IN the year 1634, the Archbishop of York, being of an honest mind to snip the pestiferous weeds of dissent that were then sprouting up in his province, sent forth his visitors into Lancashire, for the prosecution of the good work. Straightway, these pleasant gentlemen, holding court at Wigan, summoned before them one Richard

Mather, who humbly confessed that he had been minister of the church at Toxteth for fifteen years, and yet had never in all that time worn a surplice; whereupon, one of these reverend visitors “swore, ‘It had been better for him that he had begotten seven bastards.’”¹ Not having any such extenuating achievements to plead in his behalf, the poor parson, much against his will, “betook himself to a private life;” and in April, of the following year, he made his way stealthily, and in disguise, to Bristol, and thence got ship for Boston, where he arrived on the seventeenth of August, 1635. The long voyage was for him both tedious and perilous; but it brought to him, likewise, its compensations,—one being a spectacle that forever relieved his mind of some previous carnal embarrassment in connection with the difficult story of Jonah: “In the afternoon we saw mighty whales spewing up water in the air, like the smoke of a chimney, and making the sea about them white and hoary, as it is said in job; of such incredible bigness that I will never wonder that the body of Jonah could be in the belly of a whale.”²

     At the time of his arrival in Boston, Richard Mather was thirty-nine years of age; a man of extensive and precise learning in the classics, in the Scriptures, and in divinity; already a famous preacher. “His voice,” we are told, “was loud and big; and uttered with a deliberate vehemency, it procured unto his ministry an awful and very taking majesty.”³ It was of him that the illustrious Thomas Hooker had said, “My brother Mather is a mighty man.”⁴ No wonder that, upon the arrival in New England of this same mighty man, together with his loud and big voice, there was among the churches some brotherly strife for the possession of him. Dorchester, as it chanced, was the fortunate church; for, in 1636, he accepted

its call, and in its service he abode, until April the twenty-second, 1669, when “he quietly breathed forth his last; after he had been about seventy-three years a citizen of the world, and fifty years a minister in the church of God.”¹

     This man, “the progenitor of all the Mathers in New England,”² and the first of a line of great preachers and great men of letters that continued to hold sway there through the entire colonial era, had in himself the chief traits that distinguished his family through so long a period;—great physical endurance, a voracious appetite for the reading of books, an alarming propensity to the writing of books, a love of political leadership in church and state, the faculty of personal conspicuousness, finally, the homiletic gift.

     His numerous writings were, of course, according to the demand of his time and neighborhood;—sermons, a catechism, a treatise on justification, public letters upon church government, several controversial documents, the preface to the Old Bay Psalm Book, and many of the marvels of metrical expression to be viewed in the body of that work.³

     In recognition of his prominence and power in ecclesiastical politics, one of his contemporaries wrote this epitaph for him: “Vixerat in synodis, moritur moderator in illis.”⁴ Yet, as was the case with each of his famous descendants, his true life seemed to be among his books; and he did his share to create the tradition of heroic studiousness attaching to the clergy of colonial New England. On “the morning before he died, he importuned the friends that watched with him, to help him into the room where he thought his usual works and books expected him. To satisfy his importunity, they began to

lead him thither; but finding himself unable to get out of his lodging-room, he said, ‘I see I am not able. I have not been in my study several days; and is it not a lamentable thing that I should lose so much time?’”¹

     This dying speech of the first of the Mathers was, in its spirit, the living speech of all the rest of them, for more than a hundred years. Above all other things, they were a bookish clan. To them, that moment seemed lost, in which, if not publicly preaching or privately plotting, they were not either reading a book, or writing one.

     Of the six sons of Richard Mather, four became famous preachers, two of them in Ireland and in England, other two in New England; the greatest of them all being the youngest, born at Dorchester, June twenty-first, 1639, and at his birth adorned with the name of Increase, in grateful recognition of “the increase of every sort, wherewith God favored the country about the time of his nativity.”²

     Even in childhood he began to display the strong and eager traits that gave distinction and power to his whole life, and that bore him impetuously through the warfare of eighty-four mortal years. At twelve, he entered Harvard College, taking his Bachelor’s degree at seventeen.

