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 (34 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 189
BOOK THREE
COTTON MATHER (1663-1728) PROPHECY
 
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11
The Virtuous Epicure
Cotton Mather once asserted that "There is a vertuous Epicurism in Usefulness. No Epicure can swim in such Delights, as the Man that is
Useful
wherever he comes." To be useful, he explained, meant to labor, to strive and if necessary to struggle, but always to act. Even in repose a man should do something, at least he should pray strenuously in thanks for the opportunity to rest under the Lord's supervision. For those who enjoyed the assurance that they were among the chosen of God and for those who lacked it, Mather had the same advice: "
Be up
and be
doing
. Activity, Activity, in the Service of GOD, and His People; This will be most likely to be followed and rewarded with Triumphant Satisfactions."
1
The nature of the satisfactions that Mather expected is not as clear as the nature of the utility which arose in action. His suspicion of the ordinary means of gratifying the senses found in food, drink, and sex is clear in the warning, "We must kill our lusts before they kill us," which he repeated throughout his life. Asceticism provided its own gratification for him as it has for Christians from the first century to the twentieth. He experienced the pleasures of denial from a very early agehe began
 
Page 192
fasting at fourteenand he continued to pursue them until he died. But Mather had something more in mind than the joy in mortifying the flesh when he praised "vertuous epicurism." He was thinking of the indulgence of the emotions and the flesh that accompanied service and worship. Indulgence was not the word he would have chosen to describe the way he felt, but he clearly was physically rejuvenated, as well as emotionally delighted, in his work for the Lord. The groaning, fasting, panting, swooning, and the joy and raptures that enlivened his private conduct all testify to the gratification of the senses that marked his life of virtuous epicurism.
2
That life was singularly free of the great outward activity that distinguished the careers of the first two generations of Mathers in America. Unlike his grandfather Richard, who crossed the Atlantic once, and his father Increase, who crossed it four times, Cotton never left New England. His longest journeys took him to nearby towns, Cambridge, Reading, Salem; and he rarely made even these short journeys. Richard Mather composed the magisterial
Cambridge Platform
for the Synod of 1647; Increase wrote the preface to the
Result
of the Synod of 1679, and presided over its second session; Cotton's major effort to establish a Cambridge synod, for which purpose he issued his
Proposals
, ended in a squabbling failure. Nor did he exercise the political power that his father held for a time, though he did write the statement of the rebels of 1689 in Massachusetts justifying the upheaval against Sir Edmund Andros. And if his attempt to introduce smallpox vaccination in Boston did not end in failure, neither was it a universally acclaimed success. Yet despite the fairly restricted limit of Cotton Mather's public activities, he honored his injunction to be up and doing.
3
Indeed he rarely rested. His days were long and full of hard labor in his study and in his church and community. The average working day for him seems to have been about sixteen hours. The nights sometimes must have seen the exhausted man in rest, but at least several times a month he spent the night in a sleepless vigil, praying, beseeching his God for aid and comfort. He fasted even more frequently; his son, Samuel, estimated that he went without food for at least 450 days during his life; and these days too were given to strenuous prayer. The work of the ministry consumed most of his time; like his father, he preached
 
Page 193
several times a week and gave much of his scholarship to his sermons. Unlike Increase, Cotton Mather pursued the pastoral work of the ministry with dedication. This task carried him into the houses of families where he comforted the sick, catechized children, and preached to private meetings of neighborhood societies. Mather reveled in this side of the ministry as he did in all his work and in fact increased his responsibilities by encouraging the organization of neighborhood societies. He was in demand at their gatheringsyoung men in particular looked to him, asking his counsel, and seeking his preaching. For the most part, such responsibilities had to be met in daylight hours; in his spare time and in the long evenings Cotton Mather retreated to his study where he wrote the solid edification that filled his books and sermons. His output was staggeringit included over four hundred published worksand was all accomplished without the benefit of grants and leaves so indispensable to modern scholars. Much of his published work first took shape in the sermons he preached regularly on the Sabbath. But he also composed catechisms, translated Scriptures and creeds for Indians, and the Spanish in the West Indies (they were equally savage in his eyes); he wrote guides for the treatment of measles, a tract for midwives and mothers; he put together biographies and histories; he collected accounts of scientific curiosities and turned out several long philosophical treatises of his own. He also gave advice to ministersone of his distinguished works,
Manuductio Ad Ministerium
, is a manual for candidates for the pulpitbut he also put his learning at the disposal of magistrates, schoolmasters, housewives, physicians, and children, though there is not much evidence that all these groups solicited his advice. Formal theology fascinated him, and he wrote dissertations on it too; one of the monuments to his knowledge of Biblical scholarship, the "Biblia Americana," still rests in six huge volumes of manuscript at the Massachusetts Historical Society. If his scholarship testifies to his interest in this world, his prophetical writings indicate his concern for the next one. On this subject too his productions ran into hundreds of pages.
4
This impressive yield and this ceaseless activity astounded his contemporaries, as they have astounded students of Puritan history ever since. But neither Cotton Mather's contemporaries, nor ours, were to extend unreserved praise to him for his good
 
