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COTTON MATHER
decorum, and in the light of Mather's earlier flattery of Dudley lent color to the theory that he was ruled by anger at the defeat of his personal ambitions.
Part of his desire to become President of Harvard may have come from a sort of public spirit as well as from self- seeking. He was undoubtedly eager to save the college from the unorthodox. Probably his feelings were mixed ; his vanity was wounded; his ambition thwarted; and his dream that Harvard might continue proof against invasion by certain new ideas which seemed to him false, or dangerous in their tend- ency, was unfulfilled.
PRIVATE LIFE AND LAST YEARS (1700-1728)
In some ways, clearly, Mather's public career in the last thirty years of his life seems one of failure. Out of this he drew bitterness, nor were his more private concerns without tragedy. His first wife died in 1702, after bearing nine children, of whom five died before her. Mather's second wife, Elizabeth Hubbard, died in 1713, and two years later he married again. His third wife tormented him with the vagaries of what seems to have been insanity. He saw eight of his children die in youth; and one of the surviving sons, whom he had named proudly for his own father, was a ne'er-do-well. He had three sisters largely dependent upon him, he had a fatherless nephew who needed his aid, and, in 1723, he underwent the greatest of his bereavements when his father died. If Cotton Mather's eccentricities of temper and his lack of balance require our forgiveness, perhaps a measure of it may be granted, for his trials were great enough to account for aberrations more serious than his.
But one should not think of his later life as made up of unrelieved gloom. His chief work was that of a minister in Boston, and in this, so far as one can tell, he was successful. He wrote and published much, and some of his books were well received; he interested himself in science and was recog- nized therefor; he corresponded with scholars in Europe and kept abreast of what he thought were the best books of the time, all the while adding to his own great library. His political defeats were not uppermost in the minds of the
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From the original in the Harvard College Library
COTTON MATHER'S MANUSCRIPT FOR A SERMON PREACHED SEPTEMBER 1, 1702
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PRIVATE LIFE AND LAST YEARS
Fellows of the Royal Society of London when they asked him to join their number; in 1710 the University of Glasgow gave to him an honorary degree, and when he died, in 1728, sermons by Thomas Prince, Benjamin Colman, his erstwhile enemy, and others, celebrated his achievements. Colman said, "Love to Christ and his Servant commands me to draw a Veil over every Failing. For who is without them?" He devoted much space to Mather's learning, calling him: "The first in the whole Province and Provinces of New England, for universal Literature; and extensive Services. Yea it may be among all the Fathers in these Churches, from the beginning of the Country to this day, . . . none of them amass'd to- gether so vast a Treasure of Learning, and made so much use of it, to a variety of pious Intentions." Such words, from a man who was at times both his adversary and rival, are not easily to be disposed of as empty adulation of the dead.
There is other evidence that even after disappointments and failures Mather was esteemed at home as well as abroad. In 1722, it appears, he was asked to become Rector, or President, of Yale. That college was then assailed by unorthodoxy, and its trustees turned to Mather. He refused to go to New Haven, but the invitation serves to correct some exaggerated views of his last years. In his diary are many comments on his abuse by his enemies and his "ill treatment" by his country- men. In his printed writings there is denunciation of his antagonists, and their no less vituperative replies are not far to seek. Therefore it is easy to picture him as after 1701 wholly shorn of power and condemned to a sort of pariahdom in the circles in which his father, and to some extent he him- self, had once led. Such a picture is distorted. Quite apart from the respect he commanded abroad, the loyal in his own church, one of the largest in New England, far outnumbered his critics; and in Congregational councils he was still more often than not a leader whose voice and pen expressed the views of his brethren.
A glance at his work as an author, his service as a minister, and his relation to the study of science, shows why his con- temporaries were not so obsessed by his defects as to forget his virtues.
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COTTON MATHER, THE MINISTER
It is hard to estimate fairly certain sides of Mather's work as a minister. When one asks: "Did he deny himself for his flock? Did he care for the poor and outcast? Was he loved by his people?" one puts queries which cannot now be answered except on the basis of incomplete evidence. He says himself that he gave much to charity and that he devoted many pre- cious hours to aiding the afflicted by visits and prayers. For Boston negroes, perhaps then fairly to be called "poor and outcast," he tried to do much, as he did for seamen and for other classes of the community which were neither socially nor financially elect. There is little more to be said. The poor, even the plain men of the middle classes, those among whom his pastoral services, if any there were, must have been performed, have left few records of their lives and feelings; and the rare diaries and letters of theirs which are now acces- sible show, as do most similar documents of Puritan Massa- chusetts, a tendency either to suppress all that is personal or to speak of their pastors in terms of respect rather than of affection. The plain fact is that those by whom Mather was loved, if he was loved, those for whom he worked, if he did work for others, cannot now testify; we have only the formality of sermons, the billingsgate of his enemies, the prejudiced evidence of his diary, and, in general, the chilliness of public documents as opposed to more personal chronicles, by which to judge. We should not condemn a contemporary on such evidence. It is possible to paint Mather the minister as selfish, illiberal, austere, and unloved by his flock; but it is as possible and more moderate to say that the continued growth of his church, the general mourning at his death, and his reputation among his brethren in the pulpit, indicate that, if we had all the facts, he might seem more admirable than he now does to the historians who regard a manifestly in- complete set of records as sufficient for a verdict.
