SOURCE: “Goodman Brown and the Puritan Catechism,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 40, No. 1, 1994, pp. 66-88.

[In the following essay, Franklin examines the influence of Cotton Mather's catechism entitled Milk for Babes, which focuses on humankind's innate moral depravity, on Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown.”]

If the importance of an artistic creation may be gauged by the amount of critical attention it receives, then Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” is surely one of the most significant stories ever written. From Melville's comments in 1850 to the present, this dark tale has engaged many of Hawthorne's best readers and is likely to continue attracting them. I would suggest, however, that while such scholars as Hyatt H. Waggoner, Richard Harter Fogle, Frederick Crews, and other, more recent critics have helped us understand Hawthorne in general and “Young Goodman Brown” in particular, they have overlooked a statement by Brown which, when analyzed, helps explain his inability to function satisfactorily in Puritan society.¹

Soon after permitting his guide, the devil figure, to persuade him to go deeper into the woods than originally agreed, and after first seeing Goody Cloyse, Brown responds to her unexpected presence by saying, “A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness, at night-fall!”² But then, after observing and hearing most of what transpires between his guide and her and after she seems magically to leave for a meeting deep in the woods, he exclaims, “That old woman taught me my catechism!” In asserting that “there [is] a world of meaning in this simple comment” (80), the narrator insists that Brown's seemingly innocuous statement reveals something significant about the young man.

In an exhaustive historical examination of Hawthorne's art that encompasses this tale, Michael J. Colacurcio takes Brown's statement at face value, commenting that Brown “has been duly catechized, in his youth, by the dutiful Goody Cloyse.” Neal Frank Doubleday, in a study of Hawthorne's early tales, mentions Brown's sentence but does not interpret it. Although Sheldon W. Liebman argues that the reader of the tale must “distinguish between appearance and reality by way of determining what happens in the story and why,” he does not subject the sentence or its implications to such a test. Most surprisingly, critics like Melinda M. Ponder who examine the narrator of this story also ignore the sentence, despite the extraordinary claim, implicit in the narrator's remark, that any reader wishing to understand Brown must take it into account.³

As best as I can determine, only two critics analyze the sentence: Thomas E. Connolly in 1956 and Robert C. Grayson in 1990. Arguing that during his night in the woods Brown discovers the “full and terrible significance” of his faith and that the story “is Hawthorne's criticism of the teachings of Puritanic-Calvinism,” Connolly posits that the “‘world of meaning’ in Brown's statement is that [Goody Cloyse's] catechism teaches the way to the devil and not the way to heaven.”⁴ Regrettably, Connolly seems merely to assume the nature of a Puritan catechism without having consulted one.

Grayson focuses much more sharply than Connolly on the importance of a catechism in “Young Goodman Brown.” He argues that Hawthorne alludes to a specific catechism and that the four references to it in the tale collectively suggest the meaning of Brown's statement. Grayson identifies the catechism as John Cotton's and quotes from two of the answers (the sixth and the eighth) that catechumens, including Brown, would have given to questions asked by a catechist. Apparently on the basis of these answers, he concludes that “by its emphasis on total depravity, [the catechism] soured the milk of human kindness” in Puritans generally and in Brown specifically, so that it “actually undermined trust in mankind and thus did the work of the devil.” As a result of studying with Goody Cloyse, Grayson asserts, Brown's “heart has been withered, at least in part, by the catechism.”⁵ However, only four sets of questions and answers (the fifth through the eighth) in the catechism of sixty-four such sets address the issue of innate depravity. In the remaining sixty sets, the author offers rules for living and addresses in considerable detail requirements for attaining salvation, the possibility of which children would have acknowledged in their first answer during catechism instruction. Failure to consider the entire text thus causes Grayson to assign greater importance to innate depravity than the catechism calls for, thus distorting the meaning of the catechism and misinterpreting its probable effect on Brown.

In this essay, I confirm Grayson's identification of the catechism to which Hawthorne alludes in his tale. I then examine the entire catechism and apply it to Brown, demonstrating that he never masters its meaning. I also show that the narrator speaks truthfully in his pregnant but elliptical comment about Brown's words.

