The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (39 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 221
The evil crowd, whom he called the Idumaeans after Lot's wife, had never accepted the reforms of the sixteenth century and despised the Puritans who carried them further in the seventeenth. The Idumaeans were the usurpers, responsible for divine right Episcopacy and Pelagian doctrine. Their usurpation had carried so far, he argued, that they now constituted a "new Church of England."
32
As a prevailing faction this new Church used the canons to justify its unscriptural rule, a rule that prescribed episcopal ordination and deprived parish ministers of their authority to teach and to administer the sacraments. This Canonical Church maintained only a slack discipline and a virtually open Communion; indeed its religion really only "lyes in Sainting their Martyr Charles I."
33
The other partythe "True Church of England" consists, he explained, of the nonconformists, now by the Revolutionary Settlement "legal parts" of the Church of England. In fact Mather argued that the nonconformists were the only Church of England though he modestly contented himself by saying to his dissenting English brethren"
You
are indeed among the TRUEST SONS of the
True Church of England.
"
34
What Mather derided as the New Church of England revealed plans that dampened further his ecumenical aspirations. In the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701, it acquired an agency that soon produced heartburn in dissenting ministers all over the colonies. The first SPG missionary arrived in 1702 in the person of George Keith, once a Quaker but now an Anglican, and still an enemy to the churches of New England. He announced his continuing disgust with the New England way almost immediately. In the next few years Mather and other Boston ministers began complaining of SPG activities in and out of New EnglandJamaica on Long Island, for example, and in Newbury and Braintree, Massachusetts. What irked them about the Society's effortsthey saidwas its concentration on areas already served by nonconforming ministers and its neglect of plantations lacking any sort of Christian churches.
35
The worst case of all as far as Cotton Mather was concerned involved Newbury where, in 1712, twenty-two citizens, spurred on by John Bridger, the Royal Surveyer of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, petitioned Governor Dudley for his protection for
 
Page 222
themselves while they set up a church conforming to Common Prayer worship. They had already sent to the Bishop of London for a minister, and they wished the Governor to cast his friendly eye on them and, incidentally, to relieve them of the obligation of paying for a Congregational minister. The Governor immediately declared himself willing to afford protection and exemption from church-rates. Cotton Mather fumed and resolved to send books to eliminate the ignorance that must have prompted such a request; Benjamin Colman, noting the plea for relief from taxes, questioned the petitioners' motives; and Judge Samuel Se-wall appealed to a Deacon in the Congregational Church in Newbury to help recall the petitioners to their senses. All to no avail, of course, as General Nicholson sent money; a missionary arrived; and Queen Anne's Chapel, as the Newbury foundation was called, continued to lead a reduced but evidently effective existence.
36
These episcopal extensions across the sea were frightening and dampened Mather's thought of a grand union of all Protestants. Still, well into the eighteenth century both he and Colman found it possible to speak of the United Brethren as a transatlantic dissenting interest. In part his motives may have been defensive, for the High Church faction was enjoying the Queen's favor in these years and making life even more trying for nonconformists in England than in America. Mather followed the attacks on nonconformity with fascination. He was temporarily elated by the trial of Henry Sacheverell, the Tory priest, who in 1709 virtually repudiated the Act of Toleration. But Sacheverell's light sentence and the activity of the mob that supported him depressed Mather. To a friend he reported the news that a Tory mob had pulled down six Presbyterian meetinghouses; civil war was likely, he said, once peace with France was concluded. Two years later he had increasingly bad news: Marlborough had been dismissed from office, and the Tories were using the Act of Occasional Conformity to drive dissenters from all places of public trust. His Glasgow correspondents told of events that further darkened his spirits: the "Episcopal men in Scotland (who are generally Jacobites)" were being protected by Parliament to such an extent that a rupture of the Union seemed likely. He continued to predict peace with France to be followed by an alliance. All the news suggested that "Men of Revolution-Principles" were on the way out "while those of the French Mode are like to carry the
 
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Day." His worst fears were that this would bring the Church of Englandor as he usually said, the new Church of Englandinto a "coalition with the Gallican Church."
37
The experience of such measures as the Occasional Conformity Act did not bode well for a Christian Union that embraced all Protestants, especially those of the Anglican variety. Mather recognized this fact and dealt with it in the manner he had worked out in the 1690's: with the claim that nonconformity represented the doctrine of the true Church of England. And of all nonconformity the purest was found in New England where "The
Doctrinal Articles
of the
Church of England
, through the
Matchless Favour
of God, are more universally Held, and Preached . . . than in any Nation." The new Church of England, Pelagian in doctrine and persecuting in temper, had cut itself off from the catholic Church of Christ.
38
Mather assumed in all his comments on the Church of England that its doctrine was now, and had always been, Calvinist. He also assumed that nonconformists in England shared the same faith that had long obtained in New England. To stake out his claim he published, and republished, those doctrinal parts of the Thirty-Nine Articles and of the Book of Common Prayer that espoused the traditional Calvinism. And with his father and other worthies in Boston pulpits, he attacked Common Prayer worship for its Antichristian taint. Increase and the others described the situation of nonconformity in England as if public policy had not changed since the Restoration, except in cases where they argued it had become more barbarous than ever. These tracts drew replies from the Anglicans living in Boston who, following the lead of the Mathers, also reprinted works which had produced controversy twenty years before. But no Anglican proved as assiduous as Cotton Mather in sending tracts and sermons throughout English America. Those he dispatched testified to the orthodoxy of the churches in New England and to the apostasy of the High-Fliers in England. This sort of evangelical enterprise was also one more way of pointing to the neglect by the SPG of the "ungospellized" plantations in America.
39
With the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George I, Mather looked for some respite from the SPG. The Whigs and the Latitudinarians who came back into power would not try to force a bishop on the colonies, an event he had dreaded for years.
 
