Piety Rationalized:  

Notes on Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Ramist Logic of Method 

 
Douglas McKnight 

University of Alabama 

  

All the Learning that many have, serves only as a bag of Gold about a Drowning Man; it sinks them the 

deeper into the scalding Floods of the Lake that burns with fiery Brimstone: But the Knowledge of the 

Lord Jesus Christ is a saving thing. 

(Cotton Mather, 1690) 

 

  

Abstract 

Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather, two 

of the most significant Colonial New England 

intellects and ministers, began to develop an 

educational theory that aligned the intellect, the 

powers of rationality and natural world secular 

disciplines, with the emotional experience of 

evangelical tradition. Simply, they sought a union 

of the head and the heart. This was not an easy 

union. They understood the need for a pedagogical 

means to help the congregation seek the most 

important experience of the head and the heart, 

conversion, and a life of visible sainthood, also 

known as piety. They found such a method in 

Ramist Maps, which provided a step-by-step 

technique for revealing how to live a Godly life and 

how to achieve piety, which involved behaviors 

one contemplated and practiced before the actual 

conversion, then transforms into visible sainthood 

and a model for all would-be elect to observe.  

Simply, whereas one worked on being pious before 

conversion, one became pious after the experience.  

 

 

In colonial New England during the early-

to-mid 1700s, Jonathan Edwards and Cotton 

Mather, important members of an expanding group 

of American intellectual ministers, departed upon 

an “evangelical” expedition in educational theory 

that disclosed a distinct alignment of intellect and 

emotional experience -- a union of head and heart 

(Cremins, 1970). This theological and secular 

betrothal birthed tensions and ambiguities 

necessary to navigate for any hope of a reasoned 

conversion dependent upon piety and a renewed 

fervor for the divine path to knowledge. This was a 

difficult passage. Both men recognized a tacit need 

for the right tools of interpretation and the right 

map giving order to the journey and a sense of 

certainty to help quiet the anxiety of whether one 

was truly chosen or not. The New England Puritans 

found such a technique and practice in 16th Century 

pedagogical schematics known as Ramist Maps, 

the invention of a Puritan favorite schoolmaster 

and eventual martyr of the Protestant cause, Petrus 

Ramus (1515-1572).  

The Ramist Maps endorsed step-by-step, 

general-to-specific representations that “logically” 

guided one through what was considered 

providential and secular knowledge of the day. In 

effect, the maps and corresponding methods were 

more than merely means for the categorization of 

knowledge, but a system for illuminating the 

maxims of a godly life. In fact, signposts dotted the 

map an ever-building stream to be circumnavigated 

and ruminated upon then delivered by minsters 

and/or schoolmasters as they guided the 

congregation to the map’s final point of arrival -- 

piety, a type of behavior one contemplates and 

practices before the actual conversion, then 

transforms into visible sainthood and a model for 

all would-be elect to observe.  For Mather and 

Edwards, piety was to absorb all of life, not only in 

themselves but in their congregation. A pietistic 

minister saw himself as a failure if he (sic) found 

salvation, but his flock foundered. Mather and 

Edwards both wrote jeremiads exhorting church 

members to open their hearts and minds to the 



29 

 

  

emotional conversion experience by following the 

right path to possible salvation and a new kind of 

pious state of existence. Simply, whereas one 

worked on being pious before conversion, one 

became pious after the experience.  

Toward that end, Mather’s intellectual 

labor extended to developing pietistic traits within 

minister training at Harvard, along with a life-long 

correspondence with European philosophers and 

theologians operating under an umbrella of 

Pietism, which ultimately linked “the psychology 

of religious experience with the psychology of 

learning,” thus making “the educative process” 

(Cremins, 1970, p. 291) analogous to the 

conversion process and subsequent life of piety. 

Edwards agreed with and followed Mather’s 

intellectual efforts on this conceptual wedding. 

However, Mather did not deliver this pietistic 

conversion framework ex nihilo. Mather’s ideas 

fermented through lifelong correspondence with 

August Francke and his pietist followers at the 

University of Halle. Mather also cooperated both 

directly and through his English associates at the 

Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 

(SPCK). An international network collaborated in 

what they hoped would be a second Protestant 

Reformation that refashioned the soul to facilitate 

the kingdom of peace and piety under the reign of 

Christ as promised in Biblical prophecy. With his 

pen, building upon the edifice of John Winthrop’s 

famous sermon, A model of Christian charity 

(1630), Mather laid out the colonial Puritans 

purpose and responsibilities in the New World. 

New England was to regain the Biblical prophecy 

of their New World home as Winthrop’s “City 

upon a hill,” whose congregations full of visible 

saints would shine a light to all other protestant 

enclaves and compel them to join the colonials in 

bringing about the end of time. Later American 

thinkers failed to appreciate and give enough 

weight to just how powerful of an impulse toward 

such grandiose beliefs and expectations was, nor 

how these impulses would persevere after long 

after the disappearance of Puritanism proper. Even 

though the theological language that explained and 

demonstrated these impulses became hidden, 

institution after institution continued to carry them 

along in different guises. In fact, education, 

beginning with the family and extending to church 

and school sustained these desires without ever 

actually employing the Puritan language. Simply, 

the compulsions were embedded in all the rituals 

and practices of schooling and education in 

general.   