By the year 1700, the Massachusetts Puritans had used a number of catechisms, including the Westminster Assembly's shorter version. As Grayson shows, Hawthorne consulted books that identify the specific catechism used in Salem Village in the late seventeenth century. Moreover, Marion L. Kesselring's catalogue of books that Hawthorne borrowed from the Salem Athenaeum reveals that before publishing “Young Goodman Brown” in the New-England Magazine in April 1835, he once withdrew (and his Aunt Mary Manning earlier twice withdrew, apparently for him) the sixth volume of Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. This volume contains “A Description and History of Salem,” in which William Bentley specifies that the Salem Village Puritans of Brown's time used John Cotton's catechism, Milk for Babes.⁶ Then, on 21 September 1833 and 30 December 1834, Hawthorne withdrew from the Athenaeum Joseph B. Felt's Annals of Salem, which records that on 10 September 1660 Milk for Babes was selected as the catechism for Salem children.⁷ In referring to a catechism in “Young Goodman Brown,” therefore, Hawthorne clearly has Cotton's in mind.⁸

Did Hawthorne then read the catechism in order to learn what it says? No evidence exists to indicate that he did. However, Hawthorne's close familiarity with the details of early American history is well known. In some of his tales he even alludes to or cites texts that illuminate the historical material he is presenting, as in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts), “The Gentle Boy” (William Sewel's History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers), and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (Joseph Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the People of England). Further, it seems unlikely that Hawthorne would have his narrator comment so boldly about Brown's allusion to a text if he, Hawthorne, were unaware of what the text says, especially when he knew its author's name and its title. In all probability, he sought out and read Cotton's text before completing “Young Goodman Brown.”⁹

In his research, Hawthorne would have discovered that Milk for Babes addresses innate depravity only after a positive beginning, which raises the possibility of salvation and details the nature of God and humanity's relationship to him:

Q. What hath GOD done for you?

A. God hath made me, He keepeth me, and he can save me.

Q. Who is God?

A. God is a Spirit of himself, and for himself.

Q. How many Gods be there?

A. There is but one God in three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Q. How did God make you?

A. In my first Parents holy and righteous.

Q. Are you then born holy and righteous?

A. No, my first Father sinned, and I in him.

Q. Are you then born a Sinner[?]

A. I was conceived in sin, and born in iniquity.

Q. What is your Birth-sin?

Answ. [sic] Adams sin imputed to me, and a corrupt nature dwelling in me.

Q. What is your corrupt nature?

Ans. [sic] My corrupt nature is empty of Grace, bent unto sin, and onely unto sin, and that continually.

Q. What is sin?

A. Sin is the transgession of the Law [the Ten Commandments].¹⁰

At the beginning of each catechism lesson, then, catechumens like Brown would have acknowledged two of the primary tenets of Puritan faith: first, the possibility of salvation; then, humanity's certain sinful nature.

Although the treatment of innate depravity in the catechism is relatively brief, this was only one source of information about human corruption and its implications available to Puritan youth. As part of the Puritan upbringing that implicitly precedes Hawthorne's tale, Brown doubtless would have sat through many sermons that emphasized innate depravity, which his family of churchgoers presumably reinforced, if only by reading and discussing the book of Genesis. Even if he been inattentive during the sermons or if for some reason his family had been derelict in fulfilling their religious obligation to him, the Puritans of Salem Village would have taught him this belief, either directly or indirectly. Theirs was a religious society, after all; people talked about their faith. Young Brown might have encountered reading material conveying the same message about depravity, such as The New-England Primer, the reader that offers the verse “In Adam's Fall / We Sinned all” to help abecedarians master the letter A. And the same verse, or one expressing a similar sentiment, might have appeared on the hornbook Brown would have used to learn the alphabet, or elsewhere.¹¹ Because he has been reared and lives in Salem Village in the seventeenth century, Brown cannot have avoided regular exposure to the Puritan belief in innate depravity.

But before leaving the home he shares with his wife, Faith, does he believe—really believe—the gloomy philosophy presented in four sets of questions and answers at the beginning of Cotton's text? Clearly not. He thinks mortals good. How else explain the vow he makes, immediately after leaving home and while still observing his wife, that following his one night away from Faith, “a blessed angel on earth,” he will “cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven” (75)?¹² If he believed in the certainty of depravity and only the possibility of salvation, as the catechism teaches, he would know that even so righteous a person as Faith is corrupt and not necessarily of the elect, appearances notwithstanding. And how else explain his disappointment in Goody Cloyse, the minister, Deacon Gookin, and Faith when he apparently encounters them in the woods? Disappointed—and shocked—he surely is. After seeing his catechist, he says, “What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil, when I thought she was going to Heaven!” (80); after hearing the minister and Deacon Gookin, “With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!” (82); and after hearing Faith's voice and seeing her pink ribbon, “My Faith is gone! … There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name” (83). He now thinks that he was mistaken about these people he has “reverenced from youth” (87) and, by extension, about all people, especially those of his society. Only at this point does Brown finally comprehend the innate corruption of humanity. (The guilt he apparently feels at leaving Faith for the appointment with his guide seems to stem more from his violating her trust than from any belief in depravity.) As if to prove that he is one with the multitude he now views darkly—and possibly to demonstrate that he at last understands the full, somber reality of one part, if only one small part, of the catechism—Brown goes forward to participate in a fiendish version of the baptismal rite, which he finds the “Shape of Evil” conducting in the woods (88).¹³