Mather was in theology a conservative ; he did not originate new doctrines, and sought to establish no experimental Utopia in Eighteenth Century Boston. It is an exaggeration, however, to offer such an estimate as the whole truth, just as it is an exaggeration to speak of his having "not a grain of liberalism
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TOLERANCE
in his make-up." Many men essentially conservative have managed a bit of liberalism at times ; monsters of complete re- action are rare in every age.
TOLERANCE
Mather's views on tolerance show that like most men he had merits as well as faults. He believed that Congregationalism as it had developed and was developing in Massachusetts was of all sects the best. Therefore, wherever questions of doc- trine or polity are discussed, he appears on the side of orthodox Congregationalism of the somewhat Presbyterianized variety, and is vigorous in decrying all deviations from it. But to argue from this that he was intolerant is to define intolerance too narrowly. One may be a good Baptist, and eager to have Baptists politically powerful, without wishing to deny to mem- bers of other denominations the right to worship as they like or trying to harry them out of existence. Year by year Mather increased in willingness to extend to other sects the same rights and privileges that he demanded for his own, and even at his most vituperative he does not plead for persecution of anyone on religious grounds. To Unitarians, Catholics, and, perhaps, Quakers, he felt that no compromise could be offered, but to- ward the rest he became more liberal day by day. In the Magnalia he censured the Quaker persecutions conducted by his ancestors in Boston. In 1699 when the Brattle Street Church was established, on a platform of which he disap- proved, he consented to preach and pray at the opening of the new meeting-house, and it was he who drew up a conciliatory address from the more conservative congregations. Later, in a sermon, he publicly asserted his disapproval of persecution; and in 1718 he preached at the ordination of a Baptist minister. In all this was at the very least open-mindedness toward some things that were new.
Cotton Mather was as far as a man well could be from being a Roger Williams, but in one detail he is not unlike the Williams who governed in accordance with his ideal of liberty of conscience but permitted himself to denounce the Quakers in terms worthy of the most bigoted. Mather, too, made a sharp and useful distinction between tolerant speech or toler-
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ant writing and tolerance so far as actual punitive measures against dissentients were concerned.
Nor was he afraid to express publicly his more tolerant views. In his Manuductio published two years before his death he says: "I Declare . . for a Christian Encouragement in the Church for all that observe the Grand MAXIMS of PIETY." These maxims, he explains, demand faith in God, in Christ the Redeemer, and love of one's neighbor. With them he links, as desirable but not essential, belief in the Bible as a sufficient rule for life. He then declares that "free Indul- gence of Civil Rights in the State" should be granted "unto all that approve themselves Faithful Subjects and Honest Neigh- bours, and such Inoffensive Livers, that Humane Society can- not complain of Disturbance from them." "For Communion in these Churches, and Admission to all the Priviledges and Advantages of the Evangelical Church-State, I would have you insist upon it, That no Terms be imposed, but such Neces- sary Things, as Heaven will require of all." This, it may be said, is like many pronouncements which are capable of being narrowed in practice by a prejudiced interpretation, but Mather is fortunately explicit as to his own meaning, pleading that his readers "let the Table of the Lord have no Rails about it, that shall hinder a Godly Independent, and Presbyterian, and Episcopalian, and Antipedobaptist, and Lutheran, from sitting down together there." Nor was Mather preaching what he did not practice.
In number 422 of the Flying-Post, for May 14-16, 1719, is printed a letter from him, dated November 4, 1718, in which he asserts: "No Church upon Earth at this Day so notably makes the Terms of Communion run parallel with the Terms of Salvation, as they are made among" New Englanders; and he says specifically that in Massachusetts, Calvinists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Baptists "do with delight sit down together at the same Table of the Lord." In the Manuductio he says he has seen just this "grateful Spectacle" in his own church. He must have told the truth; refutation would have been too easy had be lied. All this relieves some- what the darkness of his religious conservatism, for his boast of the opening of communion in Congregational churches to
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LIBERALITY
men of the other creeds he mentions, would have horrified most earlier Puritans of Boston.
