Salem Witch Judge (29 page)

Around this time, according to Samuel’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter, my late great-aunt Charlotte May Wilson, Samuel began wearing a hair shirt. Christian ascetics have long used the hair shirt for bodily mortification and to resist temptations of the flesh. Saint Jerome in the fourth century described rich laymen wearing hair shirts beneath their ornate robes to offset their luxuries and to remind them of Christ. Early Benedictine monks and later members of other religious orders routinely used the hair shirt, although now only the Carthusian and Carmelite orders wear it by rule.

The nineteenth-century historian James Savage used a slightly different term to describe Samuel’s garment. In A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, Before 1692, Savage wrote that the “amiable Sewall…most bitterly repented in public sackcloth.” Sackcloth is a biblical symbol of penance. Puritans sometimes wore sackcloth externally during church services to symbolize penitence. But Samuel’s use of sackcloth as an undergarment—as described by
my Aunt Charlotte, whose information was passed down within the family—makes it sound like the hair shirt worn next to the skin as an instrument of self-mortification, usually associated with Catholicism.

In fact, the two terms sackcloth and hair shirt derive from a single Latin word, cilicium. Moreover, according the Catholic Dictionary, the two are “probably the same thing.” Both hark back to the garment of camel hair that John the Baptist wore. The word cilicium, from the Roman province of Cilicia in Asia Minor, refers to a rough shirt or girdle of goat hair worn for penance and mortification. The Latin cilicium appears in the Vulgate version of Psalm 34:13, “Ego autem, cum mihi molesti essent, induebar cilicio.” This word was translated as “haircloth” in the Catholic Douay Bible and as “sackcloth” in the authorized Anglican Bible and Book of Common Prayer. That difference explains the misconception of a denominational divide.

In donning a hair shirt, Samuel abandoned the prudence that had served him well for more than forty years. He determined to abandon himself to Christ. “Lord,” he had prayed just before the recent fast day, “take away my filthy garments, and give me change of raiment.” This image arises from a passage in the book of Zechariah (3:1–5) in which the high priest Joshua, “clothed in filthy garments,” stands before the angel of the Lord, alongside Satan. The Lord rebukes Satan and calls Joshua “a brand plucked out of the fire.” The angel says, “Take away the filthy garments from him.” God says to Joshua, “Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.” And “so they set a fair mitre upon his head, and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the Lord stood by.”

The same Scripture would come to mind years later when Samuel was called to speak at the May 5, 1713, inauguration of the new Town House. The old Town House was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1711. Its replacement, in which Samuel spoke, still stands today, as Boston’s Old State House. Before all the other leaders of the province, Samuel prayed “that God would take away our filthy garments, and clothe us with change of raiment.”

The rising of the new Town House from the ruins of the old reminded him of his own sin and repentance. “The former decayed building is consumed, and a better [one] built,” he said. He prayed “that our former sins may be buried in the ruins and rubbish of the
former house, and not be suffered to follow us into this.” Pointing to a framed mirror on the wall, he said, “Let this large, transparent, costly glass serve to oblige the attorneys always to set things in a true light…. Let them remember they are to advise the court as well as plead for their clients. The oaths that prescribe our duty run all upon truth; God is truth. Let Him communicate to us of His light and truth; let the jurors and witnesses swear in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness. If we thus improve this house,…the days of this people shall be as the days of a tree, and they shall long enjoy the work of their hands.” As the fire showed, “our God is a consuming fire, but it [the people] hath repented Him of the evil. And since He had declared that He takes delight in them that hope in his mercy, we firmly believe that He will be a dwelling place to us throughout all generations.”

The theme of changing raiment would reappear even later, when he thought he might be dying. In April 1724, at seventy-two, suffering from fever and a sore leg, he prayed privately, “God, may I be clothed up before unclothed.”

