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Errand into the Wilderness, by Perry Miller
Download Ebook Errand into the Wilderness, by Perry Miller
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The title of this book by Perry Miller, who is world-famous as an interpreter of the American past, comes close to posing the question it has been Mr. Miller's lifelong purpose to answer: What was the underlying aim of the first colonists in coming to America? In what light did they see themselves? As men and women undertaking a mission that was its own cause and justification? Or did they consider themselves errand boys for a higher power which might, as is frequently the habit of authority, change its mind about the importance of their job before they had completed it?
These questions are by no means frivolous. They go to the roots of seventeenth-century thought and of the ever-widening and quickening flow of events since then. Disguised from twentieth-century readers first by the New Testament language and thought of the Puritans and later by the complacent transcendentalist belief in the oversoul, the related problems of purpose and reason-for-being have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. Mr. Miller makes this abundantly clear and real, and in doing so allows the reader to conclude that, whatever else America might have become, it could never have developed into a society that took itself for granted.
The title, Errand into the Wilderness, is taken from the title of a Massachusetts election sermon of 1670. Like so many jeremiads of its time, this sermon appeared to be addressed to the sinful and unregenerate whom God was about to destroy. But the original speaker's underlying concern was with the fateful ambiguity in the word errand. Whose errand?
This crucial uncertainty of the age is the starting point of Mr. Miller's engrossing account of what happened to the European mind when, in spite of itself, it began to become something other than European. For the second generation in America discovered that their heroic parents had, in fact, been sent on a fool's errand, the bitterest kind of all; that the dream of a model society to be built in purity by the elect in the new continent was now a dream that meant nothing more to Europe. The emigrants were on their own. Thus left alone with America, who were they? And what were they to do?
In this book, as in all his work, the author of The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, and The Transcendentalists, emphasizes the need for understanding the human sources from which the American mainstream has risen. In this integrated series of brilliant and witty essays which he describes as "pieces," Perry Miller invites and stimulates in the reader a new conception of his own inheritance.
- Sales Rank: #2344522 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Belknap Press
- Published on: 1956-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
Perry Miller has corrected the extreme revisionist historians who have overstressed the authoritarian and even totalitarian aspects of Puritan political doctrine. Miller corrects the balance by bringing out the inherent individualism of American Puritanism, its respect for private conscience, and even the revolutionary implications nurtured by Puritan doctrine....He has given us an analysis of the Puritan mind which is subtle and sophisticated, profound and humane, and revised in the light of the most recent scholarship. (Richard B. Morris New York Times Book Review)
Professor Miller has assembled materials which would otherwise not be easily accessible and which, taken together, present new perspectives on the dominant Christian origin of American political doctrine and civilization. Beginning with the Puritans and their preoccupation with orthodoxy and continuing with the Quakers, the Congregationalists, Calvinists, and Unitarians, he interprets each from the point of view of its place in social and political change....Dominant figures such as Hooker, Jonathan Edwards, and Emerson are brought to life with understanding. The chapter on the various theories and prophecies on the end of the world brings the record up to the present. The author's impressive knowledge of the subject and his persistent research are evident throughout. (Library Journal)
About the Author
Perry Miller (1905-1963) was an historian and literary critic. He is the author of numerous books, including the Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1956, Jonathan Edwards, Errand into the Wilderness, American Thought: Civil War to World War I, and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Origins of American History Through the Examples of the Puritans
By Matt Tippens
Perry Miller's "Errand Into the Wilderness" is a collection of ten essays on American Puritanism. In these essays, Miller attempts to examine the origins of American history through the examples of the Puritans. His main thesis is one of Americanization. Miller's ten essays follow the theme of "errand into the wilderness" and he uses theological, social, and literary contributions to explain and exhibit this errand into the wilderness. Miller provides literary criticism for each piece to interpret them according to the uniqueness of the American experience.
