Our Employment Lies In Heaven

John Eliot, in Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, Vol. 1, p. 535:

Behold, the ancient and excellent character of a true Christian; 'tis that which Peter calls 'holiness in all manner of conversation;' you shall not find a Christian out of the way of godly conversation. For, first, a seventh part of our time is all spent in heaven, when we are duly zealous for, and zealous on the Sabbath of God. Besides, God has written on the head of the Sabbath, REMEMBER, which looks both forwards and backwards, and thus a good part of the week will be spent in sabbatizing. Well, but for the rest of our time! Why, we shall have that spent in heaven, ere we have done. For, secondly, we have many days for both fasting and thanksgiving in our pilgrimage; and here are so many Sabbaths more. Moreover, thirdly, we have our lectures every week; and pious people won't miss them, if they can help it. Furthermore, fourthly, we have our private meetings, wherein we pray, and sing, and repeat sermons, and confer together about the things of God; and being now come thus far, we are in heaven almost every day. But a little farther, fifthly, we perform family-duties every day; we have our morning and evening sacrifices, wherein having read the Scriptures to our families, we call upon the name of God, and ever now and then carefully catechise those that are under our charge. Sixthly, we shall also have our daily devotions in our closets; wherein unto supplication before the Lord, we shall add some serious meditation upon his word: a David will be at this work no less than thrice a day. Seventhly, we have likewise many scores of ejaculations in a day; and these we have, like Nehemiah, in whatever place we come into. Eighthly we have our occasional thoughts and our occasional talks upon spiritual matters; and we have our occasional acts of charity, wherein we do like the inhabitants of heaven every day. Ninthly, in our callings, in our civil callings, we keep up heavenly frames; we buy and sell, and toil; yea, we eat and drink, with some eye both to the command and honour of God in all. Behold, I have not now left an inch of time to be carnal; it is all engrossed for heaven. And yet, lest here should not be enough, lastly, we have our spiritual warfare. We are always encountring the enemies of our souls, which continually raises our hearts unto our Helper and Leader in the heavens. Let no man say, ''Tis impossible to live at this rate;' for we have known some live thus; and others that have written of such a life have but spun a web out of their own blessed experiences. New-England has example of this life: though, alas! 'tis to be lamented that the distractions of the world, in too many professors, do beecloud the beauty of an heavenly conversation. In fine, our employment lies in heaven. In the morning, if we ask, 'Where am I to be to day?' our souls must answer, 'In heaven.' In the evening, if we ask, 'Where have I been to-day?' our souls may answer, 'In heaven.' If thou art a believer, thou art no stranger to heaven while thou livest; and when thou diest, heaven will be no strange place to thee; no, thou hast been there a thousand times before.

Novangles on New-Fangled Worship

John Eliot, quoted by G.H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought, p. 101:

Novangles [the people of New England] are not New Fangles [innovators] but No Fangles (in respect to worship).

French Witness at Cape Cod

In 1647, Thomas Shepard, John Eliot and John Wilson, were sent to Yarmouth on Cape Cod on ecclesiastical business. Eliot took the opportunity to visit Indian settlements in the area, and Shepard wrote about these missionary endeavors in his 1648 work The Clear Sunshine of the Gospel Breaking Forth Upon the Indians in New-England, making an interesting reference to an earlier European visitor, p. 9:

...an aged Indian told us openly, "That these very things which Mr. Eliot had taught them as the Commandements of God, and concerning God, and the making of the world by one God, that they had heard some old men who were now dead, to say the same things, since whose death there hath been no remembrance or knowledge of them among the Indians untill now they heare of them againe. Which when I heard solemnly spoken, I could not tell how those old Indians should attaine to such knowledge, unlelesse perhaps by means of the French Preacher cast upon those coasts many years since, by whose ministry they might possibly reape and retaine some knowledge of those things; this also I hear by a godly and able Christian who hath much converse with them; that many of them have this apprehension now stirring among them, viz. "That their forefathers did know God, but that after this, they fell into a great sleep, and when they did awaken they quite forgot him, (for under such metaphoricall language they usually expresse what eminent things they meane:) so that it may seeme to be the day of the Lords gracious visitation of these poore Natives, which is just as it is with all other people, when they are most low, the wheele then turnes, and the Lord remembers to have mercy.

