Chapter II: • The Mather Dynasty

I

For one who is not a loving student of the unamiable bickerings that clutter the records of early New England, and who does not read them by the gentle light of filial loyalty, it would seem presumptuous to venture into the thorny fields tilled by the Mathers. He is certain to get well scratched, and not at all certain to return with any fruit gathered. The rancors of dead partisanships beset him on every side, and the gossip of old wives’ tales fills his ears. He will encounter many a slanderous hearsay, and the authentic documents to which he would naturally turn are often inaccessible, and always inhospitable. The countless tracts, for the most part inconsequential, that issued in an unbroken stream from the tireless Mather pens, consuming all the italics in the printer’s case, constitute a veritable _cheval-de-frise_ to protect their authors’ literary reputations from any Philistine attack; and behind that bristling barricade they have long bidden defiance to casual invasion. Only a siege can reduce their stronghold and bring them forth into the clear light of day.

Two generations of Harvard scholarship have essayed the undertaking, but there is still wanting the detached critic who will set the Mathers against an adequate historical background, and appraise them objectively in relation to their times. The Harvard contributions are excellent in their way, but a consciousness of dealing with Harvard worthies would seem to have laid the writers under certain inhibitions. Exposition too easily slides into apologetics. The latest study[96] is a somewhat meticulous defense. It is an extraordinarily painstaking document, that has added to our knowledge of Increase Mather’s life and work, but it was unhappily conceived in the dark of the moon, a season congenial to strange quirks of fancy. Some tangle it has cleared away, but fresh obstacles have been added by the intrusion of a thesis to be defended. In consequence, the interpretation of motives is colored by special pleading, and the very necessary inquiry into the sources of those virulent antagonisms that sprang up full-armed in the minister’s every footprint is put aside as ungermane to a biography. It is an unfortunate assumption for it puts aside much that is crucial. The rehabilitation becomes too easy and complete. It proves too much. It would have us believe that in spite of all the smoke that gathered about Increase Mather’s militant pilgrimage through life, there was never any fire of his kindling; that in spite of all the puddles through which the priestly politician splashed to reach his ends, no spot or stain ever smutched his gown. The contention may be sound, but it puts credulity to the strain, and unless one has something of a Mather stomach for marvels, one is likely to indulge in the luxury of doubt.

II

The Mathers were a singularly provocative family, capable, ambitious, certain to have a finger in every pie baking in the theocratic oven. From the emigrant Richard with the great voice, chief architect of the Cambridge Platform, to the provincial Cotton, the family combativeness and love of publicity put their marks on New England history. Of the three generations, certainly Increase Mather was the most generously endowed with capacity for leadership; an able man, practical and assertive, liking to be in the forefront of affairs, not wanting his light hidden under a bushel. An arch-conservative, he justified his ways to his conscience by the excellence of the heritage he strove to conserve. A formalist, he satisfied his intellectual curiosity by extolling the sufficiency of the creed of the fathers. He closed the windows of his mind against the winds of new doctrine, and bounded the fields of speculative inquiry by orthodox fences. He was of the succession of John Cotton rather than Thomas Hooker, a priestly theocrat, though never a shuffler like Cotton, less troubled by free inquiry, less by the intellectual. All his life he was inhibited from bold speculation by his personal loyalties and interests. As a beneficiary of things as they were, certain to lose in prestige and power with any relaxing of the theocracy, it would be asking too much of human nature to expect him to question the sufficiency of the established system of which he was the most distinguished representative. Not to have approved it would have been to repudiate his habitual way of thinking, his deepest prejudices, his strongest convictions. He had been molded and shaped by the theocracy; it was the very marrow of his bones; as well demand that pig iron turn molten again after it comes from the matrix. The ore of which he was fashioned was excellent, but once molded it was rigid; there would be no return to fluidity. And so determined by every impact of environment, by every appeal of loyalty, and by a very natural ambition, Increase Mather became a stout upholder of the traditional order, a staunch old Puritan Tory of the theocratic line. How could any promptings of liberalism find nourishment in such a mind?[97] Why should one expect to find in the works of such a man the seeds of new systems of thought or more generous institutions? He was the outstanding figure of the theocracy in the days of its overthrow, but intellectually he was not worthy to unloose the shoe-strings of Roger Williams.

In his professional capacity, Increase Mather was the priest rather than the theologian, a pastor of the flock, an expounder of the creed, rather than a seeker after new light. As a minister his mind was circumscribed by the thinking of John Calvin. He learned nothing from Luther, and was bitterly hostile to those phases of Independency that embodied the more generous Lutheran principles. No man was by temperament better fitted to embrace the coercive spirit of the Genevan discipline. Strong-willed and ascetic, he discovered in discipline the chief end for which the children of Adam are created. A profound admirer of the close-knit Genevan system, he was a Presbyterian in spirit, a man after Calvin’s own heart, who clung to the old coercions in an age that was seeking to throw them off. If he counseled innovation it was in the way of strengthening ministerial authority, never in the way of liberalizing either creed or practice. It was the Congregationalism of the Cambridge Platform, and not that of early Plymouth, that he upheld; and to strengthen that order he turned earnestly to the practical work of Presbyterianizing. He was the prime mover in summoning the synod of 1679-80, requested by the Court to consider amongst other things what “may appeare necessary for the preventing schismes, haeresies, prophaneness, & the establishment of the churches in one faith & order of the gospell,”[98] and the chief suggestions of the body, of which he was the conspicuous leader, were a return to a stricter discipline, and a strengthening of the passage in the Savoy Confession of faith--adopted by the synod--by borrowings from the Westminster Confession, which “more positively set forth the authority of the state in doctrinal questions.”[99]

