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 (37 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 209
12
Christian Union and the Meaning of New England
By the time Cotton Mather came to maturity the jeremiad was a well established convention. As a youth he was nourished by its sadness, its feverish appeals to the people of the Bay to honor the objectives of the founders, its claims that New England had been undertaken in the service of God. He accepted as fact that the land and the people had a special character; and if he never tired of castigating the people for their failures, he never flagged in his defense of them as the soberest and the best in an imperfect world. This divided attitude toward his country reflected ambivalence within the jeremiad which, if it were to remain true to itself, was bound to maintain that God had sifted an entire people for the choice seed with which to plant the New England colonies. From this seed a lovely plant sprouted whose delectable fruits were the Congregationalist churches. A good people watered this plant, and the State, a gentle careful gardener, drove off pests and blight in the form of Antinomians and Anglicans. But now this noble vine threatened to turn itself into a poisonous weed with the rank foliage of a backsliding
 
Page 210
people and indifferent magistrates. The second generation, including Increase Mather, used all these figures in their appeals for reform. As they preached of New England's apostasy, they also insisted that its fate was full of portent for the rest of the world. Increase, of course, elevated this insistence into the hope that his people would serve as a type for the New Jerusalem.
1
Cotton Mather repeated much of what his father said about New England, for the jeremiad bit deeply into his mind. He shared the desire of his father's generation that the Congregational polity that developed in New England would truly serve the rest of the world. In the
Magnalia
, his greatest exposition of this idea, Mather suggested that Christ planted the churches in New England in order that "He might there,
to
them first, and then
by
them, give a
specimen
of many good things, which He would have his Churches elsewhere aspire and arise unto. . . ." Still, if Cotton made his father's hopes his own, he did so in his own way, imparting his own flavor to the conventional versions of the Puritan mission to America.
2
The fear and sadness of the jeremiad impressed him more deeply than the claims for New England as a model. He came of age, after all, just when the Bay lost its charter; he listened to the frantic wailing in the old Puritan faction as one disaster followed another in the persons of Edward Randolph, Joseph Dudley, and finally Sir Edmund Andros. To be sure, he participated in the Glorious Revolution in April 1689 which saw these satanic agents first consigned to jail and then dispatched to England. But the next few years offered their own bag of horrors, infestation by witches, and a new charter that provided that the King should select Massachusetts' governor. These events strengthened a disposition to despair for the future of New England.
They also put Cotton Mather to examining the past for a fuller understanding of the purposes of New England. His great historical works, especially the studies of the Reformation and of Church history, coincide with the Dominion of New England and the first period of the new charter While these studies all indicate that his feeling about New England's mission persisted, they reveal chastened hopes. Cotton Mather never gave up the belief that his America had much to teach Europe, but he did not envisage the new society serving as a blueprint for the old. Its
 
Page 211
corruption, which drew relentless afflictions from the Lord, rendered any such suggestion simple arrogance. As for New England standing as a type for the New Jerusalem, for anyone who took seriously the catalogue of sins presented in the jeremiads, that notion was better left unexamined. In fact Cotton Mather never commented on this dream of his father. Typology remained for him a rhetorical device, not an instrument to be used in the analysis of history.
3
His ideas about New England went through a long evolution. They began with a comprehension of the founding that drew more on Richard Mather's thought than on Increase's. Richard, and the divines of his generation, had felt that they were in exile. They had been banished. Though they intended always to give their best for the Lord in America, and though they believed they could do much for Him in the wilderness, their removal from England did not fill them with a sense of triumph. They despised the corruption in their homeland, and for a time expected the Lord to smite it just as He had Israel, but still they hated being driven away. And driven and persecuted they felt, even as they grasped at their opportunities in America to fashion the true Church polity in the expectation that history was rapidly nearing its close.
4
The sons of the founders, the generation that created the legend of their fathers' grand errand into the wilderness, experienced little persecution and felt nothing approaching banishment. Nor did Cotton Mather, who reached maturity at a time when his father's hopes were in decline, when the argument about New England's decay seemed irrefutable. In this saddened mood he returned to the founders' explanations of their coming and found them true.
His pronouncements of the 1690's and of the early part of the eighteenth century emphasize the "PERSECUTION" of the first Puritans who came to the Bay Colony; they were driven from England by "'Fire!
and
Sword!'" as the noble Blackmore's poem said. "It was indeed a
Banishment
, rather than a
Removal
, which was undergone by the glorious Generation" that settled New England. This understanding of America's beginning enabled him to make a case that he clung to for the rest of his life: the banishment of the founders included the banishment of the best part of Christ's Church from England. The founders
 
