1. In referring to Hooper as a “case of conscience,” I invoke the authority of Warren, Austin, The New England Conscience (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 132–42Google Scholar. For the more famous case of Goodman Brown, see the “casebook” of Connolly, Thomas E., Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown” (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1968).Google Scholar

2. The classic view of the unresolvable ambiguity of “The Minister's Black Veil” (hereafter MBV) is Fogle, Richard Harter, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1952), pp. 33–40.Google Scholar

3. The most meaningful comment on the sermon before Belcher is the brief reference by Altschuler, Glenn C. in “The Puritan Dilemma in MBV,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 24 (1974), 25–27Google Scholar. The “fact” is also mentioned by Bell, Michael Davitt, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 68Google Scholar, and by Doubleday, Neal Frank, Hawthorne's Early Tales (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1972), p. 171Google Scholar. For other generally “historical” interpretations, see Fossum, Robert H., Hawthorne's Inviolable Circle (Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1972), pp. 56–59Google Scholar; Henderson, Harry B., Versions of the Past (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 101, 109Google Scholar; and Morsberger, Robert E., “MBV: Shrouded in Blackness, Ten Times Black,” New England Quarterly, 46 (1973), 454–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For explicit rejections of significant “historicity,” see Benoit, Raymond, “Hawthorne's Psychology of Death,” Studies in Short Fiction, 8 (1971), 553–60Google Scholar, and Baym, Nina, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), p. 58.Google Scholar

4. Behind Baym's preference for psychology over history or Christian morality stands Crews, Frederick, The Sins of the Fathers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), esp. pp. 106–11.Google Scholar

5. The “knowing” view of Hooper as guilty of some explicit (probably) sexual crime was originated by Edgar Poe, in his famous and widely reprinted review of the Twice-Told Tales. For a carefully guarded comparison with Dimmesdale, see Doubleday, , Early Tales, pp. 177–78Google Scholar. And the classic case for Hooper—as against Goodman Brown—is Cochran, Robert W., “Hawthorne's Choice: The Veil or the Jaundiced Eye,” College English, 23 (1962), 342–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. The similarity between Digby and Hooper is well established in the criticism. For their relative status as images of “The Puritan,” see Bell, , Historical Romance, pp. 64–68Google Scholar. For their similarity as romantic “egoists,” see Bell, Millicent, Hawthorne's View of the Artist (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 23–24Google Scholar. And for Digby as the “grotesque” version of Hawthorne's sexual “escapists,” see Crews, , Sins, pp. 114–16Google Scholar. MBV was first published in the Token for 1836 and was almost certainly part of The Story Teller as it existed in 1834; “The Man of Adamant” appeared in the Token for 1837.

7. Baym, , Shape, p. 55.Google Scholar

8. Hooker, Thomas, The Application of Redemption, quoted in Miller, Perry and Johnson, Thomas H., eds., The Puritans (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 292.Google Scholar

9. Cf. Goen, C. C., Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), esp. pp. 1–114Google Scholar, and, a bit less specifically, Gaustad, Edwin Scott, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pp. 102–25.Google Scholar

10. Fogle's premise of radical ambiguity has found relatively few supporters; it has seemed necessary to decide. Against Hooper, see Stein, W. B., “The Parable of Antichrist in MBV,” American Literature, 27 (1955), 386–92Google Scholar; Stibitz, E. E., “Ironic Unity in Hawthorne's MBV,” American Literature, 34 (1962), 182–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Canaday, Nicholas Jr., “Hawthorne's Minister and the Veiling Deceptions of Self,” Studies in Short Fiction, 4 (1967), 135–42Google Scholar. In favor, see Benoit, , “Psychology of Death”Google Scholar; Cochran, , “Hawthorne's Choice”Google Scholar; Voight, G. P., “The Meaning of MBV,” College English, 13 (1952), 337–38Google Scholar; Strandberg, Victor, “The Artist's Black Veil” New England Quarterly. 41 (1968), 567–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Santangelo, G. A., “The Absurdity of MBV,” Pacific Coast Philology, 5 (1970), 61–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. All citations from the text of MBV refer to the Centenary Edition of Twice-Told Tales (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974).Google Scholar

12. See Edwards, Jonathan, Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions, quoted in Goen, C. C., ed., The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 144–49Google Scholar. And for the more general relevance of Edwards (as well as of Bunyan and Shepard), see Morsberger, , “Shrouded in Blackness.”Google Scholar

13. Evidently something like a “Puritan” problem lies behind our own critical tendency—noted by David Levin—to disregard the literal in Hawthorne. See Levin, David, “Shadows of Doubt,” American Literature, 34 (1962), 344–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. The creator of the flamboyant awakening “style” was Whitefield rather than Edwards. Even the famous “imagistic” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was delivered by Edwards in monotone, with “his eyes fixed on the bellrope”; the upset came from the auditors. See Miller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Sloane, 1949), pp. 145–46.Google Scholar

15. Clearly the protagonist of “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent” (1843) figures, at one level, as a sort of latter-day Puritan “awakener,” who is also (as such) a victim of his own consciousness.