However, 19th and 20th Century educational 

historians tended to dismiss any real impact of the 

colonial Puritan theological narratives on 

education and schooling. Colonial Puritans were 

painted as disconnected artifacts not relevant to 

later ideologies of the Fathers of the Revolution 

(e.g., Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster) and the 

political framework of the common school in mid 

-to- late 1800s. The overall assumption was that 

colonial Puritans served as a quaint if not odd and 

curious collection of congregationalist whose 

worship of a providential plan, framed within the 

“errand into the wilderness” and “city upon a hill” 

narratives, foretold a national rhetorical inclination 

toward political rhetoric and lofty nationalism, 

such as the concepts of American exceptionalism 

and “Manifest Destiny.” However, while the New 

England Puritans dispersed into enclaves that 

eventually stretched and broadened out and lost 

much of its geographical coherence, the same 

could not be said for their cultural and intellectual 

beliefs, pedagogies, and institutional frameworks. 

These assemblages endure but go unspoken in 

current educational thought. The Puritans were the 

first to provide a European imprint on the 

imagination of what it meant to be an “American.” 

As Miller (1953) wrote, “The first Puritans did 

indeed succeed in impressing upon the tabula rasa 

of America a European and Protestant seal. With 

their articulated sciences of theology, psychology, 

logic, and rhetoric, they possessed coherent 

answers to all conceivable contingencies” (p. 14). 

Simply, their ideology of theological and secular 

impulses still directs the national consciousness 

and narratives about the aims and methods of 

schooling even as the rhetoric has shifted from 

theological to Capitalistic metaphors. The colonial 

Puritan footprint goes beyond that. They were the 



30 

 

  

first intellectuals to spread their gospel of secular 

and spiritual mission, the first to provide a national 

literature, local and national histories (Nash, 2009) 

and theological narratives with an accompanying 

social ethics (Bercovitch, 1975, 1993) the creators 

of spiritual autobiographies, public testimonials 

and the act of witnessing so important in Protestant 

culture (Hall, 2004), not to mention the first to 

develop conceptions of science in relation to God’s 

material world. For all forms of secular scholarship 

attempting to understand the world was just 

another means by which to access God presence in 

the world, another means to serve the spiritual. In 

the material world were clues to be accessed and 

interpreted as part of the conversion and piety 

journey. Only would the Divine plan come to 

fruition if all learning aims pointed toward the 

pious life and finally, if all the Elect are truly 

converted, the end of life all together as foretold by 

Biblical prophecy.  

For the Puritans that involved eschatology, 

which was both a burden and an inspiration about 

which the Pietist especially obsessed. Annihilation 

of the world was both end and beginning. Only 

through destruction, made so vivid to the Puritan 

by the medieval paintings of God's horrific final act 

of justice, would regeneration of the spirit occur 

(Miller, 1953, 1957).  

All these New England products converged 

and led to the origination of the first higher 

educational institutions, primarily Harvard and 

Yale. These foundational initiatives still speak 

through the inherited forms of their modern 

descendants. Indeed, the Puritans were particularly 

situated to embody and carry out these changing 

social, scientific, intellectual, educational, and 

theological lines of flight. Giving such thought its 

significant spiritual qualities was the profound 

principal of piety, which for fervent New England 

Pietist such as Mather and Edwards, was God’s 

ecstatic gift for a congregation to renew and sustain 

the evangelical roots.   

 

Puritan Piety and Ramism 

Pietism was a 17th and 18th century 

religious movement—often recognized in histories 

of the Great Awakening of 1740—that stressed 

individual Bible study, spiritual experience, 

religious fervor, and the daily impact of jeremiads 

upon the ears and the souls of a congregation that 

gathered its weekly practical religious charges 

from the mouths of ministers. Pietism demanded 

that the individual engage in an “errand into the 

wilderness” (Miller, 1957), an interior and exterior 

passage of suffering and possible grace and 

salvation, or at least a chance to craft some Godly 

order out of the overgrowth of sin. As Cremin 

(1970) explains, during the early-to-mid 1700s 

Mather and Edwards amplified this message with 

the creation of a “rational piety,” combining 

secular knowledge with a practical theology 

propelled forward by a passionate, emotive 

condition of being. Together, the head and the 

heart, along with the minister’s instruction, would 

steer the congregation along the flight God 

intended for a pious life and away from a state of 

malaise and declension. 

Edwards claimed a state of acceptance and 

purely reasoned existence had curtailed most 

congregations. Edwards bemoaned the loss of the 

“errand into the wilderness” and the emotive 

passion crucial to pursue and banish evil and its 

conterminous suffering. However, Edwards shared 

a commonplace Puritan dilemma -- doing right in a 

world that does wrong so that the end may arrive, 

and the spirit be rejuvenated (Miller, 1953, 1957). 

Through his words, Edwards painted horrific 

images of what a life without passion and emotion 

would become unless the congregation burned 

away their sin and allowed a revival spirit to 

emerge from the ashes. In Sinners in the Hands of 

an Angry God (Edwards, 1740), a jeremiad written 

during the time of the Great Awakening and at the 

height of his call for preparation and conversion to 

beat back declension and overt rationality, 

Edwards tackled the threat of back sliding and the 

evil that awaited. If the congregation waited too 

long, they would experience a physical and 

spiritual devastation that no rational solution could 

either ignore or arrest. Life was on a razor edge, 

with the fear of failure generating as much emotion 

as experiencing God’s presence. Edwards began 



31 

 

  

his most famous jeremiad on the inevitability and 

hopelessness of backsliding in true Ramist fashion 

-- setting up the general theme, then breaking it 

down into its constituent parts, each leading to the 

necessity but improbability of piety through God’s 

grace: 

 

The expression I have chosen from my text, 

Their foot shall slide in due time, seems to 

imply the following things . . .. 1. That they 

were always exposed to destruction; as one 

that stands or walks in slippery places is 

always exposed to fall . . .. 2. It implies, that 

they were always exposed to sudden 

unexpected destruction. As he that walks in 

slippery places is every moment liable to 

fall . . .. There is no want of power in God 

to cast wicked men into hell at any moment.  