The French had sailed the waters of what would become Provincetown Harbour as early as 1605 under Samuel de la Champlain. Fishermen on their way to or from New France found the area to be a veritable fishing goldmine. A short-lived Jesuit mission was established on Mount Desert Island (Maine) in 1613. The "French Preacher," however, may have been one of the survivors of a 1616 French shipwreck on the shores of Cape Cod that is referred to by William Bradford in Of Plimoth Plantation, p. 119. In that instance, the local Patuxet Indians killed almost all survivors, excepting three or four, whom they tormented and enslaved (some think this was done in reprisal for the 1614 expedition from Virginia under Captain John Smith during which Thomas Hunt kidnapped a number of the Indians, including Squanto, who would later help the Pilgrims). After some time, the French were able to learn enough of the Indian dialect to communicate and the Indians took note of the French interest in a book, the Bible. They spoke about God, and one of the Frenchmen, who had acquired greater fluency than the rest, conveyed to them that God was angry with them for their cruelty, and would destroy them, and give their country to another people. They responded that they were too many for God to kill, but the Frenchman answered that God had many ways to kill them of which they were ignorant. It was soon after this that a plague struck the Indian community from 1617 to 1619, which some suppose to have been smallpox brought by the French. Two of the Frenchmen were ultimately rescued by Captain Thomas Dermer in 1619, who himself had met Squanto after he escaped from Dermer. Squanto, meanwhile, returned home after time in Europe to find his village wiped out by the disease. It was this plague which played such an important role in paying the way for the Pilgrim's arrival and survival, with Squanto's help. And the memory of the French witness to God lingered even after so many of the Indians died out. The prophecy of being removed by another people caused the Patuxet to be wary of the Pilgrims, and these events were brought to remembrance when John Eliot preached to them in 1647. God's providential hand was behind it all.

The Devil is God's Ape

Martin Luther, Table Talk (Of God's Works, No. 67):

The Greeks and heathens in after times imitated this, and build temples for their idols in certain places, as at Ephesus for Diana, at Delphos for Apollo, etc. For, where God build a church there the devil would also build a chapel. They imitated the Jews also in this, namely, that as the Most Holiest was dark, and had no light, even so and after the same manner, did they make their shrines dark where the devil made answer. Thus is the devil ever God's ape.

Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman:

Wherever God erects a house of prayer
the Devil always builds a chapel there;
And 't will be found, upon examination,
the latter has the largest congregation.

When people today think of catechism, they often think of the Roman Catholic catechism. When people think of missionaries from the past, images from the movie The Mission may come to mind, or stories about Jesuit missionaries. But Edward Leigh helps the reader to discern between Biblical catechizing and brainwashing, between Biblical missions and ungodly proselytizing (Matt. 23.15).

Edward Leigh, Prolegomena (p. 6) of A System or Body of Divinity (1654):

The Papists in the Preface to the Catechism of the Councel of Trent, confesse that all the ground which we [that is, Protestants] have got of them is by catechizing; and let us look that we lose not our ground again for want of it.

HT: Paul Korte

Edward Leigh, Three diatribes or discourses. First of travel, or A guide for travellers into forein parts. Secondly, of money or coyns. Thirdly, of measuring of the distance betwixt place and place. (1671), To The Reader:

The Jesuits themselves and others write much, how industrious the Jesuits were in the propagation of the Christian Fatih, and how they have sown the seed of saving truth in China or elsewhere.

Mr. Baxter in the 2d. part of his last Book of Christianity, c. 14. p. 488. saith, The attempts of the Jesuits in Congo, Japon and China were a very noble work, and so were the Portugal Kings encouragements: but two things spoiled their success.

First, That when they took down the Heathens Images, they set them up others in their stead; and made them think that the main difference was, but whose image they should worship.

Secondly, But especially, that they made them see, what while they pretended to promote Religion, and to save their souls, they came to promote their own wealth, or the Popes Dominion, and to bring their Kings under a Forein power.

The honest attempts of Mr. Eliots in New England, is much more agreeable to the Apostles way, and maketh more serious spiritual Christians.