16. The narrator may be confusing “secret sin” in his own mind with the related but secondary problem of other “sad mysteries”; but the theologically literate reader should not do so. The primary sense of “secret sin” should clearly be Calvin's sense of a sinfulness rooted in our nature that we (while unregenerate) are unaware of. For Puritans, this should all be an “open secret”; and confusion on this point marks the narrator's (or the critic's) loss of touch with the Calvinist idiom.

17. Cf. “Passages from a Relinquished Work,” published in the New England Magazine, 12 1834Google Scholar. The bibliographical argument for the inclusion of MBV within the projected “Story Teller” was first advanced by Gross, Seymour, “Four Possible Additions to Hawthorne's ‘Story Teller,’” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 51 (1957), 90–95Google Scholar. The argument has been rejected by Doubleday (Early Tales, note 3 above, p. 170Google Scholar) and Baym (Shape, p. 40Google Scholar), but the tale's narrative peculiarities would seem to support inclusion. For the most complete discussions of “The Story Teller,” see Adkins, Nelson F., “The Early Projected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” PBSA, 39 (1945), 119–55Google Scholar, and Weber, Alfred, Die Entwicklung der Rahmenerzählungen Nathaniel Hawthornes (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1973), pp. 142–307.Google Scholar

18. Hooker, , Application of RedemptionGoogle Scholar, quoted in Miller, and Johnson, , Puritans, p. 305.Google Scholar

19. Quoted from Miller, and Johnson, , Puritans, p. 312Google Scholar. At this point I am treating Hooker more as an analog or a locus classicus than as a “source.”

20. For the innocent response to “efficient,” see Stibitz, , “Ironic Unity,” p. 189Google Scholar. The official status of the word may be inferred from Joseph Tracy's laudatory characterization of Edwards as “perhaps the most efficient preacher in New England.” See Tracy, Joseph, A History of the Revival of Religion (Boston: 1842), p. 214.Google Scholar

21. See Edwards, Jonathan, The Distinguishing MarksGoogle Scholar, quoted in Goen, , Great Awakening, pp. 266–67.Google Scholar

22. The critics most hostile to Hooper are Stein and Stibitz (note 10 above). Much of their case seems true but “partial.”

23. Accepting the Melvillean hint—which surely applies to MBV as cogently as to anything in Hawthorne's Mosses—we must yet stop short of the argument that would make Hawthorne himself a latter-day Puritan whose system emphasizes sin but omits grace; see, for example, Austin Warren's “Introduction” to the American Writers Series Nathaniel Hawthorne (Cincinnati: American Book, 1934), pp. xix–xxi.Google Scholar

24. Lying in wait for those who overvalue the commonplace in Hawthorne is (still) Frederick Crews. His arguments answer not only a simplistic theology like that of Edward Wagenknecht in Nathanlal Hawthorne (New York: Oxford, 1961), pp. 172–201Google Scholar, but also the sort of truistic moralism associated with Eisenger, Chester E.'s “Hawthorne as Champion of the Middle Way,” New England Quarterly, 27 (1954), 27–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Hooper might conceivably pass the test of the Religious Affections: His consciousness is arguably “spiritual,” and his outwardly irreproachable life agrees well enough with Edwards's “neonomian” Twelfth Sign, which insists on “Christian practice.” But the relevant standard might be in the earlier Faithful Narrative: Hooper would not seem to possess the “holy repose of soul” that marks the last stage in Edwards's simplified morphology; and the unrelieved blackness (or monochromatic grayness) of his veiled vision might associate him with those unregenerate men who would discuss the precise hue of salvation knowing only the “names of colors.” See Goen, , Awakening, pp. 173–74.Google Scholar

26. It is as if Hooper had experienced Thomas Shepard's preparatory phases of “conviction,” “compunction,” and “humiliation” without going on to “Faith,” with its “privileges” of “justification,” “reconciliation,” and “adoption.” See Shepard, Thomas, The Sound Believer, in Albro, J. A., ed., The Works of Thomas Shepard (Boston: 1853), I, 115–284Google Scholar. For a full account of the orthodox limits of preparation, see Miller, Perry, “‘Preparation for Salvation’ in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 50–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Pettit, Norman, The Heart Prepared (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), esp. pp. 86–157.Google Scholar

27. Perry Miller himself seems always to be flirting with the temptation to regard Edwards as primarily “literary”; see not only his Edwards (note 14 above) but also “The Rhetoric of Sensation,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956)Google Scholar, and the “Introduction” to Images or Shadows of Divine Things (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948)Google Scholar. For the problem of selfreflexive literariness in MBV, see Carnochan, W. B., “MBV: Symbol, Meaning, and the Context of Hawthorne's Art,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 24 (1969), 182–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Against all more or less moral or psychological readings, Carnochan holds that the story is “concerned above all with the veil as a symbolic object, pointing toward questions that cluster about the notion of symbol itself” (p. 183).