(Edwards, 1740, pp. 65-66) 

 

But all was not lost. If one prepared 

enough, studied enough, prayed enough, acted 

righteously enough, and opened the spirit up for 

emotional exploit by God, the individual (and so 

the whole congregation) yet might be saved. This 

spiritual and intellectual exertion was employed for 

one purpose and desire – conversion. In fact, for 

Mather and Edwards, true Christianity started with 

the moment of conversion, the acceptance of God’s 

permeating presence, and how this profound 

experience must stir all thought and conduct. A 

reader concerned with piety was to become 

intimate with Scriptural knowledge and 

appreciative of God’s Creation and our place 

within it, for only then could one begin to perceive 

correctly divine knowledge. When a young Puritan 

began the process of accessing the theological and 

natural world (secular knowledge), the possibility 

of conversion came one step closer. And 

conversion meant guaranteed salvation and a life of 

piety that made salvation visible. In other words, 

chosen status (elect) was revealed through these 

rituals of contemplation of and acting with piety. 

Or not. There were no guarantees. Yet God charged 

the minister and the minister pleaded with and 

threatened the congregation to accept this state of 

uncertainty as necessary. It was divine mystery. It 

was also a mystery for mankind to understand and 

embrace. And only with all the intellectual and 

emotional efforts going into pre-conversion, the 

conversion, then living a life a piety, did one begin 

to understand.  

The significance of this experience was tied 

to the Puritan (as good Calvinists) belief in 

predestination, which generated a persistent 

anxiety as one struggled to engage in a true 

conversion experience. One was never quite sure 

even after the conversion experience. The 

intellectual and emotive vigilance was a way of 

indicating that the individual was truly a member 

of the elect. Thoughts were nothing without 

poignant feelings, and feelings were but fleeting 

impulses without rational order and 

correspondence to the natural world. As such, the 

colonial Puritans were literate people raised in the 

educational movements toward “rational” thought 

taking place in Europe during the Reformation, 

conversion was believed to occur through an 

interaction of faith and Reason. As point out above, 

one had to prepare through study and prayer, which 

would result in exacting moral behavior of piety. 

The elect’s actions were to demonstrate visible 

sainthood, especially due to the uncertainty 

(McKnight, 2004). This uncertainty of salvation, 

given their schooling, led to the creation of 

instructional methods developed by the 16th 

Century pedagogue, Peter Ramus. Leading from 

general to specific, his method for classifying and 

presenting knowledge provided an easy and 

efficient step-by-step process for all learning. As 

Mages (1999) explains, “Employing this Ramean 

method, one first identified the concept to be 

investigated then divided it into halves, halved 

these again in turn, and so on until all the 

components were established. Once all the reasons 

or concepts were laid out, then an individual could 

start combining them to form arguments” (p. 97). 

Essentially, Ramus developed techniques, or 

better, the technology of standardization to 

administer and transmit knowledge effectively to a 

great mass of people. It was tailored for the Puritan 

world view, which sought eclectic truths that felt 



32 

 

  

right and supported their faith.  According to 

Morrison (1936) Ramism was the first system 

taught to students attending grammar schools and 

then Harvard, and its method of diagramming 

concepts became highly popular with educators 

throughout New England (Ong 1958; Miller 1953; 

Morison 1936; Hamilton 1990). It provided neat 

dichotomies of wisdom, “branching out like a 

family tree, and on which the student could 

conveniently hang all the knowledge that he 

acquired from either books or lecture” (Morison 

1936, 155). As president of Harvard “Mather’s 

Father [Increase] had been a devotee of the 

Ramean logic” and his own “copy of Ramus was 

heavily glossed” (Woody, 1969, p. 11).  

Ramus’ appeal to the pietistic Puritans of 

colonial New England flowed from its practical 

power (Miller 1953; Ong 1958, 1956; Morgan 

1986). Morgan (1986) identifies its utilitarian 

value for different audiences, both high and low.  

