SOURCE: Hammond, Jeffrey A. “‘Ladders of Your Own’: The Day of Doom and the Repudiation of ‘Carnal Reason’.” Early American Literature 19, no. 1 (spring 1984): 42-67.

[In this essay, Hammond explores the spiritual logic of Wigglesworth's broad and apparently harsh judgment of the damned and unregenerate of humanity.]

1

Modern opinion has generally not been kind to Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom. Most assessments echo that of Moses Coit Tyler, who maintained that in the poet's “intense pursuit of what he believed to be the good and the true, he forgot the very existence of the beautiful” (277). Even such a sympathetic critic as Kenneth B. Murdock conceded that the most popular poet of Puritan New England “was handicapped on the one hand by his allegiance to the letter of the Bible as expounded by his school of theology, and on the other by his knowledge of his audience” (vii). F. O. Matthiessen agreed, characterizing the poet as “a hard intellect working within very narrow limits. The fire is there, but walled in” (500). Most recently, Robert Daly has stated that the limitations of Wigglesworth's verse stem from the poet's extreme “dismissal of the natural world” and his resulting “inability to perceive, and hence to use, metaphor” (132).¹

These statements are certainly accurate in light of current assumptions of what a poem should be and do. The Day of Doom indeed displays little of the dramatic or sensory interest we have come to expect from poetry; it reduces the potentially sweeping scope of doomsday to the level of theological debate; its portrayal of Christ is thoroughly repugnant; its form seems woefully unsuited to its themes. But such assessments, by stressing what the poem fails to do rather than what it actually does, do little to explain how the poem affected Puritan readers and why they found it so satisfying. Harrison T. Meserole's comment that the poem “has been repeatedly denounced as inexorably stern doggerel by those who would have it be what it is not” describes an approach that obscures, rather than clarifies, Wigglesworth's achievement (41).²

Tyler's separation of the good and the true from the beautiful reflects, of course, a modern perspective. For Puritan readers, truth—as they defined it—was beauty, and once we view The Day of Doom in terms of the expectations of such readers, we begin to understand its phenomenal popularity. Recent studies developing this approach have started with the recognition that the poem was, above all, a sermon in verse designed “To set forth Truth,” as one of Wigglesworth's contemporaries put it, “and win men's Souls to bliss” by weaning its readers away from a reliance on the world and the carnal self.³ By portraying what would come to pass at the end of time, Wigglesworth exposed all that had to be swept away in the here and now of the reader's present. In urging the reader to beg Christ to reform the self so that the terrors of the Judgment could be escaped, The Day of Doom left few qualities of the carnal man untouched. What has not been so clearly recognized, however, is how carefully and systematically Wigglesworth mounts a pervasive attack on the ultimate source of willfulness and sin—the unregenerate soul's confidence in natural gifts. As Thomas Hooker had affirmed, a true preparation for grace consisted of a violent renunciation of self-worth, “not paving but levelling, not a bringing in of some gracious ability … but a removing of all that, out of the way which might stop or stay our Saviors coming” (Application 146). For Wigglesworth, the prime obstacle to the work of preparation was a blind reliance on carnal reason, and The Day of Doom accordingly portrays the logic of fallen humanity as nothing more than a tool with which the unbowed soul erects self-damning barriers to Christ.⁴ By pitting unregenerate thinking against the reproving power of God's Word, Wigglesworth in effect forced his readers to see that the ladders of mere human reason and invention could never reach heaven. The terrors of damnation could not be avoided unless the heart had been truly broken and the self-reliant assertions of carnal reason had been replaced by an unquestioning faith in Christ.

2

Thomas Shepard maintained that sinners lulled themselves into damnation by a “false bastard peace begot in the conscience”—a false security resulting from a misplaced confidence in natural gifts and abilities. The “understanding's arrogancy,” Shepard warned, held forth great danger chiefly because it kept the soul from relying on Christ for salvation. The secure “mind, having been long rooted in this opinion, that I am in a good estate, will not suffer this conceit to be plucked out of it,” and was thus unwilling to work toward the broken heart—the sense of one's utter worthlessness—which was requisite to the coming of grace into the soul (Sincere Convert 82, 73).⁵The Day of Doom dramatizes the effects of such security. Without the influences of grace, Wigglesworth insists, mere human reason is incapable of grasping the true ways of God. Throughout the poem, as Wigglesworth repeatedly stresses the insufficiency of “carnal reason” and its inventions, the reader is pushed toward a repudiation of the fallen self as a first step in seeking saving faith.⁶ In order to find oneself, Wigglesworth warns his readers, one first had to lose oneself—especially any dependence one had on natural reason and its elaborate defenses.

The Day of Doom sounds the theme immediately. Building upon Paul's exhortation for the believer to “become a fool, that he may be wise” (1 Cor. 3:18), Wigglesworth opens his prefatory “To the Christian Reader” by dedicating himself to what Paul had called “the foolishness of preaching” (1 Cor. 1:21): “Reader, I am a fool, / And have adventured / To play the fool this once for Christ, / The more his fame to spread” (p. 1). The subversion of worldly wisdom extends from the sudden awakening of the damned at the arrival of the Judge through the dubious arguments and doctrinal heresies of the sinners to the final scolding in “A Postscript unto the Reader” of “foolish man, who lovest to enjoy / That which will thee distress, or else destroy” (p. 80). Wigglesworth repeatedly affirms that “Grace transcends mens thought” (135); God reveals true piety to “Babes,” “When to the wise he it denies, / and from the world conceals” (123). The attack on human wit receives perhaps its fullest expression in one of the concluding poems, “A Short Discourse on Eternity,” in which earthly conceptions of space and number are shown to have no meaning whatsoever when applied to the celestial and eternal realm. “A Cockle-shell,” Wigglesworth states, “may serve as well / to lade the Ocean dry, / As finite things and Reckonings / to bound Eternity” (p. 69).⁷

The products of worldly wisdom fare no better. Human truth, for example, collapses with Christ's affirmation “that God is true / and that most men are liars” (117). Human justice, as Wigglesworth presents it, is based solely on selfishness; sinners have “no ground of strife” simply because divine justice fails to coincide with what they think is fair (163). Doomsday also levels earthly distinctions of rank and prestige:

Of wicked Men, none are so mean
                    as there to be neglected:
Nor none so high in dignity,
                    as there to be respected.

