The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (46 page)

Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Historical, #United States, #Leaders & Notable People, #Religious, #Christian Books & Bibles, #History, #Americas, #State & Local, #Christianity, #Religion & Spirituality, #test

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
2.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 265
How fully Mather comprehended the growing differentiation of groups in New England's society is not clear. By the end of the seventeenth century new social types were emerging that would not have pleased the founders. The development of overseas commerce hastened their appearance; in fact merchants trading with London provided the most striking examples of the new sort of men in New England. To say that these merchants constituted a "class" is surely too simple; in attitudes and values they differed from one another in important ways. But they did share a rough unity of economic interests. Among other things, they needed to find money and goods to ease an unfavorable balance of trade; to maintain their ties with English merchants and officials, both of whom had so much to say about imperial regulation; and to ensure the existence of colonial governments sympathetic to their concerns and problems.
9
They counted pious men within their number, men like Samuel Sewall, who studied the prophecies and wrote about the end of the world. Sewall had married the daughter of John Hull, a wealthy merchant who instructed his ship captains in the ways of the Lord as faithfully as he did in the ways of business. Sewall served the Massachusetts Bay Colony for years as a Superior Court judge and councillor; and he took a loving interest in all the problems of his church. And there was his interest in New England, an interest that propelled him into beliefs that some of his sophisticated contemporaries considered absurd: opposition to wigs, for example, and to the keeping of Christmas.
10
Samuel Shrimpton, a merchant, was one of those contemporaries. Shrimpton had inherited a fortune on the death of his father in 1666, a sum of almost 12,000 pounds, and twenty years later he was the richest man in Boston. Shrimpton traded fish to Europe, imported English manufactures, and sent logs to England. He owned sizable amounts of real estate in and around Boston. Shrimpton's wealth and his overseas connections disposed him to fancy himself an English gentleman. He did not admire Puritan government, and soon after Massachusetts lost its charter he refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the local courts and the legislature. Not surprisingly he supported Andros and the Dominion of New England. A number of great merchants of his sort actually joined the Church of England; Shrimpton
 
Page 266
may not have joined, but the first Anglican marriage ceremony was performed in his house.
11
Sewall of course did not like Shrimptonnor his style of life. Sewall's
Diary
contains this account of the riotous excesses of Shrimpton and his friends: "Mr Shrimpton, Capt. Lidget and others come in a Coach from Roxbury about 9. aclock or past, singing as they come, being inflamed with Drink. At Justice Morgan's they stop and drink Healths, curse, swear, talk profanely and baudily to the great disturbance of the Town and grief of good people. Such high-handed wickedness has hardly been heard of before in Boston."
12
Shrimpton and Sewall stood at nearly opposite poles among the merchants, and taken together suggest how far social complexity had proceeded in the New England that Cotton Mather wished to reform. These merchants had economic concerns in common but not much else united them. And not even economic interest joined the youth, the sects, the craftsmen, shopkeepers, sailors, fishermen, farmers, housewives, teachers, doctors, and all the others Mather hoped to bring into Christian Union. Mather, of course, did not often think of these groups in economic, or sociological, categories. He occasionally remarked on the different "tribes" in his church, explaining that he meant the rich, the middling-sort, and the poor. He saw that a desire for social status motivated the secessionists from his church who formed first the New North and then the New Brick churchesthis "proud Crue," he said in his
Diary
, "must have Pues for their dispicable Families.''
13
As he watched them scrambling for position, he thought he detected the ''Dissolution" of his church.
14
He was exaggerating, of course, and may have realized ithe was far too compelling a preacher to lose his church and he knew it. A few years after the New North secessionists departed, their places had been filled by others eager to listen to Mather. Yet he could not help but think of dissolution when he observed secessionists in his or other churches. The fragmentation of a particular church seemed symptomatic of a splintering of institutions and communities of all kinds in New England.
15
Cotton Mather's comprehension of the changes he observed with such distaste was limited by his propensity to see them largely in moral terms. Sometimes he blamed the Devil as the
 
Page 267
instigator; at others he saw the melancholy sins of his parishioners in them; at still other times he viewed them as the just afflictions sent upon him by God for his own derelictions. But whatever the explanation, he saw only one way out for his peoplereform and repentance and the doing of good that might help reunite all men. This concern led him into an innovation that probably contributed to the division that he sought to close: he began asking his flock to suggest topics for his sermons, and at least part of the time he agreed to preach to private groups on subjects they chose. These practices inevitably led to a subtle erosion of his own authority as a minister who declared what God's purposes were for His people. Mather of course used all these occasions to say what he wished, preaching sermons designed to convert and to persuade men to join in a Christian Union. But still he was contributing to a social process he did not understand.
16
In his confusion and fear he also preached jeremiads. If the jeremiad expressed a familiar appeal, it had, nonetheless, undergone a subtle change in fifty years. The first jeremiads had addressed a backsliding people, a people like Israelstiff-necked, selfish, too much attached to this worldbut still a good people, the chosen of the Lord. By the early eighteenth century, this assumption that goodness resided in the people was not so easily made. Ministers still addressed the people of New England as a body and assured them and the world that as things went they were the best people in the world. Their religion was purer, their morals higher, their behavior better than others'. Their need for reformation, the ministers warned, lay in the fact that though in comparison to the world they were good, they had declined disastrously from their fathers. Their fathers of course had been told the same thing. Yet in repeating the old admonitions the ministers of the eighteenth century did more than follow a respected form. To be sure, they attempted to recall a people to holiness that constituted their difference from other peoples of the world, butand herein lies a departure from the old conventionthey also sometimes suggested that perhaps this new generation of New Englanders was never any good. It had not declined; it had never arisen above the pollution of original sin.
17
The ministers' uncertainty about their people is put flatly at
 