28. Cf. Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), esp. pp. 1–34.Google Scholar

29. Although some critics have, undeniably, worked too simply with the positive or affirmative values in Hawthorne, the problem itself remains valid and important, and a book like Fick, Leonard J.'s The Light Beyond (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1955)Google Scholar does not entirely collapse under the attack of Frederick Crews.

30. The Melvillean recognition remains apt: “Try to get a living by the Truth—and go to the Soup Societies,” Davis, Merrell R. and Gilman, William H., eds., Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 127.Google Scholar

31. Edwards, Jonathan, “The Divine and Supernatural Light,” quoted in Faust, Clarence and Johnson, Thomas H., eds., Jonathan Edwards (New York: Hill & Wang, 1962), p. 104.Google Scholar

32. The Christian typology of marriage and the Church derives most explicitly from Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, though it draws much of its richness from the “mystical” interpretation of the Song of Solomon. For the general Puritan acceptance of this system of privileged metaphors, see Wakefield, Gordon S., Puritan Devotion (London: Epworth, 1957), pp. 32–37.Google Scholar

33. Doubleday notes that we see Hooper at Sunday service, wedding, and funeral; he concludes (too simply) that these exhaust “the rituals for what is really important in human experience.” Doubleday, , Early Tales (note 3 above), pp. 171–72.Google Scholar

34. Thus Nina Baym dismisses the “Puritan” import of MBV and associates it with lesser pieces like “David Swan,” “Sylph Etherege,” and “Edward Fane's Rosebud.” Baym, , Shape (note 3 above), pp. 55 ff.Google Scholar

35. The most illuminating treatment of the Puritan problem of baptism—in relation to the psychological experience of conversion, which tended to overshadow it—is Pettit, , Heart Prepared, esp. pp. 74–93, 134–36.Google Scholar

36. The full case for the “Puritan” character of Poe's “horror” remains to be made; I make only the beginnings of such an argument, incidentally, in “The Example of Edwards: Idealist Imagination and the Metaphysics of Sovereignty,” in Elliott, Emory, ed., Puritanism and American Literature (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Edwards's crucial reference to “horror” occurs in his early essay on “The Mind.” See The Works of President Edwards, Dwight, Sereno, ed. (New York: 1829), I, 701.Google Scholar

37. For example, Bercovitch persuades us of Cotton Mather's success in making John Winthrop figure as an American-Puritan Everyman; but many of the more autobiographical cases clearly fail in their representative attempts. And Mather himself surely fits more readily into the “pathological” schema of Austin Warren. See Puritan Origins, pp. 15–25Google Scholar, and New England Conscience, pp. 1–28, 76–87.Google Scholar

38. For the basic Puritan “ambivalence” toward the remaining Protestant sacraments, see Nuttall, Geoffrey, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), pp. 90–101Google Scholar, and New, John F. H., Anglican and Puritan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 59–76Google Scholar. A partially revisionist argument holds that Puritanism gradually outlived its antisacramental bias in favor of “experience” and that the New England of the early eighteenth century actually experienced a sort of “Sacramental Renaissance.” See Holifield, E. Brooks, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), esp. pp. 139–224Google Scholar. Assuming Hawthorne was himself aware of these developments—he borrowed Cotton Mather's epoch-making Companion for Communicants in 1828; see Kesselring, Marion, in Hawthorne's Reading (New York: New York Public Library, 1949), p. 56Google Scholar—his point would again concern Hooper's reversion to the original Puritan emphasis on experience as such.

39. Such is the “Transcendental” verdict of Rosina, at the end of the “Puritan” career of Roderick Ellison, in “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent.” But as Roderick goes on to show in “The Christmas Banquet” (1844)Google Scholar, the idealist cure may be worse than the moralist disease: Self for self, the nineteenth century beats the seventeenth all hollow; or, paraphrasing Crews, a “snaky” identity may be better than none.

40. For a sexual interpretation of Hooper's self-veiling, see Crews, , Sins (note 4 above), pp. 106–11Google Scholar, and, less drastically, Crie, R. D., “MBV: Mr. Hooper's Symbolic Fig Leaf,” Literature and Psychology, 17 (1967), 211–17Google Scholar. Certain details of Crews's reading are criticized by Quinn, James and Baldessarini, Ross in “Literary Technique and Psychological Effect in MBV,” L & P, 24 (1974), 115–23Google Scholar. Any very stern case against Hooper must come to terms with Elizabeth. For Stein she signifies, “by common biblical association,” a person “consecrated to God” (“Antichrist,” note 10 above, p. 389Google Scholar); but a more strenuous argument might point explicitly to that Elizabeth who was the cousin of Virgin Mary and the miraculous mother of John the Baptist. The effect would be ironic, of course, but the ironies would redound on Hooper primarily; no miraculous birth occurring, Hooper remains—literally, at least—outside the line of salvation, as partial a “Father in Faith” as is Digby in the role of Abraham. For a commonsense justification of Elizabeth as “the norm of human wholeness and love in the story,” see Canaday, , “Veiling Deceptions” (note 10 above), p. 141.Google Scholar