(51)

“Vanity of Vanities: A Song of Emptiness To Fill up the Empty Pages Following,” another poem placed after The Day of Doom, recapitulates the subversion of earthly values and assumptions by means of a full presentation of the ubi sunt theme. One by one, Wigglesworth dismisses the great attractions of the world—beauty, friends, riches, honor, and power—as nothing more than “Trash and Toyes.” Curiously, the litany of empty virtues creates a chantlike effect in which the words themselves—the very designations by which the carnal mind esteems the world—become as empty as the pleasures that they signify. For Wigglesworth, all human history has value only as parable; the worthies of the past, “Cut down by Time,” have become a mere “Story, / That we might after better things aspire” (p. 91).

Such a view of what the carnal self values was, of course, thoroughly conventional, especially in treatments of the Judgment. But The Day of Doom transforms doctrine into drama. Especially in the extended debate between Christ and the damned, Wigglesworth demonstrates the error of depraved ways of classifying and experiencing the world. Significantly, sin in the poem is associated not so much with vicious actions as with fallen modes of thinking. The most overt criminals against God—apostates, idolators, profaners, scoffers, adulterers, the covetous, vicious children and parents, murderers, witches, and Sabbath-polluters—are dealt with rather quickly, and do not, in fact, speak for themselves at the debate (28-33). Instead, Wigglesworth concentrates on those sinners who could pass undetected in a community of saints—hypocrites, the presumptuous, reliers on works, the spiritually lazy, the misguided, and the uninformed. Part of the homiletic effectiveness of the poem stems from the fact that the arguments of the damned are inescapably human and ordinary, and, as Kenneth Requa has pointed out, the general nature of the sins enhances the ease with which readers could locate themselves and their errors within the poem (94). Secure readers could take some comfort if they had not committed this or that specific atrocity, but The Day of Doom did not give them the opportunity. Any tendency to distance oneself from the damned was anticipated and undercut by Wigglesworth's consistent emphasis on the secret sins of the heart and mind.

Wigglesworth's dramatization of mental sin begins with the very fact that the damned attempt to argue their cases at all. A sure sign of the unbowed will was, as Hooker had insisted, sinners' attempts to “secretly snarle at Gods dealings, and quarrell with his dispensations, and privily grudge and repine when they see others have more and better then they” (Application 196). The doomsday debate brings all such private resentment to light. Wigglesworth's sinners, “void of tears, but fill'd with fears” (37), show no remorse prior to their sentence; they “grudge, / and grind their teeth” in envy of the elect (49). Their arguments, which function much like “objections” inserted into a sermon as a means of refuting error or clarifying doctrine, dramatize their decision to go it alone at the Judgment—to face Christ as adversary rather than accept him as Advocate. The trial accordingly presents an elaborate and extended series of clashing wills as one expression of fallen reason after another is raised up only to be refuted by the doomsday Judge. From the start, the reader understands that the debate presents a no-win situation for the damned—a point underscored by a scriptural text cited in a marginal gloss just prior to the proceedings: “O man, who art thou that repliest against God?” (Rom. 9:20). But as the narrator states, “each Man's self against himself, / is forced to confess” (56), not because the sinners have any chance for mercy, but because divine justice would be demonstrated most fully if they were permitted to convict themselves.

Wigglesworth frames their arguments accordingly, and what Christ points out to the “Civil honest Men” holds true for each rank of the damned:

Your argument shews your intent,
                    in all that you have done:
You thought to scale Heav'ns lofty Wall
                    by Ladders of your own.

(101)

One by one, the “Ladders” of human invention and discourse collapse in the course of the debate, as the sinners unwittingly reveal their true natures in the very act of trying to clear themselves. True to form, for instance, the hypocrites demonstrate a false show of faith by appealing to Scripture in their defense; after all, hadn't they partaken of the Lord's Supper, “Whereon who feed shall never need, / as thou thy self dost say” (74)? But the hollow attempt to trip up Christ in the Word is exposed in their boast that “We took great care to get a share / in endless happiness” (82). The self-serving tone and the pious works they take pride in plainly reveal that they remain hypocrites at doomsday. Their pitiful assertion that “We thought our sin had pard'ned been” (83) reveals an appalling lack of self-knowledge, and, ironically, their life-long attempts to trick God and the elect end only in self-delusion.

Such revelations of confidence in the unregenerate self mark the entire debate. The arguments of the “Civil honest Men,” for example, display the very sin for which they have been damned—a worldly pride in good works—in their claim of having been “blameless livers” (92):

We hated vice, and set great price,
                    by vertuous conversation:
And by the same we got a name,
                    and no small commendation.

(94)

Those who complain that they were not given sufficient time on earth to demonstrate their “good will to turn from ill” offer no evidence to support their good intentions (108); those who protest that Scripture had been too difficult shift the blame to “wiser men” who also stumbled in interpreting the Word (121); those who feared persecution defend their decision to please the world rather than God (125). Presumers on divine mercy attempt to flatter Christ by appealing to the “more glorious fame” doomsday leniency would bring him (133). Arguers against predestination reveal their spiritual laziness by protesting that even if they had “apply'd our selves” to gaining Christ's love, “our busie pain / and labour had been lost” (146). And although the heathens claim that they would have been “more wise” had they heard the Gospel, their protest expresses the very reliance on natural gifts that seals their damnation (160). Even the reprobate infants, arguing with the perverse logic of mature sinners, expose a selfish will as they renounce their heritage in Adam:

Not we, but he, ate of the Tree,
                    whose fruit was interdicted:
Yet on us all of his sad Fall,
                    the punishment's inflicted.

(168)

In complaining that Adam had been “set free” (170), the infants reveal not only a headstrong desire to shift the consequences of sin to someone else, but also the envy with which the truly damned soul is unmistakably marked.