 

First, those who were learned but who had 

not yet been converted could be brought to 

an “external’ (or preparationist) 

appreciation of the procedures of 

Christianity; secondly, for those whom 

faith had already made regenerate, the 

structures of reason, familiar from secular 

existence, could be shown to be compatible 

with the truths of revelation.  While 

Ramism did not overwhelm its opposition 

in the [English] universities … it became 

extremely popular among those who sought 

to explain their knowledge to a wider 

audience. These included Puritan preachers 

and schoolmasters. (p. 112) 

 

The Ramus method was not just for the 

schoolroom, but also applied by clergy, most 

notably within jeremiadic works, such as Edward’s 

famous 1741 “Sinners in the hands of an Angry 

God,” which sought to spark fear and trembling 

within the congregation, and to reveal and reject 

any notion that they could achieve their fate 

without God’s grace and salvation. God had to call 

them. And they had to learn how to hear it. In 

contrast to Aristotle, Ramus’ logic complemented 

this instructional goal. As Miller (1953) explains 

  

Ramus held that logic was derived from 

experience by ‘invention.’ Therefore, logic 

had to remain faithful to reality [nature]: it 

could not create fanciful constructions, but 

only make replicas of that pattern of ideas 

embodied in creation. If God so desired, He 

could call His saints by an audible voice, or 

by investing them with a halo visible to the 

naked eye. Instead, He had chosen to deal 

with them as with rational creatures. …He 

has provided that the Word should come to 

men’s ears externally and sensibly. (pp. 74-

75) 

 

The system of mapping knowledge served to 

structure life. As William Doll (1997) notes, “there 

was an affinity between the discipline, order, and 

control Calvin [Puritans were strict Calvinists] felt 

all Christians should bring to their lives and that 

which Ramus brought to pedagogy” (p. 11). 

Thanks to Ramus’ instructional turn knowledge 

gained a new utility within the modern world its 

utility was key. Indeed, for Ong (1971) “there is an 

obvious relationship between this mentality and the 

mentality of a commercial, merchandising world, 

where good had to be thought of in terms of 

operations with a view to possible users or 

consumers” (p. 171). Ramism combined naming, 

ordering, analyzing, and storing for quick 

reference; it explained experiences, brought 

control, and charted a linear flight toward a desired 

end. Edwards, fortified with the Ramist methods he 

learned at Harvard, implied that the pious life could 

not be sustained purely on emotion. Individuals 

also needed a sense of meaning and order. As a 

master teacher (a term often used for the head 

minister of the congregation) he thus sought to 

unite fear of God with the explanation of the 

rational pathway to salvation.  



33 

 

  

 

Figure 1 Ramus Map of Charity from William 

Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642) 

which Edwards and Mather would have read at 

Harvard. 

This Ramean pedagogical desire generated 

the cultural muscle needed to sustain an early 

national narrative constructed by the colonial 

Puritans that coupled their religious, symbolic 

typology and their literal historical situation as 

settlers in a “New World.” This symbolic narrative 

configured the “New World” as a “city upon a hill” 

throwing light onto the rest of the world.  This 

“light” was one element in the symbology of the 

broader “errand into the wilderness” (Bercovitch, 

1975, 1978; 1993; Miller, 1957). The errand was 

constituted by the colonial Puritan’s Godly 

ordained mission in the “New World” to shape and 

order the primitive “American” wilderness. This 

errand could not occur happenstance. It needed a 

means. Hence, order and God’s will could be 

achieved only by applying a spiritual, yet earthly 

bound map, constructed with the techniques 

revealed and mastered through the observations 

and study of God’s world – both internal and 

external (Bercovitch, 1975, 1993; McKnight 2003; 

Miller, 1957). 

 

Pedagogy of the Exterior and the Interior 

True to the spirit of Christian philosophy, 

Ramus methods offered a powerful and efficient 

means to instill and guide piety across the colony. 

That is, the Ramist technology, understood as the 

ordering and administering of knowledge to reflect 

the Divine form of thought, was perceived as the 

key pedagogic instrument to help the individual 

find salvation and play their part in God’s plan. 

Miller identifies this impulse toward technique, the 

technology of method, that allowed a minister, 

teacher, student, church member and, finally, any 

literate Puritan to “break down” in a linear general-

to-specific map imprinted with what constituted 

knowledge in both Bible and textbook. This map 

contained only the simplest and plainest of words 

expressing accepted translations so that anyone 

could easily grasp, organize, manage, and recall the 

information imprinted upon it. Importantly, it was 

this ease of managing knowledge that enabled the 

individual to analyze and seriously engage with the 

meaning of the content.  This was key to a Godly 

learning that helped students comprehend God’s 

plan and voluntarily embrace their religious and 

social duties.  In sum, it provided a technique by 

which to map out and explicate the path to spiritual 

conversion and a life of ethical action.  God could 

be located and listened to not only by way of 

objective study of natural world, but through 

objective and reasoned observation and study of 

the interiority of mankind as well. The inner world, 

just as much a wilderness to be made over as the 

landscape of “America,” was considered an object 

to be analyzed, reflected upon, and made anew. To 

make over one’s inner world and outer world was 

an effort to make oneself and one’s surroundings 

coincide with the God’s intention, the ultimate in 

pietistic hopes.  

 For the Puritans Ramus’s visual branching 

maps served not only to facilitate the study of 

God’s Creation, but also as a tool to by which to 

interrogate the interior landscape of the soul (e.g., 

see above Ramus map of Charity), a part of the 

“errand into the wilderness” narrative framework. 

They objectified divine norms capturing the 

guiding light of Christ’s (sola fide) example; a 

mirror by which the individual could quantify their 

sinfulness. In this way, the inherent dialectic of 

God’s material world and spiritual plan was 



34 

 

  

revealed, providing a pedagogy of religious 

education that would teach the straight and narrow 

path of Christian piety—as evident in the 

jeremiadic tradition still in use today (Bercovitch, 

1975; McKnight 2004). The sense was that even if 

one was not truly saved, at least they could follow 

the path along with the elect and give the 

impression of piety and salvation.   