     His Latin oration, at Commencement, was so vigorous an assault upon the philosophy of Aristotle, that President Chauncey would have stopped him, had not the Cambridge pastor, Jonathan Mitchell—a man of great authority-cried out in intercession, “Pergat, quaeso, nam doctissime disputat.” In 1657, on his nineteenth birthday, he preached in his father’s pulpit his first sermon,—a sermon so able in matter and in manner, that it greatly added to the general belief that here was a youth from whom more was to be heard by and by. Twelve days afterward, he

sailed for Dublin, where his eldest brother, Samuel, was a noted preacher, and where, entering himself as a student of Trinity College, he took, with high reputation, his Master’s degree in the following year,—declining a fellowship. During the subsequent three years, he exercised his talents as a preacher, with great effect, in various parts of England and in Guernsey; and in 1661, not deeming the outlook an agreeable one, just then, for dissenters in the mother-country, he abandoned his purpose of making a career there, and returned to his native land.

     At once, invitations poured in upon him from “as many places as there are signs for the sun in the Zodiac.” Declining to be settled anywhere in haste, he divided his services between his father’s church at Dorchester and the North Church of Boston; and at last, in May, 1664, he consented to be made minister of the latter church, which, thenceforward, to the end of his own life, and to the end of the life of his more famous son, continued to be the tower and the stronghold of the Mathers in America.

     Thus, before his twenty-sixth birthday, Increase Mather had found the place of his work for life,—a prominent pulpit in the chief town of the New England theocracy. There, wielding the most tremendous weapon of influence known in such a community, he continued to fulminate, to the delight of his adherents, to the great terror of his foes, for almost sixty years; and by force of his learning, his logic, his sense, his eloquence, his tireless energy, his adroitness in intrigue, his sagacity and audacity in partisan command, he became, during the first thirty years of that time, the most powerful man in all that part of the world. In the desperate conflict in which Massachusetts contended with James the Second for its own existence, Increase Mather was a potent counsellor of the people; and for several years, as the representative of his colony at the court of James, and of William and Mary, the Boston pastor proved himself an able and successful diplomats. For sixteen years, also, he filled the high office of president of

Harvard College, without ceasing to be pastor of North Church. From about 1694 and until his death in 1723, his political prestige, even his ecclesiastical prestige, greatly declined; yet to the last, he was a sovereign man throughout New England, illustrious for great talents and great services, both at home and abroad.

     Here, then, was a person, born in America, bred in America,—a clean specimen of what America could do for itself in the way of keeping up the brave stock of its first imported citizens; a man every way capable of filling any place in public leadership made vacant by the greatest of the Fathers; probably not a whit behind the best of them in scholarship, in eloquence, in breadth of view, in knowledge of affairs, in every sort of efficiency.

     As to learning, it has been said¹ that he even exceeded all other New-Englanders of the colonial time, except his own son, Cotton. On the day when he was graduated at our little rustic university, he had the accomplishments usual among the best scholars of the best universities of the old world; he could converse fluently in Latin, and could read and write Hebrew and Greek; and his numberless publications in after life bear marks of a range of learned reading that widened as he went on in years, and drew into its hospitable gulf some portions of nearly all literatures, especially the most obscure and uncouth.

     His habits as a student were those of the mighty theologians and pulpit-orators among whom he grew up. He had the appalling capacity of working in his study sixteen hours a day. One now contemplates with a mixture of admiration and horror—alleviated by incredulity—the picture that has been left us by filial hands, of one of this man’s ordinary working-days: “In the morning, repairing to his study (where his custom was to sit up very late, even until midnight and perhaps after it) he deliberately read a chapter, and made a prayer, and then plied what

of reading and writing he had before him. At nine o’clock, he came down and read a chapter, and made a prayer with his family. He then returned unto the work of the study. Coming down to dinner, he quickly went up again, and begun the afternoon with another prayer. There he went on with the work of the study till the evening. Then with another prayer he again went unto his Father; after which he did more at the work of the study. At nine o’clock, he came down to his family sacrifices. Then he went up again to the work of the study, which anon he concluded with another prayer; and so he betook himself unto his repose.”¹

     His power as a pulpit-orator was very great, and it was bought at a great price. On Monday morning he began his sermons for the next Sunday, and continued to work upon them diligently until Friday night; on Saturday he committed them to memory. Of course, on Sunday, armed thus at every point, he could march into his pulpit with confident tread. Using no manuscript, he spoke without hesitation, “with a grave and wise deliberation,” often with impassioned vehemence. He had, like his father, a commanding voice; and he used it with great effect, at times, indeed, “with such a tonitruous cogency that the hearers would be struck with an awe, like what would be produced on the fall of thunderbolts.”² It was a common saying of his contemporaries, that Increase Mather was “a complete preacher.”