Page 212
were driven out under the benevolent eye of a Providence that watched over the true Church in the world. It had always been so, and always would be to the end of history. God always had an Israel. For a time the Jews had served, but they lost their place as the chosen of the Lord when they sank themselves in their lusts. The Savior revived the failing Church, and for a time it thrived in the days of the primitive Christians. With the appearance of Rome and the Antichrist, it was almost lost once more. Now in the last days of the Antichristian apostasy, its purest elements had been carried to New England, driven from their homes by persecuting bishops and their agents. In New England the task of the people in covenant with God was to preserve the Church until justice and mercy arrived with the Second Coming of Christ.
5
Cotton Mather retained his faith in this broad view of New England history until late in his life. It was a view that included many of his father's cherished beliefs, but it never attempted to reconcile within itself the typological ecstasies of Increase. It did of course make use of covenant theory. New England had pledged itself to the Lord's service in the national covenant, Cotton Mather insisted. This covenant, he used the terms "outward" and "external" covenant, embraced all the people, though rain agreement with his fatherhe believed that only the elect would survive the final cataclysm. New England, as a people in the outward covenant, could do much for the Church. If godliness, sanctity, and good behavior prevailed, the Church could be preserved in a form pleasing to God. But if they declinedif the Church were polluted by the ungodly, the Lord would remove all His blessings from the land. Hence the need to hold the people together in a condition that honored their covenant with the Lord.
6
There were imprecisions and vagueness in this theory. The relationship of the saints and the sinners was never clear; indeed Cotton Mather swung his emphasis on this question erratically. The one sure proposition was that the Church would always survive. But a godly land might not. At times, like his father, Cotton Mather suggested that a faithful few could protect the land. This view contained dangers of its own: if a saving remnant was all that the Church required, what grounds could be established for calling for obedience from all the people? In most
 
Page 213
sermons addressed to these questions, Mather simply assumed that the fates of the Church and the land were inseparable. If the people failed, Christ would remove His Church; and if the Church were poisoned by unregenerate members, or a flawed structure (which he believed Stoddard proposed), the Lord would blast the land.
7
This position was not in fact as ambiguous as it seems to us. Cotton Mather, even more than his father, was an American Puritan. As devoted as he was to the Church of Christ, to the Congregational polity, he could not think of New England in terms defined solely by a single institutionhowever precious it was to the Lord. He loved the Church, and he ached to see its triumph at the Day of Judgment. But the knowledge that the Church would surviveGod would have His Israel, however evil the behavior of a dissolute people like New England'sdid not offer complete consolation. A third generation American, whose family had participated in the founding and had worked in the public arena, Cotton Mather could not take lightly the fate of his people and his land.
In thinking about New England's purposes, Cotton Mather did not prove to be a conservative, yearning only for the good old days of unchallenged Congregationalism. He recognized that the political circumstances created by the Revolutionary settlement voided the policy of intolerance which his father, following the lead of the founders, espoused. In time, as he came to believe that the unity in the essentials of religion did not lie in the forms of Church organization, he exploited the toleration that the Crown had forced on his country in 1691 to work out a fresh understanding of the meaning of New England.
All this is not to say that Cotton Mather welcomed the loss of the original charter. He regarded the Crown's removal of it with a hatred envenomed by the knowledge that the era of Congregational dominance had passed. In effect the charter of 1691 and the Toleration Act transformed the magistrate into a secular creature. Cotton Mather recognized what the new situation meant for religion: unformity was dead, and he said so openly, while he mourned its passing in private.
8
He was not so oppressed by the new dispensation as to be unable to point out that the Act of Toleration provided protection for Congregationalists as well as for Anglicans. Indeed
 
Page 214
immediately after the return of his father in 1692, he began preaching about the immunity New England now enjoyed from persecution from abroad. In these sermons he folded ''the Rights of ENGLISH-MEN" around his people, and he claimed additional privileges because "we are NEW-ENGLANDERS" who dwell in a Puritan soil where the power to persecute is "by a Royal Charter, for ever kept from coming into the Hands of any that might hereafter incline to use it on us."
9
Mather's invocation of the rights of Englishmen and his espousal of toleration have been interpreted as signifying a momentous shift in the New England mind. This view holds that he and others now recognized the centrality of the State and that he almost, in spite of himself, testified to its prominence not only by invoking English rights but by issuing tracts on currency and by writing
The Political Fables
.
10
He also recommended the expedition against Louisbourg on the grounds of its necessity to New England's prosperity; and in other statements in the first confused years of the 1690's he carefully linked the charter to property. In these actions he has been pictured marching down the road toward secularization in lockstep with the merchants and the "moderates."
11
Cotton Mather may have touched that road at several times in his life, but only to cross it while pursuing his own purposes. His comments on coin, business and war are not in themselves revealing of a secular tendency; he remarked on the events of his time at every opportunity in order to improve them for the Lord. He bade the old Congregational order in Church and State farewell in his sermons of the 1690's because its departure could not be prevented. But while he watched it go, he never dismissed the vision of Christian unity that animated it. By the early years of the next century he regained that vision, when it appeared before his zealous eyes in the hues and shapes of evangelical "PIETY."
12
This development of his mind in the twenty-five years following the new charter began in the confusion and hope of the Glorious Revolution. His father had slipped out of Boston bound for the court of James II just months before. Three thousand miles away, Cotton could not realize with the certainty that soon came to his father that the old charter was irretrievable. Cotton could only wait and pray, and after Andros was jailed he could
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