Study Guide Island Christianity
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The Sabbath
“Divine examples of God's severe judgements upon Sabbath-breakers” (1671).
From Solberg, Redeem the Time, 81.
Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University (Hollis Number: 005233047).
Keeping the Sabbath was an important mark of the convert’s transformation both on Martha's Vineyard and on the Puritan mainland. Jewish thinker Ahad Ha'am once proverbially said, "More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews." Self-styled as the “new Israelites,” the Puritans would undoubtedly have seen a certain appeal in such notion, though for them the Sabbath was primarily a means of salvation rather than a way of preserving of their way of life. Keeping the Sabbath was a responsibility shared by all members of the community, a notion reflected in the range of characters portrayed in the broadside on Sabbath breakers to the left. As historian Winton Solberg notes in Redeem the Time, public desecrations of the Sabbath were rare but certainly a cause for concern (Solberg 167). While searching her soul for the failings that led to her Indian captivity, Puritan good-wife Mary Rowlandson lights upon the her negligence regarding the Sabbath:
I then remembered how careless I had been of God's holy time; how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent, and how evilly I had walked in God's sight; which lay so close unto my spirit, that it was easy for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut off the thread of my life and cast me out of His presence forever.
Rowlandson’s anxiety reflects the importance of the Sabbath was a central way of ordering and marking time, as well as its central place in apocalyptic belief. Devotional manuals emphasized the necessity of preparing for the Sabbath as a means for salvation: in Johann Gerhard’s The Soules Watch: Or a Day-Booke for the Devout Soule, for example, each day of the week was presented as a “stage on the pilgrimage to the Sabbath” (Hambrick-Stowe 203). The Sabbath also was central to Puritan apocalypticism, as it represented an important intrusion of millenarian time into everyday life. Puritan culture was based upon the belief that the Day of Judgment was near, a time when time would no longer progressed in a ceaseless, irreversible, linear fashion, but would suddenly rupture and halt in a cataclysmic fashion. The Sabbath, too, was a moment in which time halted and the worshipper glimpsed the world to come.
Sabbatarianism was a central aspects of early missionary activities. In his first sermon at Nonantum, John Eliot preached about the importance of keeping the Ten Commandments, including commandment number four regarding the Sabbath, and Sabbath observance quickly became a concern for the Algonquian community at Natick (Solberg 183). Praying towns throughout New England regulated the Sabbath and fined profaners (Solberg 184-85).
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