In 1691, while in London, Mather had been active in the work of uniting the Presbyterian and Congregational churches of England, under articles that would seem to have been more Presbyterian than Congregational; and in 1705, following the curiously spiteful controversy over the Brattle Street Church he joined vigorously in the proposed work of rejuvenating the New England system by engrafting further shoots from the Presbyterian stock. One of these grafts from the London, agreement--the principle of licensing ministerial candidates by the association of ministers, thereby effectively preventing the intrusion of undesired members--established itself on the Congregational system; but another--the principle of associational control of the several churches--was blighted by the attack of John Wise.[100] What this desired consolidation of power in the hands of the ministers implied, is suggested by the terms of the Cambridge Platform, which asserted that “the work & duty of the people is expressed in the phrase of obeying their Elders,” and that they may not “speak in church, before they have leave from the elders: nor continue so doing, when they require silence, nor may they oppose nor contradict the judgment or sentence of the Elders, without sufficient & weighty cause.”[101] Recalling that the elders of a church had been reduced in number to the single minister, one may perhaps venture to suggest that a man ardently working to strengthen the hands of the ministerial oligarchy by further Presbyterianizing was no friend to Separatist-Congregationalism, nor one in whom the spirit of humility would work any lessening of the authority of the Lord’s stewards.[102]

In his conception of toleration Mather followed naturally in the footsteps of John Cotton. He would tolerate all views that were not in error, but his criteria of truth were so far from catholic as to lead him into constant and vehement attack upon other sects. As a responsible leader he was careful to clothe his attacks with generous professions; but he never stepped forward to uphold the right of free thought, or to dissuade his brethren from heresy-baiting. His biographer is greatly impressed by the minister’s professions, and takes them at somewhat more than face value, forgetting the ancient saying that by the fruits of men’s lives they shall be known. Casuistry is useful for purposes of defense, and a skillful apologist can explain away much; but the spirit of toleration revealed in the following passages was certainly no child of liberalism:

The “Anabaptists” had given trouble in New England. They had
installed as minister a man excommunicated from the Congregational
church, and, when their meeting-house was closed to them, they
persisted in assembling publicly before its barred doors rather
than worship unmolested in a private house. To Mather these were
attacks upon the true faith, and manifest disturbances of the
civil peace. Naturally there is some acidity in his strictures
on the “blasted Error” of “Antipedobaptism.”... He denounces
Baptists roundly enough, points to their kinship with the turbulent
Anabaptists in Europe, and writes: “Are they not generally of a bad
Spirit? Bitter enemies to the Lords most eminent Servants? yea,
to the faithfull Ambassadors, spitting the cruel venome of Asps
against them.”

He then concludes: “Nor is the modern reader likely to disagree” with the apology by President Oakes, who wrote in an introduction to Mather’s screed:

It is sufficiently known to those that know the Author, that he is
none of the Ishmaels of the times, that have their hand against
every man and love to be taking a Dog by the Ears ... or to be
dabling in the waters of strife.... They that know his Doctrine
and manner of life, cannot but know that the life of his Spirit
is in the things of practical Divinity, and the great Design of
his ministry is to promote the power and practice of piety in the
greatest instances.... I dare undertake ... his design ... is not
to traduce ... those that are otherwise minded, or expose them to
severities & sufferings on the bare account of their opinion.[103]

From these curious passages the unsympathetic realist is likely to draw the conclusions that the spirit of mutual admiration came to early birth in New England, and that it makes a vast difference whose ox is gored. Something of the same casuistry is employed to explain away Increase Mather’s unhappy part in the witchcraft mess.[104] The whole matter is involved and rendered difficult by guilty consciences and the need to save reputations, and perhaps the facts are not to be got at; yet it is only another instance to show how quickly candor flies out at the window when a Mather comes in at the door. One may make much or little of the son’s statement that Increase grew more tolerant in his later years; it would seem at best to have been only the difference between black and dark gray. A dominating man does not take kindly to differences of counsel. Increase Mather was a stout upholder of the law and order in the shaping of which he had a hand, but he looked with no friendly eye on the architects of a different order; and the bitterness of his later years was the natural consequence of a strong, proud, ambitious man, thwarted in his dearest projects.

