, thanks to her staunch defense she was able to negotiate honorable terms for her surrender which were signed on May 8, 1643. Lady Blanche was able to leave the castle with her head held high but she had no money and no place to go. Fortunately Lord Hertford provided her with accommodations at Salisbury. Her husband later returned at the head of royalist column and took back the castle his wife had so heroically defended but sadly he was later wounded in battle and died at Oxford the same year. When Lady Blanche Arundell died at Winchester on October 28, 1649 she was buried alongside her husband at Tisbury. Her brave defense of her hearth and home, her children and family honor, all in the cause of her King warrants Lady Blanche being listed among the pantheon of great English royalists of the Civil War.

Just before the beginning of the Civil War, Charles I passed another law making the presence of Catholic priests in England a crime punishable by death (forced by Parliament). Although Hugh Green intended to leave England under this ban, he was too late.

He was captured near Lyme Regis, imprisoned and then executed on August 19, 1642. In prison his constancy so affected his fellow-captives that two or three women sentenced to die with him sent him word that they would ask his absolution before death. They did so after confessing their sins to the people, and were absolved by the martyr. A providential reward for his zeal immediately followed. A Jesuit Father, despite the danger, rode up in disguise on horseback, and at a given sign absolved the martyr, who made a noble confession of faith before death.

The story of his execution is more appalling than usual: there was no experienced executioner available, so a barber-cum-executioner spent almost half an hour trying to locate his heart after he had been hung. Finally a soldier mercifully ended this torture. When his head was cut off, the Puritans used it as a football! As Archbishop Challoner notes, this was not an event repeated in the annals of the English martyrs. Blessed Hugh Green is honored at the Church of Our Lady, Queen of Martyrs and St. Ignatius, Chideock, as one of the Dorset martyrs. Here is a link to some pictures of the church.

Please note that this is Jane Austen country, and any reader of Persuasion would remember Anne Elliott's fateful visit to Lyme Regis!

In a very strange coincidence, there was an American style football player named Hugh Green, who was born in 1959. He played for both the Miami Dolphins and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Leap Day, 1604: John Whitgift, RIP

John Whitgift, Elizabeth I's third Archbishop of Canterbury, died on February 29, 1604 (although the stained glass window at right says 1603--unless it is referring to the year of Elizabeth I's death); thus his death anniversary technically roles around every four years.

According to this website, Whitgift was Elizabeth's agent against the Puritans, succeeding Edmund Grindal, whom she had placed under house arrest and deprived of his jurisdiction as Archbishop of Canterbury (fine exercise of Supremacy, there):

John Whitgift was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1583 by Elizabeth I. She knew that Whitgift was anti-Puritans and that he would spearhead a royal desire for religious conformity in England and Wales. In this task, John Whitgift was not to disappoint.

Whitgift was born around 1530. He was the son of a wealthy merchant. His father could afford to educate Whitgift and he attended St. Anthony’s School in London. After this, he went to study at Cambridge University. In 1555, Whitgift was elected Fellow of Peterhouse. During the attacks on Protestants during the reign of Mary, he stayed in England.

Over the next few years, Whitgift acquired a number of posts – Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity (1563), Master of Pembroke (1567) and Master of Trinity (1563). Professionally in the academic world, he got just about as far as he could when he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University.

Whitgift became Elizabeth’s chaplain in 1563. Such a position was very prestigious but it also meant that Whitgift had access to the Queen. Over the years it became clear to her that Whitgift shared her views on conformity, though for the Queen it was as much a political issue as religious. It is likely that Whitgift only took his stand from a religious viewpoint. When Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to condemn prophesying he was replaced by Whitgift (1583). He was the obvious man to support Elizabeth and to place him in the most important religious position in the country gave Elizabeth many advantages. In 1586, Whitgift was given a position on the Privy Council.

Whitgift pursued non-conformists with a vengeance. However, the actual policing of them in a city the size of London was very difficult. Despite his best efforts, groups such as the ‘Barrowists’ grew in Islington. Whitgift produced his ‘Three Articles’, which were designed to effectively trap those he labelled non-conformists. If someone swore to uphold the ‘Three Articles’ they had to leave any non-conformist group they were in. Those who refused to swear to uphold them were, in the case of practicing ministers, deprived of their ministry. Those who held no church positions simply identified themselves as non-conformists to Whitgift. The ‘Three Articles’ were considered by the likes of the highly influential Lord Burghley to be too draconian and he asked for them to be watered down. By degrees they were, but the impact of the ‘reformed’ articles was still as marked.

Whitgift insisted that all clergy uphold Royal Supremacy and the Book of Common Prayer. The Court of High Commission gave what he did the legal clout it needed. The head of the High Commission was Whitgift.

Non-conformist leaders could pay a very heavy price for their beliefs. Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, both leaders in the Congregationalists (though followers of Barrow tended to be known as ‘Barrowists’) were executed for sedition.

However, Whitgift did make one mistake. He concentrated all his resources on enforcing conformity and eradicating non-conformity. As a result, he failed to fully tackle issues within the Church itself and few doubted that problems still existed. As a result, when James I came to the throne in 1603, the remaining Puritans gained new hope and renewed energy. It was Whitgift who crowned James king.