41. For an account of the tendency of liberals throughout the eighteenth century to retain a strict nominal loyalty to the orthodox language of sin, see Haroutunian, Joseph, Piety Versus Moralism (New York: Holt, 1932), pp. 3–71Google Scholar, and Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King Press, 1955), pp. 59–90, 115–134.Google Scholar

42. The famous sermon on “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry” (1740) is by Gilbert Tennet. See Heimert, Alan and Miller, Perry, eds., The Great Awakening (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 71–99Google Scholar. As Heimert and Miller show, the theme is a dominant one among defenders of the revival.

43. My treatment of Hooper as “absolutist” follows Stibitz, who charges him with “harmfully exalting one idea” (“Ironic Unity,” note 10 above, p. 182Google Scholar). But critical discussion of the typical Hawthorne protagonist as too rigid an idealist has had a long and distinguished history, going all the way back to Randall Stewart's identification of “the scholar idealist” as “perhaps the most important single type of character in Hawthorne's works.” See the “Introduction” to Stewart, Randall, The American Notebooks (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1932), p. xliv.Google Scholar

44. The reference is to Stoddard, Solomon, Doctrine of the Instituted Churches (Longon: Ralph Smith, 1700), p. 22Google Scholar. My point is simply that Hooper can treat the Supper neither (traditionally) as a sign nor (revolutionarily) as a means; his isolationism has rendered any sacrament of unity meaningless.

45. The phrase is that of Milton Stern. See Stern, Milton, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1957), p. 1Google Scholar. Stern treats Melville as a unique anti-Transcendentalist founder of American naturalism, but if such terminology is indeed applicable, it would clearly apply to Hawthorne first, from whom much of Melville's “Christian Naturalism” clearly derives.

46. Baym, Nina, “Hawthorne,” in Woodress, James, ed., American Literary Studies: An Annuall 1974 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1976), p. 25Google Scholar. Baym's formulation is in response to my own insistence on the full historicity of “Young Goodman Brown” in “Visible Sanctity and Specter Evidence,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 110 (1974), 259–99.Google Scholar

47. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, True Stories from History and Biography (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 273–74.Google Scholar

48. Franklin is quite anxious that we understand “the terms” of his friendship with Whitefield: He invites the great revivalist to lodge at his own house, but the offer is made “not for Christ's sake” but for Whitefield's. His way of listening to the Evangelist's message is to compute the distance at which his clear, loud, and articulate voice may be heard. It is, all too plainly, a matter of communications theory, and it is a little like his being interested in The Pilgrim's Progress mainly for its mixture of narrative and dialogue. See The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 175–80.Google Scholar

49. Franklin, Autobiography, pp. 53–54Google Scholar, and Edwards, , “Personal Narrative,”Google Scholar in Faust, and Johnson, , Edwards (note 31 above), p. 57.Google Scholar

50. “Preface to Poor Richard, 1747,” in Mott, F. L. and Jorgensen, C. E., eds., Benjamin Franklin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1962), p. 193.Google Scholar

51. Biographical Stories, p. 274.Google Scholar

52. Franklin, , Autobiography, pp. 102–3Google Scholar. For the Enlightenment heritage of both Franklin and Edwards, see Levin, David, The Puritan in the Enlightenment (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963).Google Scholar

53. See America's Coming of Age (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915), pp. 3–35.Google Scholar

54. For the influence of Samuel Clarke on the American clergy, see Wright, , Beginnings of Unitarianism (note 41 above)Google Scholar, and May, Henry F., The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 12–21Google Scholar. Mott and Jorgensen (Franklin, p. cxviiGoogle Scholar) speculate that either Bentley or Derham may be the villain of the Franklin piece, but the editors of the Yale Autobiography more plausibly suggest Clarke. Not only did his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704)Google Scholar affect Hume and Holbach just as Franklin says he was affected, but even more significantly, when Franklin describes his return to virtue, he sounds very much like the Clarke of the Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Virtue (1705)Google Scholar, arguing that virtue is part of the “Reason of Things.”