If he contributed nothing to a more liberal theology or church organization, it is idle to expect him to have contributed to political speculation. As a leader of the theocracy he meddled much in practical politics, but it would seem that he was quite unread in the political philosophers and wholly ignorant of major principles. The great English liberals of Commonwealth times and later left him untouched. He bought and read many books, but almost none of a political nature.[105] Hobbes, Harrington, Sidney, Milton, Filmer, Locke, were as much out of his intellectual ken as were the speculations of Roger Williams. Interest in political theory had ceased in Massachusetts with the banishment of the great Independent, and the principles of liberal thinkers like Harrington and Milton would have awakened little sympathy in so stalwart a theocrat as Increase Mather. He was a practical man, an administrator and mentor, a stern _castigator morum_ to the commonwealth, and as a college president he had been trained in a school little notable for its sympathetic consideration of the views of subordinates. He got on ill with his Harvard tutors, and one of the unseemliest squabbles of his later years grew out of the bitterness sowed between a “strong” administrator and his teaching staff.[106] A man accounted less pious, concerned with ends more patently worldly, might well be reckoned dictatorial and domineering; but Puritan righteousness, perhaps, is not to be judged by profane standards, nor the same severity of judgment applied to politicians laboring in the theocratic vineyard, that is applied to the common breed.

Perhaps the happiest years of Increase Mather’s arduous life were those spent in London as agent of the theocratic party to secure such terms as he could for the settlement of New England. It was a congenial task and a congenial field. His love of diplomacy and his fondness for England were both gratified. He mingled there on terms of equality with the intellectual leaders of English Nonconformity, and matched his wit with men high in station. He proved himself a skillful manager, but the threads were too tangled for any Puritan diplomat to smoothe out, and he fell short of his hopes. The terms of the charter as finally drafted satisfied few of the Boston theocrats, and his nomination of Sir William Phipps for Governor was certainly ill-judged. Sir William had been converted to the true faith by Increase himself and was reckoned by him a chosen vessel of the Lord; but he turned out to be no better than a cracked pot, and with the coming of Dudley the political influence of Increase Mather was finally broken. He was maneuvered out of his position as president of Harvard and later suffered the mortification of seeing the post fall into the hands of Leverett, the old tutor now become an influential politician, with whom he had been bitterly at outs. “Doubtless there is not any government in the world,” he wrote, “that has been laid under greater obligations by a greater man than this government has been by me. Nevertheless I have received more discouragement in the work of the Lord, by those in government, than by all the men in the world besides. Let not my children put too much confidence in men.”[107] It is not pleasant to be ousted from one’s position by politicians, and if one is certain that the slight intended for the servant falls on the Master, it is scarcely to be borne. If waves of black pessimism swept over him in those unhappy later years when his ambitions were hopelessly frustrated, there was provocation enough. He had outlived his age and the ablest of the native-born theocrats had become a byword and a mocking amongst the profane of Boston.

Not a great man, as the world reckons greatness, Increase Mather may scarcely be accounted a great Puritan. As a theologian he was wanting in speculative vigor, and as a pastor he was wanting in self-denying love. It is not necessary to set him over against Roger Williams or Jonathan Edwards or William Ellery Channing, to reveal his intellectual and spiritual shortcomings. One has only to place him beside so rugged and honest a Puritan as Samuel Hopkins, who in true Christian humility, utterly regardless of his own fame, gave his life to theology and the care of the poor and the outcast, to realize how conventional a soul was Increase Mather, how incurious intellectually, how ambitious and self-seeking. Men loved Samuel Hopkins even though they might vigorously reject his doctrine, as they loved Roger Williams and Ellery Channing; but few seem to have loved Increase Mather. One might respect his abilities, but he was too austerely forbidding to like, too overbearing to awaken the spirit of good will. Ideas in the abstract held no interest for him. His biographer has happily recalled Mather’s forgotten interest in scientific inquiry, and for this slight relief from the intolerable drab of his life-story one may be grateful. Yet one must not build too high on an insubstantial foundation. In the England that Mather loved, and toward which he was strongly drawn--hoping that opportunity would offer for a pulpit there--pottering over natural philosophy had become a mark of distinction, and a man so envious of repute would have wished to approve himself to those whom he admired. Though he lived in Boston he would not have it thought that he was provincial.

Of the miscellaneous literary output that flowed from his pen in an abundant stream, little need be said. It is of concern only to minute historians of the local. That he was master of an excellent prose style, clear and straightforward, is sufficiently evident; if his matter had been so good, his legitimate fame would have been far greater. The work on which his reputation largely rests is _An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_, printed at Boston and London in 1684, and twice reissued in the nineteenth century under the title _Remarkable Providences_. It is an amusing book of old wives’ tales, not singular at all for the times, but characteristic rather; an expression of the naïveté that crops out in Winthrop’s _History of New England_, and other writings of the emigrant generation, but now become a fashion amongst the lesser lights of the Royal Academy and English Nonconformists. It suited to a nicety the Mather love of marvels, and Increase constituted himself a generous repository of all the chimney-corner tales of the countryside. To call such a book “a scientific and historical recording of phenomena observed in New England,” as his biographer has done, is to gall the back of a thesis with hard riding.[108] In one chapter only does Mather suggest the spirit of scientific inquiry; four out of the twelve deal with witchcraft and kindred topics; and the rest are made up of such instances of divine providence as great fish jumping out of the sea into the boats of starving sailors adrift, of the freaks played by lightning and tornadoes, and of God’s punishments on wicked Quakers. At the time it was a harmless enough book, but in the light of after developments it was scarcely so harmless. The emphasis laid upon witchcraft was an unfortunate, if unconsidered, influence in preparing the psychology of New England for the Salem outbreak, and the minister later reaped a bitter harvest from it.