The title of the book derives its name from Samuel Danforth's 1670 election sermon. The word "errand" is a "metaphor" that probes "some deeper configuration in the story than mere modification, by obvious and natural necessity, of an imported European culture in an adjustment to a frontier" (p. 1). Miller's first chapter discusses the second and third generation Puritans who began to question if they had fulfilled John Winthrop's prophecy of a "city upon a hill." Did they set up and provide a model society for Protestant Europe or did they create something new? Miller contends that the Puritans had unknowingly "redefined their errand" and had begun the process of Americanization and a new identity. This process of "redefining their errand" led to inner tensions and splintering among the Puritans. In "Thomas Hooker and the Democracy of Connecticut," Miller opposes the Vernon L. Parrington and James Truslow Adams views that Connecticut was more democratic than Massachusetts. Miller believes that the rivalry between Hooker and Cotton Mather was much more a factor in the separation. Miller explains the pattern of settlement among river towns of the Connecticut Valley worked out a social pattern, a wilderness pattern, that was vastly different from that of Boston or Salem. Miller believes the philosophical view in Connecticut was similar to Massachusetts.
In the essay entitled "Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia," Miller tries to show that this colony had many similarities with New England. Even though historians have represented Virginia as a business proposition, the colonizing impulse was Protestant, similar to that of the Puritans. The Virginians justified their errand into the wilderness by appealing to the Protestant theology that it would be most acceptable to God. When the Company dissolved it went from a holy experiment to a commercial plantation. In the following essay, "The Puritan State and Puritan Society," Miller believes that Puritanism was not tolerant or democratic and that the government of New England was a dictatorship that was carried into the wilderness. The following chapter on Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening, presents the awakening as a social revolution or transformation that was brought into the American wilderness in search of a new concept of meaning. By 1740, Edwards was the turning point in the Puritan errand into the wilderness. Edwards, a child of the wilderness, was convinced that people should be brought into the experience, that it was not "private and privileged," but "social and communal" (p. 163). The people played a role in their own welfare. Miller analyzes the influence of John Locke on Edwards, saying that Edwards went beyond Locke, that the word was linked not only with the idea, but also with the emotions. The belief that an idea in the mind is not merely a concept, but an emotion, and Edwards preached terror and fear.
Miller continues on with Edwards by comparing him to Ralph Waldo Emerson in an attempt to show that the two of them are not as far apart as we would believe. Miller asserts that Puritan covenant theology, Edwards' sensationalism, and Emersonian transcendentalism have some similar features. Edwards went to nature to find the images or shadows of divine things, whereas Emerson went to nature and saw the mind in a mutual embrace with nature. Miller goes onto discuss the mid-nineteenth century fascination with nature in America. That nature was the last thing between Americans and civilization. If nature were civilized, it would mean the end of the errand into the wilderness.
In the final essay, Miller asks the questions, "Can an errand, even an errand into the wilderness, be run indefinitely?" "What will America do - what can America do - with an implacable prophecy that there is a point in time beyond which the very concept of the future becomes meaningless? What then happens to the errand?" (p. 217). Here, Miller extends his argument from Edwards to the atomic bomb. Miller calls Jonathan Edwards the greatest artist of the apocalypse and that the need for a Judgment had not been removed by scientific discovery. "It will come as a cry at midnight," Edwards said (p.233). Miller, however, concludes that the errand into the wilderness was not run for this. Even though Massachusetts ministers and magistrates thought that their people had not been faithful to the errand, Miller finds that their "errand into the wilderness" was, indeed, a success.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
It's Miller Time!
By Thomas B. O'Neill
Perry Miller is a rare experience in American history writing. I think he's wrong about fifty percent of the time, but so help me, I'd rather read Miller wrong than just about any other historian right. He's that stimulating. Compared to him, the accepted field of other writers--with the exceptions of Howard Zinn and Richard Hofstadter--seem so many antiquarians and nostalgia freaks. They'd be very happy collecting and sorting rocks. With Miller it's always the Big Questions front and center: Who are we, and how did we get that way. - Tom O'Neill
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Analysis of Puritan beliefs and practices
By Rich Brown, Midlothian
Identifies held beliefs and how they changed over time as the NE colonies matured and circumstances changed. Must reading for any student of the era.
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