What all the damned share, of course, is a self-vaunting pride in their own abilities. The degree of characterization Wigglesworth provides in The Day of Doom was sufficient to show his readers that the true motives of the sinners stem not from “true love to things above, / but from some other thing” (88)—a selfish desire, as Christ states, “To save your skin” (128). By emphasizing their reliance on carnal reason to frame self-centered defenses, Wigglesworth is able to portray the damned as petty, whining figures of cowardice without a trace of heroic but ill-advised rebellion. Ultimately, the damned seem more stupid than wicked, and their futile arguments reveal—from the Puritan perspective—an extraordinary persistence in error and bad judgment. They don't even seem to know what the Judge wants to hear; far from renouncing or denying their security, they end up mounting an elaborate and willful defense of it.

Being the damned, they cannot do better, and the Judge responds to their stubbornness in kind. Tyler anticipated the standard modern response to Wigglesworth's Christ in stating that the poem, “with entire unconsciousness, attributes to the Divine Being a character the most execrable and loathsome to be met with, perhaps, in any literature, Christian or pagan” (287). But Wigglesworth's portrayal is not, I think, accidental; rather, it is entirely consistent with the fact that he depicts Christ in the specific role of doomsday Judge. All but a few of Christ's speeches are directed toward the damned, and the assertions of depraved thought demanded an uncompromising response. This Christ, at least, is capable of confronting security and confidence with biting, even cruel, sarcasm:

They have their wish whose Souls perish
                    with Torments in Hell-fire,
Who rather chose their Souls to lose,
                    than leave a loose desire.

(149)

Wigglesworth is careful to emphasize that the damned have chosen—in an act of unregenerate reason—to place their faith in the self rather than in Christ. At this final point in redemptive time, the Judge demonstrates no interest in sparing the feelings of those whose “wish” is being fulfilled by eternal suffering; this is a Christ capable of verbal play (lose/loose) as he banishes souls to the flames. Elsewhere, Christ sarcastically urges the damned to “rejoyce” at their “portion” in hell (128); he dismisses their suffering as “an equal thing” (138) and, at the final sentence, invites them to “Depart to Hell, there may you yell, / And roar Eternally” (205). Even the reprobate infants, objects of natural sympathy that they may be, become targets of derision. Christ mocks their attempt to separate themselves from Adam with an ironic reversal of their own plea. If Adam had not sinned, Christ asks,

Would you have said, we ne'r obey'd,
                    nor did thy Laws regard;
It ill befits with benefits,
                    us, Lord, so to reward?

(174)

In this light, their famous sentence to “the easiest room in Hell” (181) should, I think, be read less as a concession to their relative innocence than as a sarcastic rebuttal of their futile presumptions upon mercy.⁸

Wigglesworth could draw upon ample scriptural precedent for such doomsday cruelty. Three times, for instance, he cites a text commonly seen as an expression of the divine attitude toward the damned: “I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh” (Prov. 1:26). The vengeful Christ—a far cry indeed from the lovely bridegroom so popular in private meditation—highlights his ultimate relationship with the damned. In stressing Christ's apocalyptic transformation from Advocate to Judge, Wigglesworth underscores the poignant contrast between Christ present and Christ future and thereby emphasizes the urgency of repentance. The entire poem witnesses the terrifying irony of confronting a Christ without mercy, a Saviour with no inclination to save, a Prince of Peace intent on waging verbal war against his enemies. Wigglesworth's merciless Christ served special notice to any readers who harbored a widespread assumption of natural reason—that God's mercy was sufficiently vast to be presumed upon, and hence abused. One rank of sinners makes explicit the attempt to redefine divine mercy in terms of human pathos: “can mercy have the heart / To recompence few years offence / with Everlasting smart?” (131). But they err, as the Judge points out, in imploring a Christ of mercy on the very day of Judgment, when “all [is] too late, grief's out of date” (134). Christ's doomsday shift from mercy to justice would be irrevocable; to portray a Christ waffling at the Judgment would be to denigrate both dispensations. As the Judge affirms,

If now at last Mercy be past
                    from you for evermore,
And Justice come in Mercies room,
                    yet grudge you not therefore.

(137)

Convicted readers struck by such harshness would realize that Christ was simply speaking to their level. If the doomsday Judge seemed impenetrable, then the Christ outside the poem—the Christ of mercy and present opportunity—had to be appealed to at once. Wigglesworth made it inescapably clear that the objections of fallen reason had to be silenced before the Advocate could renew the soul. Moreover, the silence would have to come quickly: the still, small voice would not last forever.

Inevitably, Wigglesworth's saints adopt Christ's view of sin. Their final repudiation of worldly values and assumptions is revealed in the joy with which they

… behold with courage bold,
                    and thankful wonderment,
To see all those that were their foes
                    thus sent to punishment. …

(219)

For true believers as well as for Christ, all compassion for sinners “is out of fashion, / and wholly laid aside” (196). Perhaps the most moving passages in the entire poem occur at this point, when the saints overcome the most compelling of earthly enticements—human love—and renounce all carnal ties in favor of their eternal union with Christ. Building upon the promise that “henceforth know ye no man after the flesh” (2 Cor. 5:16), Wigglesworth stresses the utter loneliness of the damned, cut off from all sympathetic communication with husbands, wives, parents, and friends. Doomsday would in effect create an entirely new society based solely on the eternal division between the saved and the damned; no other relationships or distinctions would survive. The “pious Father” who sees his son sentenced to the fire “doth rejoyce to hear Christ's voice / adjudging him to pain” (200); one brother sees another “in this astonied fit, / Yet sorrows not thereat a jot, / nor pitties him a whit” (197); the blessed husband “Shall mourn no more” upon recognizing his wife to be a “damn'd forsaken wight” (198). The saints' attitude seems shocking—even inhuman. But Puritan readers would have found it appropriate precisely because of its apparent inhumanity. Since the psalmist had affirmed that, like Christ, “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance” (Ps. 58:10), the saints' vindictive glee was for Wigglesworth's readers a sign that the restored will of the elect had been made entirely consistent with God's. Once human attachments were replaced with divine love, the very categories by which people define their relationships with one another would be utterly destroyed. By emphasizing the saints' scorn for their unregenerate brethren, Wigglesworth underscores the radical nature of their transformation into new creatures, and demonstrates how fully they have adopted the Christic point of view as their own.