Justus Heurnius (son to John Heurnius the learned Physician) left the study of Physick, and wholly gave himself to the study of Divinity, that thereby he might be the better inabled to promote the Conversion of the Indians, and taking an Evangelical Embassie to the Indies, he there abode above 14 Years, preaching to the Indians in their Mother Tongue, Catechising them, and admonishing them privately, and by his singular innocensie, humility and modesty, and daily fervent devotion, and great charity to the poor; He endeavoured to propagate the Kingdome of Christ among them.

For more on Justus Heurnius, see Lemuel Call Barnes, Two Thousand Years of Missions Before Carey, p. 99-100:

Justus Heurnius was one of the most distinguished of the early Dutch missionaries. Son of a medical professor in the newly founded University of Leyden, he took the medical course of study. After five years of travel in France and England he returned and took a theological course. He was eager to go to India as a missionary, but both the Dutch and the English East India Companies were opposed to missions until long after this time. He wrote a vigorous book to arouse his countrymen to their missionary duty. This was in 1618. Six years later the East India Company sent him to Batavia. He began at once to work for the natives, both Malays and Chinese. He translated the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments into Chinese, making also a Dutch-Latin-Chinese dictionary.

His earnest evangelistic spirit led him to advocate the independence of the church from the East India Company. On this account he was arrested and imprisoned. On release he went to the Island of Amboyna. Here and in neighboring islands he gave himself to work among the natives. He won many of the people for whom he toiled. Missionaries of Islam were active there at the same time and poisoned his food. Though it did not take his life immediately, he never entirely recovered from the effects of the poison and was obliged to return to Holland. There, before his death in 1652, he revised a version of the-Gospels and translated the Acts, the Psalms and a liturgy into Malayan. He also prepared a dictionary and put some of the Psalms into Malayan rhymes. He was a devoted missionary and an efficient advocate of missions one hundred years earlier than the Moravians.

Godly Commonwealth

During the Interregnum (1649-1660), England was governed as a Commonwealth, that is, as a republic rather than a monarchy. It was a heady time for Puritans, even those who opposed the personal rule of Oliver Cromwell 'the Usurper.' They envisioned, prayed for and worked towards a godly, theocratic government, rather than the arbitrary, despotic government that the Stuart kings had personified. This was true even of those Puritans -- and there were many -- who opposed the regicide of Charles I and desired the return of the covenanted Charles II.

It is worth taking note of two particular Puritan treatises advocating theocratic government, which have much in common: Richard Baxter's A Holy Commonwealth and John Eliot's The Christian Commonwealth. Both were published in 1659 (although Eliot's treatise was actually written, it is believed, in the 1640s), and both were later retracted by the authors for pragmatic reasons (Eliot retracted his work in 1662, and Baxter in 1670, to please the royalist authorities and remove a "stumbling-block" of offense for those who perceived seditious tendencies in their works). Both books were born from a "common impulse" to see society governed under the headship of King Jesus. William Lamont writes in his introduction to the 1994 edition of Baxter's Holy Commonwealth (pp. xvi, xxvii) that:

[Baxter] knew all about New England from, among others, John Eliot, the missionary who was converting the native Indians to Christianity. The excited correspondence of the two men -- for there were parallels in the problems posed by American heathens and Kidderminster reprobates -- throughout the 1650s would result in two near-identical titles, published in the same year of 1659: Baxter's Holy Commonwealth and Eliot's Christian Commonwealth.

In 1659, Richard Baxter -- who although he had supported Parliament in the 1640s in its military resistance to King Charles I, had never quite fully supported Oliver Cromwell -- was enthusiastic in his support of Richard Cromwell, whom he viewed as magistrate with great potential and lacking in his father's regicidal and tyrannical baggage (Lamont describes A Holy Commonwealth as a 'love poem to Richard Cromwell').

A Holy Commonwealth was written in a turbulent, euphoric time when Baxter saw great things ahead. It contains 380 theses designed to 1) justify Baxter's support for Parliament in the 1640s, 2) lay out the groundwork for Biblical magistracy, include the proper theocratic relationship between church and state, 3) respond to James Harrington's views on the utopian republic as described in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and 4) provide a Biblical and historical rationale for the obedience of subjects to lawful magistrates and their resistance to tyrants. As a result of the fast-changing political scenario in England, a series of Meditations was included by Baxter at the end of the work when it was published which reflect the dismay he felt at the direction the nation had taken in the short time between when he wrote the work and when it was ready for the press. The 1994 edition includes his 1670 recantation of (parts of) the work as well. The reasons for his retraction are complex having to do with the political baggage it brought to the Protectorate as well as to him personally during the Restoration, rather than the substance of his arguments. When reading it today, it helps to remember the context of its initial writing, the subsequent Meditations, its later retraction and its place in Baxter's political writings overall. It is a curious and valuable work for these reasons.