Ramist methodology enabled the 

schoolmaster and minister to “break down” 

knowledge in both the Bible and the textbook and 

convey it in a clear and distinct manner readily 

understandable. Given the corruption of the 

faculties caused by the Fall, knowledge did not 

come through pure intuition, it had to be built 

through the careful guidance of Christian reason. 

The wisdom inherent in the order of things radiated 

“to the brain through the perceiving senses, as is 

the smell of flowers through the nostrils” (Miller 

1953, p. 428).  Ramist logic, Miller explains was 

derived from experience by ‘invention.’ Therefore, 

“logic had to remain faithful to reality: it could not 

create fanciful constructions, but only make 

replicas of that pattern of ideas embodied in 

creation. If God so desired, He could call His saints 

by an audible voice, or by investing them with a 

halo visible to the naked eye. Instead, He had 

chosen to deal with them as with rational creatures. 

…He has provided that the Word should come to 

men’s ears externally and sensibly” (Miller 1953, 

pp.74-75). The danger came with the human 

imagination, which had to be constrained to 

spiritual revelation and manifested within the 

experience of emotions. Ramist dialectic provided 

a logical form to the subject content which 

facilitated comprehension and easy 

communication to the learner.  Indeed, over time, 

according to Miller (1953, 1957) the Puritans 

shifted in their understanding of reason from the 

act of interpreting text of perceptions to the clear 

apprehension of a given, self-evident truth as 

presented in the Ramus map. Plain style required 

the pedagogical expediency of simplifying, 

ordering, and transmitting ideas in order that the 

learner could understand self-evident truths 

through the light of reason granted by God.  Human 

reason led to vice and error, Christian wisdom to 

the pious life. 

For the New England Puritans, the capacity 

to read and understand the Bible was a beginning 

burden of every citizen, making basic, primary 

schooling in reading a must, though the reading of 

the Bible began even earlier, a healthy habit of the 

family, a sacrament carried into every part of daily 

life, including work and church. Every individual 

had to read the Bible and other devotional texts for 

themselves – with the correct guidance of Ramus 

methods and ministerial jeremiads -- to determine 

the meaning of God’s plan. They also had to master 

sufficient secular learning to support their 

vocational duties and appreciate the splendor of 

God’s creation (Bercovitch, 1993; Miller, 1957; 

Morgan, 1986). Accordingly, the Puritans were not 

isolated from the general shifts taking place in 

Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries, as the 

quest for useful knowledge (Reinhold, 1975) 

became more and more of a consideration in the 

daily lives of individuals. Perhaps the broadest 

statement one can make concerning this era, was 

the pursuit for efficient techniques to organize and 

apply to all areas of life (Ong, 1958, 1971). For the 

Puritans this charge wedded theological and 

secular impulses into an ethos that entertained no 

conflict between religious and worldly education 

(Greaves, 1969; Merton, 1938; Morgan, 1986). 

This utopian scheme—the vision of a 

Godly community of Christian service—could 

only be achieved by overcoming evils and errors 

that flowed from Mankind’s sinful nature. It 

demanded a spiritual rebirth brought about by the 

profound experience of religious conversion. As 

introduced above, only then could the mind be 

freed from selfish passions and deceits of human 

reason. First and foremost, therefore, the Puritans 

looked to the preparation of the soul, an interior 

labor that found its logic and narrative through the 

concept of errand. This began with a recognition 

that the fall of Adam rendered all lost without God. 

To reclaim their original identity, men and women 

had to analyze and transform within. Like the 

wilderness without, the soul was overgrown and 

disordered. An interior turn was needed to cultivate 



35 

 

  

reason and restore the innate powers granted by 

God so that the individual could see, embrace, and 

mirror the truths revealed in the example of Christ. 

During the inward interrogation, evil was not 

something to turn away from, but to confront and 

root out. In fact, due to the Fall, 

  

the notion of evil served as a prime 

motivation in this struggle to succeed. All 

things, the Puritans believed, were 

naturally depraved and as such needed a 

purifying will to impose goodness upon 

them. Simply, evil became the object of 

purification. Evil became the lowly matter 

by which the Puritan will would mold 

goodness. Evil was not to be ignored, 

eschewed, or even feared. It was 

opportunity. It was a means by which to 

focus the tendency to identify and struggle 

with moral dilemmas. Each dilemma was 

an occasion for the individual to impose 

upon the world a form, a moral structure, 

carved out of the symbolic narrative of the 

“errand into the wilderness.” 

 (McKnight, 2004, p. 44) 

 

Simply, the soul’s original identity vanished, along 

with Paradise. Meaning and reality was no longer 

transparent, the harmonious order of God’s 

creation had become a thicket of confusion. A 

method was needed to reform this interior 

wilderness. Simply, to have any chance of 

achieving a return to the Garden, the individual 

required a lens, a language by which to 

comprehend God’s reality.  

Central to this paradigm, therefore, was the 

assumption that not only could one locate God in 

the external world through the objective study of 

nature, but He was also to be found in the inner life 

of the soul (Greaves, 1969). Certainly, a significant 

portion of the “errand into the wilderness” journey 

was that the interior world was as much confused 

and overgrown as the New World, literally an 

unknown forest waiting to be given form and order 

so that a “city upon a hill” could arise – or so they 

believed.  Just as cutting down forest and building 

“civilization” was an arduous task, so was it 

important to recognize that finding God was a 

demanding and profound experience that—given 

our corrupt nature—did not come easily. 

