 | 16. Increase quotes Richard in
Life and Death
, 12. Winthrop's views on the everlasting Church are in the
Winthrop Papers
(Boston, 1929, 5 vols. published to date) III, 10.
|
| 17. John Winthrop, "A Modell of Christian Charity,"
Winthrop Papers
, 11, 282-95. The quotation is on 295.
|
| 18.
Life and Death
, 18-19, and
passim
.
|
| 19. The scriptural passages are Psalms 119.27; Daniel 12.4; 2 Timothy 3.7, 3.1, 3.2; Revelation 6.12; Joel 2.30, 31.
|
| 20. The text for commentators on the conversion of Israel was Romans 11.26: "And so all Israel shall be saved: . . ." Protestant theologians took comfort from the fact that the ancient fathers, including Origen and Chrysostom, had expected a conversion of Israel; they also pointed out that Aquinas and the Schoolmen had subscribed to the belief.
|
| 21. The quotations are from John Cotton's
The Powring Out of the Seven Vials: or an Exposition of the Sixteenth Chapter of the Revelation, With an Application of it to our Times
(London, 1645), 3, 4, 32, 58, 79. Cotton discussed related eschatological problems in
The Churches Resurrection
(London 1642) and
An Exposition Upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation
(London, 1655); this last work was based on sermons preached in 1639 and 1640.
|
| 22.
Life and Death
, 11-19, and
passim
.
|
| 23. Richard Mather and William Thompson,
An Heart-Melting Exhortation Together With a Cordiall Consolation
(London, 1650), 61-70. This work was written in 1645.
|
| 24.
Ibid
. 67, 79-80.
|
| 25. Richard Mather, "To The Christian Reader," in John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew,
Tears of Repentance . . . Narrative . . . . of the Gospel Amongst the Indians in New England
(London, 1653), reprinted in Massachusetts Historical Society (M.H.S.)
Collections
, 3d Series, IV, 217-25. I have used the M.H.S. edition; see especially Mather's contention (218) that the conversion of the Indians in New England was evidence that the Kingdom of God "is now beginning to be set up where it never was before, even amongst a poor people, forlorn kind of Creatures in times past, who have been without Christ. . . ." Virtually everything that Mather wrote, which still survives, is shot through with an eschatological expectation. It is not intense in such works as
Church-Government And Church-Covenant Discussed
(London, 1643), where his indebtedness to Foxe is clear (24-27), but it is present; and in such works as The Summe of Seventie Lectures, mss. A.A.S., it is burning. Mather's great
|
| contemporary, Thomas Hooker, shared his belief that their age would be one of increasing knowledge about the Church, which was widely believed to be one of the signs of the imminence of the end; see the "Preface" to
A Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline
(London, 1648). See, too, Thomas Parker (pastor in Newbury, Mass.),
The Visions and the Prophecies of Daniel Expounded
(London, 1646) for another expression similar to Mather's mood.
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