3

In The Day of Doom, the antithesis of the assertions of fallen reason is the silence of assent. The strident arguments of the damned highlight the most important sense in which they differ from the elect. Willful arguments of worldly wisdom, reflected in a concern with the hollow performance of pious works, demonstrate that the sinners have not grasped the fatal limitations of unregenerate thinking; self-reliance has stopped up their ears and blocked their way to heaven. As the Judge points out,

Your Penitence, your diligence
                    to Read, to Pray, to Hear,
Were but to drown'd [sic] the clamorous sound
                    of Conscience in your ear.

(90)

In contrast, the saints do not rely on human logic and discourse for their salvation and, consequently, do not speak for themselves at all in the poem—not even at the end, when their songs of praise are described rather than actually given. Wigglesworth's central point, I think, is that the saints have no need to speak at the Judgment. Their will has been made fully consistent with that of Christ, who, in keeping with his role as their Advocate, speaks for them and justifies their election. They have no need to be weaned away from a dependence on carnal reason; Christ's doomsday sermon does not apply to them, and the part they play in the poem is accordingly small. Their passivity, however disappointing to modern readers expecting a stronger expression of the joys of election, reflects the Puritan ideal of true humiliation and complete submission before Christ.

The damned must learn this lesson the hard way. Predictably, Christ's reproof achieves the intended result, and their willful contending is finally replaced with the inner silence they should have attained when they had the opportunity. Their consciences, which “had grosly been abused” while they lived (55), are restored as a result of the debate: “Their Consciences must needs confess / his Reasons are the stronger” (181). Remorseful, they “have nought to say, / But that 'tis just, and equal most / they should be damn'd for ay” (182). They have, in their measure, been broken of self-love to the extent that they now regret having led others astray; their woe is increased “Because that they brought to decay / themselves and many moe” (194). They have even come to love God, but with a belated repentance that makes their fate all the more poignant:

Oh piercing words more sharp than swords!
                    what, to depart from Thee,
Whose face before for evermore
                    the best of Pleasures be!
What? to depart (unto our smart)
                    from thee Eternally. …

(202)

Finally convicted in sin, the damned stand “Like stocks … at Christ's left-hand, / and dare no more retort” (156); “Vain hopes are cropt, all mouths are stopt” (182); “Their mouths are shut, each man is put / to silence and to shame: / Nor have they ought within their thought, / Christ's Justice for to blame” (187).

The damned have been emptied of all depraved objections to the Word. With their silence, the assertions of carnal reason come to an end. The worldly Babel has been replaced by the eschatological Eden; the turmoil of earth has been overcome by the peace of heaven. Paul had attested to the silence of true conviction in sin: “what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God” (Rom. 3:19). The damned finally come to see the inevitable result of all attempts at self-justification; their refusal to heed the call to lose oneself ends, ironically, in the surrender of the very humanity they have exercised their reason to defend—a fate suggested when Wigglesworth describes them as “creeping Moles” in their initial attempts to hide from divine wrath (20). After a final expression of woe upon hearing their sentence, they become not new creatures but old, and react like the irrational and inarticulate beasts they have chosen to be:

They wring their hands, their caitiff-hands
                    and gnash their teeth for terrour;
They cry, they roar for anguish sore,
                    and gnaw their tongues for horrour.

(205)

Their bestial response recurs at the end of “A Short Discourse on Eternity,” when they “bite, for fell despite, / their very tongues in twain” and “rore for great horror” like creatures who have abused their most treasured gift—the light of their own reason (p. 72). Having persisted in ignoring the need for a total reformation of thought and speech, they finally become incapable of either.⁹

The sinners bite their tongues because their speech has revealed the fatal error of their thinking. All the words of the unregenerate, Shepard maintained, “are sins, … their mouths are open sepulchers, which smell filthy when they are opened” (Sincere Convert 31).¹⁰ Hooker believed that Satan himself was the ultimate source of verbal corruption: “when he would cast a vaile over the ugly and deformed face of Vice, and graceless courses he is forced to lay some false colors of indifferency, delight, and pleasure.” Under Satan's tutelage, Hooker insisted, drunkenness becomes “good fellowship,” covetousness becomes “frugality,” and cowardliness “is trimmed and decked up in the robes of discretion, and wariness” (Application 211). Through the speech of the damned, Wigglesworth demonstrates the degree of verbal distortion that occurs when carnal reason, unchecked by grace, spins out arguments of damning self-reliance. For Wigglesworth, all human language—even if used with the most pious of intentions—was incapable of expressing the divine schema. He concedes, for example, that any doomsday description, including his, was bound to be sadly inadequate. “Who can tell,” he asks,

… the plagues of Hell,
                    and torments exquisite?
Who can relate their dismal state,
                    and terrours infinite?

(212)

The “Postscript” reaffirms that “those Torments are an hundred fold / More terrible than ever you were told” (p. 78). The celestial bliss of the saints is equally “beyond what thought / can reach, or words express” (222). Paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 13:1, Wigglesworth acknowledges that neither “tongues of men (nor Angels pen)” can begin to convey Christ's glory; “And therefore I must pass it by,” he adds, “lest speaking should transgress” (16). And toward the end of The Day of Doom, when the narrative demands some description of the saints' reward, Wigglesworth adopts the biblical convention of depicting their joy primarily in terms of what it would not be—in terms of an absence of earthly “distress and heaviness,” which “are vanished like dreams” (222).¹¹