Without addressing the catechism directly, Colacurcio, in calling Brown “theologically ill-prepared,”¹⁴ offers one reason why Brown, before leaving home, has such an un-Puritan view of human nature: perhaps he does not comprehend the tenets of his faith, one important source of which is the catechism. Goody Cloyse might share this view. In terming her former student a “silly fellow” (79), she may intend to suggest that although he memorized the catechism answers, his latitudinarian attitude toward her, Faith, and others before he enters the woods signals his inability truly to understand and psychologically assimilate the full significance of Milk for Babes. Even if this is not what she means, the historical record indicates that many young people before, during, and after Brown's time have had difficulty mastering the meaning of a catechism.

This problem attracted the attention of several important seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century divines, both American and English. No less a figure than Richard Mather implies that too many people fail to master the meaning of a catechism. In his 1657 farewell sermon, he observes, “[C]omonly they that fall to erro[ur,] [ar]e defective in the knowledg of Catechistical points.”¹⁵ At almost precisely the same time that Brown would have been studying the catechism with Goody Cloyse, however, the English cleric Richard Baxter was suggesting that it is more important for children to memorize the words of a catechism than to understand what the words mean, at least initially. He writes: “Cause your younger Children to learn the words, though they be not yet capable of understanding the matter. … A child of five or six years old can learn the words of a Catechism or Scripture, before they are capable of understanding them.”¹⁶ If this attitude prevailed in Salem Village during the time when Goody Cloyse would have been teaching Milk for Babes, it might help explain Brown's early inability to embrace the full significance of Cotton's text: there would have been no compelling reason for him to master it; he would have been required only to memorize the words. Yet he would have been expected to understand the catechism as he matured and to begin conducting his life according to its principles. He does neither.

Others also expressed opinions about the common deficiency in understanding a catechism. Cotton Mather, for example, addressed this problem in 1699, only seven years after the probable date of the events in “Young Goodman Brown.” Clearly, he is less inclined than Baxter to make allowances for children's lack of comprehension:

Be sure, that they [catechumens] Learn their Catechism very perfectly; But then content not your selves with hearing them say by Rote, the Answers in their Catechism; Question them very distinctly over again about every clause in the Answers; and bring all to ly so plain before them, that by their saying only, Yes, or, No, you may perceive that the sense of the Truth is Entred into their Souls.¹⁷

Three years later, Mather's concern had not abated. He includes the text of Cotton's catechism in one of his own publications and adds to it questions that can be answered affirmatively or negatively, precisely as he prescribed in 1699. He admonishes: “To Remember, and not Understand, is as Tedious as Useless a Thing. It is a thing of the first Importance, that our Children do Understand, what they Remember, of their Catechism, and not recite it, like meer Parrots, by rote.”¹⁸ In 1730, the English hymnographer and catechism writer Isaac Watts argued even more directly:

[I]f by virtue of a faithful memory persons should retain the words which they have learned in childhood, they will vainly imagine themselves furnished with a set of principles of religion, though they feel no power of them upon conscience in the conduct of life; and all this because these articles do not lie in the heart, or even in the understanding, as a set of principles for practice, but rather in the head or memory as a set of phrases.¹⁹

In stating that children should not memorize what they cannot comprehend, the Mathers and Watts disagree with Baxter; to them, catechumens must understand a catechism from the outset. If they do not, they will be deluded into thinking themselves morally prepared for life and will therefore think as they should not and comport themselves poorly, as Watts avers. Such is the case with Brown. Clearly, his attitude before leaving for the woods is contrary to the Puritan way of thinking conveyed in Milk for Babes, a text he should have mastered. His decidedly non-Puritan faith in the goodness of humanity permits awareness of human corruption, once it comes, to destroy the young man's heart. David Levin, although he does not discuss the catechism, implies something similar in asserting that “Young Goodman Brown” is “about Brown's … discovery of the possibility of universal evil.”²⁰ I would amend Levin's statement by changing the word possibility to certainty. As a Puritan reared in Salem Village, Brown should not have to make such a discovery as a young adult, years after Goody Cloyse taught him the doctrine of innate depravity during their catechism lessons.

Even had Brown not understood human imperfection from the catechism or other sources as he progressed into adulthood, he should have suspected it because of his own moral shortcomings, his latent desires to violate religious precepts set forth in the catechism and especially the Ten Commandments. To the Puritans, the Commandments were extremely important: they served as a summary of scriptural instruction on proper behavior in every circumstance. In fact, Cotton stresses their significance by devoting twenty-seven sets of questions and answers to them in his catechism.²¹ How successfully does Brown obey the Commandments? Either in his dream or in reality, in the woods or after returning to Salem Village, he disobeys all of them to one degree or another.