LIBERALITY
He showed the same progress toward liberal ideas in another phase of his ministerial work. He became interested in the English societies organized to promote morality, and seized eagerly upon the method as one applicable to colonial needs. He proposed many such societies for Boston, and brought some of them into being. One may agree with Sibley, who says that in Mather's activities "we see the germs, and in some cases the fruits, of many of the modern religious and benevo- lent societies." Earlier New England knew little of this. For it the meeting-houses sufficed. In Mather's day lessened in- terest in the churches as such, made it necessary to work for the public morality and welfare by other means, and he was quick to discover how similar problems had been met else- where and to use the same remedies in Massachusetts. Indeed, the farther one goes in Mather's life the more one finds him emphasizing practical piety, relatively non-sectarian, as the chief good to be sought. Look over the long list of titles of his books and sermons, read a few pages from his later writ- ings, and compare the impression thus gained with that de- rived from a similar survey of the works of most of the earlier Puritans on these shores.
The result is a sense that Mather came to rely less on the church itself, less on creed, and less on the shibboleths of a sect, than upon what may fairly be called an appeal to Chris- tians of various stripes, united by a belief in the cardinal tenets of the faith and by a common desire to put into effect as perfectly as might be in an errant world what were then understood as the teachings of Christ. His sympathy with German pietism points, like many another straw, in the same direction. For all his conservatism he was able to take a broader and more humane view of the function of religious teachings than had been achieved by his forbears.
Finally it appears that he was not always a strict Calvinist, blinded by Calvinism to all else. His Christian Philosopher, printed in 1721, is, according to Professor Riley, “ a rejection
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of deism in name" but "an acceptance of it in principle"; and may be regarded "under that phrase of deistic development which was stimulated by the growing interest in the external world." 'And the same critic remarks: "In its sense of the beautiful and its cheerful outlook upon the world" it "was strangely at variance with the Puritanic spirit as ordinarily conceived."
Mather "sounded a note that did not die; the book with its scientific arguments for design fell flat, but its æsthetic element lived on; it anticipated by a century the transcendentalists' love of nature for its own sake." Professor Riley points out, too, that Mather's Reasonable Religion is a representative work marking "the desire for a change from a gloomy theology to a cheering theodicy, from the doctrine of inscrutable decrees to the belief in rational purpose and benevolent design in the universe." Mather, then, was on occasion at least not merely the conservative, but a pioneer in expressing a line of thought new to his more orthodox contemporaries in the colonies. The ideas which seem to be faint stirrings of a desire to en- large the bounds imposed by Calvinism are not original with Mather. They were discovered by him in English books, but he was almost alone in giving them circulation before 1728 in New England. They would have left John Cotton or Richard Mather cold-unless they had provoked irate attempts at ref- utation-but Cotton Mather saw good in them. That he did, testifies that his love of the past and his conservatism were not such as to make him look always backward.
MATHER THE WRITER
Mather published some four hundred and fifty books. A few of these contained occasional poems. Many were sermons, often full of expert if old-fashioned rhetoric and dotted with vivid phrases which account in part for his great popularity as a preacher. Still others of his writings are mere compila- tions, of which he was editor rather than author. Many hold no interest, probably, for anyone to-day; others offer here and there passages of historical or literary value. Mather could write well. Barrett Wendell placed the Magnalia "among the great works of English literature in the Seventeenth Century."
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MATHER THE WRITER
He could sketch character, and even in eulogies bring out the small traits needed to give the effect of individuality. His wit is out of tune with present taste, but was none the less wit by the literary criteria of his time. He loved words and good phrases; his ear caught the difference between a well- turned sentence and a mere string of nouns and verbs ; he knew how to mould a paragraph and how to construct a sermon. Mather the stylist has much to commend him to those whose appreciation of good things in books is truly catholic.
The Magnalia Christi Americana was his most elaborate published work, and is the only one now generally known. It was an attempt to write the "Church-History of New Eng- land"-to tell the tale of this part of the New World with special reference to its religious institutions. It has many faults. It lacks form, and is a collection of biographies, his- torical fragments, and undigested debate, rather than a finished book. But it is precious to the historian and antiquarian; and for the lover of literary oddities and the amateur of belles lettres it is often a source of joy. It is sprinkled with errors, but it must always be remembered that neither Mather nor any one qualified to do so was allowed by the printer to correct the proof, so that the book as we have it contains not only all the slips made by the author but also all those contributed by the printer and his devils.
The famous Essays to Do Good, a book by which Franklin was impressed, became popular because it taught essentially not theology but Christian morality. Its method, the direction of specific counsels to members of various classes and profes- sions in the community, shows how practical was its purpose. In this is a clue to Mather's position as a man of letters. He had ability; he had a partially developed literary sense; but for him books were first of all the means of doing his work as parson and missionary. If he could gratify his taste for artistic expression in them, so much the better, but this was secondary. A desire to teach, to serve wholly practical ends, is not usually the spirit which produces the greatest works of pure literature. Had he realized this-and perhaps he did- Mather would probably not have altered his attitude toward his writing. To be an artist was good; to be an active agent in spreading the truth, measured in terms of Congregational
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Christianity, was better. Mather the littérateur stood always in the shadow of Mather the teacher and moralist.
