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 (53 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 309
matter there. He was dealing with men of substance and men who wished for substance. In his heart of hearts he knew that they cared less for the consolations of religion than they did for the creatures of this world. Though for the moment, they were impatient of ecclesiastical divisions, they did not fear the new groups appearing on the New England scene. Nor did they attribute a plot against Christian liberty to the High-Fliers of the Church of England, as he and Increase did. They undoubtedly hoped to be among the saints Christ would draw up to Himself when He came again, but they would leave that for the future. For the moment they looked to this world, a world transformed not by grace, but by property. As he sensed this disposition, Cotton Mather played to it and exposed his unwitting participation in the corruption of his society. For the unique advantage of piety that he singled out"one which is not every day insisted on"was calculated to appeal to the business mentality: piety pays, Mather proclaimed, and declared that by this argument the people of New England "would be persuaded unto almost any other Thing in the World." "Piety duely Expressed will render you sure of being
in the Worst of Trines
well Provided for. Oh! The
Charms
of Piety! How is it possible to be deaf unto them!"
10
Such statements disappeared from Mather's sermons around the year 1715. They were never easily reconciled with his understanding of religious experience as an affective process; and they placed him in the absurd position of recommending Christianity on the grounds that it returned a profit while yet espousing the traditional Puritan contempt for overvaluing the creatures. As if the conjunction of these views did not sufficiently defy logic, Mather further compounded his inconsistencies by advocating a worship that placed a high value on suffering and asceticism.
11
Worship, of course, was intended to yield the experimental religion. Over the years as he worked out his ideas on how a man should approach his God, Mather elaborated a variety of techniques which gradually contributed to a radically different understanding of religious experience itself. Considered separately, or even together, Mather's methods of worshipthe systems of a man both systematic and unsystematic, and at times irrationaldid not differ from much that is familiar in Puritan-
 
Page 310
ism. Yet, as traditional as most of the techniques he advocated were, his understanding of worship reveals his altering conception of religious experience itself.
12
One of his earliest devices involved spiritualizing the creatures, which saw the worshipper concentrate his energy on a thing in order to experience the Divine. The experience, Mather noted, might occur largely in the reason, but ideally one should be affected as well as informed. Of course worship had always been enjoined to move the emotions of men as well as their minds. Mather hoped that spiritualizing the creatures would induce a number of different feelingsexhilaration at the power of a God who possessed the power to create an infinite variety of things in the world, and gratitude for His gifts to sinful men. These hopes were closely tied to still another purpose that became more and more explicit as Mather's religious theory became increasingly "experimental" and "evangelical"words he used himself.
13
Worship should produce submissivenessa condition completely in accord with psychology of abasement. Mather urged that this objective should animate virtually all the exercises of piety, from daily spiritualizing, self-examination, prayer, meditation, vigils, to fasts. Night vigils, for example, should be "Flesh-Suppressing Exercises"and would be, he promised, if they were conducted with labor and self-denial.
14
Mather recommended these exercises of piety with still another favorite design in mind: they would further the cause of Christian Union. His ecumenical vision described a strife-free community suffused by a warm Christian love. The exact character of that love was not always cleareven to him, one suspects. But he clearly saw it as a force breaking down barriers, uniting men in Christ. His prescriptions for worship reveal that he also thought of love as a restrainingeven repressiveinstrument. The love he saw emerging from the exercise of Piety would induce the self-denial that worship explicitly required. Worship that subdued the promptings of the flesh would ensure that men would not break the peace of others. Social order resulted, he said in
Love Triumphant
,
15
when carnal outbursts were prevented. And worship in PIETY could produce the control necessary to pacific men.
16
Christian Union was one of the ends he most desired to stimulate by a worship controlled by asceticism. As these hopes
 
Page 311
gradually faded in the eighteenth century, he continued to demand fervency from the people of New England. In fact, as he became more disillusioned, his own worship and his exhortations to others grew not only more affective but came to rely increasingly on the direct influence of the Holy Spirit. It was in this dependence on the Spirit that he exposed his own altering, and at least partially unself-conscious, conception of religious experience. For it was the celebration of the Holy Spirit that ultimately defined his version of the experimental religion.
17
The curse of the Antinomians, and their cousins the Quakers, probably slowed Mather's Pietistic progress. But even as he reviled both groups in the seventeenth century, he was yearning for some experience that would put him and others into direct contact with the Lord. For most of its practitioners, spiritualizing the creatures, like other kinds of meditation, was an affective processs but it did not bring them into an immediate encounter with the Holy Spirit. When Mather instructed his flock in its techniques, he urged them to be "boiling hot" in its use, but as late as 1702 he only claimed that it would "affect" them.
18
Formal meditation, he said in
Christianus Per Ignem
,
19
should simply see worshippers take a scriptural text or a case of conscience and "speak unto it as well as we can." The believer should take two steps meditating on a "thing": first he should consider its nature, titles, distribution, causes, effects, subjects, adjuncts, opposites, and comparisons; and second he should examine his own life and behavior, remonstrate with himself to improve, and finally resolve on better conduct. This type of meditation might be compressed "in the little
Fragments of Time
, that intervene between our more stated Businesses'' but compression no more than elaborate formal meditation brought a direct infusion of the Holy Spirit. Not even close concentration on a scriptural passage, which would undoubtedly move the believer to feel that it was composed under the influence of the Spirit, could do that. So Mather's opinions stood on practice of meditation around the opening of the eighteenth century.
20
But in the next fifteen or twenty years Mather came to see that the exercise of Piety in devotional practices might pay higher returns. He had always urged worshippers to study the Scriptures while they spiritualized the creatures or engaged in any sort of meditation. Concentration on the Lord inevitably
 
