Summary: Errand into the Wilderness

By: Perry Miller

Miller begins by clarifying the terms of his title, which is taken from Samuel Danforth’s 1670 sermon A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness. The “wilderness” is part of what sets New England apart from England, and a “basic conditioning factor” of New England “was the frontier” (1). But he intends, as Danforth did, to stress the “errand” aspect of the Puritan endeavor.

There are two types of errands. The first is done in service to a superior power; “the errand boy” who follows the directions of his senior. The second type of errand is more self-conscious: “the actual business on which the actor goes, the purpose itself, the conscious intention in his mind” (3). Which type of “errand” defined the Puritan mission in New England?

Miller suggests that the initial errand had been essentially English and European, and done to “prove” the Reformation cause on uncorrupted soil. The first generation was in no way “American” nor did they see themselves as such. By the 1650s and 60s, the Puritan’s “errand” had met two barriers. First, there was in “irreconcilable split” within New England between Independent (Congregationalist) and Presbyterian visions (13). Second, the “triumph” of the Puritans in New England, following the victory of Oliver Cromwell had not, as hoped, “completed” the Reformation but had led to a policy of “Tolerance” in which “so long as a man made a good soldier in the New Model Army, it did not matter whether he was a Calvinist, an Antinomian, an Arminian, an Anabaptist or even---horror of horrors—a Socinian!” (13).

The Puritans in New England faced a crisis of identity in the last decades of the 17th century. They could no longer “report back to” their superiors in England on the progress of their errand and “they were left with the second, and required to fill it with meaning by themselves and out of themselves. Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America” (15).

Hooker and Connecticut Democracy

Miller argues against scholarship (notably Parrington) that praised Thomas Hooker and his Connecticut colony for being more fully “democratic” than Winthrop and Massachusetts, which was “theocratic.” He begins by explaining the basics of Congregationalism, which was simultaneously “monarchical” (in respect to Christ’s authority”, “aristocratic” (in respect to the elders/officers) and “democratic” (in respect to the congregation).

While scholars have argued that Hooker left MA in order to implement a more “democratic” society, Miller rejects this argument on a number of counts. Theologically, he argues that there was not a fundamental difference between Hooker and the major figures in MA (Cotton, Winthrop). Politically, he admits that CT’s Fundamental Order allow for greater representation and that Hooker’s political contentions sounds more “democratic” than MA’s (see 36-37), but both state’s political systems were based on the principles of Congregationalism. They just put different emphasis on the power balance between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The difference in emphasis can largely be explained by the geography and restrictions placed on the two colonies. While Winthrop and the MA leader were confined by their Charter, which had a preformed governmental structure, Hooker and the CT leaders drew up their Fundamental Orders after they had been organically developed. Because they were not constrained by a preformed governmental structure, they were able to implement a system that fit what “had already materialized” (38). CT then succeeded in “carrying Congregationalism into politics” (44) in a way that was different from, but not fundamentally separate from, MA. Both states built upon the same Congregationalist foundation.

The Marrow of Puritan Divinity

Miller argues that there is continuity between Calvinist theology and the federal theology of the Puritans, but that the two are far from identical. At the heart of both theologies is the belief that God is essentially unknowable. Calvin emphasized that God was not only unknowable, but that he elected the “saved” at his own will, and that his Will was also unknowable.

Calvinist theology, however, had two major failings. First, it gave no value to “works” or morality. By valuing human works, one was in danger of undermining God’s freedom (54) by claiming that human action could have an effect on God’s will to save or not save. Second, Calvinist theology did not provide any method for knowing or judging salvation; believers were left with no assurance that they were one of the elect.

English theologians in the 17th century were faced with the challenge of accounting for these problems. The Puritan “answer” relied on covenant theology. While Luther and Calvin had paid little attention to the covenant, this became the foundation for the theology of Perkins, Ames and other influential English theologians. They reasoned that while God had made a covenant of works with Adam, which required him to act in a particular way, He had reformulated the covenant with Abraham as one based on faith. Abraham, unlike Adam, was required only to believe. Furthermore, by agreeing to sign a “contract” with Abraham, God was essentially voluntarily limiting himself, making Himself comprehensible to Abraham.

