USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. II > Part 43
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Few private Christians can ever have been more conscientiously assiduous in the culture of personal holiness, - Cotton Mather in a single year record- ing his observance of more than sixty days of fasting and prayer, and twenty
1 Parentator, as cited by Sibley, i. 414.
2 [He died Aug. 23, 1723. His will is printed in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1851, p. 445 .- ED.]
8 Parentator, as cited by Sibley, p. 433.
4 Ibid., p. 431.
5 Ibid., p. 432.
6 Life, etc. (1729), p. 5.
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THE MATHER FAMILY, AND ITS INFLUENCE.
nights of vigil ; while habitually inspecting his every utterance and thought in the jealous purpose that each be acceptable to God and useful to men. Few divines can ever have been more unwearied in preaching, his Diary making it clear that in one (apparently average) twelvemonth he delivered more than seventy public discourses, with nearly half as many private ones; while it is made obvious, by that frank and minute record of his every-day employments, that it was his custom to make the preparation of his sermons an elaborate and serious business. Few pastors can ever have excelled him in fidelity. In the one or two afternoons of each week assigned to that duty, systematically visiting his people from house to house, with exhortation and prayer;1 putting into their hands, in their homes, religious reading;2 making it matter of conscience never to allow even the most casual interview to end without some special spiritual appeal; and often spending whole days on his knees with the list of their names before him, begging God to inspire him to give to each a portion in due season. Few philanthropists can ever have been more eager to make others happier.and better than he, whose dying exhortation to his son, asking for some motto which might be treasured as a guide of life, was: " Remember that one word, Fructuosus;"3 whose private journal4 bears almost daily witness to his solicitude lest he should somehow fail to do all that it was possible for him to do to meliorate the general lot; who originated more than twenty societies for various departments of Christian beneficence; who undertook to Christianize the negroes,5 himself for a time bearing the entire cost of a school for their instruction ; and who, in the face of an abusive and virulent popular opposition, led by the medical profession, - an opposition un- scrupulous enough even to attempt his life,6- successfully introduced and
1 " 21 April, 1716. Visit, visit, visit, - more frequently, more fruitfully. Redeem Thursday afternoons for my own part of the town."- MS. Diary, s. d. " 25 June, 1716. Draw up a more complete catalogue of Enquiries to be made, and of Directions to be given, and of Counsels to be insisted on, where I make my pastoral visits in ye flock." - Ibid.
2 " 13 Feb. 1715-16. I would, as soon as I can, get furnished with my Echos of Devotion (which is not yet published), that I may lodge ye Book in all ye families where I come."-Diary. " He has given away above a Thousand [books thus to his people] in a year." - Life, etc., p. 38. Life, etc., p. 1 56.
4 Take such entries as the following, selected from many others (Feb. 18-May 5, 1716), within a few weeks of each other : " Relieve, rebuke, and exhort a poor man clothed with rags at ye North End." " A miserable man in prison - I must clothe and help him." "The expired Charity School I would get revived." " A poor gentleman in prison for debt must be relieved." " Several old men in want to be looked after." " An aged handmaid of the Lord in poverty to
be provided for." " I will take a poor Father- less child to lodge and feed in my Family, and watch opportunities to do him further kind- nesses." " A miserable woman that wants to be relieved on many accounts, and also to have passage to London paid for - I must bear ex- penses for her." "A poor depraved youth in my neighborhood must be looked after." " An orphan- I will take him, and feed him and lodge him in my own family."-MS. Diary. [As already noted in the Introduction to Vol. I., considerable portions of his Diary are preserved in the libraries of the American Antiquarian Society and of the Massachusetts Historical So- ciety. It was his custom to make the entries for each year of his life in a separate little quarto book. One of these is in the Congregational Library, marked: "The LIV year of my life. 12d XII m. 1715-16."-ED.]
5 "6 Aug., 1716. I would send for the Negroes of ye Flock, would form a religious society, and entertain them at my house, with suitable ad- monitions of Piety." - MS. Diary.
