The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (44 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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chology of conversion, a point he made in various ways throughout his ministry. A sinner whose first duty was to beg for the strength to surrender himself to God should not be told that a life of righteousness could be attained by demanding anything from God or that he could complacently regard external behavior as adequate to satisfy the law. Men were too prone to settle for these easy subterfuges and to evade their responsibilities. They should not be encouraged to look upon the covenant as a contrivance they might enter at will, nor should they be permitted to assume that their "consent" to its terms came from themselves. That was the assumption of graceless men who pledged themselves to God and then relaxed secure in their own virtue.
15
In many sermons, Cotton Mather used an old mode of analysis, presenting Christ in His various guises as the Priest, the Prophet, and the King; in others he examined the Trinity.
16
None of these efforts was orginal, nor was any of them an exercise in disinterested scholarship. What Mather intended was to illuminate and glorify Christ as a sacrificial figure who provided a means of redeeming sinners and a model for the righteous life. The covenant of redemption which existed between God the Father and God the Son far transcended the covenant of grace between God and the believer. The covenant of grace, he once explained, was an "Echo" of the covenant of redemption.
17
Every Puritan divine of the seventeenth century would have agreed, but most preferred to work directly on men's souls through the explication of the terms of the covenant of grace. At the same time these ministers must have sensed the inconsistency of urging men to abase themselves before Christ and telling them to regard conversion as a legal transaction. Cotton Mather did and said so. Although he was never a model of harmonies, he managed to make his psychological assumptions rest easily with his doctrine of conversion. And he found a vocabulary which expressed both.
18
To his auditories in churches all over New England, he spoke of the need of men to repent and convert. He often delivered his message without once mentioning the covenant of grace and somtimes did not even pronounce the word "conversion." Instead he saturated his message with metaphors which suggest the sinner's dependency and which diminish the importance of his power while continually urging him to try incessantly to join
 
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with Christ. The sinner should "fly" to Christ, to unite with Him, and "nestle" under His "wings." Taking his text from Ezekiel 17.23 on one occasion, Mather told a society of young people that Christ is a "Cedar" offering "shelter'' to all kinds of men; the branches are His Churches; sinners who come to Christ are ''birds" enjoying a divine protection. The hackneyed figures of the shepherd and his lambs entered Mather's discourse too; their use serving for all their familiarity in the seventeenth century to emphasize the sinner's need for greater righteousness than his own.
19
Christ provided the center in all these pulpit efforts. Mather was dazzled by the splendor of Christ's sacrifice and humble before it. If Mather's listeners heard anything he said they must have received the impression that they too should worship the miracle of Christ's incarnation. Mather lavished attention on this part of his Christology: at some point before the creation of the universe, Christ had covenanted with God the Father to take on the flesh of man, to suffer all the degradation of human kind, hunger, thirst, fatigue. And in the flesh He accepted the scorn of the Pharisees, and the afflictions of His Roman captors. Finally, He gave His life for His Church, the elect of God. In this act, Christ, the guiltless, took on the burden of men's enormities, their sins; and men, the guilty, enjoyed the immense benefit of His righteousness, which the Lord imputed to them.
20
Theologically Mather's reasoning was impeccable: the God of predestination chose men according to His pleasure and nothing they could do affected His choice. And Christ's sacrifice supplied the righteousness to satisfy the guilt of the fallen. The knowledge that concentrating on these old verities put him on secure theological footing reassured Mather, but he chose this bent in preaching for other reasons as well, reasons which he may not have fully recognized. His tendency of thought ran to the personalizing of issues: he rarely spoke of evil without invoking demons or the Devil; and good reminded him of the best man who ever lived, the Son of God, Christ the Savior. This habit of mind and character accorded well with an ancient tradition in Christian worship and homiletics, the imitation of Christ. In the works of Thomas à Kempis and others like him Mather found inspiration and information for his own attempts to break down
 
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the security residing in the covenant of works and to provide a model of behavior for gracious men.
21
Men required a knowledge of Christ's sacrifice if they were to be converted. Anyone could get a "speculative" or "notional" knowledge of itwe would say that anyone could understand it intellectually. Such knowledge could not save; and Mather in all his Christology argued that men must obtain a saving knowledge, or as he once said, "be very Really sensible of the Beauty and Sweetness that is in Him, and like that woman once, we should feel
Vertue going forth
from Him unto our Souls; or like Paul, find upon our selves the
power
of what is in our Lord.'' Should we succeed, or as Cotton Mather cautiously phrased it, should we be enabled to come to God, we might then imitate His life as closely as possible.
22
For all those sinners schooled in the attitudes of self-scrutiny and steeled to face the worst in themselves, the imitation of Christ offered a further means of gaining assurance that they belonged to the Lord. What Mather attempted in these sermons was to supply a method by which a right frame of mind could be attained by Christians, a frame of mind which would govern every thought and action of their beings.
Cotton Mather recognized the danger implicit in his prescription. A man who imitated Christ might in time become convinced that he himself was divine. Hence Mather took pains in a number of sermons to remind his church that of course they could not conform to Christ in every respect. They could not recapture Christ's mediatory function nor could they achieve His holiness. Yet they must give their best to efforts in conforming to Him, for "Without the
Imitation of Christ
, all thy
Christianity
is a meer Nonentity."
23
Although the methods proposed by Mather were varied, their essence was simplethe regulation of the self in all its thoughts, actions, and appetites so "that the
Sweetness
of everything shall be more or less, according to the
Service
of a glorious CHRIST, promoted in them."
24
When a believer applied this standard, he attempted to duplicate Christ's reactions when he confronted both good and evil. Human excellence should set him to thinking of Christ's; abasements must make him reconstruct the Savior's circumstances when He took on human flesh. When the believer
 