Preston, Ames, Shepard and others reasoned that this act of self-limitation proved the “kindly” character of the divine (64-65). The covenant also allowed man to be assured of God’s salvation, as long as he lived up to his own part of the bargain. Men were required only to believe.

The question was then how to live up to covenant. The Puritan theologians argued for a moral component to covenant theology. In their reincorporation of morality, Puritans “redefined, or rather redescribed, the nature of grace itself” (79). Grace, given by God to the elect and resulting in the ability to truly believe—to have faith—was conceived as “reason elevated” (79). Grace could then be seen as simultaneous with the beginning of a moral life, and beginning a moral life could even be seen as justification, even if there had been no “inward experience of regeneration” (83). Federal theology, then, linked grace with morality and then presented ministry and the sacraments as the means to both experiences.

In New England, covenant theology formed the basis of both church and state. Winthrop declared that in creating a state and constitution, men made a covenant with other men. The Congregational church, meanwhile, was a gathering of saints who made a pact to “carry out in ecclesiastical life the obligations to which they stand individually bound by their covenant with God” (91).

Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia

The story of the founding of Virginia is not, as most historians have assumed, governed only by economic motives, but must be understood first and foremost in religious—specifically “low” Protestant—terms. The literature of Virginia in the first quarter of the 17th century reveals that the first settlers conceived of Virginia not as a “mercantile investment” but as a “medieval pilgrimage” (101). This may not correlate with what actually happened, but Miller argues that “history is oftem more instructive as it considers what men conceived they were doing rather than what, in brute fact, they did” (101).

The religiosity of the Virginia endeavor is revealed through a variety of aspects within the colony’s early literature. First, Englishmen were motivated by their desire to carry the Gospel to foreign lands and convert Indians (101-103). Discussion of conversion was not merely propaganda and disillusioned modern historians should not interpret it as such, just because of their knowledge of the last three centuries. Second, the Virginians organized their society as a Christian one and religious observance was not mere ritual (104). “Society, economics and the will of God were one and the same, and the ultimate authority in human relations was the ethic of Christendom” (105).

The type of Protestantism that governed the worldviews of the first Virginians was of the “Puritan” or “low-church” variety. The colonists viewed their world as one governed by Providence—the exertion a mysterious God’s Will in the world—and the colonizing of Virginia was itself an act of Providence (109-111). The economic incentive of Virginia was only secondary to the New World’s role as the “scene of the next great act in the history of redemption” (115), in which the Englishmen were reintroducing Christianity to the “fallen race” of the Indians who had been cursed after Babel (116-117). Commerce was thus the incentive devised by God to endeavor the Christian English to rediscover the heathen race of Indians. “Christians automatically carry the Gospel with them, and when mankind has been once more united by the merchants, it can be made one in profession by the preachers” (117). Covenant theology also gave meaning to the early Virginians suffering, in that they saw themselves as the chosen people, tested by God (120).

Miller critiques the historiography of Virginia’s founding as being interpreted as a democratic forerunner of the Revolutionary times (Alexander Brown, 19th c.) or as a purely commercial endeavor (Craven, mid 20th c.). Virginia was conceived of and enacted by Englishmen whose world was governed by a Christian cosmology. Their “political doctrine was founded on the premise of original sin” (129), in that government is necessary because man is innately sinful, and the mission of government was not only negative (to “restrain the evil passions and the rapacity of men” (129)) but also positive (to “maintain religion, to force observance of divine services, to compel support of the true church, and to suppress heresy and schism by the sword” (129)). Protestant political philosophy valued an authoritarian state, not a democratic one, and the seeming democracy of the VA Company was tactical rather than ideological (136).

It was, in fact, the dissolution of the VA Company and the massacre of 1622 that “overthrew the entire ideological rationalization” of Virginia and “the glorious mission of Virginia came down to growing a weed,” tobacco (138). The disillusionment was one of a series of historical developments that led to the abandonment of the predominant Protestant cosmology and led to the development of the “rights of man” as the foundation for government.