Page 194
works. Certainly he was respected, but the respect has always been grudgingly given except by his close friends and admirers; and for every expression of admiration there has been one of derogation. Thomas Prince, a friend, remarked on Mather's powers as a conversationalist, singling out for especial commendation his wit. Benjamin Franklin, no friend, playing on the same quality, transfixed Mather as ''Silence Dogood" in the essays of that name published in the
New England Courant
. His family and friends found his early piety impressivehe wrote short prayers for his schoolmatesbut a number of his peers, who anticipated the views of several twentieth-century historians, found this zeal cloying. His schoolmates thrashed him with their fists; S. E. Morison, repeating the beating in the pages of his history, rejoiced that the "young prig" got what he so richly deserved. Mather's learning, which sometimes decended to pedantry, was immense and was recognized by other intellectuals, but to the Quakers he was always, as they said, the New England school boy. And to a modern scholar who understood much of his thought, he was at best the source of a profound revulsion, or at worst of an upset stomach.
5
If the variety of responses to Cotton Mather is bewildering, there is good causehe was a bewildering man, capable of selfishness and selflessness, given both to excesses and to asceticism, noble and self-effacing at times, and petty and self-righteous at others. He could be the pleasant and witty gentleman to his friends, yet he distrusted wit and laughter. He despised and feared sexual gratification, but he married three times, fathered fifteen children, and enjoyed the marriage bed at least as late as his fifty-fifth year when his wife's illness forced celibacy upon him. He was an opponent of Quakers and Antinomianism, but his private worship approached enthusiasm.
6
The outward circumstances of Cotton Mather's life help clarify some of the mystery that envelops his character and his behavior. He was born on February 12, 1663, the first of the nine children of Increase and Maria Cotton Mather. His mother was twenty-two years of age and his father almost twenty-four. Like his father, Cotton was a very bright boy, and he could read and write before he went to school. His early piety matched his intelligence apparently, for, as he later remembered, he prayed as soon as he could talk. In school he enjoyed the tutelage of one of the dis-
 
Page 195
tinguished masters in New England, Ezekiel Cheever, who put him through the customary rigorous training in the learned languages. Cotton thrived on the diet of the classics and emerged when he was twelve to enter Harvard College. At this time his proficiency in Latin was so good that while listening to the Sabbath sermon, which was delivered in English, he could take notes on it in Latin. He wrote the customary Latin themes and letters, and he read Greek capably. He had only begun Hebrew grammar, however, but before he was fourteen he redeemed himself by acquiring the skill to write in it. Mather's progress at Harvard was depressingly rapid, and he was graduated in 1678, in his sixteenth year, after having consumed enormous numbers of books in most of the arts and sciences known to seventeenth-century scholars.
7
Not even his father had expected this brilliant performance, but Cotton believed that as a Mather he could do no less. In fact in these years he had already acquired the habit of reproaching himself for his sloth, among other failures which threatened to prevent him from serving God in the tradition of his great ancestors who were never long out of his mind. His family pride shaped his character far more than his early studies or even Harvard, providing him with a standard to measure himself by and the spur to get as much out of himself as possible.
8
He shared his father's estimation of Richard Mather and John Cotton. Although Increase had initially rejected his father's view of the Half-Way Covenant, he had changed his mind before Richard's death. And he had maintained a loving relation with his father even through the period of their disagreement. Cotton Mather was only six years old when Richard died and could not have known him well. His life of Richard Mather in the
Magnalia
leans heavily upon Increase's account of 1670 and adds nothing to it. What seems to have most impressed Cotton about his grandfather was not his contribution to ecclesiastical theory or to the practice of the New England churches, but the purity he displayed in leaving degenerate England in 1635. Richard stands as the noble exile, banished to the wilderness of America for his devotion to the true Church order. But his part in defining that order, while noted, receives only perfunctory praise.
9
This restraint disappears in Cotton Mather's life of his maternal grandfather, John Cotton. Here again he follows a lead
 
Page 196
provided by Increase Mather, who said that John Cotton, more than any other man, gave New England its name and being. His son repeated this judgment, explaining that John Cotton had provided the most exact statement of the New England way left by the founders in his
The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven
.
10
Yet Cotton Mather fully acknowledged that his grandfather had disagreed with the other ministers of New England in the Antinomian crisis. The paroxysms induced by these encounters with ministers, he wrote, assumed such proportions that Grandfather Cotton thought of leaving the Bay for another colony. Cotton Mather did not venture an opinion on where the truth lay in these conflicts among the ministers, preferring to emphasize that after all the struggles, they found it possible to unite in the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson and her friends.
11
As important as the influence of his grandfather was in his conception of himself, it did not approach the power of his father's example for him. He saw his father as the great exponent of his grandfathers' system of Church polity. Increase had properly worked within the system largely devised before his birth. The only time that Increase challenged this systemin the controversy over the Half-Way Covenant"He was in the wrong." Cotton Mather did not condemn his father for this deviation; his father had recovered his sense of proportion after all and had become a stout defender of the Synod of 1662 and all its works.
12
On only a few other matters did the son pronounce the father in error. Increase had erred in defending persecution, but here too he had changed his mind. Increase had also published a book on the coming Kingdom of God without sufficiently studying all the evidence, Cotton believed. Yet on this issue as on all others, he eventually repaired his earlier mistakes. There were, however, differences between Increase and Cotton in ideas and attitudes, several of which remained unresolved at Increase's death. The father gave up on New England; the son did not. The father refused to concede supervisory powers over churches to ministerial associations; the son did not. The father sometimes hurt the son, for example, in 1690, when he proposed to remain in England.
13
Cotton never publicly disagreed with his father on important
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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