George R. Abernathy, Jr., wrote, "The English Presbyterians and the Stuart Restoration, 1648-1663," in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 55, Part 2 (1965), p. 25:

A single quotation from the Holy Commonwealth is sufficient to indicate Baxter's basic position:

If the whole Family, with whom the People were in Covenant be extirpated, or become uncapable, the People may forme the Government as they please, (so they contradict not the Law of God:) not by Authority, but by Contract with the next chosen Government; nor as Subjects, but as Free men, the Government being dissolved.80

80 Ibid., p. 451 [this is Thesis 375, which appears on p. 208 of the 1994 edition]; italics added.

Meanwhile, John Eliot wrote The Christian Commonwealth: or, The Civil Policy of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ from New England in the 1640s as encouraging reports came in from the mother country that godly magistracy was coming into its own. The manuscript was shared with friends in England, but sat around for over a decade before someone took occasion to send it to the printer. Although the timing may have seemed auspicious just then, those fast-changing events in England proved otherwise. After the Restoration, Massachusetts authorities, eager to curry favor from the Crown, banned the book and required Eliot to provide a written retraction and apology. Like Baxter, it appears that he did so to avoid giving offense rather than because he actually repudiates the principles contained within. This book, which advocates the Headship of Christ over England and all the nations, including the political sphere, and the institution of theocratic civil government modeled after Exodus 18, is said to be "the first book of political theory written by an American and also the first book to be banned by an American government."

Indian Covenanting Confession

The Westminster Confession of Faith was not printed in America until 1723 (B.B. Warfield, "The Printing of the Westminster Confession" in The Westminster Assembly And Its Work, p. 353). But "possibly the first Confession of Faith printed in America" is John Eliot's Indian Covenanting Confession, a confession of faith and covenant written by John Eliot in the Massachusetts Indian Language (sometime between 1669 and 1690) and published later with an English translation, the text of which is rendered below in slightly modernized spelling (John Small, ed., John Eliot, The Indian Primer; or, The Way of Training Up of Our Indian Youth in the Good Knowledge of God. 1669. To Which is Prefixed The Indian Covenanting Confession (1880), p. xlvi).

The Indian Covenanting Confession

I Believe with my Heart and Confess with my Mouth. Rom. 10.10.

1. There is but one, only, living and true God. Deut. 6.4. Jer. 10.10. But He is Father, Son, holy Spirit. Matt. 28.19. 1 John 5.7.

2. In the Beginning God made Heaven and Earth very Good. Gen. 1.1, 31.

3. He made Adam to rule this Lower world. Gen. 1.26, 27.

4. Adam quickly sinned, and was punished. Gen. 3.

5. Adam conveyed to us his sin, and also his guilt and punishment. Rom. 5.12.

6. For this cause, we are all born in sin, Psal. 51.5.

7. Our sin is twofold.

1. Original sin. Rom. 3.10.

2. Actual sin, Matt. 15.19.

8. By these we deserve Damnation in Hell forever. Rom. 6.23.

9. I believe we shall all rise again to Judgment at the last day. 1. Cor. 15.

1. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Psa. 2.6, 7. He became a ma, and is both God and man in one person. Heb. 2.16, 17.

2. Jesus Christ hath Three offices, Priest, Prophet, King. Heb. 7.1-3. Acts 3.32. Isa. 33.22.

3. Jesus Christ obeyed perfectly for us, He paid his Death for us when He died for us, and hereby He deserved pardon for all our sins. Rev. 1.5. Matt. 3.15.

4. Now by the Gospel New-Covenant Jesus Christ calleth us all to repent, and believingly to turn unto God. Acts 17.30.

5. For these causes, we that dwell in this Town called ------------ are gladly willing to bind ourselves to God, to Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, so long as we live. And also to bind ourselves to each other, to meet together every Sabbath day (when it may be done) to do all our Sabbath day Services, prayers &c., according to the word of God, the holy Spirit of God helping us.