55. For the Universalist controversy provoked by John Clarke and Charles Chauncy, see Wright, , Beginnings of Unitarianism. pp. 187–93Google Scholar. And it is obviously Dwight's response to this controversy that mediates between Bunyan and Hawthorne, controlling the emphasis on hell and also providing the model for smooth-it-away in the “smooth Divine, unus'd to wound/The Sinner's heart, with hell's alarming sound.” See Dwight, Timothy, “The Triumph of Infidelity,” in McTaggart, W. J. and Bottorff, W. K., eds., The Major Poems of Timothy Dwight (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1969), pp. 356–58.Google Scholar

56. For the likely associations of Shute, see the biographical notice of “Daniel Shute, D.D.,” in Sprague, William B.. Annals of the American Pulpit (New York: 1865), I, 18–22.Google Scholar

57. For Peter Clark's dangerous concession to the liberals, see The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin, stated and defended. In a Summer Morning's Conversation … (Boston: 1758), esp. pp. 2–25, 42Google Scholar. For Chauncy's ruthless response, see The Opinion of one that has perused “The Summer Morning's Conversation …” (Boston: 1758)Google Scholar. Clark only makes things worse with Remarks on a late Pamphlet … (Boston: 1758)Google Scholar. The whole controversy is reviewed by Haroutunian in Piety, pp. 15–42Google Scholar; Wright in Beginnings of Unitarianism, pp. 37–90Google Scholar; and Smith, H. Shelton in Changing Conceptions of Original Sin (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), pp. 37–39.Google Scholar

58. The mention of “Peter Clarke” occurs in “Old News, I.” See The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 140–41Google Scholar. The treatise in question would be Clark's Scripture-Grounds of Baptism (Boston: Kneeland & Green, 1935)Google Scholar. For Hawthorne's reading of the various newspapers in question, see Kesselring, , Hawthorne's Reading (note 38 above), p. 45Google Scholar. My own suspicion is that Hawthorne knew the works of Peter Clark directly. He was by no means an obscure figure: His ministry at Danvers (formerly “Salem Village,” the site of the witchcraft episode) lasted from 1716 to 1768; over that period he published at least sixteen separate titles. See Shipton, C. K. and Mooney, J. E., National Index of American Imprints Through 1800: The Short-Title Evans (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1969), p. 153.Google Scholar

59. Clark, Peter, The Ruler's Highest Duty and the People's Only Glory (Boston: Kneeland, 1739, Euans listing 4350)Google Scholar. For Barnard, see Plumstead, A. W., ed., The Wall and the Garden (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1968), pp. 223–80.Google Scholar

60. For identification of all of the twelve sermons delivered before Belcher, see Vail, R. W. G., A Check List of New England Election Sermons (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1936)Google Scholar. The first hundred years of New England election sermons have been studied by Breen, T. H. in The Character of the Good Ruler (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970)Google Scholar. The election sermons of the 1760s and 1770s have become a staple in studies of “Puritanism and the American Revolution,” but there is no adequate discussion of the import of these sermons in the middle of the century. For Hawthorne's reading of such sermons, see Kesselring, , Hawthorne's Reading, p. 61.Google Scholar

61. Wigglesworth, Samuel, An Essay for Reviving Religion (Boston: 1733, Evans listing 3735)Google Scholar. For Prince's sermon, see Plumstead, , Wall and Garden, pp. 179–220.Google Scholar

62. Wigglesworth, , Essay, pp. 1, 4, 5, 7, 18, 23, and esp. 31.Google Scholar

63. At his ordination in 1716, William Cooper distinguished himself by “publicly drawing up a confession of faith in the articles of Calvinism” (Miller, , Edwards, note 14 above, p. 21Google Scholar). Many of his (numerous) early publications stress the need for a revival; and after sponsoring the Calvinism of “God Glorified” in “free and catholic” Boston, he went on to co-author a preface to Edwards's Faithful Narrative, plainly declaring the “wonderful work at Northampton” an authentic “effusion” of the Spirit (in Goen, , Awakening, note 12 above, pp. 136–41Google Scholar). Aside from his election sermon, his major publications of 1740 and 1741 stress the connection between the revival and a strict orthodoxy of sin and grace (see Gaustad, , Awakening, note 9 above, pp. 56–61Google Scholar). His very aggressive preface to the Distinguishing Marks not only repeats Edwards's charge that opposition to the Awakening stems from Arminianism and may amount to the “unpardonable sin”; it also proposes the creation of a journal (like The Christian History), which would “transmit accounts” of all local revivals (in Goen, , Awakening, pp. 223–24Google Scholar). A final sign of Cooper's absolute loyalty to the ideals of the revival would be his suggestion (in 1743) that perhaps Edwards had gone too far in exposing the faults of certain revivalists (Goen, p. 80). Once again, the argument is not that Hooper is Cooper. But certain bits of evidence are scary indeed: Cooper's preface to the Distinguishing Marks opens with a citation of the precise chapter and verse in Corinthians in which Paul discusses the self-veiling of Moses, which W. B. Stein (“Antichrist,” note 10 above), long ago proposed as the Biblical source of MBV. See Goen, , Awakening, pp. 215–25.Google Scholar