Conversion without “soul searching” was no 

conversion at all. Moreover, emotional outbursts 

that lacked the means or technique to understand 

and sustain rebirth was useless.  As such, the results 

of the conversion experience would always be 

suspect. One had to be born to Christ every day. 

Careful preparation, which involved confessional 

writings, fervent acknowledgment of failures and 

humble notices of success, spiritual 

autobiographies, study of the minister’s Ramist 

map sermons from the day before, and so forth, all 

were necessary to toil through a sinful nature so 

that when conversion did occur, the extent of its 

truth would be revealed and acknowledged. 

Importantly, they also had to know how to 

methodize and sustain it. Aligned with their 

German brethren, Mather and Edwards understood 

that emotion was the prime mover of any 

individual called by God, but reason was also 

necessary to channel this energy into a productive, 

practical faith. It is important to remember that the 

end game was nothing less than salvation. The 

curriculum thus went far beyond the mastery of 

scholarly learning to encompass Christian 

knowledge about the proper order of individual, 

family, church, and community life. Hence, piety 

was possible only once order was established. 

 

The Pedagogy of Conversion 

Pietism can also be read as a rebuke to the 

intellectualism and dogmatics of orthodox 

theology, in favor of the centrality of spiritual 

experience. Edwards offers the most striking 

example of the vitality of the imperative. Religious 

faith demanded more than knowledge of the Bible 

it required the correct emotional response 

(Marsden, 2003). But he was far from discounting 

the positive and necessary role of reason, he 

demanded members of his congregation keep a 

diary—a spiritual autobiography—reflecting the 

trials and tribulations of the inner life and struggles. 

Only through such organized and methodical 



36 

 

  

examination could the emotional fervor of 

conversion be rationally cultivated and sustained. 

Being “born again” was both a cognitive and an 

affective task. To this end, Edwards penned and 

presented jeremiads, such as “Sinners in the hands 

of an angry God” as Ramist maps (represented as 

short notes to memorize and follow the step-by-

step instructions toward conversion) that identified 

the dangers lurking in the dark wake and 

threatening the individual’s relation to the 

congregation.  Such sermons revealed a method of 

revelation of God’s light, burning and cleansing the 

spiritual and material weeds lodged deep in both 

the interior and exterior existence (Ong, 1958; 

Miller, 1957). 

Edwards harangued those in his 

congregation to hear and speak and experience the 

powerful light of God’s knowledge, insisting that 

all possible forms of experience must be attended 

to by way of the senses, the emotions, and the 

intellect, the faculties of reason. The soul had to be 

stirred through the full and broad engagement of 

both the mind and the emotions. This method, as 

Marsden point, had been honed under the influence 

of his father, Timothy Edwards. Jonathan was 

required to report vigorously on his spiritual 

progress; his first fervent moments of faith and the 

litany of personal failures that inevitably followed. 

“First was ‘conviction’ or ‘an awakening of a 

person’s sad estate with reference to eternity” 

(Marsden, 2003, p. 27). After the initial explosion 

of powerful emotions, an inevitable relapsing 

would commence, making real to all in the 

congregation just how helpless one was without 

God’s grace. As laid out above, the only way to 

temper the relapsing narrative and prevent its 

consummation of the soul was to spend all waking 

hours working through an extensive spiritual 

chronicling. The form of prose was a humble 

recounting of triumph, but more importantly, it was 

often a melodramatic account of the tiniest 

disappointments.  Each failure, no matter how 

small, served as a warning of what will happen 

when, not if, one falls asleep to God’s purpose. 

Such writing was nothing less than a necessary 

preparation toward awakening to the difficulty of 

conversion as well as staying on the path of piety. 

True conversion occurred through this 

writing and reporting because the narrative 

becomes one of humiliation leading to humility. 

“Potential converts not only had to recognize their 

guilt deserving eternal flame but be truly humbled 

by a total sense of their unworthiness. Only then 

was one sufficiently prepared to reach the third 

step—if God graciously granted it—of receiving 

God’s regenerating ‘light’” (Marsden, 2003, p. 28), 

as guided by the Holy Spirit, which was found in 

all God’s creation and all acts of mankind. The 

more one worked at it, the greater the light, the 

better chance of receiving God’s grace. Only then 

was one truly ready to receive it. This narrative 

entered Edwards’ preaching during the religious 

Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, as well as to 

his more theological and philosophical 

explanations with other theologians. Edwards had 

to walk a fine line.  

While true to the strict doctrines of 

Congregationalism, he also sought to excite and 

incited his congregation to engage in an emotional 

turn to God—represented in his hell and brimstone 

sermons—warning his congregation that if they 

failed in the methods of following a Pietistic life, 

they would be doomed in all possible physical and 

spiritual domains. An emotional attachment was to 

be formed with pious existence so that the journey 

could be sustained. Even more important, however, 

was the imperative that emotion embed itself in the 

actions one takes in the world. The Ramean 

curricular layout of how to move from emotion to 

emotion, from experience to experience, tied his 

narrative to a Providential order of life. 