If it was fatal to rely on one's reason, it was nearly as dangerous to resort to one's own words. For Wigglesworth, the only possible antidote to either was to adhere closely to Scripture—to those words with which God had condescended to reveal himself to humanity. The ongoing dichotomy in The Day of Doom between the sinners' words of self-reliance and the sacred language of the Word as revealed through faith defines, I think, the “persistent tension” that Larzer Ziff has observed in the poem “between the absolute and statically fixed divine dispensation and the constant struggle that this permits and encourages” (166). Wigglesworth's insistence on the scriptural basis of divine truth emerges most clearly, perhaps, in the fact that Christ's refutations consist largely of close paraphrases of relevant biblical texts. Throughout the trial, Christ relentlessly performs his doomsday task not only as the Word made flesh, but also as the Word of Scripture forcefully articulated and defended. As preacher-exegete within the poem, however, the Judge affirms that simply knowing the Word is not enough. The fact that the damned repeatedly try to pervert the Bible for their own ends illustrates the need to see the Word with the restored understanding of the saint. Presumers on God's mercy, for instance, attempt to hold Christ to the promise that “he, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity, and destroyed them not” (Ps. 78:38):

Thus we believ'd; are we deceiv'd?
                    cannot his mercy great,
(As hath been told to us of old)
                    asswage his angers heat?

(130)

But the sinners, following the lead of the carnal understanding, fail to grasp the true significance of the text. Christ points out to them that the promise of clemency, which applies only to the elect and not to all mankind, is fulfilled “by those that here / are plac'd at my right hand” (135). Elsewhere, the “Civil honest Men” argue scriptural precedent for their reliance on works by paraphrasing a text from 1 Samuel: “to obey, as he doth say, / is more than sacrifice” (94). They, too, overlook the proper interpretation of the verse, in which Samuel condemns Saul's rote performance of sacrifices, and thus fall into the very trap against which the text warns. As Christ makes clear, “th'affection / and temper of the heart” are crucial to the efficacy of all religious duties (99). What the sinners conveniently ignore in the text is the simple exhortation to obey “the voice of the Lord” (1 Sam. 15:22). Depicted as inept exegetes throughout the poem, the damned have twisted the proper sense of obedience into a justification of mere legal righteousness. Unable to interpret the Bible according to the light of faith, they persist in trying to force God's Word into the framework of fallen logic. For the sinners, carnal reason has spoiled the edifying possibilities of Scripture itself.

The correcting application of the Word is also evident in the many scriptural citations provided in the margins. Their frequency, which certainly helps create for the poem the sheer weight of biblical authority and doctrinal orthodoxy, acknowledges Wigglesworth's close adherence to the Bible in framing his doomsday vision. The degree of unadorned biblical paraphrase in The Day of Doom reflects the frankly homiletic aims of a poem that “opens” Scripture as fully as any sermon. Because its themes and images are so relentlessly and exclusively biblical, the poem itself served its readers as model as well as stimulus for the proper use of the Word as a means of repudiating the logic of sin. Wigglesworth takes pains to eschew anything and everything that does not come directly from the Bible—a renunciation made explicit in his self-conscious refusal in the prefatory “Prayer unto Christ the Judge of the World” to invoke the classical Muses, “Which is th'Unchristian use, and trade / Of some that Christians would be thought” (p. 7). Determined to be guided by the “sacred Sprite” itself (p. 8), the same force that inspired the various penmen of Scripture, Wigglesworth made certain that no readers could accuse his doomsday account of being sullied by the products of mere human invention. For him, the only valid assumptions concerning the divine schema were those set forth clearly and explicitly in the Word. To speak for oneself at the Throne would seal one's own damnation; God's will could not be grasped except through God's language.

Because the verities of the Word fall exclusively on the side of the Judge, Wigglesworth is able to construct a debate that is, in effect, a nondebate. Despite the doctrinal give-and-take that comprises the bulk of the poem, The Day of Doom makes no attempt to invest the sinners' side of the argument with any credibility whatsoever. For all his emphasis on undermining the logic of the damned, Wigglesworth is in this sense strikingly nonlogical—from a modern perspective, even unfair—in his refusal to acknowledge any possible degree of legitimacy in their objections. In each case, their arguments represent not a balanced portrayal of “carnal reason” but an extreme exaggeration of it. As Wigglesworth reduces their objections to absurdity by means of parodic and reductive paraphrases of the worldly point of view, the ranks of the damned do not merely reveal their error—they reveal it to the fullest possible degree. No argument against Christ, Wigglesworth insists, could possibly make sense, let alone prevail. Although this one-sidedness marks the entire poem, it emerges perhaps most clearly in “A Short Discourse,” as the narrator replies to one last objection of the willful heart: “What, have the years of sinners tears / no limits, or no bound?” (p. 70). Wigglesworth responds by positing an ironic alternative to the divine plan:

When Heav'n is Hell, when Ill is Well,
                    when Vertue turns to Vice,
When wrong is Right, when Dark is Light,
                    when Nought is of great price:
Then may the years of sinners tears
                    and sufferings expire,
And all the hosts of damned ghosts
                    escape out of Hell-fire.

(P. 71)

The eternal sentence could indeed be lifted, but only when “Christ above shall cease to love” and “God shall cease to reign”—when the most unassailable verities of the Word would be overturned. The ironic inversion presented here functions as an exaggerated restatement of the arguments of the damned. By extending the error of sin to its furthest reaches imaginable, Wigglesworth links the assertions of depravity not with their origins in human doubt and uncertainty, but with their inevitable conclusion—as he saw it—in a total negation of the Puritan schema. All sins would lead to the ultimate Sin; the various mental errors of the damned are depicted as inseparable from the great error of denying the very power and goodness of the Divine.