The Puritan State and Puritan Society

Not until the end of the 17th century was it even conceptually possible for state and church to be separate. While the 18th century was characterized by “the triumph of scientific method and of rationalism,” “the unity of religion and politics was so axiomatic” in the 17th that “very few men would even have grasped the idea that church and state could be distinct” (142). The Puritan theory of state was based on original sin and government was seen as necessary to keep order among sinful men. The Puritan “frontier” in the Americas was not “individualistic” or solitary, but fully social (143) and the state took and active role in individuals’ lives. There was “no idea of the equality of all men” and Puritan colonies were dictatorships of the holy (144). There was no idea of toleration (145) because “the whole Puritan philosophy of church and state rested upon the assumption that the Word of God was clear and explicit, that the divines had interpreted it correctly, and that no one who was not either a knave or a fool could deny their demonstrations” (145).

Miller refutes the idea that Roger Williams envisioned a church-state split in a modern-day conception. Rather, “he wanted to separate church and state so that the church would not be contaminated by the state.” This is in contrast to Thomas Jefferson, who “loved the world and was dubious about the spirit, and he sought to separate church and state so that the state would not be contaminated by the church” (146).


In New England, the “fundamental law was the Bible” (147) and the government, like the church, was based on covenant theology (148). By joining in covenant, “citizens renounce all natural liberty” (149), meaning anything they would “lust after,” and “retain only the freedom that ‘is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority’” (149). In other words, though the ministers of the church and the commissioners of the government were “chosen” by “the people,” these “people” were already subject to God’s authority, people who had entered into a covenant. Thus the Puritan state was a theocracy set up by the regenerate.

There were problems with this system: first, not all people were Godly, so suffrage was limited to church members. As time went on, however, “religious inspiration waned” and eventually, the meaning of the covenant with God lost its meaning and individuals were left with the power to elect their own magistrates and a nascent conception of “individual rights” (151). By 1750, there “ceased to survive even the faintest memory o an era when the social contract had incorporated absolute subjection to the ontological realities of the good, just, and honest—those anterior verities which existed from eternity, long before any people anywhere were gathered into societies and which no mere convention of the citizens could alter or redefine” (152).

Nature and the National Ego

In “Nature and the National Ego,” Perry Miller argues that the American mind—represented by Winthrop no less than Emerson (and thus forging a continuity between the Puritan mind and American romanticism)—has been shaped by an essentially “American” reality: the wilderness. The wilderness is, as described by Miller, the American version of Nature, and fundamentally different from Europe’s “Nature,” which is “artificial” (212). America is “Nature’s Nation,” a “ubiquitous” fact in early nineteenth century American literature that imbues the young country with a fledgling sense of identity. (210)

The development of “Civilization” in America challenges the domain of Nature, a concern that becomes more pronounced throughout first half of the nineteenth century, during which time America “become[s] a civilization.” (214). The roots of this concern, however, reach back to the unique religious concerns of the Puritans. (207) By the mid-nineteenth century, Miller sees the “irreconcilable opposition between Nature and civilization” (208) throughout the nation, even when “elaborately masked, so concertedly disguised, that one may study the epoch for a long time without detecting it.” (214) The opposition of civilization and Nature is the “secret heart” (214) of America, defining the formation of the American mind.

The development of the “Nature-civilization” dichotomy occurs simultaneously with romanticism, a fact that suggests, for Miller, a “deeper conjunction.” (216) Miller traces the American Protestant hostility toward utilitarianism and connects American Protestantism, as descended from Puritanism, with American romanticism, based on their unified dislike for the “sordid philosophy” of the Utilitarians and their unified “veneration of Nature.” (208-9)


One of Miller’s fundamental methodological assertions is that the history of ideas and concepts is essential to any study of American character. He argues against an overemphasis on “physical impositions of geography and the means of transport” (210) suggesting instead that “if there be such a thing as an American character, it took shape under the molding influence of [the] conceptions [of Nature and civilization].” (210) He criticizes social historians, who “do not pay much attention” (210) to the ubiquity of this theme throughout the early nineteenth century because they are “preoccupied with the massive expansion and the sectional tensions.” (210) Studying behavior, Miller contends, cannot tell us about “how the people apprehended their conduct.” (210) Miller’s method of ascertaining “apprehension” centers upon literary figures like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, as well as literary critics and journalists (he cites authors The New York Evening Mirror, The Knickerbocker Magazine, and The Literary World).