reflection blog - 3

The book "The Crucible" definitely displays the qualities of puritan writing and puritan beliefs. For the people in the book, their everyday world and their spiritual world were very closely intertwined. In the book, whenever anything happens, the people immediately relate it to spiritual things. One thing that is interesting about this book, which is different than many other puritan writings is that the people in the story usually relate things to spiritual things when the thing is a negative thing. Usually the puritans relate everything good that happens in their life to God and say that they are able to experience those good things because of the providence of God. Whereas in this book, so far the people have only related things in a spiritual way only when things have been going badly. For example, When the girl would not wake up and seemed to be acting strangely, they immediately blamed it on spirit, and the devil and blamed the girls for conjuring spirits. I find it interesting that instead of immediately turning to God to ask what was the problem and turning to him to see what should be done, they started making accusations of their own and trying to fix things by themselves. I feel like as Christians they should have had a different response to how they went about things, but that is just my opinion.

Puritans were a protestant group seeking to "purify" the church in England. The people in this story were definitely seeking to "purify" the church. They wanted what was best and did not want there to be things standing in the way of their town having God's blessing. They minister was quite rude to his niece when he thought they were conjuring spirits in the woods, and he was very quick to judge her and would not listen to what she was saying. The Bible says to be quick to listen and slow to speak. This minister apparently didn't get the memo. He was very quick to judge harshly and needed to work on his listening skills.

It seemed as if the whole town gathered in the bedroom of the minister's house when his daughter was "sick". All of the people wanted to work together to help the town and do things for the good of the people and in God's favor. When they did that, it seemed very much like the puritans. Although they did spend much of their time arguing, they really did want to be there to help solve the problem and to help figure out what was wrong. They were very similar to the puritans.

It was very interesting that Abigail was lying and covering up for the things that she did wrong. It seems like that is not something that the puritans would appreciate, and clearly the minister was fairly upset that she was acting that way. I think it is also strange, as the people were supposedly Christians, and they believed the girl had a demon in her yet did not ask God to call the demon out. That seems very strange that self-proclaiming Christians would not call on the Lord during this frightening phase of their life.

Miller, Arthur. The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts. New York, NY: Penguin, 2003. Print.