 

Cotton Mather’s Pietism  

The strict religious instruction demanded 

by the founders of the Common School had 

gradually been diluted both by the apathy of 

communities and the demand for more relevant and 

useful instruction. Even Harvard was straying from 

its foundational mission, as liberal clergy (tiring of 

doctrinal disputes) introduced the secular uses of 

classical learning. Certainly, Boston was awash 



37 

 

  

with the latest intellectual currents of 

enlightenment thought; Mather himself was a 

professed cosmopolitan. But science had to be 

married to Scripture. Most importantly for Mather 

Aristotelian Logic had to be supplanted with a 

Christian philosophy—the discoveries of Baconian 

experimentalism he extolled in his Magnalia 

Christi Americana (Lovelace, 1979). The 

discovery and understanding of God’s works were 

a natural instrument for the promotion of piety.  

Indeed, the schooling of children in texts 

embedded learning in their sense experience of the 

world.  In short, knowledge of nature 

complemented the divine word, reinforcing the 

pious life through knowledge of God and his 

works. The secular and the sacred were thus tools 

in the all-important project of conversion. Mather 

identified and celebrated this union of heart and 

mind in many of his writings. He wrote that “the 

Power and Process of Reason is Natural to the Soul 

of Man” 

  

We have to do with GOD, as often as we 

have Right Reason calling upon us …. And 

I will now say, We never Transgress any 

Law of Reason, but we do at the same time, 

Transgress the Law of GOD. . .. G0D sets 

up Reason in Man. If we do not keep 

Reason in the Throne, we go to Dethrone 

the Infinite GOD Himself. The Voice of 

Reason, is the Voice of GOD.  (Mather, 

1718, p.7) 

 

Accordingly, while Mather looked to the 

religious traditions of Europe with suspicion, he 

found a kindred spirit in August Francke, whose 

“strong emphasis on the authority of scripture and 

the necessity of individual spiritual rebirth as a 

foundation for social reform” matched his own 

deep-seated aspirations for the regeneration of 

religiosity in New England (Peterson, 2019, p. 

235). “For Mather,” Peterson continues, Francke’s 

pietism “complemented and confirmed a range of 

ideas that he had independently been developing” 

during the period when his “interest in practical 

piety, reform, and social benevolence was at its 

height” (Peterson, 2019, p. 237). No less than 

Edwards Mather wanted to transform the religious 

education of the whole community though active 

clerical engagement. He spent his life as an 

associate minister of Boston’s North Church 

offering Christian council for families in the 

community, advocating in concert with the SPCK 

for Charity Schools, the reformation of prisoners, 

the instruction of Native Americans and the other 

“uncivilized” peoples of the world. Notably, this 

included enthusiastic support of Francke’s efforts 

to export the message of Christian piety through 

the Tranquebar mission in India.  

This raised the all-important question of 

ministerial education.  How should Harvard 

prepare future clergy for this more expansive and 

demanding religious mission?  His father, Increase 

Mather had been president of Harvard between 

1681 to 1701, and Cotton long hoped to follow in 

his footsteps. But his candidacy for the presidency 

in 1708 and then 1724 failed to convince the 

university’s liberal trustees. Even so, in one of his 

last works he laid out his vision for the reform of 

university instruction along the lines Francke had 

pioneered at Halle. Mather had been in 

communication with Francke and his English 

disciple Anthony William Bohme, a leading 

member of the SPCK who translated Francke’s 

works into English and English works into German 

in support of the growing Protestant cause. He also 

translated the key pietist text, Johan Arndt’s True 

Christianity, which was highly valued by both 

Mather and Edwards. Bohme supplied Mather with 

a Latin copy of Francke’s (1727) Pietas Hallensis, 

detailing the aims and methods of the Halle project 

which Mather then summarized in English and 

published for the benefit of New England clergy. 

As the tract’s title explained, these “Good & Great 

things: A Doing for Kingdom of God in the Midst 

of Europe” mirrored the essential commitments of 

his own rational piety and evangelical Biblicism. 

Drawing upon Francke’s achievements, Mather 

drew inspiration from Halle for the reform of his 

beloved alma mater.  It too had to educate 

ministers able to advance practical Christianity and 

help promote the good works necessary to realize 



38 

 

  

the prophesied millennium of peace and prosperity 

under Christ’s monarchy.  

Mather’s view of clerical education laid out 

in Manuductio ad Ministerium, his 1727 

prospectus for reform at Harvard, has notable 

similarities to the program of instruction instituted 

at Halle. Both operated off certain shared 

principles, themes that ran throughout their 

conceptualization of the university. Indeed, Mather 

borrowed directly from Francke his understanding 

of the purpose of Pietist universities (Woody, 

1969). Mather worked diligently to provide 

universities in the colonies with a means for 

“Candidates of the ministry, how to order  

their Studies, that they may become useful 

Servants of God” (Mather, Diaries, quoted in 

Woody 1969, p.9).  

A beginning principle emphasized the 

centrality of Biblical knowledge, which possessed 

the power of the Holy Word that served to 

spiritually edify the reader. Mather’s pietist 

colleague from Germany, Francke, believed that 

conversion depended upon an emotive experience 

and use of the scripture. He insisted that only the 

converted was up to the task of working for God’s 

glory and participating in the conversion of other 

souls. Mather and Francke insisted that knowledge 

of the Bible’s spiritual power was best learnt 

through Hebrew and Greek, the languages most 

closely aligned to the original tongue of the 

inspired authors. The secular discourses and 

disciplines that begun to shape how mankind 

conceptualized, understood, and shaped the world 

were only as useful to the point they could serve 

Christian philosophy.  

