But the original speaker’s underlying concern was with the fateful ambiguity in the word errand. Like so many jeremiads of its time, this sermon appeared to be addressed to the sinful and unregenerate whom God was about to destroy. The title, Errand into the Wilderness, is taken from the title of a Massachusetts election sermon of 1670. Miller makes this abundantly clear and real, and in doing so allows the reader to conclude that, whatever else America might have become, it could never have developed into a society that took itself for granted. Disguised from twentieth-century readers first by the New Testament language and thought of the Puritans and later by the complacent transcendentalist belief in the oversoul, the related problems of purpose and reason-for-being have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. They go to the roots of seventeenth-century thought and of the ever-widening and quickening flow of events since then. These questions are by no means frivolous. Miller’s lifelong purpose to answer: What was the underlying aim of the first colonists in coming to America? In what light did they see themselves? As men and women undertaking a mission that was its own cause and justification? Or did they consider themselves errand boys for a higher power which might, as is frequently the habit of authority, change its mind about the importance of their job before they had completed it?
Miller's analysis resonates still.The title of this book by Perry Miller, who is world-famous as an interpreter of the American past, comes close to posing the question it has been Mr. 217) The Puritan sense of the errand into the wilderness is pervasive in American society to the present. "Can an errand, even an errand into the wilderness, be run indefinitely?.Can a culture, which changes to embody itself in a nation, push itself into such remorseless exertion without ever learning whether it has been sent on its business at some incomprehensible behest, or is obligated to discover a meaning for its dynamism in the very act of running.What will America do-what can American do-with an implacable prophecy that there is a point in time beyond which the very concept of a future becomes meaningless? Protestant America, as well as Catholic, has an implicit commitment to this event. Miller asks several fascinating questions at the conclusion of this volume. Making the world a better place has long been the "stuff" of the American character. The utopian element of Puritan thought comes through clearly in these essays, and they present a compelling element of the American experience. Essays with titles like, "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity," "The Puritan State and Puritan Society," "The Rhetoric of Sensation," and "The End of the World" trace an overriding concern for the salvation of humanity through increasing "perfection" in this life. The Puritans explicitly accepted the mission of an "errand into the wilderness" to establish God's kingdom, serving as a beacon to England of what it should become as well. All but one of them deals with Puritan thought, but the one on the Virginia colony also emphasizes the religious/intellectual nature of the "errand" to create a more perfect society in North America. "Errand into the Wilderness" is a collection of ten essays, mostly previously published, on various aspects of colonial intellectual history. I recommend "Errand into the Wilderness" both as an important statement of the intellectual history of the Puritans and an enthralling reading experience by one of the masters of American colonial history.
The quest for a perfect society motivated them beyond all else. He argues in this book that the Puritans came to America not so much in search of a better livelihood so much as in search of a better world. Having just reread this volume, originally published in 1956, Miller's work still offers insight into the Puritan mindset. in American history more than twenty years ago Perry Miller's studies of Puritan New England represented required reading on this religious group and its settling in North America.
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