"The Contagion of Corrupt Opinions" in Puritan Massachusetts

Wurr RITING in i644 to a friend in England, Thomas Shepard lamented late differences and breaches amongst the godly in that country and warned against spreading of the contagion of opinions. Such cracks and flames in the new building of the Reformation portend a fall, he continued; to avoid worse dayes than ever England yet saw English Puritans would have to follow New England's example and move decisively to crush dangerous heterodoxies before the contagion became epidemic. Massachusetts Bay Colony had not hesitated to suppress sectaries like the Antinomians and Familists, Shepard told his correspondent, and therefore The Churches here are in peace; Common wealth in peace; Ministry in most sweet peace; Magistrates (I should have named first) in peace.' Shepard spoke too soon, for in the next decade New England Puritanism experienced the same ideological fragmentation as its English counterpart, though on a much smaller scale.2 But while historians have noted accurately that in the i640s and i650s the colonial Puritans felt threatened by radical spiritists with links to the English sectarian underground, little attention has been paid to their fear of infection by corrupt opinions of a different sort-those associated with English latitudinarian

Political science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism

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  Chad van Dixhoorn•Sixteenth Century Journal•2009

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