Word: errands
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...born in a shop," he liked to say, referring to his mother's modest lacemaking establishment; for all his rebellion, an incorrigible petit bourgeois, pinching every franc, lived within Celine. At 14 he dropped out of school and worked at a silk shop and as an errand boy. In the evenings, eyes "burning with lack of sleep," as he recalled, he studied on his own, managing to pass the difficult exam for a baccalaureat degree...
...hopeless depravity of their English brethren. If the short-lived blossoming of Babylon--the successful Puritan Revolution--undercut that justification, the dread finality of the Restoration left the New England Congregationalists even more anxious and alone, involving them in a desperate search for a meaning to their "errand into the wilderness...
...essay "Errand into the Wilderness," Miller emphasized the discontinuity between the limited optimism of the first generation Puritans, who hoped their New World settlement would serve as a model for a corrupt Europe, and the insecurity of later generations, who saw their role preempted and then rendered irrelevant by events in England...
...attachment of the Miller-Heimert school to historical fact--as imaged in the writings of Puritan divines--has obliged it to account the Puritan errand at least a partial failure. For these historians, the corruption of the communal vision led inevitably to the separation of individual and communal salvation. Not so for Bercovitch. By shifting his emphasis from historical fact to the language itself, Bercovitch can support the continued coincidence of the two. In The Puritan Origins of the American Self, facts have ceased to matter at all--what counts instead is the distinctive Puritan rhetoric tying the redeemed individual...
...assess the Puritan achievement in a frankly celebratory vein. "History betrayed them, we know," he writes. "That they persisted nonetheless requires us, I believe, to redefine their achievement in a positive way." In labeling Cotton Mather as the keeper of the American dream, Bercovitch writes that "he rescued the errand by appropriating it to himself." Although his style betrays him at times, Bercovitch's errand--the task of rescuing their errand--makes The Puritan Origins of the American Self an important, positive contribution to Puritan scholarship...