“Not many years ago,” he wrote in the preface to _Illustrious Providences_, “I _lost_ (and that’s an afflictive _loss_ indeed!) several moneths from study by sickness. Let every God-fearing reader joyn with me in prayer, that I may be enabled to redeem the time, and (in all ways wherein I am capable) to serve my generation.” That Increase Mather sincerely desired to serve his generation according to his lights, none may deny. His labors were appalling, his reputation was great, and when he died the light of the old churches went out. The spirit of Presbyterianism went to its grave in New England, and not till a hundred years later did the new light--which was no other than primitive English Independency--shine out in the life and work of William Ellery Channing. After two centuries Unitarianism recovered for the Massachusetts churches the spirit of early Separatism that had been lost since the days of the Cambridge Platform. Channing finally uprooted the vine that Increase Mather had so laboriously tended.

III

Of the unpopularity that gathered about the name of Mather after the fall of the theocracy, the larger portion fell to the lot of the son, the eccentricities of whose character made him peculiarly vulnerable to attack. In his youth the spoiled child of Boston, in middle life he was petulant and irritable, inclined to sulk when his will was crossed. In the career of no other New England Puritan is the inquisitorial pettiness of the Genevan system of theology and discipline revealed so disagreeably. The heroic qualities of an earlier age had atrophied in an atmosphere of formalism, and Boston Calvinism of the year 1690 had become a grotesque caricature of a system that in its vigor had defied the power of Rome and laid kingdoms at its feet. Embodied in Cotton Mather it was garrulous, meddlesome, scolding, an echo of dead voices, a shadow of forgotten realities. The common provincialism had laid its blight upon it. The horizons of the New England imagination grew narrow, and Puritan anthropomorphism unconsciously reduced the God of the Hebrew prophets to the compass of a village priest, clothed in stock and gown, and endowed with the intellect of a parish beadle. In the egocentric universe wherein Cotton Mather lived and labored the cosmos had shrunk to the narrow bounds of a Puritan commonwealth, whereof Boston was the capital and the prosperity of the North Church the special and particular object of divine concern. The mind of Increase Mather had been enlarged by contact with English life; the mind of the son was dwarfed by a village world.

Cotton Mather is an attractive subject for the psychoanalyst. Intensely emotional, high-strung and nervous, he was oversexed and overwrought, subject to ecstatic exaltations and, especially during his celibate years, given to seeing visions. In the carefully edited _Diary_ which he left for the edification of his natural and spiritual children, at the beginning of his twenty-third year, is an apologetic entry--“_Cum Relego, Scripsisse Pudet!_”--that Professor Wendell has put into English thus:

A strange and memorable thing. After outpourings of prayer, with
the utmost fervor and fasting, there appeared an Angel, whose face
shone like the noonday sun. His features were as those of a man,
and beardless; his head was encircled by a splendid tiara; on his
shoulders were wings; his garments were white and shining; his robe
reached to his ankles; and about his loins was a belt not unlike
the girdles of the peoples of the East. And this Angel said that he
was sent by the Lord Jesus to bear a clear answer to the prayers of
a certain youth, and to bear back his words in reply. Many things
this Angel said which it is not fit should be set down here. But
among other things not to be forgotten he declared that the fate of
this youth should be to find full expression for what in him was
best; ... And in particular this Angel spoke of the influence his
branches should have, and of the books this youth should write and
publish, not only in America but in Europe. And he added certain
special prophecies of the great works this youth should do for
the Church of Christ in the revolutions that are now at hand.
Lord Jesus! What is the meaning of this marvel? From the wiles of
the Devil, I beseech thee, deliver and defend Thy most unworthy
servant.[109]

The passage throws a good deal of light on the psychology of Cotton Mather. Such visions were clearly the result of abnormal stimuli, acting on a neurotic temperament. From both sides of his family he inherited a tense nervous system that was aggravated by precocity and an unnatural regimen. The inevitable result was a hothouse plant of Puritan forcing. His religious exaltation flowered from the root of egoism. His vanity was cosmic. He esteemed himself a beacon set on a hill, a divine torch which the very hand of God had lighted. The success or failure of God’s plan for New England, he believed, rested on his shoulders; and with such heavy responsibilities devolved upon him he was driven, hot-haste, by the prick of urgency. The king’s business requireth haste. The work of the Lord cannot wait upon sluggards. “O then _To work_ as fast as you can,” he wrote in _The Magnalia_, “and of soul-work and church-work as much as ever you can. Say to all _Hindrances_ ... ‘You’ll excuse me if I ask you to be short with me, for my work is great and my time is but little.’” And so with an amazing activity that was little short of neurosis, he gave himself over to the great business of managing the affairs of New England in accordance with God’s will.