6 W. B. O. Peabody, Life, etc. (Sparks's Am. Biog.), p. 324.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
defended inoculation as a protection against the sweeping and terrible ravages of the small-pox. Few who have ever attempted authorship can have left behind them so long a catalogue of printed books, which the public seemed always ready to absorb, -the list of his published works, given by his son, rising to the amazing number of three hundred and eighty-two,1 many of which, it is true, were simply sermons, but several were elaborate volumes, and one a folio of eight hundred pages; while beyond these, to his great grief,2 the work which he esteemed the chief labor of his life, his Biblia Americana, in six folio volumes, remains in manuscript to this day.3 Few scholars of his century could have enjoyed so wide an inter- course by letters with the great men of the Old World, or gained so high repute among them, - he at one time being in correspondence with more than fifty learned Europeans; 4 receiving in his forty-seventh year from the University of Glasgow the degree of Doctor in Divinity, and being made a Fellow of the Royal Society,- both in those days, for a remote colonist, being remarkable distinctions.
Clearly he had capacities, acquirements, opportunities ; and these with his achievements made it easy and natural for the New England Weekly Fournal (Feb. 26, 1728), in its notice of his funeral, to say : -
" He was, perhaps, the principal Ornament of this Country, and the greatest Scholar that ever was bred in it. But, besides his unusual learning, his exalted Piety and extensive Charity, his entertaining Wit, and singular Goodness of temper recom- mended him to all that were Judges of real and distinguished merit."
But while all this was honestly and honorably true, it is also true that Cotton Mather had serious defects of character. His vast reading was in- digested and unassimilated to that degree, especially in connection with his vicious theory of composition, habitually to hinder the best usefulness of his employment of it.5 Not by nature gifted with conspicuous common-sense, that studious seclusion in whose plodding industries lay imbedded the roots of his amazing literary fertility, by withdrawing him from large and unpro-
1 His son (Life, etc., p. 178) gives the total as " three hundred and eighty-three ;" but he sets down only three hundred and eighty-two titles, and elsewhere (Ibid., p. 67) he gives that as the true number.
2 See (MS. Diary, Oct. 14, 1716) his refer- ence to the "strange Frowns of Heaven," which " defeated " its publication. *
8 [In the Library of the Massachusetts His- torical Society, Boston. A MS. Autobiography by Cotton Mather was sold in the library of the late Rev. Dr. William Jenks of Boston, and is now in the possession of Judge Mark Skinner, of Chicago .- ED.]
4 Life, etc., p. 80.
5 One of his latest critics, not wholly able to divest himself of that tendency to berate poor Mather which has been the fashion of the literati
of the past generation, still on the whole speaks so aptly of his style as to justify reference : " The mind of Cotton Mather was so possessed by the books he had read, that his most common thought had to force its way into utterance through dense hedges and jungles of quotation. Not only every sentence, but nearly every clause, pivots itself on some learned allusion ; and by inveterate habit he had come to consider all sub- jects, not directly, but in their reflections and echoes in books. It is quite evident, too, that, just as the poet often shapes his idea to his rhymes, and is helped to an idea by his rhymes, so Mather's mind acquired the knack of steering his thought so as to take in his quotation, from which in turn, perhaps, he reaped another thought."- M. C. Tyler, History of American Literature, ii. 88.
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THE MATHER FAMILY, AND ITS INFLUENCE.
fessional intercourse with men as they were, still further tended to dissoci- ate him from that close sympathy with practical life which is essential to the largest sagacity. It must be conceded that he was ambitious; nor can it be denied that he was self-opinioned, not infrequently to the verge of vanity. His Diary, in the touching frankness of its frequent bewailings of sudden sharpness of speech, reveals his penitent consciousness of the fact that he had an irritable temper.1 His want of good taste sometimes jarred even with the not specially prudish standards of his time.2 Nor, had he been attracted to such endeavor, with his peculiarities of nature and train- ing, would he have found it easy to rise above the spirit of his age in certain matters concerning which the world is wiser since. He accordingly believed in special judgments as induced by special transgressions 3 and suggested by special misfortunes, and in ghosts;4 and he shared with most of the devout and learned men of his generation that lamentable misjudg- ment and infatuation out of which sprang the witchcraft delusion. It is to be noted, however, by him who would thoroughly understand Cotton Mather, that his chief misfortune lay in the fact that he outlived that state of society to which he was germane. He was the belated Diornis, or Dodo, of an incongenial geological period. In the epoch of his father or his grandfather he would have understood his generation, and been con- gruously comprehended by it. But the day in New England when the minister was mightier than the magistrate, when the sharp Calvinism of the Westminster Confession was hardly stanch enough to embody the theology of the multitude, and a profane oath was about as rare as an elephant, had gone by forever. He was unhappy, he scarcely knew why, from some vague consciousness that the old solid ground was ever more and more slipping away from under his feet; and that he was thus unhappy made him unpopular; and that he was unpopular made him still more un- happy; until, to measure to him that same measure of classic quotation which he was so fond of meting to others, he more than justified Ovid's apt observation,5-
" Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos ; Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris."