When Goody Cloyse, in the course of catechistical training, presumably asked young Brown to explain the meaning of the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other Gods but me,” the proper response would have been, “That we should worship the onely true God, and no other beside him” (MB [Spiritual Milk for Babes], 2). Similarly, when she asked for Brown's understanding of the Second Commandment, “Thou shalt not make to thy self any graven image, &c.,” he would have said, “That we should worship the true God with true worship such as God hath ordained, not such as man hath invented” (MB, 2-3). But Brown violates both commandments. He might not worship his guide, the devil figure, but he permits his companion to manipulate him in an almost godlike manner. He obeys his cicerone. And as Brown moves toward the forest altar, he prepares to worship the “dark figure,” the “Shape of Evil,” who is about to initiate the converts into “the communion of [their] race” (86), which is to say into evil. Only awakening from his dream, if such it is, keeps Brown from worshiping under the direction of this minister, who is hardly the equivalent of a Puritan divine. Brown accepts and embraces for the remainder of his life the man's dark message that converts “shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood-spot”—a message that differs from Cotton's at the beginning of the catechism by emphasizing only the negative and by urging mortals “to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin” (87).

In explaining his understanding of the Third Commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, &c.,” Brown would have said, “To make use of God, and the good things of God, to his Glory, and our good; not vainly, not unreverently, nor unprofitably” (MB, 3). After observing (or dreaming about) people in the woods and then returning home, Brown cannot acknowledge that there are “good things of God” and that he lives among them, flawed as he believes Faith and the others are. Not only does he fail to use the townspeople to glorify God, he also distances himself from them emotionally, revealing his vanity and arrogance, his irreverence and ignorance. Instead of glorifying his creator, Brown cares only about preserving himself from the threat of spiritual contamination. As he finds others “unprofitable” to him, so too does he become to them, although Faith apparently continues loving him for the remainder of his life. In separating himself from his fellow mortals, he violates the Third Commandment.

Following his return to Salem Village, Brown might or might not rest on the Sabbath; certainly, though, this morose young man never frolics then, or at any time. However, disillusioned with humanity and most especially with the church officials, he does not perform the Lord's work or feel close to God, even on Sunday. Therefore, he disobeys the Fourth Commandment, “Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day, &c.,” which means that “we should rest from labor and much more from play on the Lord's day; that we may draw nigh to God in holy Duties” (MB, 3-4).

Brown also violates the Fifth Commandment, “Honour thy Father and thy Mother, that thy dayes may be long in the Land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” When Goody Cloyse asked Brown to define father and mother, he would have replied, “All our Superiors, whether in Family, School, Church, and Common-wealth”; and in detailing what honor he owes these people, he would have said, “Reverence, obedience, and (when I am able) Recompense” (MB, 4). Goody Cloyse, the minister, and Deacon Gookin are clearly Brown's religious superiors. Before his night in the woods, Brown had revered these people, but he did not truly obey them in the sense that he did not honor their teachings about human depravity. And after this night, he reveres them no more. To him they are now hypocrites whose apparent goodness veils corruption. In the woods, Brown does honor his father, or what he believes is “the shape of his own dead father” (86). The image of the elder Brown beckons him to the ceremony and Brown obeys. But a woman (the narrator suggests that she might be Brown's mother) warns him not to come forward. He disobeys her. And at the end of the tale, if not at the beginning, Faith is clearly Brown's superior. She obviously loves her husband, presumably functions more or less normally in her society, and exhibits an enthusiasm for life, whereas Brown, following his night in the woods, loves nobody (except possibly himself), quits functioning as a social being, and necessarily withdraws from life. In rejecting Faith upon returning to Salem Village, Brown humiliates and dishonors her. In fact, of the characters in the tale, Brown honors only the image of his father, the man who apparently conducts the ceremony in the woods, and his guide.

Just as surely as Brown fails to obey the Fifth Commandment, he also violates the Sixth, “Thou shalt do no murther.” Religious novitiates indicated their understanding of this commandment by saying it means “[t]hat we should not shorten the life, or health of our selves or others, but preserve both” (MB, 4). Brown lives a long life, long enough to see Faith “an aged woman” (90) and to have grandchildren follow his corpse to its grave. But his emotional health, his psychological health, dies during his night in the woods; his long life is essentially a long nonlife. The murder Brown commits is spiritual suicide.