In undertaking so difficult a job, he frequently came into conflict with other interpreters of God’s plan for New England, and partisan venom gathered about him wherever he passed. Tact was never a Mather virtue, and Cotton made two enemies to his father’s one. His quarrels trod on each other’s heels, and a downright vindictiveness breathes through his private records of them. He railed at whoever disagreed with him, and imputed silly or malignant motives. The pages of his diary are filled with epithets that he flung privately at his enemies; one marvels that so many in the little town of Boston could be singled out as “strangely and fiercely possessed of the Devil.” Robert Calef, whose _More Wonders of the Invisible World_ was an inconvenient reply to his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, was set down as “a very wicked sort of a Sadducee in this Town, raking together a crue of Libels ... an abominable Bundle of Lies, written on purpose, with a Quil under a special Energy and Management of Satan, to damnify my precious Opportunities of Glorifying my Lord Jesus Christ.”[110] When an anti-Mather group of Cambridge men set up the Brattle Street Church, and invited Benjamin Colman, who had received Presbyterian ordination in England, by way of reply to the Mather group, to become their pastor, Cotton wrote in his diary:

A Company of Head-strong Men in the Town, the cheef of whom, are
full of malignity to the Holy Waye of our Churches, have built in
this Town, another Meeting-house. To delude many better-meaning Men
in their own Company, and the Churches in the Neighbourhood, they
past a Vote ... that they would not vary from the Practice of these
Churches, except in one little Particular.... But a young Man, born
and bred here, and hence gone for England, is now returned hither,
at their Invitation, equip’d with an _Ordination_, to qualify him,
for all that is intended.

On his “returning and arriving here, these fallacious People” gave themselves over, in short, to “Their violent and impetuous Lusts, to carry on the Apostasy,” and Cotton Mather prayed God to make him an instrument to defeat the “Designs that Satan may have in the Enterprise.”[111] Similar passages of extravagant abuse of men so wicked as to disagree with him flowed from his pen in copious abundance. Although he constantly prayed that his daily life might be “a trembling walk with God,” he was clearly a difficult fellow to get on with; and in the opinion of many he was justly described by a contemporary, as a “malecontent priest,” consumed with an “Hereditary rancour” that made him “everlastingly opposite” to every will but his own.

The diary of Cotton Mather is a treasure-trove to the abnormal psychologist. The thing would be inconceivable if the record were not in print. What a crooked and diseased mind lay back of those eyes that were forever spying out occasions to magnify self! He grovels in proud self-abasement. He distorts the most obvious reality. His mind is clogged with the strangest miscellany of truth and marvel. He labors to acquire the possessions of a scholar, but he listens to old wives’ tales with greedy avidity. In all his mental processes the solidest fact falls into fantastic perspective. He was earnest to do good, he labored to put into effect hundreds of “Good devices,” but he walked always in his own shadow. His egoism blots out charity and even the divine mercy. Consider his account of an “execution sermon” preached to a nameless girl condemned for killing her natural child, and the light it throws on both minister and congregation:

The Execution of the miserable Malefactor, was ordered for to have
been the last Week, upon the Lecture of another. I wondred then
what would become of my _Particular_ Faith, of her condition being
so ordered in the Providence of God, that it should furnish me,
with a _special Opportunity_ to glorify Him. While I was entirely
resigning to the wisdome of Heaven all such Matters, the Judges,
wholly without my seeking, altered and allow’d her Execution to
fall on the Day of _my Lecture_. The _General Court_ then sitting,
ordered the Lecture to bee held in a larger and a stronger House,
than that _old_ one, where ’tis usually kept. For my own part, I
was weak, and faint, and spent; but I humbly gave myself up to the
_Spirit_ of my Heavenly Lord and Hee assured mee, that Hee would
send His good Angel to strengthen mee. The greatest Assembly, ever
in this Countrey preach’d unto, was now come together; It may bee
four or five thousand Souls. I could not gett unto the _Pulpit_,
but by climbing over _Pues_ and _Heads_: and there the Spirit of my
dearest Lord came upon mee. I preached with a more than ordinary
Assistance, and enlarged, and uttered the most awakening Things,
for near two hours together. My Strength and Voice failed not; but
when it was near failing, a silent Look to Heaven strangely renew’d
it. In the whole I found Prayer answered and Hope exceeded, and
Faith encouraged, and the Lord using _mee_, the vilest in all that
great Assembly, to glorify Him. Oh! what shall I render to the
Lord![112]

Straightway thereafter, he rendered the Lord another characteristic service. No sooner was the girl hanged--for whose safekeeping no good angel seems to have been available after the minister had bespoken his--than he hastened to the printer to arrange for printing the sermon, and “annexed thereunto, an History of Criminals executed in this Land, and effectually, an Account of their dying Speeches, and of my own Discourses with them in their last Hours.... I entitled the Book, +PILLARS OF SALT+.” Clearly this was the time to peddle his wares, when all Boston was talking of the great event; and with a nose for publicity as keen as Defoe’s, he flung together a jumble of material, and trusted to its timeliness to sell. Some such origin, no doubt, accounts for a good many of the small library of titles that bore his name, an output that seems to have justified the angelic prophecy of “the books this youth should write and publish.” With a very lust for printer’s ink, he padded his bibliography like a college professor seeking promotion; but in spite of all the prayers poured out in behalf of them, they would seem for the most part to have been little more than tuppenny tracts, stuffed with a sodden morality, that not even an angel could make literature of.