1 [Instances can be pointed out in which he was not sufficiently considerate of others who crossed his path or distrusted his influence. - ED.]
2 "Isa. xxxiii. 17, was preached from by Mr. Cotton Mather,-'Thine eyes shall see the King,' etc .; whoes Sermon was somewhat disgusted for some expressions, - as 'Sweet-sented hands of Christ,' 'Lord High Treasurer of AEthiopia,' 'Ribband of Humility,' etc., - which was sorry for because of the excellency and seasonable- ness of the subject, and otherwise well-handled." Diary of Samuel Sewall, i. 119.
8 This tendency of those days finds illustra- tion in an entry in Sewall's Diary : "23 Oct.,
1701. Mr. Increase Mather said at Mr. Wil- kins's, ' If I am a Servant of Jesus Christ, some great Judgment will fall on Captain Sewall, or his family.' " - Ibid., ii. 45.
4 Cotton Mather wrote in his Diary thus : " 15 Nov., 1716. There has lately been in the Town an apparition of a Dead person. It is a thing so well attested that there can be no Room to doubt of it. It may be a service to Sundry, and serve many good purposes, for me to obtain a full Relation of ye matter, and have ye persons concerned therein to make oath unto it before a magistrate." - MS. Diary, s. d.
5 Tristia, i. El. ix. 5.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Samuel was Cotton Mather's fourth son, born of the second of his three wives, and the only one who lived to middle age. He graduated at Harvard College in 1723, before he was seventeen; and, June 21-July 2, 1732, four years after his father's death, was ordained (colleague pastor with Rev. Joshua Gee) over the Boston Church, to which his family had been in the habit of administering. In less than ten years difficulties arose which culminated in a scarcely peaceful separation and the erection of a new meeting-house, where, with a diminishing following, he labored until his death, in 1785. He was a man of considerable learning, of good repute, except as talked against in the church quarrel, but of unattractive utter- ance; received the degree of Doctor in Theology from his college in 1773, and was the author of fifteen or twenty treatises, chief among which are a jejune memoir of his father,1 and An Apology for the Liberties of the Churches of New England, which deserves remembrance. Neither of his three sons studied for the ministry, with him this remarkable series coming to an end, the least being also the last; so that one might amend the epitaph said to have been composed for his great-grandfather, to make it read : -
Under this stone lies Richard Mather, Who had a son greater than his father, And eke a grandson more famous than either, But the next generation failed - rather.
It were easy to criticise the tastes, judgments, ways, and works of such a family according to the standards of our times. But to struggle back into the atmosphere which they breathed, to strain the eye to see life and duty as seen by them and by those who surrounded and acted upon them, to know them as they were, and - discrediting alike the fulsome eulogies of many of their contemporaries, and the bigoted animosities of some of their modern critics- to judge them as they deserve, and thus justly estimate their influence upon the religion, the literature, and the general civilization of the country and the world, is so difficult as to be well-nigh impossible.
The first glance suggests that there was something in the agglomerated kinship of such a sequence of intellectual laborers which must have been felt as an appreciable force by the colonial mind. The close succession of four generations of men of note in the pulpit, and with the pen, is in itself remarkable, if not unique. President Dwight, with his two well-known sons, Lyman Beecher and his famous children, and the Winthrop family in secu- lar life remind one of it. The Edwardses -Timothy, Jonathan, with the younger president of the same name, -and the Storrs family, now culmi- nating in the third Richard Salter, come nearer to it. Among civilians the Adamses-of whom the fourth noted generation is extant with cheering vigor - strongly resemble it. But the case has never been wholly paralleled on this side of the sea.
