Search Results

This chapter focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson's mentorship of aristocratic Boston banker and art critic Samuel Gray Ward. It considers how Ward filled Emerson's need for an art critic in his journal, the Dial. Before analyzing the relationship between Ward and Emerson, the chapter examines Ward's decision to marry wealthy socialite Anna Barker rather than Margaret Fuller, and how that marriage was perceived by many as a defection from the transcendentalist movement. It then turns to the reaction of Emerson and Elizabeth Peabody to the Ward-Barker union before concluding with a discussion of Ward's writings on art criticism and history.

This chapter explores parishioners' attitudes to church authority. Good fellowship among the less-godly was bestial sin to the godly, and the ceremony of ‘good and faithful drunkards’ became notorious, featuring in Samuel Ward's 1622 sermon ‘Woe to Drunkards’ — where Ward claimed that the participants all ‘died thereof within a few weeks, some sooner, some later’. But men and women could not be kept out of the alehouse — even when they should have been at church. When in 1571 Thomas Harmer of Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, was rebuked by the minister for playing cards in the alehouse in service time, he gave him an earful of abuse and called him ‘knave’. John Gay of Childerditch, Essex, was presented in 1584 for keeping evil rule in his house on a Sunday, ‘in so much that the minister could not say service for the great noise of the people’.

Thomas Fuller, born in 1608 in Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, was the son of Thomas Fuller, the minister of St. Peter’s Church in Aldwincle. His mother Margaret’s brother was John Davenant, the president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, who became bishop of Salisbury shortly after Fuller entered Cambridge. The curriculum there emphasized Latin and Greek literature, partly as a result of the residence and teaching of Erasmus, the eminent Renaissance scholar, in the early sixteenth century. Fuller contended, in an essay published in 1642, that the “general Artist,” or university graduate in the arts, completed his academic endeavors with the study of history, enabling him to understand a broad range of human experience. Fuller studied theology under Samuel Ward, the master of Sidney Sussex College, a close friend of Bishop Davenant. His education prepared him well for his calling as a church historian.

Chapter 5 continues to investigate the Montagu affair by surveying adjacent doctrines related to the perseverance debate. For instance, Dort’s more narrow definition of perseverance caused difficulties for those holding a more traditionalist view of baptism and regeneration. After looking at Montagu’s baptismal argument against perseverance of the saints, the chapter evaluates published responses to Montagu’s advocacy of baptismal regeneration as well as more private debates where John Davenant and Samuel Ward tried to reconcile a form of baptismal regeneration with Dort’s determination on perseverance. This survey shows division on the efficacy of baptism even within the pro-Dortian party, with readings and receptions of Augustine factoring in. It also reveals further evidence of how a broad-church approach to being Reformed set the Church of England at odds with the international trends of the Reformed churches.

This brief epilogue attempts to answer why Rhode Island was so criticized and why it alone refused to attend the Constitutional Convention. It was by far the most democratic colony and state and the most commercially advanced. It had the weakest elite and the most middling elements, which made it an ideal example of what was to come in the wild and disorderly northern economy of antebellum America. Its excessive paper money was a symptom of its advanced commercial character and the source of much of its economic success in the nineteenth century.