     From a literary point of view, his writings certainly have considerable merit. His style is far better than that of his son,—simpler, more terse, more sinewy and direct, less bedraggled in the dust of pedantry; it has remarkable energy; in many places it is so modern in tone that it would not seem strange in any pulpit now, except for the numerous quotations from Scripture, as well as for an occasional use of some Latin or Greek or Hebrew phrase. Thus, depicting

the victory of Christ over the Devil, the preacher exclaims: “He has led captivity captive. He has disarmed the Devil and all his angels, and, as it were, tied them to his triumphal chariot, and exposed them openly in the sight of heaven and earth.”¹ The worth of a human soul—that enticing and ineffable theme of pulpit-rhetoric in every age—he proclaims in this pithy and vivid manner: “One soul is of more worth than all the world. . . . Every man has . . . a body that must die, and shall die, and a soul that shall never die. To save such a soul is a mightier thing than to save all the bodies in the world.”² In the battle of life, here upon the earth, we are not engaged, he tells us, in an obscure field, or unwatched by throngs of spectators: “Let us always remember what eyes are upon us. There are glorious eyes, which, though we see not them, are observing us in all our motions. The eyes of holy angels are upon us. . . . And the eyes of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, behold us. . . . And the eyes of God behold us. . . . It is reported of a faithful minister of Christ, that there was written on the walls of his study, ‘Deus videt, angeli adstant, conscientia testabitur,’—God seeth thee, angels are by thee, thy own conscience will be a witness how thou dost behave thyself.”³ Sometimes, he casts his thought into an illustration so luminous and so shrewd that it makes further argument unnecessary; as when he says of the government of Massachusetts under Sir Edmund Andros: “The Foxes were now made the administrators of justice to the Poultry.”

     The publications of Increase Mather defy mention, except in the form of a catalogue. From the year 1669, when he had reached the age of thirty, until the year 1723, when he died, hardly a twelvemonth was permitted to pass in which he did not solicit the public attention through the press. An authentic list of his works would include at

least ninety-two titles.¹ The most of these works are sermons; but as sermons, they sweep the entire circuit of themes, sacred and secular, on which men employed their thoughts in those days,—divinity, ethics, casuistry, church government, law, English and American politics, history, prophecy, demonology, angelology, crime, poverty, ignorance, dancing, the Indian question, earthquakes, comets, winds, conflagrations, drunkenness, and the small-pox.

     Of all the great host of Increase Mather’s publications, perhaps only one can be said to have still any power of walking alive on the earth, the book commonly known by a name not given to it by the author, “Remarkable Providences.” The origin of this book is worth mention. As early as 1658, a number of Puritan ministers in England and in Ireland combined to put on record, and finally to publish, authentic accounts of extraordinary interpositions of Providence in recent human affairs. After some progress had been made in the work, it was dropped. Subsequently, the manuscript was sent to New England, probably by Milton’s friend, Samuel Hartlib. For many years it lay in obscurity in Boston, until, by good fortune, it fell into the energetic hands of Increase Mather. The plan was exactly suited to a mind like his; and after communicating it to his clerical brethren, and receiving their cordial encouragement to go on with it, he sent forth proposals through New England, calling upon ministers and other reputable persons to forward to him written narratives of Providential events that had occurred under their own observation. In 1684, the book was published, under the title of “An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences.”² Thus the work is simply a compilation of anecdotes sent to the editor, or culled by him from his own observation and from books, the whole being plentifully

