Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (32 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 176
were looking out for the Lord's chosen in this world. "Angelology" still claimed a place in natural philosophy early in the eighteenth century, but its hold was becoming precarious. Scientists could find few uses for angels in the explanations they offered of natural events, and Puritans retained Calvin's suspicion that Catholic reliance on angelical offices was nothing more than ancient "superstition." This superstition, as Calvin argued, posessed dangers of its own because its emphasis tended to obscure the ''glory of Christ." Increase Mather, who read Calvin and the standard Protestant works on the subject, had no desire to shift anyone's gaze from Christ, but in his preaching after the incursion of the witches at Salem, he stressed the manifold ways in which spirits inserted themselves into men's lives. The Salem episode was largley responsible for this emphasis as his references to it testify in his sermons on angels and demons. After Salem, Increase could no more deny the importance of angels than he could of witches.
36
At the same time Increase carefully aligned himself with those Puritan writers who denied any independent activity to angels and who always presented them as mere instruments of an omnipotent God. Angels ought to be loved and honored, Increase told his church; they were pure spirits who did much for the saints. But whatever their service they must not be worshipped; such reverence must be saved for God. It was well also to remember that God no more needed angels than He did men; His reason for using them was simply that it pleased Him to do so: "God's will is the Reason of all Reasons."
37
With these premises forcefully stated, Increase did not hesitate to tell his flock that angels did much for believers. Calvin had professed uncertainty about the proposition that at birth every saint had been assigned a guardian angel; Increase expressed no doubt that the Lord directed such superintendency over His elect "from the Cradle to the Grave." This angelic watch also included warnings and deliverances from evil. It was true, Increase admitted, that angelic apparitions had virtually ceased, although as Puritans in New England had learned through the Salem experience, the Devil sometimes transformed himself into an angel of light. But if angels were no longer to be seen, they had ways of making themselves felt. Increase cited angelic actions as a species of edification: angelshe told his
 
Page 177
churchinfluenced men's thoughts and spirits. In the combat against Satan they served as "tutors" to the saints, inspiring them and presumably, though Increase was understandably vague on this point, instructing them as to what constituted good behavior.
38
Because Mather knew that the way to enthusiasm lay close in claims of angelic intercession, he did not sound these themes as strongly as he did those pertaining to the service angels would give dead saints. Here, too, he betrayed his propensity to play down disappointments in this world in favor of the glories of the next. When you die, he told the saints in his church, your souls will not fall into the clutches of Satan. For the angels afford protection to the souls of dead saints, conveying them through the demonic hosts who lurk in the earth's atmosphere to the abode of Christ where eternal bliss awaits.
39
Angelology furnished still another standard in the advice Mather gave on the conduct of life in this world. The tacit premise of all this preaching was that only the regenerate could attain a sanctified existence, although, of course, the unregenerate were commanded to try. Mather urged both sorts of men to model themselves on the angels, which was another way of saying that perfection was not to be found in this world. Lest this counsel escape inattentive ears, he spelled it out in terms used in ordinary life: to rich men he said, your wealth is all vanity, and your desire to leave your estates to your children is scandalousso long as you regard their unconverted condition indifferently. You must work for your children's souls, not their substance. To men on the make, those rising retailers and craftsmen who filled Boston's shops, he delivered another uncompromising message: work in a calling can be overdone, especially if it carries you to violate the Sabbath, and if the voice of the creatures renders you deaf to the call of God. Such men, Increase pointed out, fell far short of the purity of the angels, whose examplethough not to be equalled in Boston's counting-houses and shops or anywheremight at least be imitated insofar as it led men to bend whatever they did and thought to the glory of God.
40
Whether any of this genuinely edified or consoled anyone in the Second Church may be doubted; more likely, it left some uneasy and depressed. Increase Mather probably sensed a variety
 
Page 178
of responses in his churchhe was at times an extraordinarily perceptive man. In any case he leavened these sermons of his last years with hope for sinners, by reminding them that God might save the most depraved of men. In giving grace to the Jews with the blood of Christ still ''reeking on them," He demonstrated His mercy. To men who, though aware of God's power and mercy, remained fearful of their own unbelief, Mather spoke the reassuring words that perhaps their fears indicated that they did, in fact, believe.
41
Mather did not often say in these sermons what he did elsewhere: men who lose this fear can degenerate into the complacent, the secure, and finally become so dead spiritually that they do not care one way or the other about their inner conditions. Mather had no wish to give assurance that paralyzed growth in grace. The tension that some in his flock felt was far better for them than complete assurance. There was still another reason that his preaching, which seemed to offer comfort, actually stimulated unease. These sermons reflected his own intensity, his growing inclination to reject this world and all its works. So as he offered the "comfort" that fear of unbelief was a good thing, he said almost simultaneously that only a few would be saved whatever they felt, and in spite of, not because of, their efforts. Relatively speaking, Heaven would be lightly populatedand justly so.
42
He passed along these truths out of dissatisfaction with much of the preaching of his own day. In the last ten years of his life he remarked several times on the failure of many ministers even to mention Christ in their sermons. These preachers gave their listeners moralitynot the doctrine of free graceand the implication of their message was clearly that a man's own efforts were efficacious in his salvation. Increase deplored this old delusion and the language these Arminian ministers used to present it. So much of the new preaching affected a "Dramatic Style," he reported, and it brought "Playhouse Phrases into the Language of the Pulpit." Increase recognized the poison beneath the enameled language of the new homiletic mode, and he determined to oppose it with his own plain style. He had no "racy Notions" to provide, no sermons "
gingling with Latin.
" What men needed was the righteousness of Christ, and they should learn too that they must obtain it soon.
43
 