Christ is able, of course, to refute such obvious expressions of sin quite handily—perhaps a bit too handily for modern tastes, since much of the potential drama of a human-divine confrontation is certainly blunted by such unsympathetic paraphrases of unregenerate opinion. It is tempting to explain the imbalanced dialectic of The Day of Doom in terms of a failure of imagination or empathy on the part of Wigglesworth as poet. But the inequity resulting from the exaggerated portrayal of sin is, I think, a purposeful element designed to enhance the convicting aims of the poem. In the first place, Puritans insisted that true conviction would not simply make the believer aware of sin; it would induce an utter disgust which approximated God's view of sin. Since the Judge would assuredly not view the depraved in humanistic terms, preachers were careful to divorce sin from any human-centered framework of excuse or tolerance. “When they come to preach,” Hooker urged, “they must make sin appear truly odious, and fearful to the open view of all, that all may be afraid and endeavor to avoid it.” Without such a strategy, the benign view of sin fostered by carnal security could not be overcome; the hard-hearted soul merely “sits down willingly, well apaid with his own estate and portion, [and] sees no need of any change …” (Application 211, Application … The Ninth Book 57). It is this convicting perspective of sin toward which Wigglesworth pushes his readers. They had to see the objections of carnal reason for what they really were, that is, as they would sound in the ears of the Judge. At doomsday, Wigglesworth affirms,

Such aggravations, where no evasions,
                    nor false pretences hold,
Exaggerate and cumulate
                    guilt more than can be told.

(64)

The Judgment would usher in a divine perspective in which all sins, however small, would appear monstrous. The tolerant view of sin held by the unregenerate mind would be shattered, and the errors of self-reliance would finally appear “in their own proper hew” (65) as hideous affronts to the Divine.

The slanted depiction of fallen modes of thought also guaranteed that no reader could possibly find them attractive. Wigglesworth portrays the carnal perspective in a manner consistent with how a preacher would handle erroneous opinion within a sermon. In his manual on homiletics, for example, William Chappell warned preachers not “to buzze many, especially subtile objections into the hearers Ears, which peradventure would not otherwise enter into their thought …” (130). Wigglesworth's doomsday poem presented an even greater challenge than that posed by the standard sermon. The Judgment would be nothing if not an extended refutation of fallen opinion, and the doomsday debate required him to express at great length the viewpoints of a wide range of sinners. Wigglesworth needed to voice their objections in a way that would avoid enticing some readers and suggesting new errors to others. Given the homiletic aims of The Day of Doom, he could not risk provoking even the slightest sympathy for the damned. Such sympathy would, after all, represent a human—and hence fallen—response to divine justice. By consistently depicting sin from the divine perspective, Wigglesworth encouraged his readers to view their sins now as they would certainly be judged then—and thereby urged them toward the repudiation of carnal reason, which was wrought by conversion and which would be recapitulated at large in the fullness of time. In their exaggerated pride in the self, Wigglesworth's sinners vividly illustrated Hooker's statement that “there is in every mans heart naturally such corrupt carnall pleading, that it labours to defeat, and put by the worke of the word, that it may not come home to the heart” (Soules Preparation 26). The Bible was clear, however, on the manner in which the Judge would view “carnall pleading” at the end of the world: “The Lord shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaketh proud things” (Ps. 12:3). Wigglesworth's repulsive portrayal of sin left his readers little choice but to adopt the Christic view of depravity as their own.

It is appropriate, then, that the reader is not actually argued into conviction. Even though, as Matthiessen observed, the overall tone of The Day of Doom is “not sulphurous, but logical,” rational arguments in defense of the faith would have appealed to the very faculty that the poem attacks (500). Despite the illusion of dialectic and disputation, Wigglesworth's Christ does not refute fallen reason by devising syllogistic chains or constructing intricate appeals to logic. Instead, he merely affirms and reaffirms the sinners' fundamental disagreement with biblical statement. The divine perspective is thus tied not to reason, but to faith in the authority and truth of Scripture. Rational discourse may constitute the external vehicle of The Day of Doom, but the actual “proofs” of orthodoxy are based precisely on that quality that distinguished the elect soul from the unregenerate—a pure and unquestioned belief in the promises of the Word. The most basic opposition of The Day of Doom is not human versus divine logic, but carnal reason versus gracious belief. The essential “logic” of salvation would be faith, and faith alone.

4

By whittling away at the presumptions of carnal reason until only faith in Christ and the Word remained, The Day of Doom provided Puritan readers with a verbal parallel to doomsday itself. The association of inner conviction in sin with the broader conviction of the damned at the Judgment encouraged the reader to seek the humiliation of the self that was so conspicuously absent in the doomsday sinners. In this context, the poem may exhibit a closer match of form and purpose than is generally recognized. The relative lack of concrete imagery, for example, may reflect homiletic strategy. Robert Daly is certainly correct in observing that the “reader, not Wigglesworth, provides the natural imagery and the experiential drama” of the poem (131). But this should, I think, be seen as a strength rather than a weakness in a poem geared toward a humbling examination of the self. For one thing, the abstract language certainly permitted a straightforward presentation of doctrine necessitated by Wigglesworth's broad audience. Hooker, among many others, had attested that “a plain and powerful Ministery” appears “When the Language and Words are such as those of the meanest Capacity have some acquaintance with, and may be able to conceive. …” The Day of Doom follows Hooker's lead in “alwayes avoiding the frothy tinkling of quaint and far fetched Phrases, which take off, and blunt as it were the edge of the blessed Truth and Word of God …” (Application 206).¹² The poet's preference for direct doctrinal statement attests to his concern that readers see the error of their ways in no uncertain terms. In addition, the generalization of experience fostered by the abstract language would have permitted few readers to escape a convicting identification with the damned. Any imagistic blanks in the assertions of the sinners would be filled in by readers, pious and otherwise, who recognized chilling echoes of their own self-confidence within the poem.