Holding so strong a conviction of apostleship, Cotton Mather would certainly play the politician, and quite as certainly blunder and go wrong. Far more than his father he was a bookman, who believed that all knowledge was shut up between pigskin covers. He was as lacking in worldly wisdom as a child, and in his ecstatic contemplation of the marvels wrought by God in primitive New England he never discovered that that older world had passed away. Another age was rising, with other ideals than ecclesiastical, which the three thousand books in his library told him nothing about. He was an anachronism in his own day. Living in an earlier age, when the hierarchy was in its prime, he would have been carried far on the tide of theocratic prestige; a generation later, when lay-power had definitely superseded clerical, he would have taken his place as a stout defender of Tory ways. But at the moment when a critical realignment of parties was under way in Massachusetts; when the villagers were becoming democratized and the gentry toryized; when even the clergy were dividing--Cotton Mather was a general without an army. He was a primitive Puritan in a Boston that was fast becoming Yankee, and his love for the theocracy grew stronger with every defeat.

The judgment of after times finds little in his political activities to approve and much to condemn. After all allowances are made the fact remains that he was a leader of reaction; and no protestations can obscure the motive of personal ambition. His own prestige was involved with that of the theocracy. It was due to the traditional authority of the ministry that he enjoyed the distinction of being a “Person, whom the Eye and the Talk of the People is very much upon,” and any lessening of that authority would hurt him cruelly in his vanity. This remains the sufficient explanation of his varied political activities in the course of which he trimmed his sails to different winds. He first essayed a frontal attack on the secular power, but suffering a personal slight, he shifted and struck in the dark at an exposed flank; and finally, receiving only further mortification, he made overtures of peace and found his way back to the tables of the great. It was against the administration of the wily and unscrupulous Dudley that he waged his bitterest warfare. Failing to make headway by open hostility, he seized upon a current trade scandal, poured out his grievances in an anonymous pamphlet sent to London to be published, and awaited the result. It was a slashing attack, done in the tone of a lover of the ancient rights and privileges of New England, and it must have cut Dudley to the quick. A quotation or two will suffice to reveal the nature of the charges:

But, when the President [Dudley] was pleased, out of an Active
and Passive Principle, to tell our Countreymen, in open Council,
_That the People in_ New-England _were all Slaves; and that the_
only _Difference between Them and Slaves, was their not being_
Bought _and Sold: And that they must not think the Privileges_ of
Englishmen _would follow them to the end of the World_. I say,
when the People heard this, they lookt upon themselves in a manner
Lost....

All the People here are Bought and Sold, betwixt the Governour and
his son Paul....

This is the _Third Time_ that he has been Trusted with Power from
the _Crown_ in _America_, and he has constantly Abus’d it, to the
Dishonour of the Government, and almost Ruin of the People he was
sent to Govern.[113]

There was enough truth in the charges to make them serious, but the spleen was quite too evident. The author was at once discovered and Cotton Mather suffered a vigorous counter-attack that damaged a reputation already undermined. Perhaps even worse was the social slight put upon him by those in government. What it cost him to be left out of the invitations of the great he reveals in the _Diary_:

2 _d._ 7m. [September] Friday. [1709] The other Ministers of the
Neighbourhood, are this Day feasting with our wicked Governour;
I have, by my provoking Plainness and Freedom, in telling this
_Ahab_ of his wickedness, procured myself to be left out of his
Invitations. I rejoiced in my Liberty from the Temptations, with
which they were encumbred, while they were _eating of his Dainties_
and durst not reprove him. And, considering the Power and Malice of
my Enemies, I thought it proper of me, to be this day Fasting, in
Secret, before the Lord.

Ten years later there is a different story to tell. The minister has left the opposition bench and gone over to the government. A note in Sewall’s diary tells the tale:

March, 12. [1718/19] Dr. Cotton Mather prays again [in Council],
Preaches the Lecture from Prov. 29: 18. no Vision. [_Where there is
no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is
he._] The Govr., Lt. Govr., Mr. Dudley, Mr. Belcher press’d hard
that there might be an order of the Govr. and Council to print it.
Col. Tailor, Clark, Davenport, Sewall and others opposed it. For
my part, the Dr. spake so much of his visions of Convulsion and
Mutiny, mentioning our being a dependent Government, and the Danger
of Parliamentary Resentments: that I was afraid the printing of it
might be an Invitation to the Parliament to take away our Charter.
Govr. would have it put to the vote: but when he saw how hardly it
went, caused the Secretary to break off in the midst.[114]

Here is a party alignment that tells its own story, and it needs no very lively imagination to fill out the meager note and reënact the little drama. The minister, eager to make overtures of peace, falls into the Tory note, talks about mob-rule and the sinfulness of popular unrest, calls upon authority to maintain law and order, and hints at the expediency of preserving due colonial subservience in view of possible resentments on the part of certain great men in England. Sewall, as a “true New-England man,” squirms somewhat under the implications, but the little group of Tories are loud in praise. Such a sermon, from so eminent a servant of God, would aid wonderfully in strengthening the spirit of loyalty to the crown, and it must be printed and circulated amongst the people. But the opposition proved too spirited, and the manuscript was not dispatched to the printer, no doubt to Cotton Mather’s chagrin.

