This World is One Big Heape of Dung

The historian Edmund Morgan describes a conversation between Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop and Roger Williams, the separatist and future resident of Providence, Rhode Island (after being banned from Massachusetts).

"[Roger Williams] did indeed think that the Lord had forsaken New England for failing to separate her churches wholly from the filthiness of English corruption. And to [John] Winthrop he offered the very advice that Winthrop could least willingly listen to. Where Winthrop had urged him to pause and consider whether everyone was wrong but him, he replied with an invitation to join him in splendid isolation: 'Abstract yourself,' he urged, 'with a holy violence from the Dung heape of this Earth.' Williams would not learn the lesson which Winthrop had taught himself so painfully before he left England, that there was no escape from the dung heap of this earth; and that those who sought one or thought they had found it acted with an unholy, not a holy, violence."

Roger Williams (From: Wikimedia)

Morgan explains a series of stages Williams passed through to purify himself by associating only with other righteous people. The final stage was Williams' conclusion that "he could not conscientiously have communion with anyone but his wife... He had effectively demonstrated the proposition to himself as he withdrew successively from the Church of England, from the churches of Massachusetts, and finally from everyone but his wife. What he saw at last was what Winthrop had tried to point out to him, that he was seeking an unattainable goal, that there was no escape from the dung heap of this earth."

After reaching this conclusion, Williams progressed to a radically new position of extreme tolerance. Or, as Morgan tells us, "since he could not escape the dung heap, he would embrace it."

Why did I share this with you? Because I am fascinated by the metaphor of this world as a heap of dung. No other reason (besides the fact that I enjoy early New England history)!

--quotes are taken from Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, pp. 120-131

An Alcoholic Cod

"During Prohibition, fishermen, like everyone else, had to find ways to supplement their meager income. One way for a lobsterman to do so was to turn to a bit of low-level rum-running. The lobsterman would place orders in notes in his traps and then retrieve the traps a day or two later. In them he found, in place of the notes, peculiar lobsters... in the shape of bottles of booze...

Atlantic Cod (From: Wikipedia)

In July 1929 three Isleboro [Maine] fisherman, in outer Penobscot Bay, pulled in a seventy-pound cod. When dressing it, they found a sealed full-size bottle of bootleg whiskey in its gut. Cod are notorious for swallowing anything within reach--and this bottle, no doubt, was pitched overboard by a rumrunner being pursued, perhaps even a rum-running lobsterman." (230) --Matthew P. Mayo, Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England 

How to Detect Pregnancy in 18th Century America

Dr. George DeBenneville
(From: U.S. National Library of Medicine)

"In describing the symptoms of pregnancy to his married daughter, Harriet, the eminent Dr. George DeBenneville [a respected American doctor] never mentioned the cessation of menstruation, listing instead 'coldness of the outward parts,' that 'the Belly waxeth very flat,' that 'the Veins of the eyes are clearly seen,' and, finally, the appearance of a 'small living creature' in urine that had been stored for thirteen days." (201) --Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans

Say "Justification by Faith", or I Pull Your Beard!

The Council of Trent (From: Wikipedia)

At the Catholic Church's Council of Trent around 1545: "After passing various reform decrees on preaching, catechetical instruction, privileges of mendicants and indulgences, the council took up the thorny question of justification. Discussion was postponed for some months out of consideration for the emperor, who feared it might irritate the Protestants, and only gave his consent to it in the hope that some ambiguous form acceptable to that party, might be found. How deeply the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very bosom of the church was revealed by the storminess of the debate. The passions of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the consideration of a fundamental article of their faith that in the course of disputation they accused one another of conduct unbecoming to Christians, taunted one another with plebeian origin and tore hair from one another's beards." (297) --Preserved Smith, Reformation in Europe