That The Day of Doom does not deal with sin in sensory terms also enabled Wigglesworth to cover an enormous range of unregenerate opinion within a relatively brief compass. Puritans assumed that the final dispensation of the Law would not be acted out hastily. Shepard, for instance, insisted that “things shall not be suddenly shuffled up, as carnal thoughts imagine, viz., that at this day, first Christ shall raise the dead, and then the separation shall be made, and then the sentence passed, and then suddenly the judgment day is done. No, no; it must take up some large quantity of time, that all the world may see the secret sins of wicked men in the world …” (Sincere Convert 41). Depravity had spread too far for a short doomsday, and, given the sad catalogue of error that would have to be exposed, Wigglesworth's narrative is remarkable for its compression. As Richard Crowder has observed, the collapsing of the vast variety of sins into several broad categories of error creates “a concentration of action” that serves to reinforce the urgency of the poem's convicting message. Crowder demonstrates how the brisk pace resulting from the successive ranks of the damned, coupled with Wigglesworth's skillful use of verb tenses, produces an effect of “horrific efficiency and devastating terror” (“Chronomorph” 955). John F. Lynen also notes how “The preternatural smoothness of the poem as it spins on and on as equably as a cart on ball bearings must have impressed the Puritan reader with the sense of divine inevitability” (61). The ballad meter, in addition to making the poem easier to memorize, could only have enhanced this effect—especially when the poem was read aloud. As Crowder states, “the energy of the vocabulary and the driving force of the ballad line convey an insistence that is irresistible” (“Chronomorph” 954). As each stanza rolled into the next and as one group of sinners quickly gave way to another, the rhythmic and structural regularity made it clear that time for mercy—whether conceived as one's lifetime or as the progress of redemptive history—was indeed running out, that carnal reason would surely be dismissed every bit as quickly and irrevocably. Readers of The Day of Doom could hear as well as see that nothing would impede the onrushing and unstoppable fulfillment of divine justice.

As Murdock has pointed out, Puritan readers “knew that to apply purely literary criteria was beside the point” in assessing Wigglesworth's achievement (vii). For these readers, such qualities as structure, characterization, and meter were inseparable from homiletic strategy. The modern temptation to isolate the traditional literary elements for study at the expense of the homiletic obscures how each reinforces the other. While we are inevitably disappointed, for example, at the deflated drama resulting from the fact that the debate is so mismatched, Puritan readers would have had no doubt that the actual defeat of the damned would be just as sweeping, that Christ's victory over carnal reason would be every bit as effortless as the poem attests—indeed, easier than words could possibly convey. While Wigglesworth's doomsday vision may seem a bit too calculated—perhaps too carefully worked out, and certainly too predictable—for modern tastes, Puritan readers would have applauded, as did Cotton Mather, the poet's success in providing “the Edification of such Readers, as are for Truth's dressed up in a Plaine Meeter” (Faithful Man 24). They would have pointed to the theological accuracy of Wigglesworth's portrait of the prideful soul and relished the systematic conquest of unregenerate reason by the relentless application of the Word. Attracted to its scriptural fidelity and its uncompromising vision of the Judgment, they would have appreciated how skillfully the poem undermined any confidence in the carnal self.

Nor would their reaction have been totally one of terror. Because of the convicting themes of the poem, it is easy for modern readers to overlook the consolation that the Puritan reader would have drawn from The Day of Doom. Wigglesworth certainly followed Richard Bernard's suggestion that sermons aimed at “guilty parties” should emphasize the “fiercenesse of Gods anger against sinne, in giving the law, in punishing without respect all sorts, the horror of an accusing conscience, the agony of death, his short time of life, apt to sudden death, the terrour of the last judgement, hell-fire, the eternall torture” (312, 313). But as long as time and the world continued to exist, the Word could console as well as convict, and the biblical texts that damn the sinners within the poem simultaneously held forth hope to readers looking on from without. “Whoever sought heav'n as he ought,” asks the doomsday Christ, “and seeking perished?” (152). The scriptural text cited at this point—“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matt. 7:7)—underscores what the entire poem witnessed: despite the inevitability and imminence of the Judgment, readers still had an opportunity to stop looking to carnal reason for spiritual truths. The doomsday sinners admit that they never did “believe, nor credit give, / unto our faithful Preachers” (217). The living, however, still had time to receive the Word, and harsh as The Day of Doom may seem, the poem presented its readers with yet another chance to knock at the door of redemption. Wigglesworth underscores the implicit hope set forth by the poem in “A Postscript,” not by softening the doomsday account, but by reiterating the reasons for its harshness: “Nor speak I this, good Reader, to torment thee / Before the time, but rather to prevent thee / From running headlong to thine own decay” (p. 79). The corrective purpose was standard in Puritan homiletics. As Shepard had asked, “What hurt will it be to know the worst of thy condition now, when there is hope hereby of coming out of it, who must else one day see all thy ‘sins in order before thee,’ to thy eternal anguish and terrour?” (Sound Believer 132-33).¹³

The unregenerate may well have resisted such a lesson, but pious readers would have taken comfort from Wigglesworth's insistence that one had to rely totally on Christ's redemptive power. In The Soules Implantation, Hooker had followed a reference to the “wise fool” of the true believer—the Corinthians text with which Wigglesworth opens his exhortation “To the Christian Reader”—with the affirmation that “if any man will have succour in his miserie, he must see himself unable to relieve himself; and then the Lord will doe it for him” (11). Painful as it was, Wigglesworth's sweeping away of every vestige of self-reliance merely reinforced a shifting of the redemptive burden from works to faith, from the fallen self to the merciful Christ. Accordingly, the poet is careful to depict salvation as potentially attainable. The saints did not, after all, earn their election by performing impossible acts of piety; indeed, as Wigglesworth points out, they were in their actions and inherent worth “as vile, / [and] as bad as any be” (42). When he recounts the reward of the martyrs, he takes pains to reserve a share of bliss for those who only stand and wait—who “had not such a tryal” but “ready were the Cross to bear” in the more mundane battles of everyday life (24). And despite the chilling warning in “A Short Discourse” that the divine realm simply cannot be fathomed by the carnal understanding, Wigglesworth spells out the joy that, if the believer has achieved a proper humbling of the heart and mind, should offset the despair of self-renunciation:

Cheer up, ye Saints, amidst your wants,
                    and sorrows many a one,
Lift up the head, shake off all dread,
                    and moderate your mone.
Your sufferings and evil things
                    will suddenly be past;
Your sweet Fruitions, and blessed Visions,
                    for evermore shall last.