Page 224
And unfriendly legislation, such as the Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Bill, might be nullified. For these reasons, Mather greeted the Hanoverian succession with joy, preaching
The Glorious Throne
in its praise only three weeks after George I received the crown. Most ministers in New England agreed that George promised more than Anne and joined in a friendly address to the King in 1715. For a while they considered Mather's suggestion that two agents carry their memorial to the King but finally contented themselves by commissioning several nonconformist ministers in England to act for them. Cotton Mather managed the ministerial convention that met in Boston to discuss the churches' response to the new monarch; and he drafted their address. The New England ministers did not have to be pushed; most disliked the SPG and almost all wanted guarantees that the High-Fliers would not push legislation across the Atlantic. Benjamin Colman, for example, preached on the accession of the new king and the next year declared New England's happiness that the Jacobites had been put down.
40
Both Colman and Mather used these occasions to talk about the United Brethren as a transatlantic association. In fact no such organization existed though correspondence passed back and forth between like-minded ministers on both sides of the Atlantic. And the plan for a grand ministerial association and a standing council that might advance the catholic spirit of Christian Union foundered on Congregational independence. All earlier attempts at imposing some hierarchy had failed for the same reason. Informal meetings of ministers had draw the opposition of Roger Williams in 1633 on the grounds that such gatherings might lead to the introduction of the Presbyterian polity. On at least two occasions in the next thirty years, the Reverend Thomas Parker of the Newbury Church had tried to persuade his colleagues in the Bay to strengthen the powers of synods. He was accused of Presbyterianism and his suggestions were dismissed. Perhaps Parker was encouraged by English Presbyterians; in any case, Richard Mather, John Cotton, and Thomas Hooker, among others, had spent an inordinate amount of time answering Presbyterians in England.
41
With the Restoration, fears of Presbyterianism had faded in New England, especially as Congregationalists discovered how much the persecuted everywhere had in common. Meetings of
 
Page 225
ministers undoubtedly took place even during the worst of the transatlantic squabbles; and shortly before the end of the century there were a handful of ministerial associations throughout Massachusetts. They had no existence in law, however, and they were not empowered to discipline churches or members or indeed to do anything more than discuss common problems.
42
But in August 1705, these associations met in Boston and agreed upon the
Proposals
, a plan for ministerial associations empowered to license ministers and for standing councils which would meet annually. The standing councils would have lay members, sent by the churches, but in all actions the major part of the ministers would retain a veto. The councils then would remain snugly in ministerial hands. The actions a council might take all bore on disciplinary matters which traditionally had belonged to the individual churchesdisputes within a church between ministers and brethren for example. Under the
Proposals
a standing council might in extreme cases order the churches of the Bay to discontinue their relations with a disorderly church and to receive its godly members to their own communion.
43
What prompted this plan is not altogether clear. Undoubtedly the motives of its projectors varied from a desire to strengthen ministerial authority in a society increasingly prone to ignore it to a sense that some fresh way of introducing godliness into a decaying society had to be discovered. Its proponents included most of the distinguished ministers in the eastern associations, though Increase Mather held himself aloof until 1716 when he publicly declared his opposition.
44
Cotton Mather played some part in organizing the meeting that drafted the
Proposals
, and he signed them, but he said very little openly in their favor. He gave his support cautiously because he, better than anyone else, knew of his father's opposition. A part of his own favorable disposition arose in the frustration he felt over the attacks on nonconformity in England and New England. The SPG alarmed him; strong ministerial associations might help keep its High-Fliers in check. This much is hinted at in his
Diary
, where he also indulged his rage at other intruders, for example, Samuel May, "a wondrous Lump of Ignorance and Arrogance," who preached to a congregation of Anabaptists, until he was unmasked as a plagiarist and woman-chaser. In 1699 when May appeared, Mather probably would have relished the chance to bring
 
Page 226
him before an association, or better to refer the case to a standing council.
45
Still he knew that in a state pledged to religious toleration nothing effective could be done about the Mays of Boston or about High-Fliers of the SPG. He said as much the year following in a meeting of ministers in Boston, where he savagely attacked Stoddard's recent sermon, which proposed a whole hierarchy of provincial classes and a national synod. The decrees of Stoddard's organizations, he said at this time, ''will signify little, except they have a
Civil Magistrate
that will make them cutt." The possibility that the State might once more enforce the true religion, he continued, did not exist, nor never would again in New England.
46
Mather's advocacy of the
Proposals
five years after the assault on Stoddard was not an act of pure consistency. Yet both positionsthe opposition to Stoddard and the support of the
Proposals
were deeply felt. Mather hated the suggestion for synods from Stoddard because it came from Stoddard, a man who had already repudiated long-standing conventions of Church discipline and worship. Stoddard's synods would ratify the Church organized on the basis of geography, not the covenant; and they would give Communion to unregenerates in the belief that it was a converting ordinance. These practices, Mather declared in the attack on Stoddard, would "ravish" the churches of New England and far from reforming them, would lead them into the arms of the Antichrist. But synods and standing councils committed to the true polity and holy worship would not lead the New England churches into Popery. Others thought differently, among them the Reverend John Rogers of Ipswich, who announced his opposition briefly and cautiously the next year. But for the most part the
Proposals
were ignored publicly until John Wise delivered his great
Churches Quarrel Espoused
in 1710.
47
Even as the
Proposals
of 1705 sank in a sea of apathy, Mather groped towards a more satisfying basis for union, one that would transcend factions and varieties in ecclesiastical polity. He had begun searching for such a basis by denying the divisive force of differing principles. Agreement on practicehe believedshould placate nonconforming groups whatever their principles. Now early in the eighteenth century he sought, and found, the fundamentals of Christian Union.

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