“With respect to sex and marriage, the normal Puritan view was a robust and healthy one. The Rev. William Gouge, in Of domestical duties (London, 1634), used Proverbs 5:18, 19, to express the joy and beauty of marital sex: “Let thy fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times, and be thou ravished always with her love.” The Puritans often spoke of marital sex as one of the great delights and joys among earthly blessings. Frye tells us that a “favorite Biblical passage cited by Puritan churchmen is Genesis XXVI. 8 where it is recorded that ‘Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife.'”

A typical employment of this passage is that made by William Gouge, who uses it for an attack upon Stoical abstinence–“A disposition,” said the Puritan Gouge, “no way warranted by the “Word.” Thomas Gataker provides a final and summarizing statement of Puritanism’s anti-ascentiticism in a marriage sermon published in 1620. Gataker is discussing the Christian life, with particular reference to marriage, and observes that it is a tactic of the demonic to misrepresent Christianity as a damper placed upon the joys of living; in other words, to misrepresent it as opposed to human happiness. This false picture of Christianity, says the Puritan Gataker, is “an illusion of Sathan, whereby he usually perwades the Merry Greekes of this world; that if they should once devotoe themselves to the Service of Jesus Christ, that hen they must bid an everlasting farewell to all mirth and delight; that then all their merry dayes are gone; that in the kingdome of Christ, there is nothing, but sighing and groning, and fasting and prayer. But see here the contrary; even in the kingdome of Christ, and in his House, there is marrying and giving in marriage, drinking of wine, feasting, and rejoicing even in the very face of Christ.””  (Rushdoony, The Flight from Humanity)

Rushdoony writes this in the context of a notable exception to the typical Puritan delight in marital love and other physical blessings, Michael Wigglesworth. Wigglesworth does aptly represent the false impression for the that merry lot who built a brewery among the first buildings of America. Here is to recovering Puritanism!