If Brown does not violate the Seventh Commandment, it is not for lack of trying. Even Puritan prepubescents must have known what “Thou shalt not commit Adultery” really means; but when asked to define it, they said, “To defile our selves, or others with unclean Lusts.” And to indicate that they understood their responsibilities, they stated that their duty was to “[c]hastity, to possess [their] vessels in holiness and honour” (MB, 5). Definitions usually clarify, not obfuscate; but even today, adults might use euphemisms as vague and locutions as evasive as these in a similar context. At this late date, though, few would doubt that Brown goes to the woods primarily for sexual reasons.²² Support for this interpretation emerges in sexual imagery, as when Goody Cloyse says that “there is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night,” or when Deacon Gookin says that “there is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion” (79, 81). Other evidence includes the apparent presence in the woods of the governor's wife and other women, many of them exalted, but all without their husbands. Their companions are “men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes” (85). I would suggest that Brown goes to the woods to participate in an orgy, in clear violation of the Seventh Commandment.

Puritan youth were taught that “Thou shalt not steal,” the Eighth Commandment, forbade them “to take away another mans goods, without his leave, or to spend [their] own without benefit to [them]selves or others” (MB, 5). In separating himself emotionally from Faith and their children for the remainder of his life, Brown steals from himself and from them the life of normal familial interaction that they might reasonably have anticipated.²³ In similarly subtle ways, he disobeys the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy Neighbour.” Brown would have explained to Goody Cloyse that bearing false witness means “to lye falsly, to think or speak untruly of our selves or others” (MB, 6). He certainly thinks “untruly.” Not only does he perceive Faith, Goody Cloyse, the minister, and Deacon Gookin incorrectly, both before and after his night away from home, but in thinking himself superior to them upon returning to Salem Village, he thinks untruly about himself.

Finally, Brown violates the Tenth Commandment, “Thou shalt not covet, &c.” This commandment forbids “[l]ust after the things of other men, and want of contentment with our own” (MB, 6). Brown is not content. Either he is unhappy with Faith, or he is not yet able to be faithful to her sexually, or both. Surely, when he goes to the woods, he knows what is happening there “this night … of all nights in the year” (74), and he wants to participate. Even though he does not frolic with the women he desires, he consummates a physical relationship with more than one of them in his heart. This newlywed defiles himself with what he once would have identified, in explaining the Seventh Commandment to Goody Cloyse, as “unclean Lusts” (MB, 5).

The fact that Brown violates, or dreams of violating, the Commandments either in the woods or later in Salem Village suggests that he had urges to disobey them before leaving home.²⁴ And if so, he should have surmised from observing himself, if not from having studied the catechism with Goody Cloyse or from living in a Puritan society, that people are fundamentally corrupt, precisely as Cotton states in Milk for Babes. That Brown fails to honor the Commandments does not make him unique among mortals, however; nor does it mean that he is necessarily destined for eternal damnation. Rather, Cotton relates in the catechism that because of Adam's sin, no human is capable of keeping the Commandments:

Q. Have you kept all these Commandements?

Ans. No, I and all men are sinners.

(MB, 6)

Had Brown understood from childhood that humans, all of whom are depraved, cannot obey the Commandments, that fidelity to God's law is impossible, he would not be so surprised to see, or to think he sees, the several worthies preparing to act in a decidedly non-Christian manner in the woods. But because he did not learn this lesson well, he is surprised; and as a result, he thinks that, in the words of Emily Miller Budick, “evil is our only reality and the devil our only God.”²⁵ For the remainder of his life he retains this view, which destroys him.

After presenting the Ten Commandments, Cotton concludes the catechism by addressing salvation once again. Doing so is structurally appropriate because it reintroduces the hope expressed in the first catechism answer that God “can save me” (MB, 1). It is also theologically appropriate, the natural Christian conclusion to a traditional presentation of the gospel, as interpreted by St. Paul in Romans 8.²⁶ Cotton devotes twenty-eight sets of questions and answers to the possibility of salvation, illustrating its importance. Also, in this section, he requires catechism students to give their longest, most detailed answers, forcing them to address some of the fine points concerning salvation.

In helping Brown with the conclusion to the catechism, Goody Cloyse would have taught him that because all mortals are sinners, only Jesus can save them. But in order to gain salvation, they must look to the Bible, which teaches their need for a savior. Although unworthy of Christ's grace, they may attain it by denying themselves and demonstrating faith in him, by praying to God, by repenting (detesting their sins and asking forgiveness), and by attaining a new life (rejecting their corrupt state and walking before Christ as church members). The faithful of the church have a covenant wherein they give themselves to God, whom they worship, and to the church officials. Baptism and communion, the seals of the covenant, provide for resurrection from the dead on Judgment Day, a time when God will determine the fate of all souls on the basis of works performed in conjunction with the faith that gives them merit in God's sight.²⁷ Some souls will reside in heaven, some in hell.