64. Cooper, William, The Honours of Christ (Boston: 1740; Evans listing 4498), p. 18.Google Scholar

65. Significantly, Roy Harvey Pearce anthologizes many of the same sight-of-sin passages as Miller. See Pearce, Roy Harvey, ed., Colonial American Writing (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), pp. 78–115Google Scholar. Miller long ago identified Hooker as the founder of an American tradition of preparationism stressing conviction, humiliation, and contrition. He also noticed that, although Hooker's views became normative, they did not escape criticism for making preparation theologically too all-inclusive (“Preparation for Salvation,” pp. 56–67Google Scholar; cf. Colony to Province, pp. 57–65Google Scholar). Elaborating and emending Miller, Norman Pettit admitted that “the preparatory phase was by far the most important single activity in Hooker's conception of conversion.” Pettit, Norman, Heart Prepared, p. 100Google Scholar (note 26 above). Hooker's most recent biographer is careful to explain that Hooker really does have some sense of a light beyond, but clearly his own emphases and his later (very considerable) influence have to do with the idea of an elongated and painful preparation. See Shuffelton, Frank, Thomas Hooker, 1586–1647 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 78–97, 247–61, 282–307Google Scholar. Furthermore, Pettit has recently made it quite clear that it was Hooker who effectively turned the Puritan Mind inward by emphasizing a “preparatory anxiety [that] put off assurance.” See Pettit, Norman, “Hooker's Doctrine of Assurance: A Critical Phase in New England Spiritual Thought,” New England Quarterly, 47 (1974), 518–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Thus Hawthorne's evocation of Hooker comes to seem not only fair but in a sense inevitably right. Thomas Shepard, also a preparationist, might also stress the “uses of anxiety,” but his emphasis is much more clearly on the need for uncertainty and watchfulness within the phase of sanctification; see McGiffert, Michael's Introduction to God's Plot (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1972), pp. 3–32Google Scholar, and (more significantly) Shepard's own Parable of the Ten Virgins, Works, Vol. IIIGoogle Scholar. Clearly Hooker came closer, intellectually at least, to getting “stuck” in preparation. He might cure sick souls by distinguishing their needful anxiety from gratuitous despair, but he could also be accused of separating “a good faith” from any “relish and sweetness” (Pettit, , “Assurance,” p. 521Google Scholar). And an instructive sense of Hooker's exemplary difficulties might well come from his summary and definitive Application of Redemption (1656–57), which expends its ten (extant) books and thousand pages on “Preparation” alone—leaving “Implantation” (the other, complementary half of the relevant, plenary Ramean dichotomy) simply hanging in unwritten literary space. Or from the earlier sermon on “The Soules Implantation into Christ,” which admits that “The Lord will not always give his children a cordial,” attempts to derive some encouragement from God's being pleased “to knock off our wheels, and leave us in the dust,” and then hurries over the topics of vocation, justification, adoption, and sanctification in a few pages; see Emerson, Everett H., ed., Redemption (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars Facsimiles, 1956), pp. 120–39Google Scholar. It probably is not quite fair to claim that for Hooker redemption was the true sight of sin; and somebody will always remind us that Hooker distinguishes between a “legal” and an “evangelical” preparation. But clearly Hawthorne is not that person—especially when his Hooper is, after all, only a figure of a tendency.

66. Quoted from Miller, and Johnson, , The Puritans, p. 305Google Scholar. Miller also reproduces a brief portion of Hooker's remarks on “Repentant Sinners and their Ministers” (pp. 309–14). Hooker's point is that the converted eventually realize that their induced terrors were necessary and that (ironically, in Hooper's case) the minister himself eventually “feasts [with] them as guests.”

67. Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana (Hartford, Conn.: 1853–1855), I, 343, 346.Google Scholar

68. Cooper sounds most like Hooker when advising his hearers to love and advance their preparatory motions: “If your Convictions are but superficial, beg God to make them deep. If they are but transient, beg God to fasten them as a Nail in a safe place.” See Cooper, William, One Shall Be Taken and Another Left (Boston: 1741), p. 14.Google Scholar

69. For the career of Hooper as First Puritan, see Neal, Daniel, The History of the Puritans (New York: Harper, 1843), I, 51–52Google Scholar. Hawthorne borrowed the 1816–17 edition of Neal in April, 1827. Kesselring, , Hawthorne's Reading, p. 58.Google Scholar

70. Hawthorne borrowed Ames's Fresh Suit in 05, 1827Google Scholar. Kesselring, , Hawthorne's Reading, p. 43.Google Scholar

71. Such, it seems to me, is the just reading of Hawthorne's much-quoted remarks in “The Old Manse”: Hawthorne reads everything, with “reverence,” and always in search of some “Truth.” If “books of Religion” usually frustrate his search, it is because they “so seldom touch their ostensible subject”—and not, as is often assumed, because the subject itself was outside his concern. It is always with “sadness” that he turns away from such books. Nor is the rejection of “theological libraries” quite absolute: It is only “for the most part” that they amount to a “stupendous impertinence”; and even when they do not advance Hawthorne's own quest, they always reveal (as in a sort of “newspaper”) the history of the general search. See Mosses from an Old Manse (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 19–21.Google Scholar

72. The Oxford English Dictionary makes it clear that “parson” is, etymologically, the same word as “person” but that, historically, it refers to the legal person in whom ownership of the local (English) parish church is invested. Thus it is both properly Anglican and inherently objectionable to Congregationalists.

