The Mathers: Three Generations Of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 - Plot & Excerpts
Here the State, acting with the churches, still might play its part. Mather's expectations that in a nation committed to do-good the old alliance would retain its value is clearly put in Bonifacius: "When Moses and Aaron join to do good, what can't they do?" 37 To seal the league and infuse it with pietistic purposes he urged that every reforming society should have among its members a magistrate as well as a minister. The societies themselves would act as the arms of justice, reaching out to warn the tempted and to inform on lawbreakers. Mather himself reprinted an abstract of the most important laws regulating behavior. Along with each offense, the penalty was carefully listed, obviously with intention of demonstrating the force of the State behind, as he explained, "the worthy Designs of REFORMATION."38 The entire system of societies embracing all ranks of men which act on one another to produce conformity in thought and behavior has the odor, as Perry Miller points out, of nineteenth-century midwestern small-town Protestantism.
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