For a devout Puritan to adopt a traditionally Catholic tool of self-mortification seems surprising given the Puritans’ suspicion of Rome and the history of mistrust between American Protestants and Catholics. Yet scholars have found remarkable links between seventeenth-century Puritan (Reformation) and Catholic (Counter-Reformation) devotional practices. The religious historian Terence Cave called it “legitimate…to speak of a Protestant devotional tradition running parallel to the Catholic one and encouraging private prayer and meditation [with] a great deal of common ground between the two traditions.” In The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England, the scholar Charles Hambrick-Stowe concluded that “Puritans knew and used classic Catholic devotional works…. To a large extent the Puritan devotional writing that blossomed in the early seventeenth century was modeled on earlier Roman Catholic devotional literature…. Puritans did engage in devotional exercises quite similar to those of their Catholic forebears, contemporaries, and adversaries.”

In the seventeenth century, strikingly, both Puritans and Catholics looked back to the fourth-century writings of Augustine of Hippo. Hambrick-Stowe explained, “A far broader stream than the Puritan or even the Reformed movement issued from the meditations and
mystical tradition of [Augustine’s] Confessions…. Augustine had Catholic and non-Puritan Church of England heirs as well,” including the meditative poets John Donne and George Herbert. “The tradition was passed to all parties in the seventeenth century through the writings of medieval Catholic mystics, which…were increasingly available in England. Saint Teresa of Avila…acknowledged her debt to Augustine in a passage that a Puritan could easily have penned: ‘Scarcely had I begun to read the Confessions of Saint Augustine than I seemed to have discovered myself [and my] frivolous and dissipated life….’”

Just as Saint Teresa can seem Puritan, Cotton Mather can seem Catholic. He periodically fasted and denied himself sleep, like medieval mystics. He reported speaking with angels while praying. At least once the Reverend Mather imaginatively experienced the crucifixion of Christ. “There was a kind of voluptuousness in Cotton Mather’s immersion in denial, sacrifice, and finally as an old man, in martyrdom,” his biographer Robert Middlekauff wrote. He “increasingly found fulfillment in…the imitation of Christ.” Mather admonished his congregation to meditate on their own deaths, as a spiritual exercise and to avoid pride. The minister often prostrated himself to meditate, a prayer position also recommended by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a leader of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Saint Ignatius, who was born in Catholic Spain in 1491, founded the Society of Jesus, which sent Jesuit missionaries around the globe. Ignatian spirituality presumes an ongoing global combat between the forces of good led by Christ, and the forces of evil led by Satan—not unlike the Puritan worldview. Saint Ignatius’s most influential work, Spiritual Exercises, presents a system of daily prayer and meditation aimed at achieving utter devotion to God and a profound indifference to this world. Jesuits, like Puritans, spread their message through small prayer groups. Their shared goal was global spiritual reformation. At the same time that Samuel was funding the Indian Bible and “gospelizing” the native people of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Maine, Jesuits were sending prayer groups from Europe to such distant spots as Mexico in the New World and Macau on China’s southern coast.

Like the Society of Jesus, Puritanism “was from the start a devotional movement, and traditional practices such as meditation and
prayer were integral to its formation and persistence,” Charles Hambrick-Stowe wrote. “Most important was the use of the imagination and the senses in the exercise known as composition of place”—imagining oneself physically present at moments in Christ’s life—which is “the usual point of departure in Catholic meditation.” Hambrick-Stowe noted the strong influence on seventeenth-century Puritanism of Catholic methods of prayer and meditation, including Jesuit practices, Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle, and Saint Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life. “All of them, and the lesser works they generated, were part of the ‘Augustinian strain of piety’ within Puritanism…. Puritan devotion, like that practiced by Roman Catholics and by other non-Puritans in England, depended upon the use of the imagination for putting oneself into the biblical drama of redemption.”

