The Puritans as they Really Were. Book Report on "Worldly Saints" by Leland Ryken
...in Luther was one of the people to reject the idea that only clergymen, monks, and nuns were engaged in holy work.” Chapter three unearths the truth about how the Puritans felt about sex. As I said earlier, the Puritans saw sex as one of the duties in a marriage. One of the examples that Leland Ryken gives about the Puritan views of sex is account of a man being excommunicated from his town because- according to his wife who complained first to her pastor and then the whole congregation- he was neglecting their sex life. Just from this account alone, we can tell that the idea that the Puritans were against sex is not true. The truth being that it was the Catholics who encouraged celibacy and virginity, even during marriage (apart from when it was necessary to reproduce) and not the Puritans. Money and wealth was not seen as being good or bad among the Puritans. The Puritans believed that life could still be lived in a holy and sacred way whether you were poor of not as long as you didn’t take for granted your wealth and if you were poor, you did not always look towards being wealthy. According to the Puritans the family was “a foundational unit of a godly society”. Family was an important factor in their society and without a good family structure society would crumble. The purpose of the family, as seen in the eyes of the Puritans, was to glorify God. “The family was ideally a place of sanctified relationships and the mutual worship of God. Chapters six, seven, and eight cover Puritan preaching, church and worship, and the Bible. A Puritan preacher “viewed himself as Wordsworth described the poet: a person speaking to other persons”. The Puritan way of preaching was, according to Ryken’s research, very plain and simple. The Puritans made the church separate from the state and simplified worship. The Puritans made sure that everyone had access to a Bible that had been translated into English. The Bible was the Puritans’ guide to life and they lived by it. The Puritans are the ones who created Harvard College. The Puritans were big believers in education. So much so, that farmers made sacrifices by contributing wheat to support teachers and students. “The strength of the [Puritan] educational theory was that they knew what education was for. Their primary goal was Christian nurture and growth.” The Puritans took an active role in society. They saw society as being “part of God’s order for life in this world” and therefore were comfortable with their involvement. Puritan involvement in society required that they “pursue the common good of the comm...