Brown fulfills only one of the requirements for attaining salvation, and it is one in which he was necessarily passive. Assuming he was born in the late 1660s to church members, he would have been baptized as an infant. Even had his parents not demonstrated evidence of saving faith and therefore not been recognized as full church members, the Half-Way Covenant of 1662 permitted the newborn Brown to be baptized.²⁸ But following his night in the woods, Brown apparently does not subject himself to the Bible, or at least not to the New Testament, if his rejection of the imperfect but admirable members of his society and his long, somber life are any indications. In refusing to deny himself, Brown demonstrates a lack of faith in Christ, which makes praying for deliverance irrelevant. He does not repent his sins. While he attains a new life, it is, in its gloominess, the antithesis of the positive new life Cotton requires in the catechism. Since Brown probably no longer remains a member of the church, he cannot properly subject himself to God or the clergy, thus rendering himself ineligible to receive holy communion, one of the seals of the covenant.²⁹ According to Cotton's teachings, then, Brown's soul will not find eternal residence with God in heaven but will reside forever in hell.

Indeed, Connolly and Grayson state correctly that the Puritan catechism treats the issue of innate depravity, as any text detailing the tenets of Puritanism must. But Milk for Babes does so only briefly, at the beginning of the text. As the Bible progresses from the talionic Old Testament to the caritative New Testament, so does Cotton's catechism progress, beginning with the fifth answer, from judgment to hope. Because it is essentially a vade mecum for living morally and attaining salvation, it is a hopeful, not a pessimistic, document. Clearly, then, Connolly misstates in claiming that the “catechism teaches the way to the devil and not the way to heaven”; and Grayson errs in proclaiming that “Connolly is right about the deleterious effects of the catechism.”³⁰

Aware that the Salem Village of Brown's time used Milk for Babes, Hawthorne astutely has his narrator state that “there was a world of meaning” in Brown's comment, “That old woman taught me my catechism” (80). Indeed, there is considerable meaning; the narrator does not speak idly—or ironically. Brown incriminates himself as one who has been unable to assimilate into his view of humanity the fundamental beliefs of his faith and of his society, as Cotton expresses them. Before leaving home, Brown thinks mortals close to perfection; an understanding of the catechism would have disabused him of this assumption. But after returning home from his night in the woods, he considers irredeemable these people he has revered. This judgment, too, is flawed. Since Brown never masters the lessons Goody Cloyse tried to teach him, he cannot fit spiritually, emotionally, or psychologically into his own society. As a result, he becomes, like Hawthorne's Wakefield, an “Outcast of the Universe”³¹ on whose tombstone “they carved no hopeful verse … ; for his dying hour was gloom” (90).

Notes

1. See Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford et al., vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 251-52; Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), 14, 59, 60-61, 119, 209-10, 253; Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, rev. ed. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 15-32; and Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966; Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 98-106. Crews disavows the psychological underpinnings of his study in the afterword to the reprint edition; see especially 278-79.

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown,” in Mosses from an Old Manse, ed. William Charvat et al., vol. 10 of the Centenary Edition of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), 78; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.

3. Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 288; Neal Frank Doubleday, Hawthorne's Early Tales: A Critical Study (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1972), 205; Sheldon W. Liebman, “The Reader in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1975, ed. C. E. Frazer Clark Jr. (Englewood, CO: Microcard Editions Books, 1975), 157; Melinda M. Ponder, Hawthorne's Early Narrative Art, vol. 9 of Studies in American Literature (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), 52-62, 138-39.

4. Thomas E. Connolly, “Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’: An Attack on Puritanic Calvinism,” American Literature 28 (1956): 375, 373.

5. Robert C. Grayson, “Curdled Milk for Babes: The Role of the Catechism in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 16 (Spring 1990): 1, 5, 3.

6. Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, 1828-1850: A Transcription and Identification of Titles Recorded in the Charge-Books of the Salem Athenaeum (New York: New York Public Library, 1949), 56. Grayson mistakenly states that Hawthorne himself withdrew the volume three times (“Curdled Milk for Babes,” 3). Also see William Bentley, “A Description and History of Salem,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 6 (1799): 260.

7. See Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, 50; and Joseph B. Felt, The Annals of Salem, From Its First Settlement (Salem: W[illiam] and S[tephen] B[radshaw] Ives, 1827), 207. The Salem church had jurisdiction over the Salem Village church until their separation in 1689 (Bentley, “A Description and History of Salem,” 266). Therefore, until at least that date the catechism used in Salem, Milk for Babes, would also have been used in Salem Village.

8. There are seven extant seventeenth-century editions of John Cotton's Milk for Babes in English, as well as a translation into Massachusett by Grindal Rawson:

   Milk for Babes (London: J[ane] Coe for Henry Overton, 1646). Wing 6443.

   Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in Either England (Cambridg[e], MA: S[amuel] G[reen] for Hezekiah Usher, 1656). Evans 42.

   Spirituall Milk for Boston Babes in Either England (London: Henry Cripps, 1657). Wing 6462A.

   Spiritual Milk for Babes (London: Henry Cripps, 1662). Wing 6459A.

   Spiritual Milk for Babes (London: Peter Parker, 1668). Wing 6460.

   Spiritual Milk for Babes (London: Peter Parker, 1672). “Corrected in Quotations by L. H. 1665.” Wing 6461.

   Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, in Either England (Boston, 1684). Evans 39225.

   Nashauanittue Meninnunk wutch Mukkiesog, trans. Grindal Rawson (Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green for Bartholomew Green, 1691). Evans 550.

   Although substantive textual differences exist among the editions in English, they do not affect meaning. Other editions reportedly were published in London in 1648, Cambridge in 1668, and Boston in 1690; and there might have been other seventeenth-century editions. See Wilberforce Eames, Early New England Catechisms: A Bibliographical Account of Some Catechisms Published before the Year 1800, For Use in New England (1898; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), 24-25. In this essay, I follow the established practice of referring to Cotton's catechism as Milk for Babes.

9. If Milk for Babes were unavailable to Hawthorne under its own title, he would nevertheless have had access to it in numerous eighteenth-century editions of The New-England Primer. See Charles F. Heartman, The New-England Primer Issued Prior to 1830 (New York: Bowker, 1934).

10. John Cotton, Spiritual Milk for Babes (London: Peter Parker, 1672), 1-2; hereafter cited parenthetically as MB, with page number. In quoting from Cotton's text, I make no effort to reproduce the long s; I also do not include the marginal glosses to biblical verses. I base my use of this particular edition on the following reasoning: First, I assume that the tale is set in 1692 (due to the suggestions of witchcraft) and, further, that the protagonist is in his mid-twenties. In a demographic study of Andover, Massachusetts (fewer than fifteen miles from Salem Village), Philip J. Greven Jr. shows that from 1690 to 1694, Andover men married at the average age of 23.5 (see Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970], 117). Hawthorne had access to similar demographic data about Andover: in September 1834, only seven months before the publication of “Young Goodman Brown,” he withdrew from the Salem Athenaeum Abiel Abbot's History of Andover from Its Settlement to 1829 (Andover: Flagg and Gould, 1829), which includes, on 185-86, birth and death data from 1652 through 1700 (Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, 43). Assuming that Salem Village's data would be similar to Andover's, and that Brown married at the average age in 1692 (he and Faith have been married for only three months at the tale's opening), then were he a real person, he would have been born in 1668 or 1669. Because he would have begun catechism lessons around age five, it is likely that Goody Cloyse would have taught him using the 1672 edition of Cotton's text, the one I cite here. (Grayson cites the edition of 1646.)

11. The New-England Primer Enlarged (Boston: S[amuel] Kneeland and T[imothy] Green, 1727), 7. Evans 2927. This is the earliest extant text of the Primer, which was possibly first published before 1690. For further information, see Paul Leicester Ford, The New-England Primer: A History of Its Origin and Development (1897; reprint, n.p.: Columbia Univ., 1962); George Livermore, The Origin, History and Character of the New England Primer (1849; reprint, New York: Cha[rle]s Fred[erick] Heartman, 1915); Worthington Chauncey Ford, “The New England Primer,” in Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (1924; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 61-65; A. S. W. Rosenbach, Early American Children's Books (1933; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1966); Heartman, New-England Primer Issued Prior to 1830; William Sloane, Children's Books in England and America in the Seventeenth Century (New York: King's Crown Press/Columbia Univ., 1955), 191-93; Cornelia Meigs, ed., A Critical History of Children's Literature: A Survey of Children's Books in English from Earliest Times to the Present, rev. ed. (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969), 110-19; Daniel A. Cohen, “The Origin and Development of the New England Primer,” Children's Literature 5 (1976): 52-57; and David H. Watters, “‘I Spake as a Child’: Authority, Metaphor and The New-England Primer,” Early American Literature 20 (1985-86): 193-213. No seventeenth-century hornbook is known to exist.

12. If Brown understood the catechism, he would know that a relationship with another person does not influence the ultimate disposition of one's soul. One does not gain salvation by proxy, as it were.

13. Cf. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” in Twice-Told Tales, ed. William Charvat et al., vol. 9 of the Centenary Edition of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), 200. Here, in what is possibly Hawthorne's earliest published tale, a “Power of Evil” performs the “impious baptismal rite.”

