When Danforth laments the people’s fall from spiritual fervor, his main audience is not the visionary founders (Winthrop and the rest)—the ones who experienced the excitement of a new mission. Rather, he’s exhorting their children. How do you get a new generation to catch the vision, when all they have known is frontier hardship? Danforth reaches far into the past and borrows a rhetorical trick used by an ancient Hebrew leader.
Moses on Mt. Sinai/Horeb
After their exodus from Egypt under Moses, the Israelites had unfaithfully stopped short of entering the Promised Land. As a result, that generation was condemned to wander the wilderness another forty years. The people finally again reached the borders of the Promised Land, but the original generation had died off. When Moses addressed the Israelites in Deuteronomy, he was speaking to the second generation, who were being given a chance to fulfill the original mission. Listen to what he did:
And Moses called all Israel and said unto them, Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep, and do them. The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day. (Deut. 5.1-3 KJV; see also 4:10-13)Using language, Moses projected on the children the covenant of the parents. The proclamation of the original covenant at Sinai puts it into effect a second time, for this and all future generations. He’s saying, “Though you were not alive yet, you were there. YOU made this covenant with God.”
Danforth's "you" projects the same power. In the quote I posted earlier, the present audience is implicated in the original choice to go to America. Danforth seizes the past, transports it, and lays it on top of the present, in order to create in his listeners an urgent sense of vision and a multi-generational continuity.
The concept of a covenant that was willfully entered into echoes throughout the sermons you're writing about. It's apowerful idea -- that even those who weren't there at the inception still "chose" to enter into a covenant.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading your posts, and have been wondering about self-examination. What does self-examination look like for the "you" that Danforth addresses? We know that so many Puritan leaders kept journals and diaries. Do you get the sense that this kind of reflection is what he calls his congregation to follow? How does the congregation at large examine and re-confirm their commitment to their errand? --lc
Thank you for identifying connections among my posts--it helps me pinpoint threads of thought that I can continue to follow. One of those threads is self-examination. The sermons tell people to examine themselves, and Danforth explains how (by remembering, by comparing past & present). I don't yet see, though, how exactly the people examined themselves--whether in quiet prayer, through writing, conversation, etc. As I read (especially poetry & journals), I'll keep this question in mind.
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