The True Spirit Of Early New Englanders – An 1882 Perspective By A Yale College President The following comments were written by Noah Porter, President of Yale College. They appeared near the beginning of an article, entitled “The New England Meeting House,” which was published in the May 1883 edition of “The New Englander” magazine. [304] I will place another post on “Explore” regarding the article itself and its meeting house theme. ++++++ As Porter wrote in 1882: I do not deny that the New Englander carried many things to excess, as, for example, when he required a divine sanction for every religious observance, and even for every trivial action, going to such an extreme, as Coleridge humorously says, that he would not apply a corn plaster without a text of Scripture. I wish, however, to emphasize the fact, once for all, that he was emphatically what Bishop Hackett calls a PUBLIC SOUL, that he was anything rather than an individual, separated from, or disbelieving in organized society, or unmindful of his responsibilities to his fellow men. The typical New Englander did not cross the ocean to enjoy an isolated independence or to exercise what was called SOUL-LIBERTY in the separate indulgence of his imaginative whimsicalities or the independent service of a private religion. The few who came hither with such theories, or who adopted them after they landed, like Roger Williams and Sir Henry Vane, were strangers to the true New England spirit and the true New England theory. They did good service in their time, but it was not the special service to which the New Englander was called. They tempered the sharp grittiness of the original steel to an elastic flexibility, but they added nothing to its masterly power to build and defend. Whatever else Roger Williams accomplished, and all the rest of the advanced men of his time, they built few meeting houses, they organized few communities, they provided few schools, they laid out few villages, they contributed very little to that remarkable organic and constructing power, and that indomitable public spirit which you can trace wherever the New England emigration has spread itself all over this land. The intolerance of the New Englander towards all sorts of intruders, the Quakers, the Baptists, and the Prelatists, grew out of his jealous zeal for the ideal perfection of the Christian commonwealth. It is explained by his devotion to what he conceived as the ideally perfect society, which he was called by God to build up in Massachusetts and Connecticut, leaving Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations to try their own experiments. ++++++
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:50:18 +0000
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