decorated with comments and speculations of his own. The materials are classified under these topics: “remarkable sea-deliverances;” “some other remarkable preservations;” “remarkables about thunder and lightning;” “things preternatural which have happened in New England;” “demons and possessed persons;” “apparitions;” “deaf and dumb persons;” remarkable tempests, earthquakes, and floods in New England; remarkable judgments upon Quakers, drunkards, and enemies of the church; finally, “some remarkables at Norwich in New England.” It cannot be denied that the conception of the book is thoroughly scientific; for it is to prove by induction the actual presence of supernatural forces in the world. Its chief defect, of course, is its lack of all cross-examination of the witnesses, and of all critical inspection of their testimony, together with a palpable eagerness on the author’s part to welcome, from any quarter of the earth or sea or sky, any messenger whatever, who may be seen hurrying toward Boston with his mouth full of marvels. The narratives, often vividly told, are tragic, or amusing, or disgusting, now and then merely stupid; in several particulars they anticipate the phenomena of modern spiritualism; while the philosophical disquisitions of the author are at once a laughable and an instructive memorial of the mental habits of very orthodox and very enlightened people in Protestant Christendom, in the seventeenth century.

     In the intellectual distinction of the Mather family, there seemed to be, for at least three generations, a certain cumulative felicity. The general acknowledgment of this fact is recorded in an old epitaph, composed for the founder of the illustrious tribe:

     This overtopping grandson was, of course, none other than Cotton Mather, the literary behemoth of New England in our colonial era; the man whose fame as a writer surpasses, in later times and especially in foreign countries, that of any other pre-Revolutionary American, excepting Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin.

     The twelfth of February, 1663, was the happy day on which he was bestowed upon the world,—the eldest of a family of ten children, his mother being the only daughter of the celebrated pulpit-orator, John Cotton. In himself, therefore, the forces and graces of two ancestral lines renowned for force and for grace, seemed to meet and culminate.

     From his earliest childhood, and through all his days, he was gazed at and belauded by his immediate associates, as a being of almost supernatural genius, and of quite indescribable godliness. That his nature early became saturated with self-consciousness, and that he grew to be a vast literary and religious coxcomb, is a thing not likely to astonish any one who duly considers, first, the strong original aptitude of the man in that direction, and, secondly, the manner of his mortal life from the cradle to the grave, the idol of a distinguished family, the prodigy both of school and of college, the oracle of a rich parish, the pet and demi-god of an endless series of sewing-societies.

     It may be said of Cotton Mather, that he was born with an enormous memory, an enormous appetite for every species of knowledge, an enormous zeal and power for work, an enormous passion for praise. At his birth, also, he came into a household of books and of students. The first breath he drew was air charged with erudition. His toys and his playmates were books. The dialect of his childhood was the ponderous phraseology of philosophers and divines. To be a scholar was a part of the family inheritance. At eleven years of age, he was a freshman in Harvard College; having, however, before

that time, read Homer and Isocrates, and many unusual Latin authors, and having, likewise, entered upon the congenial employment of exhorting his juvenile friends to lives of godliness, and even of writing “poems of devotion” for their private use. At fifteen, on taking his first degree, he had the pleasure of hearing the president of the college address to him, by name, in the presence of the great throng at commencement, a glowing compliment,—admirably constructed to ripen in this precocious and decidedly priggish young gentleman his already well-developed sense of his own importance. At eighteen, on taking his second degree, he delivered a learned and persuasive thesis, on “the divine origin of the Hebrew points.”

     One year before the event last mentioned, he began to preach. Being oppressed by a grievous habit of stammering, he was on the point of abandoning the ministry for the medical profession, when “that good old schoolmaster, Mr. Corlet,” told him that he could cure himself of his trouble, if he would but remember always to speak” with a dilated deliberation.” He adopted the suggestion, and was cured.¹ At the age of twenty-two, he was made an associate of his father in the pastorship of North Church, Boston. There, in the pauseless prosecution of almost incredible labors, literary, philanthropic, oratorical, and social, he continued to the end of his days on earth. He departed this life in 1728, having been permitted to contemplate, for many years and with immense delight, the progress of his own fame, as it reverberated through Christendom.

     Upon the whole, the picture of Cotton Mather, given to us in his own writings, and in the writings of those who knew him and loved him, is one of surpassing painfulness. We see a person whose intellectual endowments were quite remarkable, but inflated and perverted by egotism; him

self imposed upon by his own moral affectations; completely surrendered to spiritual artifice; stretched, every instant of his life, on the rack of ostentatious exertion, intellectual and religious, and all this partly for vanity’s sake, partly for conscience’ sake—in deference to a dreadful system of ascetic and pharisaic formalism, in which his nature was hopelessly enmeshed.

