COTTON MATHER

[Cotton Mather was born in Boston, Feb. 12, 1663. The son of Increase Mather, minister of the Second Church of Boston, the grandson of John Cotton, minister of the First Church of Boston, and of Richard Mather, minister of Dorchester, he inherited with his blood the most ardent traditions of the pristine theocracy of New England. Graduated at Harvard in 1678, he became two years later assistant to his father at the Second Church in Boston. Here he preached all his life; he never travelled a hundred miles from his birthplace. He died on the day after his sixty-fifth birthday, Feb. 13, 1728.]

THROUGHOUT his life, a life of rare restlessness and activity, Cotton Mather was utterly devoted to the principles which, in the times of his father and of his grandparents, had prevailed in New England. Until his active life was well begun, indeed, these old principles still seemed dominant. Church and state, the fathers held, should alike be subject to the rule of the Puritan clergy. So Cotton Mather fervently believed all his life; but, before his life was half done, New England had ceased to believe it. More and more impotent, more and more misunderstood, more and more hated, he waged a losing fight, to end only with his days, against that spirit of liberalism which from his time to ours has been the chief trait of his native region. From his time to ours, then, tradition has called him bigoted, foolish, wicked, at best grotesque. Reformers are relentless haters, even of the dead. In sober fact, as one studies him now, Cotton Mather reveals himself, for all his peculiarity, as the most completely typical of Boston Puritans. Almost the last of that stern race, and hardly ever absent from the capital town which they had founded and pervaded, he had all their isolation, all their prejudices, all their errors; but he had, too, all their devout sincerity, all their fervor, all their mystic enthusiasm.

In the course of his life, he wrote and published more separate books than have yet come from the pen of any other American; they number between four and five hundred. Many of these

were mere sermons or tracts; but at least one was a considerable folio. This, the most notable and best known of his writings, is the Church History of New England entitled Magnalia Christi Americana. According to his diary, he conceived the idea of writing it in 1693; it was published in 1702. Whoever knows the history of New England will recognize these dates as intervening between that tragedy of Salem witchcraft which broke the political power of the clergy, and the final conquest of Harvard College, the ancestral seminary of Puritan doctrine, by the liberal party which has dominated Harvard ever since. This historical circumstance throws on the Magnalia a light which has been too little remarked.

The book is commonly criticised as if it were a history written in the modern scientific spirit. Really it was a fervent controversial effort to uphold the ideals and the traditions of the Puritan fathers, in such manner as should revive their failing spirit among those whom Cotton Mather thought their degenerate descendants. In its whole conception it is such a history not as that of Thucydides, but as Plutarch's. It has been aptly described as the prose epic of New England Puritanism. In an epic spirit it tells the facts of New England history; it recounts the lives of the early governors and ministers; it describes the founding of Harvard College; it sets forth the doctrine and the discipline of the New England churches; and it details the attacks of the devil on these strongholds of the Lord, particularly in the forms of witchcraft and of Indian warfare. Throughout it is animated by a fervent desire to present all its material in an ideal aspect; its purpose is not so much to tell the truth and shame the devil as to shame him by pointing out what truth ought to be. As a record of fact, then, the Magnalia is untrustworthy; as a record, on the other hand, of Puritan ideals it is priceless. Whoever grows thus sympathetically to know it, grows more and more to feel it a good book and a brave one.

To be sure, even those who like the Magnalia best find it quaint. In 1702, when it was published, John Dryden was already dead; and the literary style now recognized as characteristic of eighteenth century England was fairly established. Cotton Mather meanwhile, in that Boston which one of his German contemporaries mentioned in correspondence as (6 a remote West Indian wil

derness," thought and wrote after fashions which Europe had discarded for above a generation. Published in the eighteenth century, the Magnalia, both substantially and formally, is a work of the school of Burton, or of Fuller, or of whoever else made the quaintly garrulous folios of seventeenth century literature. Fairly to judge it, we must compare it not with its contemporaries, but with its predecessors. It has the fantastic oddity, the far-fetched pedantry, the giant-winded prolixity of the days when folios were normal. It has meanwhile positive merits of style which have not been so clearly remembered. It is never obscure; it never lacks spirit; and it possesses a rhythmical dignity, a sustained and sonorous movement, beyond the power of later times. These formal traits, as one grows to know them, become fascinating; nor is the fascination of the Magnalia merely a matter of form. Its ideals of life, which Cotton Mather tried to show that the fathers of New England realized on earth, stand forth by and by as heroic. Until very lately the struggle between the austere Calvinism of which he was the champion, and the devout free thought with which New England has replaced it was still so fresh that no one who could frankly sympathize with either side, could be quite fair to the other. At last, however, like the older struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines, or Cavaliers and Roundheads, the heartbreaking controversies of God-fearing New England are fading, with New England herself, into an historic past. Few men to-day, of any creed, believe what Cotton Mather wrought through his whole life to maintain; and had he not failed, the hatred of his memory might still inevitably persist in all its freshness. But to-day theocracy with all its vices and all its heroisms, is as dead as the gods of Olympus. Regardless of the cause to which its epic champion devoted his life, we can now do justice to his spirit and his character. So judging him, not only as a writer, but as a man, one grows more and more to feel that whatever his oddities, whatever his faults and weaknesses, he belongs among the great men of our country. In the sustained faithfulness of his devotion to those ideals which for him constituted the truth, he was a brave and worthy precursor of any braveries to come.

