Puritan Doctrine In 17th C. Li :: essays research papers

In ordinal century America, the cosmea was a frightening place. God could, and would, strike a man d experiencewardly at any time for any missteps he might take. disposition was filled with horrors, like Indians, and the Devil resided in the forest, waiting to steal peoples souls. In the eighteenth century, however, the Enlightenment began. Man discovered that he could learn by following others example, or by observing nature, rather than looking only if to the Bible for answers. People began to become concerned with their life here on the earth, rather than concerning themselves solely with the expectations of the afterlife. God stopped being thought of as a puppeteer, pulling the strings and controlling every movement, but as a clockmaker who had wound the world up and had then stepped hind end to watch. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine were two important figures in the Enlightenment. Although their philosophies differed on any(prenominal) matters, they both believed that the world was there to observe, not merely to act as a waiting room for the afterlife. This was a dramatic change from the ordinal century viewpoint. Franklin and Paines viewpoints differed sharply from those that were held to be true in the seventeenth century, and nowhere were these differences as apparent as they were in the areas of knowledge, nature, and religion. In regards to knowledge, the seventeenth century view was that knowledge was to gained through studying the Bible, and that the only aim of gaining further knowledge would be to preserve the integrity of ones own soul, or to help others in saving theirs. The Puritans interests in gaining or preserving knowledge were solely religious, and they also believed that any knowledge that man was to engage could be found within the Bible. In The Autobiography (Part Two), Franklin writes that his main solid ground for setting up a subscription library was to give himself access to more books, and that the knowledge he gai ned would serve as his own personal inwardness of Improvement (575). According to the Puritans, if a person had a question, he or she needed only to search the scriptures for an answer. For example, when Anne Bradstreet was searching for an answer as to wherefore her house, and all of her possessions contained therein, had burnt to the ground, she looked to scripture, and found solace in the idea everything she had, including her own life, was on lend from God (278).