I've been reading a book about Christianity in England by David L. Edwards (Christian England: From the Reformation to the 18th Century) in which the author comments that Elizabeth, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, chose her bishops to do her will but that she "did not really get on with clergymen. She could not flirt with them, she seldom trouble to charm them, and even the bishops who owed their positions to her favour were probably not much attached to her person while she plundered their estates and handed down brutal instructions." (pp. 159-160) Yet, Edwards also points out that she "died gripping Archbishop Whitgift's hand". (p. 83)

One of the Most Consistent Men in the World: Roger Williams

Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island and one of the most consistent men in the history of the world, at least whom I've ever read about, was born on December 21 in 1603. He was born and baptized in London, although the records were destroyed in the Great Fire of London. He studied at Cambridge and was ordained in the Church of England, but he was not only a Puritan, but a Separatist. Williams was convinced that the Church of England was a totally corrupt church and that a new church must be formed.

He came to the New World in 1631 with his wife Mary and had six children. Williams soon propounded his three main ideas: separatism, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion. To the colonial leaders, the second idea seemed very strange. Williams disagreed with the state enforcing any laws based upon the first of the commandments (against idolatry and blasphemy, for keeping the sabbath, etc) but demanded absolute freedom of religion. Please note, however, that he thought Catholics should wear some article of clothing to identify them.

At the same time, his separatist beliefs were stretched to their most consistent conclusion: Williams left the Church of England, the Congregational/Puritan community, the Baptists, and finally any visible, institutional church. He doubted the efficacy of his own baptism, since it was administered by a Church of England minister; he doubted the efficacy of anyone's baptism, since at some point the minister would have been part of the Church of England or some other corrupt, papist-tinged church. Williams looked for a new apostle to be sent by God to establish a new church, because all the others on earth were corrupt.

Read more about his career here, including his exile from the Massachusetts colony and his new settlement in Providence. He was baptized again in 1638 in the first Baptish church in Providence--but he stayed there only a few months because, again, he became convinced that it was not separate enough, and somehow tainted by the Great Apostacy of the ancient church. Williams' absolute consistency led him, as Perry Miller explained in his biography, to be a kind of non-Christian hoping for Christianity to be re-established on earth. Edward S. Morgan's book, Roger Williams: The Church and the State is also helpful for understanding this most consistent, uncompromising man.

As I read Morgan's book in particular, I thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson's saying: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." For how could Roger Williams reconcile his separatism and lack of faith in Christian baptism and the Church with Jesus Christ's statements in Holy Scripture promising His constant presence with His Church on earth and the power of the Holy Spirit to guide His followers? My little mind just can't figure that out.

"Give my figgy pudding!": The Puritans Against Christmas

Courtesy of Tea at Trianon: The Puritans ban Christmas during the Interregnum (the period between the fall and execution of Charles I until the restoration of Charles II)--and don't understand why people keep breaking the rules, steaming their puddings and roasting their geese!

This is surely one instance that supports H.L. Mencken's definition: Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Conflict over Christmas marked the relations between Parliament and the Court of Charles I before the English Civil War and the capture and execution of Charles I. The Puritans knew what the word ChristMAS means--and that the celebration of the Catholic Mass was at the center of the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. They also thought all the other festivities and feasting centered around Christmas were "Popish" and "Papastical," very bad things to be! Once they had the power, if Parliament proclaimed the fourth Saturday of December was to be a day of fasting and the fourth Saturday of December happened to be December 25, Christmas Day, the day of fasting trumped the day of feasting and celebration. Even if Christmas Day fell on a Sunday, there was to be no special commemoration. The Book of Common Prayer was banned and the Church of England, like the Catholic Church, gone underground. Celebrating Christmas was an act of rebellion against the rebels who had become the rulers of England!

As both Diane Purkiss and Alister McGrath have commented, Puritanical control of England during the Interregnum period doomed the future of radical Protestantism in England, while the Restoration of Charles II and the Stuart Monarchy restored the celebration of Christmas in England. The Restoration Parliament made sure that Puritan influence was stifled. And that's too bad in some ways, for certainly Charles II's Court needed some discipline and moral direction; but after the experiments of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, any such protests against misbehavior at Court was just a reminder of mean people who took away one's figgy pudding and roast goose! As Alister McGrath wrote in his history of Protestantism, the Puritans failed in England because they "lost any popular sympathy through their religious rigidity".

Brian Patrick and I will discuss this theme on the Son Rise Morning Show sometime this week--I'll update and let you know ASAP!

UPDATE: please note that the BBC's History Magazine features a cover story on "popular resistance to the Puritan assault on Christmas during the 1640s and 1650s" by Mark Stoyle, Professor at the University of Southampton! A facebook friend let me know.

UPDATE: I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning--December 21--Listen Live Here!

From Calvinist Puritans to Unitarian Universalists?

Shameless Popery asks: How Did the Puritans Become Unitarians?

One of the strangest religious transitions in American history is that the Puritan congregations in New England became Unitarian Universalists. It would be hard to find a religious group who cared more about getting doctrine exactly right than the Puritans, yet within the span of only a few generations, they'd devolved into something unrecognizable as either Puritan or even Christian.

Read the rest of the post to understand how anti-Catholicism, Calvinism, and sola-scriptura-ism leads to not believing in the Trinity or in Hell.

(Remember, even Scarlett O'Hara believed in Hell--she told Rhett Butler she was raised on it! [book or movie? I can't remember].) A Unitarian Universalist church in Wichita exhorts passers-by -- via a sign on their property -- to look inside themselves if they want to find God.

(Image: Cotton Mather.)