It was easy for so reactionary a nature to slide over into the Tory. There was not a grain of liberalism in his make-up. His antipathy to all popular movements was deep-rooted, for he knew no other political philosophy than that of the obsolete theocracy in which he had grown up. He was a bourgeois soul who loved respectability and was jealous of his social position; no fraternizing with the poor and outcast for him, no profitless excursions into the realms of Utopian justice. Though he might play to popular prejudices to serve his political ends, he had scant regard for popular rights. The highest privilege of the New England people, he believed, was the privilege of being ruled by the godly. His real attitude towards the plain people is revealed in a note by his son, that refers to the days following the overturn of the Andros government:

Upon Discoursing with him of the Affairs he has told me that he
always pressed _Peace_ and _Love_ and _Submission_ unto a legal
Government, tho’ he suffered from some tumultuous People, by doing
so; and upon the whole, has asserted unto me his _Innocency_ and
freedom from all known Iniquity in that time, but declared his
Resolution, from the View he had of the fickle Humors of the
Populace, that he would chuse to be concern’d with them as little
as possible for the future.[115]

As he grew older and the shadow of failure fell across his life, his bitterness towards a people that had rejected his admonitions is revealed on many a page of his diary. It was a “silly people,” a “foolish people,” “insignificant lice”--“The cursed clamour of a people strangely and fiercely possessed of the Devil”--“My aged father laies to heart the withdrawal of a vain, proud, foolish people from him in his age”--“It is the Hour of ... Darkness on this Despicable Town.” He could not easily forgive those who had wounded his love of power and lust of adulation, and he was too aloof from the daily life of men to understand the political and social movements of the times, too self-centered to understand his fellow villagers. He possessed none of the sympathetic friendliness that made Samuel Sewall a natural confidant to every one in trouble. He loved the people when they honored and obeyed him, but when they hearkened to other counsels he would fall to scolding like a fishwife. Doubtless he was sincere in thinking he would gladly die to save his people from their sins, but he had no mind to neighbor with them or humor their wicked love of power. He immured himself so closely within the walls of the old theocratic temple that he never took the trouble to examine the groundsills, and when the rotten timbers gave way and the structure came tumbling about his ears, he was caught unprepared and went down in its ruins.

Happily most of the printed output of Cotton Mather has fallen into the oblivion it deserved. It is barren of ideas, and marred by pedantic mannerisms that submerge the frequent felicities of phrase--old-fashioned on the day it came from the press. “In his _Style_, indeed,” wrote his friend Thomas Prince, “he was something singular, and not so agreeable to the Gust of the Age. But like his _manner of speaking_, it was very _emphatical_.” Yet he possessed very considerable gifts and under happier circumstances he might have had a notable literary career; but he was the victim of a provincial environment. He was the most widely read man of his generation in America, and one of the few who followed sympathetically the current scientific movement in England. Like old Increase he dabbled in science; he was proud of his membership in the Royal Society, to which he forwarded his characteristic _Curiosa Americana_--a hodgepodge of those marvels in which his generation delighted. It was from an English source that he got the idea of inoculation for smallpox, which he urged upon Boston so insistently that a war of scurrilous pamphlets broke out. He made use of the method in his own family, incurring thereby much stupid abuse and at least one attack of violence. It was an intelligent and courageous experiment, that is not to be forgotten in casting up the accounts of Cotton Mather.

Of his major works two only call for brief consideration: the celebrated _Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England_; and the less known _Wonders of the Invisible World_. The latter is suggestive for the light it throws on the psychology of the witchcraft mania. The fantastic devil-fear, which bit so deeply into the imagination of Puritan New England, has already been commented on. In that common seventeenth-century delusion, Cotton Mather not only ran with the mob, but he came near to outdistancing the most credulous. His speech and writings dripped with devil-talk. The grotesqueries that marked the current marvel-tales crop out nakedly in his writings. “I have set myself,” he wrote in the _Diary_, “to countermine the whole _Plot_ of the Devil, against New-England, in every branch of it, as far as one of my _darkness_ can comprehend such a _Work_ of Darkness.” His conviction of the malignant activities of Satan was so vivid, that in delivering a carefully prepared sermon on the _Wiles of the Divil_, he was fain, he tells us, to pause and lift up his eyes and cry “unto the Lord Jesus Christ, that he would rate off Satan,” who “all the Time of my Prayer before the Lecture” had “horribly buffeted me”--by indicting on the fasting priest certain qualms of the stomach. How tremendous he conceived to be the battle over a human soul, he describes thus:

The _Wilderness_ through which we are passing to the Promised Land
is all over fill’d with Fiery flying serpents. But, blessed be
God, none of them have hitherto so fastned upon us as to confound
us utterly! All our way to Heaven lies by _Dens of Lions_ and the
_Mounts of Leopards_; there are incredible Droves of Devils in
our way.... We are poor travellers in a world which is as well the
Devil’s Field, as the Devil’s _Gaol_; a world in which every Nook
whereof, the Devil is encamped with _Bands of Robbers_ to pester
all that have their Faces looking Zionward.[116]

In the light of Mather’s logic, “That there is a _Devil_, is a thing Doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil,” and “God indeed has the _Devil_ in a _Chain_, but has horribly lengthened out the Chain,” his private comment on the work--“that reviled book”--becomes comprehensible.