     In his fourteenth year, he began the habit of frequent fasts and vigils, to which he attached a superstitious importance, and which he kept up with increasing intensity to the end of his life. He desired “to resemble a rabbi mentioned in the Talmud, whose face was black by reason of his fastings;”¹ and it was computed that, in the course of his life, the number of his special fast-days amounted to four hundred and fifty.² Once, in his old age, he abstained from all food three days together, and spent the time, as he expressed it, “in knocking at the door of heaven.”

     Moreover, he prescribed to himself a scheme of minute rules for the association of devout thoughts with every occurrence of the day or the night: “When he heard a clock strike, he could not help thinking and wishing that he might so number his days as to apply his heart to wisdom.” “When he knocked at a door, the faith of our Saviour’s promise was awakened in him—‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you.’” “When he mended his fire, it was with a meditation how his heart and life might be rectified, and how, through the emendations of divine grace, his love and zeal might flame more agreeably.” “When he put out his candle, it must be done with an address to the Father of Lights, that his light might not be put out in obscure darkness.”¹ In drinking a dish of tea—of which he was a great admirer—he would take occasion for these thoughts, . . . that should have many sweet

acknowledgments of the glorious Jesus in them. And whatever delight any of his senses took, it was soon sanctified and rendered more delightful, by his making such an improvement of it.” “When the Doctor waked in the night, he would impose it as a law upon himself, ever, before he fell asleep again, to bring some glory of his Saviour into his meditations, and have some agreeable desire of his soul upon it.” “When he washed his hands, he must think of the clean hands, as well as pure heart, which belong to the citizens of Zion.” “And when he did so mean an action as paring his nails, he thought how he might lay aside all superfluity of naughtiness.” “He had many years a morning cough; it every morning ‘raised’ proper dispositions of piety in him.” “Upon the sight of a tall man, he said, ‘Lord, give that man high attainments in Christianity; let him fear God above many:’ a negro, ‘Lord, wash that poor soul; make him white by the washing of thy Spirit:’ a man going by without observing him, ‘Lord, I pray thee help that man to take a due notice of Christ.’”¹ In his early days, Cotton Mather was a great sufferer from toothache; and, of course, “in these pains,” instead of inferring that some of his teeth were decayed and needed to be pulled out, “he would set himself, as well as he could, to try his ways. He considered whether or no he had not sinned with his teeth. How? By sinful and excessive eating; and by evil speeches, for there are ‘literae dentales’ used in them.”² One would like to suppose that, at least in the matter of love and marriage, Cotton Mather gave himself some slight release from these fanatic pedantries. Not so; for we read that “he thought it advisable in his twenty-fourth year to marry. He first looked up to Heaven for direction, and heard the counsel of his friends. The person he first pitched upon, was”³—the one who had the honor of

marching for a few years at the head of his procession of three wives.

     If, now, we may be permitted to stand, for some moments, in the presence of this great man, and to make a study of his literary significance in our annals, it is very likely that we shall be impressed, first of all, even as his contemporaries were, by his vast industry, the variety of his acquisitions, and his almost illimitable prolificacy.

     At the age of sixteen, he had drawn up for himself systems of all the sciences. Besides the ancient languages, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, which he used with facility, he knew French, Spanish, and even one of the Indian tongues, and prided himself on having composed and published works in most of them. It was his ambition to be acquainted with all branches of knowledge, with all spheres of thought; to get sight of all books. His library was the largest private collection on the American continent. They who called upon him in his study, were instructed by this legend written in capitals above the door: “Be Short.” He had no time to waste. He was always at work. They who beheld him marvelled at his power of dispatching most books at a glance, and yet of possessing all that was in them. “He would ride post through an author.”¹ “He pencilled as he went along, and at the end reduced the substance to his commonplaces, to be reviewed at leisure; and all this with wonderful celerity.”² The results of all his omnivorous readings were at perfect command; his talk overflowed with learning and wit “he seemed to have an inexhaustible source of divine flame and vigor. . . . How instructive, learned, pious, and engaging was he in his private converse; superior company for the greatest of men. . . . How agreeably tempered with a various mixture of wit and cheerfulness.”³ The readers of his books may, indeed, infer from

them something of his splendid powers of intellect; but they cannot “imagine that extraordinary lustre of pious and useful literature, wherewith we were every day entertained, surprised, and satisfied, who dwelt in the directer rays, in the more immediate vision.”¹ The people in daily association with him were, indeed, constantly amazed at “the capacity of his mind, the readiness of his wit, the vastness of his reading, the strength of his memory, . . . the tenor of a most entertaining and profitable conversation.”²