By this gospel covenant, we do give ourselves and our Children to Jesus Christ, to walk with Him in Church order so long as we live.

O Lord Jesus Christ, by thy Pardoning free grace and mercy Graciously receive us.

AMEN.

We compel not any, but meekly say to all let us join together to do all this.

Of Periwigs and Puritans

When one views 17th and 18th century portraits it is apparent that at least some Puritans wore powdered hair or wigs, and the modern stereotype of a stern Puritan magistrate wearing a wig (often imagined presiding over a witch trial) is powerful, vivid image in our minds today. The modern European custom of wearing periwigs, or wigs for short, developed in France in the 1620s when King Louis XIII, who was going bald, began to wear a wig. Likewise in England, it was during the Restoration with the royal patronage of King Charles II that male wigs became popular. Before this, Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, had both employed them, but the practice became a symbol of social status for men in Restoration-era England. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary the first time he wore a wig to church in 1664: "I found that my coming in a periwig did not prove so strange as I was afraid it would..."

But while the custom caught on quickly, there were those among the Puritans who opposed it. William Prynne took an early stand in 1628 when he wrote that "the wearing of counterfeite, false, and suppositious Haire, is utterly unlawfull" (The Unlovelinesse of Lovelockes). The Scottish Covenanter John Carstares wrote in his preface to the reader to James Durham's Practical Exposition of the Ten Commandments (1665, 2002):

To over-costly, curious, vain and conceity dressing and decking of the body, and setting of the hair now after one mode, now after another. (Wherein, as in other vanities, many men, somewhat unmanning themselves, do now contend with women, partly by their unnaturally nourished long hair, and horrid bushes of vanity, as Mr. [Robert] Bolton calls them, and partly by their variously and strangely metamorphosing modes and colors of periwigs) --

James Durham goes on to say further (quoting Robert Bolton again at one point), pp. 334-337:

And therefore we say that in men and women both, there is condemned by the Lord:
...
2. Strangeness in the ever-changing fashions, and extravagant modes of apparel; whileas the Lord by nature has continued the shape of men's bodies to be the same. For what is meant else by strange apparel, so often forbidden in Scripture, but that which is commonly called the fashion, or new fashion, a new and uncouth garb?...There is a lightness in clothing as to color, mounting as they call it, etc, and in dressing of the body, which may be seen in these dressings of the hair, powderings, laces, ribbons, points, etc, which are so much in use with gallants of the time; this, especially in women, is insisted on and condemned (Isa. 3:16-17, etc.) Some things indeed there mentioned are not simply unlawful, especially to persons of higher quality, and at all times; but the following particulars are condemned....

There is in clothes a base effeminateness amongst men (which someway emasculates or un-mans them) who delight in those things which women dote upon, as dressing of hair, powderings, washing, (when exceeded in) rings, jewels, etc, which are spoken of, and reproved in the daughters of Zion (Isa. 3), and so must be much more unsuitable to men. Also interchanging of apparel is condemned; men putting on women's, and women men's clothes, which is unsuitable to that distinction of sexes which the Lord hath made, and is condemned in the word, as a confusion, an absurd, unnatural thing, and an inlet to much wickedness. Whereof the Dutch annotators, as several fathers did long before them, on 1 Cor. 11:14, make men’s nourishing and wearing of long hair to be some degree, it being given to women, not only for an ornament and covering, but also in part for distinction of the female sex from the male.

And here, having touched a little on this vain dressing of the hair (now almost in as many various modes as thee are fashions of apparel), especially incident to women; it will not be impertinent to subjoin a strange story, which learned, pious, and grave Mr. Bolton, in his Four Last Things, p. 40, repeats from his author the famous Herculus Saxonia, professor of physic in Padua:

The Plica (saith he) is a most loathsome and horrible disease in the hair, unheard of on former times, as morbus gallicus, and fudor anglicus, bred by modern luxury and excess; it seizeth especially upon women, and by reason of a viscuous, venomous humour, glueth together, as it were, the hairs of the head, with a prodigious ugly implication and entanglement, sometimes taking the form of a great snake, sometimes of many little serpents, full of nastiness, vermin, and noisome smell: And that which is most to be admired, and never eye saw before, these being pricked with a needle, they yield bloody drops. And at the first spreading of this dreadful disease in Poland, all that did cut off their horrible and snaky hair, lost their eyes, or the humour falling down upon other parts of the body, tortured them extremely. It began first, not many years ago, in Poland, it is now entered into many parts of Germany. And methinks (says Mr. Bolton) our monstrous fashionists, both male and female, the one for nourishing their horrid bushes of vanity, the other for their most unnatural and cursed cutting their hair, should every hour fear and tremble, lest they bring it on their own heads, and amongst us in this kingdom.

And John Eliot was one who viewed afflictions upon New England society as attributable in part to God's wrath against men wearing wigs, and prayed against the practice.

Convers Francis, Life of John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians (1836), pp. 322-323:

Mr. Eliot had a few whims, to which he was pertinaciously attached. One of these was an unsparing hostility to the practice of wearing long hair and wigs. He could not endure it; he regarded it as an iniquity not to be tolerated. The man, and especially the minister of the Gospel, who wore a wig, he considered as committing an offence, not only against decency, but against religion. His zeal about "prolix locks" was warm, but unavailing. He lived to see the practice prevail in spite of his remonstrances, and at last gave over his warfare against it with the despairing remark, "The lust has become insuperable!" The readers of New England history will remember, that in 1649 an association was formed, and a solemn protest published, against wearing long hair, by Governor Endicot and the other magistrates.

In this punctiliousness we see the influence of sympathy with the English Roundheads carried even into trifles. In England periwigs were permitted quietly to cover the head soon after the restoration of Charles. But for more than thirty years after that time, they were deemed by many a sore grievance in New England. Gradually during that period they were coming into use; but they need all the authority derived from the practice of such divines as [John] Owen, [William] Bates, and [Joseph] Mede, to find protection at last. The intolerance they experienced from Mr. Eliot was not, therefore, a singularity in the good man; he only persevered in his stern hostility against them longer than many others.

In 1675, as a response to the devastating consequences of the King Philip's War, the General Court of Massachusetts legislated against the sin of pride in wearing wigs:

Whereas there is manifest Pride openly appearing amongst us in that long Hair, like Womens Hair, is worn by some men, either their own or others Hair, made into Perewigs: And by some Women wearing Borders of Hair, and their Cutting, Curling, and Immodest laying out their Hair; which practice doth prevail and increase, especially among the younger sort.

This Court doth Declare against this ill custome as Offensive to them, and divers sober Christians amongst us, and therefore do hereby exhort and advise all persons to use moderation in this respect; And further do impower all Grand juries to present to the County Court such Persons, whether Male, or Female, whom they shall judge to exceed in the Premises; and the County Court being authorized to proceed against such Delinquents either by Admonition, Fine, or Correction, according to their good discretion.

Increase Mather, likewise, saw the wrath of God poured out against men wearing wigs and took note of them in a sermon following the burning of Boston, Burnings Bewailed: in a Sermon, Occasioned by the Lamentable Fire Which was in Boston, Octob. 2, 1711. In which the Sins which Provoke the Lord to Kindle Fires, are Enquired into. (1711):

Monstrous Perriwigs, such as some of our Church-Members indulge in, which make them resemble ye Locusts that come out of ye bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7,8, -- and as an eminent Divine calls them, Horrid Bushes of Vanity; such strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and to express Scripture. I Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord to kindle fires in all the towns in the country.

However, his son "Cotton Mather first wigged in 1691" (Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play, p. 198) and defended the practice against those "who preached against an innocent fashion, taken and used by the best of men."

Cotton Mather's chief opponent on this score was Samuel Sewall, whose opposition to periwigs, as recorded in his diary, is legendary. He himself did wear a skull cap in his old age to keep his head warm, but he inveighed against the rising custom of wearing wigs in his day with great fervency. His diary (Vol. 1, p. 342) records his opinion of one sermon by Cotton Mather on hypocrisy:

In his proem said, Totus mundus agi histrionem. Said one sign of a hypocrit was for a man to strain at a Gnat and swallow a Camel. Sign in's Throat discovered him to be zealous against an innocent fashion, taken up and used by the best of men; and yet make no conscience of being guilty of great Immoralities. 'T is supposed means wearing of Perriwigs: said would deny themselves in any thing but parting with an opportunity to do God service; that so might not offend good Christians. Meaning, I suppose, was fain to wear a Perriwig for his health. I expected not to hear a vindication of Perriwigs in Boston Pulpit by Mr. Mather; however, not from that Text. The Lord give me a good Heart and help to know, and not only to know but also doe his Will; that my Heart and Head may be his."