They had no standing on their own without 

the teleology of God’s Divine plan, which only 

Christian philosophy could speak of directly. 

However, such discourses as science, history, and 

geography all provided insights into God’s 

creation—revealing the purpose and duties of life.  

All were encompassed with a Christian 

philosophy. This replaced Aristotelianism, but it 

also steered away from pure rationalism.  Francke 

and Mather, for example both rejected secular 

ethics—religious piety, which developed higher 

sentiments, was the proper source of moral action. 

Students, according to Francke and Mather were to 

read Arnt’s True Christianity (n.d.) rather than 

philosophical texts on virtue. Through this text 

students were supposed to exemplify and 

demonstrate their piety, and their state of 

conversion, by working in concert to interrogate 

and support their spiritual growth by way of 

confessional “solidarities,” intense examinations 

of one’s failings and desire for forgiveness, which 

revealed their true piety and conversion status.  For 

Mather and Francke, this theology and pious 

method of virtue were nothing if not practical arts 

with the purpose of pushing the student ever further 

down the pious path, constant spiritual growth as 

opposed to some final doctrinal orthodoxy. In other 

words, “Man should want the illuminations’ of 

knowledge not just ‘to gain a comfortable 

subsistence in the World,’ or to be the recipient of 

other men’s praise; he should want to become a 

better servant of God and ‘an instrument of Good 

unto others’ (Mather, 1724, p. 24-26). In other 

words, every word in the Bible had to pierce the 

heart of every soul in the congregation, compelling 

them to fall to their knees and swear to serve God 

in a Pietistic fashion, meaning with fervor and 

commitment and a confessional method to keep 

himself honest as to God’s intention.  

Whereas Francke had economic resources to 

realize his vision of a Godly city (literally a “city 

upon a hill”) and put into mass practice this form 

of Pietism. This was made possible due to the 

political support of the Prussian monarchy. 

Situated in more liberal and commercially oriented 

Boston, Mather’s ideas failed to convince in any 

widespread way throughout New England.  

Mather gathered Francke’s German Pietistic 

works and communications and used them to seed 

and grow and renew his congregation. And in 

reference to piety as focusing on practical yet 

spiritual matters, the question in each other’s 

correspondence often centered upon practical 

concerns over this renewal. In fact, as an example 

of just how practical the concerns were, the two 

would correspond on matters such as what sort of 

jeremiads were best to instruct the congregation 



39 

 

  

during the week and what sort worked best on the 

Holy Days. Both recognized that the congregation 

needed different curriculum during the week, 

usually providing Ramus maps for the 

congregation to read and prepare and practice the 

next few days during the week.  

However, underlying every jeremiad was 

the guiding principle of renewal and revival. These 

practical considerations always emphasized the 

need for each minister to go through the renewal 

process of building a sermon that compels the 

congregation to engage in a great revival, and then 

develop sermons that attempt to confront, scare, 

beatify, and consume the congregation in a way 

that increases everyone’s emotive listening and 

reading, which could then secure piety and sustain 

the powerful act of renewal and revival. Each 

sermon had a specific job in this, and so needed a 

tool, a narrative form and logic by which to make 

this task easier for not just the reverend preacher, 

but the congregation whom he was attempting to 

teach and instruct on the methods of renewal, on 

conversion (Lovelace, 1979).  In fact, as discussed 

above, while both men celebrated the value of 

Reason, reason itself was not adequate when it 

came to living a pious life. Unless Reason was 

employed at the service of determining how 

notions such as good and evil were to operate in a 

divine way as opposed to operating in a purely 

secular sense of what these concepts can speak to 

in everyday life. As Edward’s wrote in his Works 

(1957-) “To show how all arts and sciences, the 

more they are perfected, the more they issue in 

divinity, and coincide with it, and appear to be parts 

of it. And to show how absurd for Christians to 

write treatises of ethics distinctly to from divinity 

as revealed in the Gospel” (as quoted in Marsden, 

2003, p.134). Simply, Marsden (2003) argued,  

 

while the law could reveal the basic rights 

and wrongs of a community as well as the 

law showed the unregenerate their true state 

and was the delight of the converted, 

driving them toward a holiness they would 

never perfectly obtain in their life. If 

Calvinist Orthodoxy collapsed in New 

England…so would piety and so would 

strict morality. Mere moralism would never 

do because it depended on flawed human 

efforts rather than on God. In short, the 

future of their civilization and the light it 

might provide for the world depend on 

maintaining the doctrine of the sovereignty 

of God. (p.138) 

   

As Edwards’s extensive exchanges with 

Cotton Mather demonstrate, a true Christian life 

demanded the coupled guidance of both reason and 

emotion (Marsden, 2003). And he was tasked with 

the difficult charge of explaining and convincing 

other theologians of the rightness of his approach. 

Edwards spent much time in discussion and 

explanation with Cotton Mather during his life 

doing just that (Marsden, 2003).  This 

correspondence mattered as it heightened the 

importance of education, because reason and 

emotion had to formed, controlled, guided to 

achieve the correct results. Simply, it had to be 

taught. The Puritans rested their whole system 

upon the belief that "every Grace enters into the 

soul through understanding; and since children 

were born without understanding they had to be 

taught.” (Morgan, 1944, p. 46; quotes Mather 

1724, p. 34).  

 

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Manuscript submitted, March 21, 2022 

Revision received, August 25, 2022 

Manuscript accepted, August 29, 2022