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10
Chiliasm
Increase Mather attained the greatest intensity in his evangelical mood in his chiliasm, a belief that predictions of Christ's Second Coming described a literal return in time and space. Late in his life he reminded his church that he had long been a chiliast and that the first generation had contained men of similar views. This statement was accurate but it ignored the changes in his interest in the chiliad, in particular the developing fervor of his belief. His early speculations have an air of detachment; they seem deliberately to avoid raising hopes that the Kingdom of Christ would rise on the morrow with the sun. In 1666 when news of the great London fire reached Boston there were rumors in the city, as in England, that the end of the world was imminent, and that believers might hopefully scan the heavens for Christ descending with His angels. Increase took considerable pains to deflate these expectations. He did not sneer or scoff as he often did when he was uncertain of his ground, but simply observed that the time was not right and men must not expect too much just then.
1
He also proved capable in these early years of his ministry of separating his chiliasm from his Christology. The purpose of
 
Page 180
Increase's studies of Christ was the exaltation of Christ's power and glory and sacrifice. Increase offered nothing original in his views of Christ's offices, the divinity of His person, and His equality with God, all topics which had been taken up hundreds of times before in Protestant theology. What he argued supported his understanding of conversion, that is, that God did all and that man deserved nothing. It was Christ's sacrificeIncrease emphasizedthat fulfilled the terms of the covenant of grace for man.
2
By the early years of the eighteenth century, Increase was no longer content to leave these propositions in their conventional context. His celebration of Christ was no less fervent, his admiration and gratitude for Christ's sacrifice no less adoring, but now besides these old categories, he began to invoke the figure of Christ as judge at the end of history. This Christ who separates the sheep from the goats on the Day of Judgment is the great warrior-conqueror who in the final judgment slays His enemies by sword and fire. Increase connected this interpretation to the older Christology by returning to the circumstances of Christ's own deathan event which he presented as a victory, for the major part of Christ's conquering was accomplished, of course, through His sacrifice of Himself. In this sense, Increase pointed out, Samson is a type of Christ, for he killed more of his enemies by dying than by living.
3
The fact that Christ took a human form and suffered and died had long raised the question of His relationship to God the Father. Although Increase was not preaching to Unitarians skeptical of the Trinity, many of his later sermons on Christ assert at length Christ's equality with God. The case he attempted to make in these efforts was not that Christ's righteousness was great enough to save menthat seemed indisputablebut that Christ would participate in the final judgment. Thus he emphasized that the Book of Revelation described Christ sitting on the throne with the Father. Sitting denoted "Honour and Power," and Christ would demonstrate His sovereignty when He with the Father consigned some men to Heaven and others to Hell.
4
Such sermons, preached with growing heat as the eighteenth century advanced, fused his Christology and his chiliasm. They also expressed his final acceptance of the failure of the New England of the national covenant. Occasionally in his last fifteen or
 
Page 181
twenty years Increase did recall the land to its great mission and threatened it with destruction should it not repent and reform. These cries were little more than an old reflex asserting itself mechanically and hopelessly. His major concern had narrowed to the individual, to the saint awaiting the return of Christ.
5
That return Increase believed to be "imminent." But unlike his son Cotton, he never tied his hopes to a particular date. Imminent, he explained on several occasions, meant sometime in the next few years; and one should not presume to calculate precisely the movement of the Lord.
6
But the signs appeared so promising that in these last years of his life Increase attempted to do what he had been reluctant to undertake in 1666: the identification of events of his own day with the forecasts of Scripture. In his first treatise on eschatology,
The Mystery of Israel's Salvation
, Increase had denied that the world had entered into the final series of events inaugurating the millennium.
7
In that work, and for years afterwards, he had been preoccupied by Israel, largely because he saw in Israel a type of New England. As late as 1695 he had taken pains to explain that the conversion of Israel had not yet taken place. He was convinced it wouldPaul had forecast this salvation in his declaration to the Romans that "all Israel shall be saved." This salvation would be national, embracing most Jews scattered all over the world. When it was accomplished Israel would occupy Canaan and the desert would bloom again.
8
By 1710 Increase was saying publicly that perhaps this national conversion was under way. All the signs pointed toward the end of the reign of the Antichrist. Revolutions, wars, famine, and pestilence were breaking out all over Europe, and the Turkish Empire had fallen; in Danzig the plague had killed 40,000 people in the previous summer; and in Hamburg hundreds of Jews had recently been converted. Increase did not attempt to weave these events into a neat pattern but he could not help but ask, "May this be the
first Fruits
of a greater harvest shortly to follow?" Nine years later, shortly after his eightieth birthday, he published
Five Sermons
celebrating the power of supernatural grace and predicting that some of his listeners might hear the seventh trumpet sound which would signal the beginning of the millennium. These sermons repeated convictions of some sixty years standing: God chose whom He would regardless of merit,
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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