BARRETT WENDELL

THE CHURCHES OF NEW ENGLAND

I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand: And, assisted by the Holy Author of that Religion, I do, with all Conscience of Truth, required therein by Him, who is the Truth it self, report the Wonderful Displays of His Infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faithfulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath Irradiated an Indian Wilderness.

I Relate the Considerable Matters, that produced and attended the First Settlement of COLONIES, which have been Renowned for the Degree of REFORMATION, Professed and Attained by Evangelical Churches, erected in those Ends of the Earth: And a Field being thus prepared, I proceed unto a Relation of the Considerable Matters which have been acted thereupon.

I first introduce the Actors, that have, in a more exemplary manner served those Colonies; and give Remarkable Occurrences, in the exemplary LIVES of many Magistrates, and of more Ministers, who so Lived, as to leave unto Posterity, Examples worthy of Everlasting Remembrance.

I add hereunto, the Notables of the only Protestant University, that ever shone in that Hemisphere of the New World; with particular Instances of Criolians, in our Biography, provoking the whole World, with vertuous Objects of Emulation.

I introduce then, the Actions of a more Eminent Importance, that have signalized those Colonies; Whether the Establishments, directed by their Synods; with a Rich Variety of Synodical and Ecclesiastical Determinations; or, the Disturbances, with which they have been from all sorts of Temptations and Enemies Tempestuated; and the Methods by which they have still weathered out each Horrible Tempest.

And into the midst of these Actions, I interpose an entire Book, wherein there is, with all possible Veracity, a Collection made, of Memorable Occurrences, and amazing Judgments and Mercies, befalling many particular Persons among the People of NewEngland.

Let my Readers expect all that I have promised them, in this

Bill of Fair; and it may be that they will find themselves entertained with yet many other Passages, above and beyond their Expectation, deserving likewise a room in History: In all which, there will be nothing, but the Author's too mean way of preparing so great Entertainments, to Reproach the Invitation.

§ 3. It is the History of these PROTESTANTS, that is here attempted: PROTESTANTS that highly honoured and affected The Church of ENGLAND, and humbly Petition to be a Part of it : But by the Mistake of a few powerful Brethren, driven to seek a place for the Exercise of the Protestant Religion, according to the Light of their Consciences, in the Desarts of America. And in this Attempt I have proposed, not only to preserve and secure the Interest of Religion, in the Churches of that little Country NEW-ENGLAND, so far as the Lord Jesus Christ may please to Bless it for that End, but also to offer unto the Churches of the Reformation, abroad in the World, some small Memorials, that may be serviceable unto the Designs of Reformation, whereto, I believe, they are quickly to be awakened. . . . In short, The First Age was the Golden Age: To return unto That, will make a Man a Protestant, and I may add, a Puritan. 'Tis possible, that our Lord Jesus Christ carried some Thousands of Reformers into the Retirements of an American Desart, on purpose, that, with an opportunity granted unto many of his Faithful Servants, to enjoy the precious Liberty of their Ministry, tho' in the midst of many Temptations all their days, He might there, To them first, and then By them, give a Specimen of many Good Things, which He would have His Churches elsewhere aspire and arise unto: And This being done, He knows not whether there be not All done, that New-England was planted for; and whether the Plantation may not, soon after this, Come to Nothing. Upon that Expression in the Sacred Scripture, Cast the unprofitable Servant into Outer Darkness, it hath been imagined by some, That the Regiones Exteræ of America, are the Tenebræ Exteriores, which the Unprofitable are there condemned unto. No doubt, the Authors of those Ecclesiastical Impositions and Severities, which drove the English Christians into the Dark Regions of America, esteemed those Christians to be a very unprofitable sort of Creatures. But