Page 268
times"we are not the men our fathers were" expresses only one fear. In a few years this disavowal of the quality of the present generation became conventional, just as comparisions to the children of Israel had in the sermons of the first generation. More importantly the preachers of the new century inserted appeals to convert in their castigations of New England. They said that grace did not exactly abound in the land and that in time it might completely disappear. The reformation that they appealed for does not involve a return to the Lord, but a coming for the first time. This is what God expects; and they warned that His patience has extended as long as it has out of fondness for the fathers, not because the people deserve it.
18
From these premises, Cotton Mather, Stoddard, Colman, and most divines who left a record of their utterances felt justified in asking for a broad reformation of societythe conversion of men of all ranks and orders and the rejuvenation of manners and morals. These divines despised the radicals of their day, the levelers who they imagined were lurking on the fringes of society and the Antinomians who, some thought, with even less reason, still survived in New England.
By the usual standards of measuring social philosophies of this age, Cotton Mather was as "conservative" as any. He exhorted men of all sorts to give their best in their particular callings; a diligent mechanic he said was a far better person than a weathly gentleman who lived on his substance and avoided work. Once a man had a calling, he should not give it up lightly, say, just to earn more money. Of course, if he were not suited to his job, if he lacked the qualifications and the gifts to perform it well, then he might change jobs. But to give up his farm in favor of trading or the sea in order to earn a larger income violated his responsibility to God who had originally called him to his occupation.
19
This message probably did not sit well with men toiling for little return but yearning for better things. Mather gave them the comfort that the comfortable have always dispensed: stay content in your callings, he said, and resign yourselves to the Providence that has ordained you for a low, mean status in life. If honest labor does not bring you the rewards the wealthy enjoy in this world, console yourselves with the prospect that
 
Page 269
grace will bring you joy in the next. And therefore do your jobs and strive after the Lord.
20
In time Cotton Mather came to recognize the futility of this sort of preaching. In time he saw that it would no more restrain the mobility that accompanied the search for wealth, the lust after this world, than his attacks on merchants who diluted the turpentine they sold and who concealed inferior shingles by putting good ones on the outside of their bundles. Men would act in these ways, and reform would be stalled, because some men prospered in these sins.
21
The sermons calling for reformation in the eighteenth century continued to use the traditional formula of appealing to various classes of individuals. They addressed rich men and poor, husbands, wives, parents, children, servants, ministers, and magistrates. Each had a part to play in the reform of society, because each stood in relation to others. Mather used the term "relation" in its Ramist sense, that is, as describing a condition of connectedness inherent in the nature of things. As members of the community, or, as Mather said, in a typical expression of this American Pietism, as neighbors, men had responsibilities to one another. It followed in a Christian order that the strong must help the weak; the healthy, the sick; the employed, the jobless. Almost anyone in any of the relations he found himself could do goodand this was the essence of Christian behavior.
22
Do-good, the moral expression of this type of Pietism, was older than Puritanism. Its ultimate source was probably in the ancient notion of salvation through good works. But if it was as old as Christianity, it was nonetheless ineffective as a means of reform in eighteenth-century New England. But a minister could not stop preaching to individuals of their responsibilities simply because not all responded as he directedsome did and thereby demonstrated the existence of grace in their souls. Still, a minister might do more, especially if he were Cotton Mather and acutely aware of what others, similarly interested in improvement of society, had done across the sea.
In England, Mather learned in the 1690's, good men had begun to combine voluntarily in religious and reforming societies. The differences between these two kinds of agencies were probably not altogether clear to him, though he came to follow the Eng-
 
Page 270
lish practice, and established both sorts. The English societies had the tacit approval of the Crown; first William and Mary and then Anne issued proclamations denouncing the vices of the age and calling for a recovery of piety. Anne issued at least three proclamations "for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Prophaneness, and Immorality" and received her subjects' praise for them in New England, even after her concessions to the Tories who then passed the Occasional Conformity Act. If she was fully aware of the societies' composition, the Queen doubtless regarded the reforming societies with less favor than those given to reviving religion. The reformers' organizations were largely made up of nonconformists and were highly critical of Church and State. The religious societies in contrast were Anglican and had the sanction of solid churchmen all over England.
23
Increase Mather may have learned of these societies while he was in England, but he did not mention them in print until almost ten years after his return in 1692. And in that brief notice rain a preface to a sermon by Samuel Willardhe revealed that his chief interest in them had been aroused by a recent book, by Josiah Woodward, and lay in their requirement that prospective members give an account of their religious purposes and mode of life.
24
Recently engaged in the combat against Stoddard, Increase found in this practice Anglican endorsement of the New England requirement of a relation of conversion experience for Church membership.
25
Cotton Mather surely appreciated this point, and he found Woodward's study absorbing, but not primarily for Increase's reasons. He saw in the English example techniques that might be applied in America, and by 1702 he was busy organizing reforming societies, or as they were sometimes called, Societies To Suppress Disorders. In part, he built upon Puritan experience with religious societies, organizations of laymen that met for prayer and worship. These agencies were voluntary and had no official connections with churches, though they were composed of the most pious of the brethren. Massachusetts had suffered one dreadful experience with such a body led by Mistress Anne Hutchinson. For a few years that trial may have discouraged other attempts to meet in order to talk over sermons in private. Not permanently, however, for Cotton Mather preached to a

Other books

The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
Dark Embrace by Brenda Joyce
The Ties That Bind by Kate Pearce
The 4-Hour Workweek by Ferriss, Timothy
Tom Barry by Meda Ryan
Blackman's Coffin by Mark de Castrique