Page 312
brought men back to His word and if it did not, Mather was quite willing to advise them on scriptural study appropriate to any meditation. And in fact many of his Pietistic tracts recommend scriptural passages suitable for worshippers at almost any conceivable time. In the seventeenth century, a cooler period for Cotton Mather, he never proposed that such meditation would ever do anything more than affect men rightly and give them proof that Scripture was indeed the word of God. But by the last decade of his life he was so excited by these old techniques as to claim that intensive meditation could lead to the recapture of "like Motions of PIETY" of those who wrote the Scriptures.
21
The same Spirit that guided the pens of the authors of the Bible would inspire the devoted worshipper. And filled with the Spirit, the fervent Christian would gain the assurance of "coming to dwell in the same
Heavenly World
, which those men of GOD are gone unto."
22
Mather's own inner life inspirited these utterances as they did so much of what he preached about worship and behavior. Long before he began telling his church about the "New Piety," he had perfected the method of the particular faith, a technique of concentrated prayer which induced in its practitioners a conviction that what they yearned for would come to pass. He had also begun his midnight vigils, continued his fasts, and intensified his meditations every year. Occasionally he experienced the delights of interviews with angels; and his private devotions were increasingly filled with rapture and afflatus.
23
These experiences helped form Cotton Mather's preaching about the believer's covenant with God. As he became dissatisfied with his colleagues' understanding of the covenant as a transaction between "principals," he began to urge that men who entered it properly, as minor "accessories" to the major agreement between God the Father and His Son, should strive to equal the humility of Christ. Conformity to Christ, especially the imitation of His abasement, would lead men to the joy of the knowledge that they had indeed been saved.
24
Mather's own devotions convinced him that the Holy Spirit, acting under Christ's direction, brought such divine comforts. Prostrate on the floor of his study, pleading his vileness in the dust, he yearned for more of these direct encounters with the Spirit. He knew that others shared his desiresthe Pietists in Germany,
 
Page 313
for examplebut he admitted that neither they nor he could do anything without divine aid. But nonetheless, in the hot moods of this Pietistic fever, he begged God for a pouring out of the Holy Spirit.
25
Mather recognized that he was on the slippery ground of enthusiasm here; and for years he confined most such yearnings to his
Diary
. He was not an Antinomian nor a Quaker but these secret experiences placed him dangerously close to themand he was inclined to move closer. Late in his life, his father dead and most of the second generation in the grave, Cotton Mather began to sound some of these desires in the pulpit and in the press.
26
The ways in which the Holy Spirit acted in human affairs hadivided Protestants for years. Presbyterians and Congregationalists, the Puritans of the right, had long cashiered Anabaptists and Quakers, the Puritans of the left, for their insistence that the Spirit still spoke directly to man as it had in the days of the Apostles. In New England the radicals had first made their case in the Antinomian crisis, and for years afterwards Richard Mather and his heirs complained of Familists and Antinomians. Increase Mather had rejoiced over the actions of the State against the Quakers and had publicly urged on their persecutors. Cotton Mather delivered his only reasoned argument against Quakers in 1690, but even then he stigmatized their doctrines as "vomit" and the "plague of This Age." These gentle comments came in the
Principles of the Protestant Religion Maintained
;
27
Mather had dealt with Quakers the year before in the Appendix to his
Memorable Providences
,
28
and he was to attack them again in
Little Flocks Guarded Against Grievous Wolves
.
29
He preached against them in other sermons too, in 1712 for example, riding to Salem to excoriate them. The Quakers gave as good as they got. By calling him the New England College Boy they suggested that Mather's learning was not quite as weighty as he imagined; and George Keith, an effective Quaker polemist, compared Mather and his friends to "Night-birds and Beasts of prey."
30
When Mather could suppress his anger, he explained that his central difference from the Quakers concerned the operations of the Holy Spirit. What Puritans found reprehensible in Quakers, Cotton Mather said, was their pleading for "Immediate and
 
Page 314
Extraordinary" revelations "
such as the Apostles had.
" That Christ opened the Apostles' minds "without ordinary helps"reading and hearing the wordno Protestant would deny. Puritans of Mather's persuasion did deny, however, that Christ continued to work that direct way after the end of the apostolic period. The Holy Ghost spoke in "cloven tongues" then; but since then the Spirit chose to increase men's understandings only through the regular, even rational, process of operating on their faculties. The Spirit worked this way because God respected man's reasoning power, and because He had revealed all that men needed to know in Scriptures.
31
Over the next thirty years as Mather worked out his ideas about the psychology of religion and the covenant, he came to recognize that this safe view of the Holy Spirit, so nicely calculated to prevent enthusiastic outbursts, could not be reconciled with his understanding of how God converted men. In these years he insisted repeatedly on the affective rather than the rational side of the conversion process; he declared that the doctrine of preparation was only a convenient disguise for the pride of man; he called for men to abase themselves before Christ's covenant of redemption and to realize that they were only accessories to the transaction that gave them salvation. And he preached sermons telling his people that the Lord required His chosen ones at the moment grace entered their souls to abdicate their reason and their wills. At that moment at least, prideful and corrupt human beings must resign every pretension of power and merit in order that a greater power and a greater merit give them a new birth. Had Mather been braver, or more reckless, or more creative, or had he yielded to one set of impulses deep within himself, he might in these years have abandoned the doctrine of the means which held that God dealt with men through evidence accessible to their senses and their minds. Indeed he might have given up scholarship altogether, and surrendered himself totally to the Holy Spirit.
32
But he did not. Instead he led an emotional life that swung unevenly between conventional piety and direct encounters with the Holy Spirit. His public comments about religious experience only gradually revealed this precarious split. Until the last decade of his life most of his preaching about conversion pictured the Spirit acting rationally on the faculties of the saints.
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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