(P. 70)

In its characteristically Puritan manner of providing simultaneously the problem and the solution, of balancing the fear of hell with the anticipation of bliss, The Day of Doom sounded the dual theme of castigation and reaffirmation which Sacvan Bercovitch has identified as a central trait of the jeremiad. Devout readers would welcome—even cherish—the lessons of doomsday, since such reproofs from the Word were in themselves evidence that God still cared and that salvation was still within reach. If, Hooker insisted, “You were never broken-hearted here for your abominations, know assuredly that you wil burn for them one day. …” For the pious, such suffering was merely prelude to eternal joy. “Who would not go in sackcloth a while,” Hooker asked, “that he might weare silk for ever?” (Application … The Ninth Book 61, Soules Implantation 22).¹⁴

Wearing the sackcloth was the first step in a redemptive journey that would surely be fulfilled for those who truly depended on faith, and not reason, as the proper guide to the next world. Edward Taylor, in his elegy on his wife, attested that although “The Doomsday Verses much perfum'de her Breath, … yet she fear'd not Death” (114). Elizabeth Fitch Taylor's response illustrates the effect of The Day of Doom on devout readers who could calmly, even eagerly, anticipate Wigglesworth's vision of the Judgment. Those who found that the poem swept away any futile ladders to heaven erected by their own self-reliance would feel that, like the sinners in the poem, they had been humbled by a powerful application of the legal terrors of the Word. In his handbook on the proper expounding of biblical texts and figures, Thomas Hall had enunciated the standard use of such legal warnings: when we see in the “glass” of the Law “the numberlesse number of our sins, and those Seas of wrath due unto us for them; this will make us fly to Christ, as to our City of refuge, and prize a Saviour above all the Kingdomes of the world …” (134). Puritan readers would have held fast to whatever fear The Day of Doom struck in their hearts. The silence of conviction in sin, induced by the sharp reproofs of Wigglesworth's Judge, could only make them more receptive to the gentle and ongoing pleadings of the Advocate.

Notes

1. See also Richard Crowder's observation that “Only occasionally does the poet's burning sensitivity break through the wall of the theological treatise, and even then, the language and imagery are fenced in by Biblical phraseology” (No Featherbed 108). Similar views appear in Roy Harvey Pearce (22), Hyatt H. Waggoner (12), and Donald Barlow Stauffer (23).

2. Harold S. Jantz also observed that The Day of Doom “has been subjected to much abuse and ridicule by anachronistic critics who have deplored the fact that its fundamental premises were not those of the more comfortable nineteenth-century theology” (50).

3. Jonathan Mitchell, “On the following Work and Its Author,” a poem prefatory to The Day of Doom and reprinted in Meserole (412). On the popularity of The Day of Doom, see Murdock (iii). The fullest studies of the poem to date—all of which consider to varying degrees its homiletic context—include Requa (89-103), Ahluwalia (1-12), Osowski (86-112), and Crowder (“Chronomorph” 948-59). Requa provides an overview of the homiletic themes and techniques of the poem, Ahluwalia describes the manner in which the poem dramatizes the terms of the covenant, Osowski treats the poem as propaganda designed to get its readers into a heaven-oriented spiritual frame, and Crowder demonstrates how Wigglesworth structures time in the poem to project the reader toward doomsday and to keep the narrative tight and well paced.

4. The fullest treatment of the Puritan concept of preparation is Pettit, The Heart Prepared, which contains a detailed examination of Hooker's preparationism (88-101). Murdock comments briefly on Wigglesworth's concern with demonstrating the need to get beyond mere human reason and standards: “Wigglesworth had learned Francis Bacon's lesson: ‘The prerogative of God extendeth as well to the reason as to the will of man; so that as we are to obey his law though we find a reluctation in our will, so we are to believe his word though we find a reluctation in our reason’” (x).

5. For a discussion of Shepard's preparationism, see Pettit (101-14).

6. The Day of Doom, stanza 1. All quotations from Wigglesworth are from the Murdock edition. Stanza numbers in parentheses follow all citations from The Day of Doom proper; page numbers follow citations from the poems that precede and follow The Day of Doom.

7. For treatments of the otherworldly focus of Wigglesworth's verse, see Daly (128-36) and Waggoner (11-12). On the sinners' reliance on the self and the world in The Day of Doom, see Crowder (No Featherbed 163-67), Osowski (101-02), and Ahluwalia (6).

8. Gerhard T. Alexis has argued that the “easiest room” image helped Wigglesworth make his depiction of the Judgment “sharper, not softer” (583).

9. Crowder comments briefly on the doomsday transformation of the sinners into “whimpering shams” (No Featherbed 163). Wigglesworth's portrayal of the damned as “Moles” recalls the eschatological prophecy of Isaiah 2:19-20: “And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. / In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats. …” The many such scriptural texts help account for the bestial portrayal of sinners common in Puritan writing. See, for example, Cotton Mather's admonition to young candidates for the ministry: “How little Higher do you Aim, than the Beasts that perish? And how much will you deserve the Name of Brutish, which is the Denomination with which your Herd is branded in the Oracles of GOD? A little more Hair, and crawling upon all Four.—and, what the Difference!” (Manuductio 5).

10. Shepard here cites Psalms 50:16: “But unto the wicked, God saith, What hast thou to do, to declare my statutes, or that thou shouldest take my covenant in thy mouth?”

11. Compare Revelation 21:4: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

12. On Wigglesworth's efforts to accommodate his broad readership, see Murdock (vii) and Meserole (41).

13. Compare Psalms 50:19-21: “Thou givest thy mouth to evil, and thy tongue frameth deceit. / Thou sittest and speakest against thy brother; thou slanderest thine own mother's son. / These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself; but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes.”

14. For Bercovitch's assessment of the dual function of the jeremiad in simultaneously warning and consoling the saints, see American Jeremiad, esp. 6-18. That The Day of Doom presents a closer balance of hope and fear than is commonly assumed has been observed by Osowski, who maintains that Puritan readers would find Wigglesworth's vision “both appealing and obtainable” provided they submit to God's will (108); and by Murdock, who finds that the harshness of the poem is “partly balanced” by the more gentle appeals of “To the Christian Reader” and “Postscript” (x). Ahluwalia also notes how carefully Wigglesworth avoids provoking despair in his readers by maintaining a delicate balance between predestination and “the need for human exertion” (7).

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