1 [It is to be regretted that this Memoir furnishes little of the information which one might hope to find in it. - ED.]
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THE MATHER FAMILY, AND ITS INFLUENCE.
We must remember further that, as ministers, this Mather family mainly lived in times vastly more favorable than the present to professional influ- ence. The pastor, though - for cause - he sometimes changed his place, was yet settled for life, and, if fairly faithful, usually went on year after year sending wider and deeper the roots of his secret strength through the soil of the parish, and extending broader those boughs from which dropped fruits for the hunger, and leaves for the healing, of his hearers. It was safe for him to begin the exposition of a book of Holy Scripture in the reasonable expectation that he might dwell among his own people long enough to go steadily through it by course. It was his inestimable advantage as a sermonizer, that, having neither magazines, newspapers, nor lyceum, or other public lectures or addresses during the week, to feed, divert, or dis- tract them, his congregation brought themselves to him on Sunday, with whatsoever hunger for intellectual and spiritual nourishment their minds were capable of, unsatisfied and eager. And if there were any of his town or congregation who approximated his own culture sufficiently to be condi- tioned for any counter judgment of much weight, they were few and far between; while the great multitude looked up to him as an oracle in the wisdom of this world, as well as the authorized expounder of all truth, hav- ing especially to do with that which is to come. It was by no means unusual for the pastor to draw the deeds and write the last wills of his people; while in multitudes of cases, to cite the testimony of a most approved witness,1 the practice of medicine was united with the par- ochial duties of the ministers of religion. With such surroundings and under such training, it could not be difficult for ministerial self-complacency to shade into arrogance, or for the Congregational pastor to become - so extremely as well as odiously to phrase it -the pope of his village. More- over, the " Elders" were, in the early days of New England, taken into express partnership with the civil power, in a manner greatly to exalt the sway which they would otherwise have had; and which. on the one hand made it easy for them to realize, and easier on the other hand for them to attempt, great things in the way of public influence. For a period of years after the adoption of the law of 1631 limiting citizenship to members of the churches, "in Massachusetts, a meeting of the whole body of freemen in a General Court was the same as a convention of mem- bers of all the churches." 2 Surely, then, it was the most natural of all things that no public act of consequence should be decided on without the good favor of the Elders; the more that some of them - like Nathaniel Ward, of Ipswich, who drew up the "Body of Liberties "- in reality were regarded as pre-eminently capable of wise counsel in civil things.
The Mathers made full proof of their ministry, and availed of all these advantages. Richard's hand was always ready to help in laying the good foundations of the colony; while his diligence for his own special charge was unremitted. In witness whereof we read that 3-
1 Dr. James Thacher, American Medical
2 J. G. Palfrey, History of New England, ii. 39. Biography, i. 14.
VOL. II. - 39.
8 Life, etc., p. 89.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
" In his Publick Ministry in Dorchester he went over the Book of Genesis to chap. xxxviii. ; Psalm xvi. ; The whole Book of the Prophet Zechariah ; Matthew's Gospel, to chap. xviii. ; I Epistle to Thess. chap. v. ; and the whole Second Epistle of Peter, - his notes wheron he reviewed and transcribed for the press, not many years before his decease. Also he was much exercised in answering many practical Cases of Con- science, and in Polemical, especially Disciplinary, Discourses."
Of Increase it was said that he " never preached a sermon but what was worthy of the Press," - always writing his discourses in quarto books, and then committing them to memory. Mighty by the obvious concentration of all the noblest forces of his life upon his spiritual calling, as Dr. Colman said of him in his commemorative discourse,1 " a most excellent preacher he was, using great plainness of speech, with much light and heat, force and power; " " very happy in his methods; " "master of all the learning of past ages ; " " distinct and perspicuous,"-his was " a soul-searching minis- try," and " awful and reverend " in its "public addresses to God." Surely - not denying that he sometimes leaned toward over-assertion, and other- wise missed perfection - he seems fairly to have earned the title which Eliot gave him, with the testimony thereto adjoined : 2 " He was the Father of the New England clergy, and his name and character were held in veneration, not only by those who knew him, but by succeeding generations."