Samuel Sewall’s repentance was thus a turning back to the Middle Ages, to the Scholastics, and to the early Christian church. In fact, even before this penitential period of his life Samuel had not looked forward. He was not a man of the Enlightenment, nor would he ever be. There is no evidence that he ever read the works of René Descartes, who died in 1650, before Samuel was born, or even the English thinkers John Locke (1632–1704), Joseph Addison (1672–1719), or Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Sewall’s apparent lack of curiosity about Newton is noteworthy because Leonard Hoar, the Harvard president who was close to Samuel’s family, was friendly with both Newton and Sir Robert Boyle, another English Enlightenment figure. As for Samuel, he displayed irritation at the burgeoning sciences. In December 1714, after Cotton Mather remarked in a sermon that “the sun is in the center of our system,” Samuel noted privately, “I think it inconvenient to assert such problems.” The historian M. Halsey Thomas wrote that the Copernican system “was well established at Harvard a decade before Sewall entered” the college. Yet Samuel looked the other way, back to the Ptolemaic, geocentric past. He chose to write and sometimes speak in Latin. So it was natural for him, after acknowledging his guilt in the witch trials, to return to the roots of his faith. As much as possible he wished to live as Christ and his early followers had lived.

True repentance consists of more than a single act, as Samuel was aware. Unlike election, which is momentary, repentance is a long
process, entailing many steps. These include contrition, confession, compensation to those wronged, and finally a change of heart.

To accomplish this complex process of repentance, Samuel threw himself with new intensity into the book of Revelation. He roamed through other texts too, including the Old Testament, books of world history, and the poems of George Herbert. He struggled to answer the questions: When will Christ reappear on the earth? Where does America fit in the drama of history? What region will Christ choose for his next coming?

The physical location of Christ’s Second Coming held special meaning for Samuel. As an English Puritan he was raised on the notion that Jesus would return to Europe, which to a European was the center of the world. Rome was thought to be a possible setting for Christ’s return. But to a Puritan Rome would show an untenable preference for the Roman Catholic Church. Some Puritan ministers proposed Jerusalem. Others mentioned France. Fifteen years earlier Cotton Mather dared to wonder if America might be “part” of the New Jerusalem. He and Samuel had discussed this, after which Samuel wrote to ask him, “Please, when you can spare the time, give me your reasons why the heart of America may not be the seat of the New Jerusalem?”

This was a subject worth pondering. On February 24, 1686, at Samuel’s neighborhood prayer group, the Reverend Willard had led a discussion of the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which describes the days immediately after the resurrection of Jesus. The apostles ask Jesus, “Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?”

Jesus replies, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after…the Holy Ghost is come upon you; and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem…and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”

Like Jesus’s apostles, Samuel and his peers still wondered, When will the Second Coming occur? As part of his repentance, Samuel spent hours probing this question in his private chamber on the second floor of his mansion. During the summer after his public acceptance of blame he began to write a long essay, which the historian
Perry Miller later called a “prose poem.” This was Sewall’s “attempt, amid a staggering array of pedantry, to calculate the place of America in the future drama of history,” Miller added. “Dedicated to deciphering the often baffling history of the Covenant of Grace, Sewall occupied his leisure with an examination of Biblical prophesies.”

While writing this work, which in published form ran to more than sixty pages of English prose punctuated by occasional Latin paragraphs, Samuel tried to place himself outside time and place, in the realm of the divine. “Not to begin to be, and so not to be limited by the concernments of time and place, is the prerogative of God alone,” he wrote. He tried to connect the past with the future. At the beginning of “New England, and Boston of the Massachusetts,…the families and churches which first ventured to follow Christ through the Atlantic ocean, into a strange land,…were so religious, their end so holy, their self-denial in pursuing of it so extraordinary, that I can’t but hope that the plantation…will not be of one or two or three centuries only, but very long lasting.”

His mind roved back to his youth in Newbury, when his “ever honored master, the late Reverend, learned, and holy Mr. Thomas Parker,” taught him that the end of the world was at hand. In the book of Revelation the pouring out of seven vials signals the apocalypse. Parker had said, “I am so far from thinking that no vial is yet poured forth, that I am apt to conclude that no less than five angels have already poured out their vials,” meaning that only two vials remained to be poured.

Fifty years later, in Boston in 1697, Parker’s former student observed that Christianity invigorated the world’s “four quarters”: Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. He considered the possibility that the New Jerusalem might be in Asia or Spanish North America. “Why may not [America] be the place of New Jerusalem?” he wondered again.