     On his death-bed, he gave to his son, Samuel, this final charge: “Remember only that one word—‘Fructuosus.’”³ It seemed the hereditary motto of the Mathers. He himself could have uttered no word more descriptive of the passion and achievement of his own life. There is a chronological list⁴ of the publications made in America during the colonial time; and it is swollen and overlaid by the name of Cotton Mather, and by the polyglot and arduous titles of his books. We are told that in a single year, besides doing all his work as minister of a great metropolitan parish, and besides keeping sixty fasts and twenty vigils, he published fourteen books. The whole number of his separate writings published during his lifetime, exceeds three hundred and eighty-three. No wonder that his contemporaries took note of such fecundity. . One of them exclaimed:

     Another one declared:

     Very likely, however, the astonishment we may feel at the multitude of his productions, will be considerably tempered

if we force ourselves to the exertion of looking into them; for not many of these productions are large works, or represent labor beyond his direct preparations for the pulpit. As our eyes run along the columns crowded with the names of his books, we seem to get nearer to the intellectual character of the writer of them, and of the age he lived in, to find under what remote and freakish designations even very commonplace subjects are announced: “Adversus Libertinos; or, Evangelical Obedience Described;” “Boanerges, A Short Essay to strengthen the Impressions Produced by Earthquakes;” “Christianus per Ignem; or, a Disciple Warming of Himself and Owning of his Lord;” “Coheleth, A Soul upon Recollection coming into incontestable Sentiments of Religion;” “Hatzar-Maveth, Comfortable Words, the Comforts of One Walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death;” “Nails Fastened; or, Proposals of Piety Complied Withal;” “Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, A Discourse which Directs the Female Sex how to Express the Fear of God, and Obtain Temporal and Eternal Blessedness;” “Orphanotrophium; or, Orphans Well-provided for in the Divine Providence;” “Fasciculus Viventium, Essay on a Soul Bound up in the Bundle of Life;” “Ecclesiæ Monilla, The Peculiar Treasure of the Almighty King Opened.”

     The most famous book produced by him,—the most famous book, likewise, produced by any American during the colonial time,—is one to which, in these pages, we have often gone for curious spoils: “Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first planting, in the year 1620, unto the year of our Lord 1698.”¹

     From the diary a of Cotton Mather, it appears that he

conceived the design of this work in 1693, He being then thirty years of age; that in 1695, he published a prospectus of it; that in August, 1697, he set apart a day for secret thanksgiving to God for divine help in finishing it; and that thenceforward until 1702, when the book came from the press in London, he had innumerable prayers, tears, prostrations, and elevations, respecting its safe transmission to England and its slow and dubious struggle into print. On the twenty-seventh of November, 1697, “I did, at the close of the day, prostrate on my study-floor, joyfully receive . . . assurances from Heaven, . . . that there are good news coming to me from England . . . about the future publication of my

Church History.’” The twelfth of January, 1698, “I set apart . . . for the exercise of a secret fast before the Lord,” for “the direction of Heaven about my ‘Church History,’ the time and way of my sending it into Europe, and the methods of its publication.” On the fourth of March, 1698, “in the close of the day, as I lay prostrate on my study-floor, in the dust, before the Lord, . . . it was told me from heaven that” my Church History “shall be carried safe to England, and there employed for the service of my glorious Lord.” On the sixth of June, 1701, “the Lord supports and comforts my faith about my “Church History.’” On the thirteenth of June, 1701, “I received letters from London. . . . My ‘Church History’ is a bulky thing. . . . The impression will cost about six hundred pounds. The booksellers in London are cold about it.” On the twelfth of February, 1702, though the publication of the book has been “thus long delayed and obstructed and clogged,” “an heavenly afflatus causes me sometimes to fall into tears of joy, assured that the Lord has heard my supplications about this matter.” On the fourth of April, 1702, “I was in much distress . . . concerning my ‘Church History.’ . . ‘Wherefore, I set apart a vigil this night. . . . Accordingly, in the dead of the night, I first sang some agreeable psalms; and then, casting myself prostrate into the dust, on my study-floor,