73. For Solomon Stoddard's famous reinvention of the parish, see Stoddard, , Instituted Churches, pp. 7–8Google Scholar. For the full purport of “Anglicization,” see Breen, T. H., The Character of the Good Ruler (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 203–39Google Scholar; Ellis, Joseph, The New England Mind in Transition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 38–81Google Scholar; and especially Murrin, J. M., Anglicizing an American Colony, forthcoming.Google Scholar

74. Tracy, , Revival, p. 133.Google Scholar

75. Kesselring's evidence makes it impossible to decide whether it was Peters, Samuel's General History of Connecticut (London: 1781)Google Scholar or Trumbull, Benjamin's Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Ecclesiastical (New Haven, 1818)Google Scholar that Hawthorne borrowed on Oct. 31, 1727; but other evidence, chiefly that of MBV, makes Trumbull appear more likely. Certainly he seems to have read it at some time. And, working in the next decade, Joseph Tracy found the volumes of The Christian History “not very uncommon” in New England at the time (Revival, p. v).Google Scholar

76. Parsons's sermon was a local and not an official performance, and so was not immediately published. But Parsons gives a full account of its text, doctrine, and impact in his “Account”; see The Christian History.… for the Year 1744 (Boston: 1745), pp. 133–43.Google Scholar

77. Parsons, , “Account,” pp. 120–25.Google Scholar

78. Now a fairly rare book, to be read by most people in microtext (American Periodical Series, Film 639a, No. 18, Reel 10), The Christian History is an extremely important work in the intellectual and literary history of America. Suggested by Edwards and supervised by Thomas Prince, Jr., it began (on March 5, 1743) as an eight-page weekly periodical to which revivalist ministers, seized by a sense of an approaching millennium, submitted their own accounts of the revivalistic progress of salvation in their own congregations. Then, after the Awakening had run its great and general course, it was separately reprinted as The Christian History, Containing Accounts of the Revival and Propagation of Religion in Great-Britain and America For the Years 1743 and 1744, 2 vols. (Boston: 1744, 1745)Google Scholar. Parsons's “Account” appears as pp. 118…162 of Vol. II.

79. Miller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards (New York: Sloane, 1949), pp. 137–38.Google Scholar

80. In many ways Trumbull's Connecticut is the perfect complement to Hutchinson's Massachusetts, providing not only an overview of New England's “other” colony but also a perspective that took the religious affairs of revival and separation as seriously as secular matters like warfare and constitutional problems. Supplemented by The Christian History, it would have been sufficient.

81. As Goen makes clear, men touched by the New Light saw “no middle ground” with ordinary men, as these “separatical times” saw the formation of “nearly a hundred [new] churches.” Goen, , Revivalism and Separatism (note 9 above), pp. 66, 68.Google Scholar

82. The separations of Guilford and Milford both involve the withdrawal of an awakened congregation from an unawakened minister, but they seem necessary to complete the whole “world” that inspired MBV; especially suggestive is the former, in which a minister sows the seeds of separation by “hiding his real sentiments.” See Trumbull, , Complete History, II, 114–34, 177–79, 335–39.Google Scholar

83. Chauncy's attack on the discord and strife of the Awakening—frightening women and children, confusing many a “little flock,” and upsetting the ordinary arrangements of society—clearly has elements of domestic as well as of social, political, and theological conservatism. And it is his attack, made on the basis of his own survey, that later historians (like Trumbull and Tracy) were still answering. See Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (Boston: Rogers & Fowle, 1743; Evans, 5151); esp. Part I, pp. 103–19.Google Scholar

84. Baym, , ALS/74, p. 25Google Scholar. Baym's article on “The Head, the Heart, and the Unpardonable Sin,” New England Quarterly, 40 (1967), 31–47Google Scholar, arranges these traditional counters as well as anybody else's, without rescuing Hawthorne's moral psychology from the charge of banal simplicity; see Green, Martin, Revaluations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 61–85.Google Scholar

85. For the intimate relation between sorrow (tristitia) and sloth (acedia), see Wenzel, Siegfried, The Sin of Sloth (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1960), pp. 23–28, 51–55, 155–62, 171–74Google Scholar. Sorrow also figures crucially in Burton's climactic chapter on “Religious Melancholy.” See The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: 1854), esp. pp. 713Google Scholar ff. The Standard Puritan text is Baxter, Richard's Preservations Against Melancholy and over-much Sorrow (London, 1716)Google Scholar, but we should not forget the ironic fact that Hooker's early reputation rested on his cure of souls driven by sorrow to the brink of despair. See Mather, , Magnalia, I, 334.Google Scholar