One authority he cited against the practice was a sermon by Vincent Alsop, which appeared in the Cripplegate Morning Exercises, "What Distance Ought We to Keep, in Following the Strange Fashions of Apparel, Which Come Up in the Days Wherein We Live?", published in Puritan Sermons, 1659-1689, Vol. 3, pp. 488-530, and appended to the Soli Deo Gloria edition of Vincent Alsop's Practical Godliness: The Ornament of All Religion. While acknowledging that social status is lawful factor in the selection of one's apparel, Alsop saw little to no value in the use of wigs. Alsop even quoted Increase Mather against their use, which was likely known to Sewall.

INFER. II. All youthful periwigs and paintings, which are sinful in youth, are doubly sinful in the aged. (p. 507)
...
How do our gallants expect reverence, if not adoration, for their whistling silks and ruffling periwigs; and that all should rise and bow to their state, port, and grandeur! Thy silks and periwigs are but excrements; and the latter, perhaps, of one that died of the foul disease, or at the gallows. Tertullian nips this humour severely: Ne exuvias alieni, forsan immundi, forsan nocentis et gehennae destinati, sancto et Christiano capiti suppares.* "O, do not," says he, "wear on thy sacred and Christian head the hair of another, perhaps some foul-diseased fellow, perhaps one that was a malefactor and is now in everlasting burnings!"

* Tertullianus De Cultu Feminarum. (p. 513)
...
I know, both paintings and periwigs have their palliations and excuses: --

(1.) They that ruffle in their waving perukes, and look like the locusts that "came out of the smoke of the bottomless pit," whose "faces were as the faces of men, and they had hair as the hair of women," (Rev. ix.8;) do plead that they wear them upon good advice, for their health's sake, to divert catarrhs, to prevent consumptions.

ANSWER (i.) And is it indeed so, that the nation is become almost one great hospital? Are the generality of men among us just dropping into consumption? Then what other lust, what debauchery, has introduced a sinful necessity, and then taught them to plead it? But is it not evident, that the corruption is much larger than the pretended occasion? (ii.) But if cutting off the hair be in some degree useful for that end, are periwigs therefore so? Can no other thing substitute for the place of hair, but such a vanity? (iii.) But if this vanity be any ways useful, what does the curling contribute to it? and what does the change of the colour conduce to that effect? Is it no colour but one contrary to the natural, that will do the deed? Or if it must be so, what does the immoderate length signify to that end? How much more ingenuous had it been, to have confessed the sin, and yet persisted in it, than to palliate it with such slender, thin excuses? (pp. 526-527)

Solomon Stoddard also took a hard line against wigs in a letter to Samuel Sewall dated July 29, 1701:

I cannot condemn them universally. Yet there is abundance of sin in this country, in wearing wigs. Some cut off their hair, because it is red or gray; some, because it is straight; some, frizzled; and some, because it is their own. Some of the wigs are of an unreasonable length, and generally they are extravagant as to their business. They are wasteful as to cost. The wearing of them is pride, to make a vain show. It is contrary to gravity -- is light and effeminate. It makes the wearers of them look as if they were more disposed to court a maid than to bear upon their hearts the weighty concernments of God's kingdom.

There were those Puritans then who viewed wigs as an innocent fashion, and those who saw them as unnatural, effeminate, and vain, mixed with much that is sinful. Although we see some Puritans wearing them in portraits, even the Mather family itself was divided on the practice, and, lest we fall into stereotypes, we should recognize that not all Puritans approved of wigs, and some argued vehemently against them, with some nuances not to be overlooked (and I have here quoted from the opponents of wigs more extensively for the purpose of breaking that stereotype). Fashions are curious things, and while it is fashionable to view the Puritans as monolithic, the periwig controversy of the 17th and 18th centuries shows otherwise.