WONDER-WORKING PROVIDENCE is among the moderate number of those whom the official records of the colony call "Mr."Edward Johnson came over to New England in 1630 with Winthrop, probably in the Arbella. He was licensed byGovernor Winthrop to trade with the Indians along the Merri- mac River, and in May, 1631, was admitted a freeman of the colony; but he returned to England, probably in that year, and remained there till the spring of 1636, when he came out again, this time bringing his family.This absence accounts for some of the meagreness and vagueness of his information respecting the events of the years 1631-1635.In an official list of passengers sailing from Sandwich, England, in 1636, for America, we find the entry, " Edward Johnson, of Canter- bury, joiner, and Susan, his wife, seven children, three ser- vants."Data respecting the occupations of emigrants were often given in a form intended to mislead the royal officers; but the records of St. George's parish also call him a joiner, and two of his sons were shipwrights and carpenters. WONDER-WORKING PROVIDENCEThe motive for the composition of the book appears from several passages.The author was convinced in every fibre that there had been set up in New England an ecclesiastical and civil polity more closely according with the Word of God than any other which the world had seen, and that the Lord had manifested His approval by doing marvellous things in the wilderness for these His chosen people.Persons disaffected to this holy experiment, lewd fellows like Morton and Gardiner, presumptuous heretics like Gorton, had spread in England reports injurious to the Massachusetts plantation, and these ought to be combated by any one who cared for the material and political welfare of the colony, or who valued intelligent English opinion.What was perhaps still more grievous, there had been bitter criticism even from a portion of the godly in England, for in the recent debates, in and out of the West- minster Assembly, on the reforming of the ecclesiastical polity of England, the Presbyterian party, dominant in Parliament, had hotly assailed the "New England Way," the principles and practices of Congregationalism.One to whom those principles were as clear as the sun, those practices invested with the absolute warrant of Scripture, could not rest easy without exhibiting to all English readers the marvellous providences, the gracious and evident mercies, by which Jehovah had proclaimed to every attentive ear His approval of New England methods.So came into existence the first published history of Massachusetts, a book which, whatever its shortcomings, represented the honest attempt of a Puritan man of affairs to set forth to his fellow-Englishmen the first twenty-three years' history of the great Puritan colony.A book on that subject, we may be sure, met a real want in the Puritan Eng- land of 1653 and 1654, although in the changed atmosphere of 1659 Nathaniel Brooke might find it slow of sale.But, printed as it was with the author three thousand miles away, WONDER-WORKING PROVIDENCE Spenser (Colin Clout 7 s Come Home Again).All the verses in the book are in one of these two measures, except the poem alluded to above, beginning,"From silent night, true Register of moans," and that with which the volume closes.Of this six-line stanza, Professor Dodge says that it is "used by Spenser in January and December of the Shepherd's Calendar, in TheTears of the Muses, and elsewhere.It is to be found also in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, in Drayton's Legend of Gaveston and in several of his Eclogues, in fact in poetry about 1600 very often."He adds :All these measures were sufficiently common to make specific investigation of the good Captain's models needless.He may have had his favorite poets and may have imitated them, but to decide who they were would require the reading of all his verse, and even by that process one would probably not arrive at any very exact conclusions, for it takes a man of artistic temperament to imitate style recognizably, whereas a man of ordinary facility with the pen may turn out verse according to familiar measures readily enough.However crabbed the style of the Wonder-working Provi- dence, he that reads it through will be profited.It is little to say that it is the first published history of New England, andthe most important work on its history brought out before Cotton Mather's Magnolia (1702).This is only to say that Winthrop's Journal did not see the light of publication till 1790, nor Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation till 1856.The Wonder-working Providence is far from ranking in the same class with those incomparable narratives.It is the work of a much inferior mind; it is disfigured, as may be seen from the foot-notes of the present edition, by many errors and inaccu- racies; and the thought and arrangement are often sadly con- fused.Yet it gives us, what neither Bradford nor Winthrop could supply, the history, or at any rate the essential spirit, London, Printed for Nath: Brooke at the Angel in Corn-hill.
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