86. The “anatomy” of Romantic “sorrow” remains to be written. Morse Peckham's theory of a “negative romanticism” might provide a primitive conceptual beginning; see “Towards a Theory of Romanticism,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 66 (1951), 5–23Google Scholar. The “conclusion” might sound like Geoffrey Hartman's formulations concerning “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Conscious,’” in Bloom, Harold, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 46–56Google Scholar. A preliminary table of contents would be offered by the later chapters of Anderson, G. K.'s The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1965)Google Scholar. By themselves, however, Anderson's Anti-Christ-ian instances provide a morphology too Byronic and unsubtle. One needs to throw in a certain amount of Coleridgean “dejection” and Wordsworthian “despondency” to strike the uneven balance.

87. For hints of Hooper's Byronism, see Bell, , Artist, pp. 23–24, 68Google Scholar. For the implication of later, more advanced forms of subjectivity, see Santangelo, , “Absurdity”Google Scholar (note 10 above), and Benoit, , “Psychology of Death” (note 3 above).Google Scholar

88. The search for minimum psychological essence is epitomized by Baym's discussion of Hawthorne's “Twice-told Tales Period” in terms of a troubled minor romanticism. See Baym, , Shape (note 3 above), pp. 53–83.Google Scholar

89. I refer primarily (of course) to the work of Jacques Derrida. See Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, G. C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), esp. pp. 1–93Google Scholar. But see also Lacan, Jacques, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Ehrmann, Jacques, ed., Structuralism (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 101–37.Google Scholar

90. Bercovitch, , Puritan Origins (note 28 above), pp. 1–34.Google Scholar

91. Quoted from ibid., p. 18.

92. See Watkins, Owen, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Schocken, 1972), pp. 164, 238Google Scholar. Romantic reinterpretation of earlier varieties of spiritualism is a major theme of Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971)Google Scholar. For the specific case of Wordsworth and earlier religious autobiography, see McConnell, F. D., The Confessional Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974)Google Scholar, and Brantley, R. E., Wordsworth's “Natural Methodism” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975).Google Scholar

93. For Taylor's poetic attempt to laugh Every Puritan out of his Melancholy Humor, see Gatta, John Jr., “The Comic Design of Gods Determinations,” Early American Literature, 10 (1975), 121–43.Google Scholar

94. Bercovitch, , Puritan Origins, pp. 17–19.Google Scholar

95. The “sentimental” quality of Edwards was regularly recognized in the nineteenth century. Miller skillfully maintains some of this emphasis, even as he carefully distinguishes Edwards from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Miller, , Edwards (note 79 above), pp. 238–44Google Scholar. For a relatively stiff rejection of this approach, see Cherry, Conrad, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Anchor, 1966), pp. 176–81.Google Scholar

96. Trumbull, , Connecticut, II, 260–64.Google Scholar

97. Ibid., p. 264. Cf. Chapter 96 (“The Try-Works”) in Moby Dick.

98. The realization that concepts like “Romantic” and “pre-Romantic” are largely the invention of later criticism should not obscure the facts of literary history itself, where the plot is fairly thick. For example, Melville's famous opposition of his literary men of sorrows to Rabelais recalls Hawthorne's use of Cowper and Rabelais at the end of “The Virtuoso's Collection” (Mosses, p. 493Google Scholar); and Hawthorne's Virtuoso is himself a version of the Wandering Jew, considered as a sort of ultimate Romantic (but anti-Christian) man of sorrows. Moreover, Melville's prior reference to “Virginia's Dismal Swamp” seems to embody his recognition of Hawthorne's allusion, in “Ethan Brand,” to the “Bartram” who named that landscape (and influenced Wordsworth, also alluded to in “Ethan Brand”).

99. Miller, , Edwards, pp. 17–23.Google Scholar

100. Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1939), pp. 35–63.Google Scholar

101. Quoted from Langdon, G. D. Jr., Pilgrim Colony (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 101–2.Google Scholar

102. For the ambiguous question between Cotton and Williams, see Miller, Perry, Roger Williams (New York: Atheneum, 1953), esp. pp. 74–205Google Scholar, and Bercovitch, Sacvan, “Typology in New England,” American Quarterly, 19 (1967), 166–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the debate between Cotton and the Preparationists, see Hall, David D., ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1968).Google Scholar

103. As Hyatt Waggoner has long since suggested, the outline of Hawthorne's own not quite Puritan orthodoxy can be inferred from “Fancy's Show Box.” See Waggoner, Hyatt, Hawthorne (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955), pp. 12–16.Google Scholar