14. Colacurcio, Province of Piety, 301.

15. Richard Mather, A Farewel Exhortation to the Church and People of Dorchester in New-England (Cambridg[e], MA: Samuel Green, 1657), 6.

16. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory; or, A Summ of Practical Theologie, and Cases of Conscience (London: Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673), pt. 2, 582. Baxter argues that learning the words of a catechism without mastering their meaning will make understanding easier when children are capable of comprehending theological concepts. Then, instead of struggling to learn both words and meaning, they can focus on the latter. Also see David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 37.

17. Cotton Mather, A Family Well-Ordered; or, An Essay to Render Parents and Children Happy in One Another (Boston: B[artholomew] Green and J[ohn] Allen for Michael Perry and Benjamin Eliot, 1699), 19-20.

18. Cotton Mather, Maschil; or, The Faithful Instructor. Offering, Memorials of Christianity in Twenty Six Exercises upon the New-English Catechism (Boston: B[artholomew] Green and J[ohn] Allen for Samuel Phillips, 1702), 11.

19. Isaac Watts, “A Discourse on the Way of Instruction by Catechisms, and of the Best Method of Composing Them,” in The Works of the Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts, D. D. Containing, besides His Sermons, and Essays on Miscellaneous Subjects, Several Additional Pieces, Selected from His Manuscripts (London: J[ohn] Barfield, 1810), 3:214.

20. David Levin, “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” American Literature 34 (1962): 351.

21. Cotton also writes elsewhere about the importance of the Ten Commandments to the Puritans: “[A]ll the sins and good things found in the wlhoe [sic] Bible, are to be ranked within the compasse of the ten Commandments.” See A Practical Commentary; or, An Exposition with Observations, Reasons, and Uses upon the First Epistle Generall of John (London: R[obert] I[bbitson] and E[dward] C[rouch] for Thomas Parkhurst, 1656), 235.

22. For a discussion of sexuality in “Young Goodman Brown,” see Crews, Sins of the Fathers, 98-106.

23. Unless Faith is pregnant with more than one child before Brown leaves her for the woods, they have sexual intercourse after he returns, and probably more than once. Their “children” follow his body to the grave (90).

24. If Brown actually violates the Commandments, as opposed to merely dreaming about disobeying them, he might be violating civil as well as ecclesiastical law. In 1690 the General Court encouraged ministers to suppress such sins as “Unbelief, Worldliness, Heresy, Pride, Wrath, Strife, Envy, and the Neglect of communion with God, in both Natural and Instituted Worship, and the Contempt of the everlasting Gospel, with a shameful want of due Family-Instruction, which are the Roots of Bitterness in the midst of us” (By the Governour and General Court of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay [Cambridge, 1690], [2]).

25. Emily Miller Budick, Fiction and Historical Consciousness: The American Romance Tradition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 91.

26. See, for example, Romans 8:38-39, quoted from the Authorized (King James) Version:

    For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

    Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

27. Cotton states elsewhere that mortals cannot know, on the basis of their works, if their souls are heaven bound: “Sanctification … is no evidence, or witness of our union with Christ” (A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace, As It Is Dispensed to the Elect Seed, Effectually unto Salvation, 2nd ed. [London: William Miller, 1662], 43). This belief, of course, does not contradict Cotton's statement in the catechism that God judges souls according to mortals' works. For discussions of Cotton's attitude toward works, especially in the context of Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian controversy, see Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), 110-12; William K. B. Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1978), 54-55; R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 167-83; and Everett Emerson, John Cotton, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 64-67, 85-96.

28. I refer to the fifth proposition in the Half-Way Covenant, which permits children of church members to be baptized:

    Church-members who were admitted in minority, understanding the Doctrine of Faith, and publickly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the Covenant before the Church, wherein they give up themselves and their children to the Lord, and subject themselves to the Government of Christ in the Church, their children are to be Baptized.”

    (Propositions Concerning the Subject of Baptism and Consociation of Churches [Cambridge, MA: S(amuel) G(reen) for Hezekiah Usher, 1662], 19)

29. Colacurcio suggests otherwise. He says, “Goodman Brown evidently continued to be accepted at the communion table” (Province of Piety, 303). But following his return to Salem Village, Brown has no reason for wishing to remain in the church. Further, because he can no longer meet church membership requirements, as Cotton presents them, he could conceivably be excommunicated. Following the adoption of the Half-Way Covenant in 1662, Puritan churches continued to excommunicate members “for misconduct or for openly expressed heretical ideas” (Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea [New York: New York Univ. Press, 1963; Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1965], 127).

30. Connolly, “Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” 373; Grayson, “Curdled Milk for Babes,” 5.

31. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield,” in Twice-Told Tales, 140.