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was afflicted, he must take joy from the fact that his suffering established a tie between himself and Christ, who also suffered. In doing good to one's fellows, Christ's methods must be emulated"convey something of Christ to those who receive your alms"; in dealing with the contentious the same rule appliedbe a peacemaker.
25
The possibilities for imitation appeared endless; and the technique could be recommended with feeling by Mather because he himself used it in his own life.
26
Like the other elements in Mather's preaching of the covenant, the technique established on different grounds Mather's psycholoy of conversion. Its aim was to enable the Christian to achieve a regulation of his life according to divine commands. Its method imposed a subordination of the entire soulreason, will, passionsto the will of God. Implicitly the technique recognized man's terrible depravity and his helplessness, and provided gentle persuasion, as well as the means, for a surrender of the self to Christ.
Because Mather's version of Puritan Christology prescribed an emotional religion and stressed the importance of a "vital" experience of Christ, it fused smoothly early in the eighteenth century with his preaching of the New Piety. The heart of Piety was experimental religion which provided a "transforming energy" that altered human character.
27
None of Mather's new emphasis altered old doctrines; much of what he offered in the life of Piety amounted to no more than the old evangelicalism of Richard Mather, decked out in a fresh terminology. It did, however, demand more of the believer than simply taking up the covenant of grace. In signing the indentures of the covenant the believer took on more than a legal obligation; he entered more than a contract; he made more than a bargain; he agreed to testify to the renewal of his soul in a vital religious experience. But if the New Piety did not alter doctrine, nor challenge the tenets of the covenant theology, it did recommend the old theory on fresh grounds. It relegated the intellectualism of the covenant to the trash heapreplacing it with the passionate contention that only gracious experience weighed on the divine scales. The standards that men should take for their own could all be found in the experience of the believer in Christ. If men could truly make Christ their model, they would experience a glorious transformation. But to save themselves, and to do anything good, they
 
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must be born again in Christ. The figure of the new birth, important before in the primitive Church and destined for two centuries to inspire revivalism throughout the Western world, revealed the evangelical fervor of Mather's American Pietism.
28
His fervor did not cool before the unalterable fact of human impotence. All his preaching recognized the helplessness of man unassisted by grace. But the New Piety transformed man, liberated him from sin, and gave him the power to glorify God. In its anatomy this sort of evangelicalism did not differ from the old message of the covenant theology. The skeleton and the flesh were the sameman tainted with original sin and a corrupt heart awaiting purification by divine grace. But in the New Piety, the old members have been rearranged, and draped in a brighter, more inviting, and simpler clothing.
29
The advantage of Pietism to the minister who had to deal with an indifferent people lay in its simplicity and its emotionalism. No need now to balance free will against the necessities of an iron predestination; no need to make responsibilities commensurate with promises. No need to plod through the thickets of terms and conditions which one agreed to, but which one could not meet. The truth was simpler, Mather reported from the pulpit of evangelicalism: if a man could believe in the "MAXIMS OF PIETY"and live by themhe would enjoy the divine glory.
30
A believer's conformity to Christ provided, according to Cotton Mather, the only way to attain the New Piety. A typical exhortation in this mode found him calling on his church to resolve to take up the New Piety. But, Mather continued, the resolution should not be made in your own strength, for "If it be, there will be
no Strength
in it."
31
There are some, Mather preached in the winter of 1714, who resolve on a life of Piety when they feel a "
Devout Pang.
" In their arrogance they resolve to carry out their intentions unassisted. Of course nothing comes of such resolutions. Cotton Mather did not hide his contempt for these failures. "They
trust in their own Hearts
, and they are
Fools.
" These men, despite all their good resolutions, need a power greater than themselves. They need Christ; as Mather explained the way success was achieved, an ''ingredient of every good resolution of Piety is ALL THINGS THRO' CHRIST WHO STRENGTHENS ME."
32
 
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The covenant of grace scarcely appeared in this scheme. The burden will be carried by Christ who has given His promise to Godnot to man. In fact, during the last ten years of his ministry, Cotton Mather deliberately reduced the importance of the covenant of grace. Its function, he explained, is to "assign the Language of every good RESOLUTION with you." But redemptive power will come from the contract of Christ who promises God that He will "
Quicken
, and
Incline
, and
Strengthen
the people whom He will bring under the shadow of His Wings, to Glorify GOD in a
Walk before Him
." The believer's role is, in the new language, to resolve on Piety; his role is to consent to the covenant.
"The Style of the
Resolution
must be This;
O Great GOD
, Be Thou my God, I am not able to walk before thee, O my God, as I own my self under infinite Bonds to do: but I desire to do it; I desire to do it! And my dear Jesus has Engaged, that His people shall do it. And I consent, Oh! I consent, that He should cause me to do it. I put my self under His conduct, that He may do so; and Relying upon Him, I resolve to do what He will have me to do. Yes, and even in doing this also, 'tis
His Help that has bro't me to it.
"
33
Mather did not regard the covenant of redemption as one more contrivance which could be used to bind the Lord to the terms of the covenant of grace. The Federal Theologians had so considered it, arguing that this bond between God the Father and God the Son might be adduced as further evidence of God's good intentions toward men. These theologians had further created the impression that the covenant with Christ was a less glorious device than the one with the believer by presenting it as the procuring cause of the covenant of grace. In the course of things the arrangement between Father and Son had to be prior to the one between God and man, but the Federal Theologues inferred from this order that the first step, the treaty God made with Himself, carried slightly less nobility than the second, which He concluded with man. The first was taken, was it not, only to permit the second?
34
When Cotton Mather chose to follow the example of the Federal Theologues and used legal language in describing the two covenants, he invariably referred to Christ as the "surety" for the indebtedness of man. The covenant of redemption paid

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