His son Cotton would sometimes " rise" from the regular Sabbath ser- vices and the weekly lecture "to the number of eleven successive days of preaching; " and, prayerfully pressing " a glorious Christ," he built up and maintained his hold upon the largest congregation in New England, with nearly or quite four hundred church members.3 This, with six other churches by his side. Nor must it be forgotten that, when he was fifty, the " New North" became a necessity because of the crowded state of the attendance upon his meeting-house. Grant that his son Samuel was " not a powerful, captivating preacher,"4 there is enough and more than enough in the century and a quarter of the combined ministerial labors of the three eminent men who went before him to embalm the name with honor in the pulpit records of the New World.
Authorship in a new country is apt to be a most important means of use- fulness, and in this, as has already been suggested, the Mathers were pre- eminent. Richard, by his Answer of the Elders, his Answer to Herle, his Reply to Rutherford, and his Defence of the Synod of 1662, proved himself a dense, pithy, and pertinent composer and an effective disputant. Increase, while the great mass of his publications were intended by him to be, and were accepted by his generation as being, helpful incentives to the Christian life and stimulants to the advancement of the Church in her divine mission of love, did service also to our colonial annals in his Brief History of the
1 Sermon on the Death of Increase Mather. pp. 233-264, which those interested will do well to read.
2 Biograph. Dict. N. Eng., p. 312.
8 I refer here to an admirable article by Dr. 4 Dr. Daniel Dana, in Sprague's Annals, i. 374.
Quint in the Congregational Quarterly for 1859,
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THE MATHER FAMILY, AND ITS INFLUENCE.
War with the Indians and his Relation of the Troubles which have happened in New England ; struck a blow for our civil vindication in The Revolution in New England Justified,1 and did his best to advantage the polity of the churches by his Disquisition Concerning Ecclesiastical Councils, his First Principles of New England, his Order of the Gospel, and his Vindica- tion of the Divine Authority of Ruling Elders in the Churches of Christ. Cotton Mather, as an author, cultivated almost the entire field of litera- ture. He printed great numbers of sermons. He prepared many practical religious works, such as The A. B. C. of Religion, The Best Ornaments of Youth, A Companion for Communicants, Essays to do Good, A Monitor for Communicants, A Token for the Children, etc. He sent out a book of hymns, and another of psalms of his own translating. He printed more than once on Baptism, and again and again on Early Piety. He essayed to do good in secular channels by his Boston Ephemeris, his Present State of New England, his Serious Address to those who un- necessarily frequent the Tavern, and his Account of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox. He left in manuscript a medical treatise designed to promote health and long life.2 He sought to assist candidates for the sacred office by his admirable Manuductio ad Ministerium. He tried to be helpful to colonial history by his Decennium Luctuosum, his Duodecennium Luctuosum, his Memorable Providences,3 etc. In the aim to broaden the field of his usefulness, he published religious treatises in French, Spanish, and Algonkin; and while his greatest literary labor was in the service of the history and practice of Congregationalism in his Old Pathes Restored, his Ratio Disciplinae, his Eleutheria, and pre-eminently his Magnalia Christi Americana, perhaps the earnestness of his soul most went out in The Faith of the Fathers, A Seasonable Testimony to the Doc- trines of Grace, and American Sentiments on the Arian Controversy, in which he warned and protested against changes coming in seriously to modify that old Puritan theology loved and trusted by him. Wonder- fully prolific as he was, the public never seemed to tire of the products of his pen, and second and third editions of his works were not uncommon. Add now to these the really valuable Apology for the Liberties of the Churches of his son Samuel, with the dozen other treatises of his by which he made his main impression on his contemporaries, and won his doctorate from Harvard in spite of his pulpit feebleness, and it becomes clear that no family like this ever before or since had to do with authorship in the New World, and probably never in the Old.
It has been asserted, indeed, that the Magnalia is rubbish, and that few of all these hundreds of treatises had any other than an ephemeral value. The remark in general applies to nearly all literature, and the particular stricture is as ill-advised as it is ill-natured, and cannot be maintained. Con-
1 [It is held by Whitmore that Mather could tion of the American Antiquarian Society, have had no hand in this tract. See Andros Worcester. Tracts, ii. 2 .- ED.]
8 [This book plainly pertains to one witch-
2 The Angel of Bethesda, etc., -in the collec- craft case. See Mr. Poole's chapter. - ED.]
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