As man of letters Mather has real claims to be remembered, however. He was not, for all the faults which came from hasty composition and too insecure literary standards, a mere scribbler. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, though most of them come under the broad headings of theology, science, or history. If he was often a compiler of what had been written before by others, he was also one whose sure touch in many pages gave to old material new picturesqueness. And, here and there, his enthusiasm burned through into brilliance of style.
MATHER THE SCHOLAR
The hand of the scholar is apparent in much of Mather's writing. He has been called pedantic because he loads his pages with allusions, quotations, tags of Latin, Greek, and even Hebrew. In some pages all these were taken from some one book which at the moment he chose to follow, but whole- sale accusations on this score are unjust. However much he took from others, he proved that his own mind was well stocked and could give him material for most of his more learned-or "pedantic"-passages.
Other evidence than his books proves how wide was his reading. Thomas Prince, himself a scholar and book collec- tor, sketches Mather as a man who read all he could lay his hands on. An amazingly large part of his days he spent in his study. His library and his father's formed a private collec- tion unrivalled in the Northern colonies at the time. He trained himself in languages. Greek, Latin, and Hebrew he read; he wrote a pamphlet in French and one in Spanish. Even his enemies did not deny his learning. His book-lined study with its "Be Short" above the door, must have seemed to many a sort of scholarly shrine, and Benjamin Franklin long remembered the glimpse he had of it as a boy.
Mather's reading led him into many fields. It would be a dreary task to epitomize even a considerable part of it, but, in one volume, his Manuductio ad Ministerium, 1726, he out- lined what seemed to him the fundamentals for the prepara- tion of a scholar for the work of the ministry. The book is
& Libris you Cry Desom 19 17- Mal to~
Magnalia Chrifti Americana : OR, THE Eccleliattiral Diltory O F.
NEWV-ENGLAND, FROM Its Firft Planting in the Year 1620. unto the Year of our LORD, 1698.
In Seven BOOKS.
I. Antiquities : In Seven Chapters. With an Appendix.
11. Containing the Lives of the Governours, and Names of the Magiftrates of New-Fx land : In Thirteen Chapters. With an Appendix.
III. The Lives of Sixty Famous Divines, by whofe Miniftry the Churches of New-England have been Planted and Continued.
IV. An Account of the University of Cambridge in New England ; in Two Parts. The Firft contains the Laws, the Benefactors, and Viciffitudes of Harvard College ; with Remarks upon it. The Second Part contains the Lives of fome Eminent Perions Educated in it.
V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith and Order in the Churches of New-Eng- lund, puffed in their Synods; with Hiftorical Remarks upon thofe Venerable Affemblies,; and a great Variety of Church-Cafes occurring, and refolved by the Synods of thofe Churches : In Four Parts.
VI. A Faithful Record of miny Illuftrious, Wonderful Providences, both of Mercies and Judgments, on divers Perfons in Nem-England : In Eight Chapters.
VII. The Wars of the Lord. Being an Hiftory of the Manifold Afflictions and Difturbances of the Churches in New-England, from their Various Adverfa- ries, and the Wonderful Methods and Mercies of God in their Deliverance : In Six Chapters : To which is fubjoined, An Appendix of Remarkable Occurrences which Nem-England had in the Wars with the Indian Salvages, from the Year 1688, to the Year 1698.
By the Reverend and Learned COTTON MATHER, M. A. And Paftor of the North Church in Bofton, New-England.
LONDON: Printed for Thomas Parkburft, at the Bible and Three Crowns in Cheapfide. MDCCII.
From the First Edition in the Harvard College Library
TITLE PAGE OF COTTON MATHER'S Magnalia
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designedly elementary, and in no way represents the range of its author's knowledge, but it does give an idea of what he considered to be scholarly training and a sound equipment for usefulness in his profession.
He urges the study of languages, mentioning especially Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and, less important, French. He has little to say for the study of formal logic; "for some Reasons" he "would be excused from Recommending" Locke's Essay on Human Understanding; he is lukewarm about meta- physics ; and he feels that ethics, as usually studied, pays too little attention to Christ. Particularly interesting is his enthu- siastic endorsement of science, which he believes candidates for the ministry should study more than was then customary. He lauds Newton and declares that only experimental science is valid. Mathematics, too, he believes to be useful, since it develops concentration and makes "Strong Reasoners" and "very Regular and Cohærent Speakers." In discussing astron- omy he goes beyond some divines of the period in his complete rejection of the old attitude toward eclipses and comets, assert- ing that to regard them as heavenly portents of earthly changes is mere superstition. Geography he recommends, and, of course, history, which, he thinks, should be read with constant reflection upon God's power as revealed in past events.
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