The _Magnalia_ is a far more important work, the repository of a vast miscellany of information concerning early New England that his pious zeal saved from oblivion. It is the _magnum opus_ of the Massachusetts theocracy, the best and sincerest work that Cotton Mather did. The theme with which it deals, and about which he accumulates marvels and special providences together with historical facts, was the thing which next to his own fame lay nearest his heart--the glory of that theocracy which men whom he accounted foolish and wicked were seeking to destroy. The purpose of the book has nowhere been better stated than by Professor Wendell:

Its true motive was to excite so enthusiastic a sympathy with the
ideals of the Puritan fathers that, whatever fate might befall
the civil government, their ancestral seminary of learning should
remain true to its colours.... The time was come, Cotton Mather
thought, when the history of these three generations might be
critically examined; if this examination should result in showing
that there had lived in New England an unprecedented proportion
of men and women and children whose earthly existence had given
signs that they were among the elect, then his book might go far to
prove that the pristine policy of New England had been especially
favoured of the Lord. For surely the Lord would choose His elect
most eagerly in places where life was conducted most according to
His will.[117]

When old Increase was near the end of his many years, a friend wrote to ask if he were still in the land of the living. “No, Tell him I am going to it,” he said to his son; “this Poor World is the land of the Dying.” The bitter words were sober truth. The New England of the dreams of Increase and Cotton Mather was sick to death from morbid introspection and ascetic inhibitions; no lancet or purge known to the Puritan pharmacopeia could save it. Though father and son walked the streets of Boston at noonday, they were only twilight figures, communing with ghosts, building with shadows. They were not unlike a certain mad woman that Sewall tells of, who went crying about the town, “My child is dead within me.” The child of Cotton Mather’s hopes had long been dead within him, only he could not bring himself to acknowledge it. The fruit of the vine planted by the fathers was still sweet to him, and when other men complained of its bitterness, and fell to gathering from other vines, he could only rail at their perversity. He would not believe that the grapes were indeed bitter and the vine blighted; that the old vineyard must be re-plowed and planted to fresh stock. All his life he had set marvels above realities and in the end his wonder-working providence failed him. Prayers could not bring back a dead past; passionate conjurations could not strike the living waters from the cold granite of Puritan formalism. A New England flagellant, a Puritan Brother of the Cross, he sought comfort in fasts and vigils and spiritual castigations, and--it is pleasant to learn--in ways far more natural and wholesome. Incredible as it may seem, the following record is authentic, and it falls like a shaft of warm sunshine across the path of the morbid priest: “Augt, 15. [1716].... Now about Dr. C. Mather Fishing in Spy-pond, falls into the Water, the boat being ticklish, but receives no hurt.”[118] The restless minister who had fished overmuch in troubled waters, sometimes, it would appear, ventured for perch in Spy Pond.

Footnotes

[96] Kenneth B. Murdock, _Increase Mather_, 1925.

[97] Compare Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 394-395.

[98] Quoted in W. Walker, _A History of Congregational Churches, etc._, p. 187.

[99] _Ibid._, p. 190. His biographer has overlooked the significance of this. See Murdock, _Increase Mather_, p. 151.

[100] His biographer has somewhat slurred his account of the “Proposals.” See p. 282. But his justification is worth noting: “If the original brand of Puritan piety was worth saving, and Mather believed it was, an oligarchic church government was the only means of securing it in an age when men were inclined to change their religious ideas as they changed their thought on other affairs.”

[101] W. Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches, etc._, p. 205.

[102] Compare Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 361-363.

[103] Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 138-139.

[104] See pp. 294-295, where he seeks unsuccessfully to refute the position taken by J. T. Adams.

[105] See Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 125-127.

[106] “The Brattle-Street Church Controversy,” for which see _ibid._, pp. 258 ff.

[107] _Ibid._, pp. 373-4, note.

[108] _Ibid._, p. 170.

[109] _Cotton Mather, Puritan Priest_, p. 64.

[110] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 271.

[111] _Ibid._, pp. 325-326.

[112] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 279.

[113] _A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New-England ... by the Male-Administration of their Present Governour, Joseph Dudley, Esq., and his Son Paul_, London, 1707, in _Massachusetts Historical Society Collections_, Fifth Series, Vol. VI.

[114] Vol. II, p. 214.

[115] Wendell, _Cotton Mather, etc._, p. 82.

[116] _Wonders of the Invisible World_, p. 63.

[117] _Literary History of America_, pp. 48-49.

[118] Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 98.