before the Lord, I confessed unto him the sins for which he might justly reject me and all my services.” On the eleventh of April, in a vigil, “my mind is irradiated with celestial and angelical influences, assuring of me that my ‘Church History’ shall not be lost, but shall come abroad.” On the twenty-ninth of October, 1702, “I first saw my ‘Church History,’ since the publication of it. A gentleman arrived here from Newcastle in England, that had bought it there.” Wherefore, the following day “I set apart . . . for solemn thanksgiving unto God for his watchful and gracious providence over that work, and for the harvest of so many prayers and cares and tears and resignations as I had employed upon it.”

     The “Magnalia” is, indeed, what the author called it, “a bulky thing,”—the two volumes of the latest edition having upwards of thirteen hundred pages. Its scope may be sufficiently seen by a glance at the subjects of the seven books into which it is divided. The first book is a history of the settlement of New England; the second contains “the lives of the governors and the names of the magistrates that have been shields unto the churches of New England; “the third recounts” the lives of sixty famous divines, by whose ministry the churches of New England have been planted and continued;” the fourth is devoted to the history of Harvard College, and of “some eminent persons therein educated;” the fifth describes “the faith and order of the churches;” the sixth speaks of “many illustrious discoveries and demonstrations of the Divine Providence in remarkable mercies and judgments;” and the seventh, entitled “A Book of the Wars of the Lord,” narrates “the afflictive disturbances which the churches of New England have suffered from their various adversaries”—the Devil, Separatists, Familists, Antinomians, Quakers, clerical impostors, and Indians.

     Here is an imposing array of historical topics; and for the treatment of them, no other man ever had, or ever can have, such advantages as had Cotton Mather:—multitudes

of original papers of all sorts within easy reach, that have since perished; personal acquaintance with all the great New England leaders or with those who had personally known them; finally, access to innumerable and most valuable oral traditions, which afterward would have died for lack of record. On the other hand, it must be said that for the performance of careful and disinterested historical work, few men that have undertaken it, ever had greater disadvantages; since there were in him traits that constituted an intellectual and moral inability to be either accurate or fair. He had an insuperable fondness for tumultuous, swelling, and flabby declamation, and for edifying remarks, in place of a statement of the exact facts in the case; infinite credulity; infinite carelessness; finally, a disposition to stain the chaste pages of history with the tints of his family friendships and his family feuds.

     Upon the whole, as an historian, he was unequal to his high opportunity. The “Magnalia” has great merits; it has, also, fatal defects. In its mighty chaos of fables and blunders and misrepresentations, are of course lodged many single facts of the utmost value, personal reminiscences, social gossip, snatches of conversation, touches of description, traits of character and life, that can be found nowhere else, and that help us to paint for ourselves some living picture of the great men and the great days of early New England; yet herein, also, history and fiction are so jumbled and shuffled together, that it is never possible to tell, without other help than the author’s, just where the fiction ends and the history begins. On no disputed question of fact is the unaided testimony of Cotton Mather of much weight; and it is probably true, as a very acute though very unfriendly modern critic of his has declared, that he has “published more errors of carelessness than any other writer on the history of New England.”¹ Though the fame of the “Magnalia” overshadows that

of all the other writings produced by its author, it was the book of a young man—if, indeed, we are permitted to suppose that Cotton Mather ever was a young man. Of the books he wrote after that, and especially in his later years, several are more readable, and perhaps also more valuable, than the work on which his literary renown principally rests.

     One of these is “Bonifacius, An Essay upon the Good that is to be Devised and Designed, with Proposals of unexceptionable Methods to do Good in the World: “a book quite remarkable for the clear ingenuity and the fascinating power with which it reduces charity to an exact science, and plans the systematic transaction of good deeds on business principles; a book to which Benjamin Franklin,¹ in his old age, paid the highest tribute—saying, that it had largely directed his conduct through life, and had done much to make him a useful citizen of the world; a book which holds the germs and hints of nearly all those vast organizations of benevolence that have been the glory of the years since it was written.

     Upon the great and agitating theme of psalmody in his time, Cotton Mather obviously needed to be heard; and in 1718, he expressed himself on the subject, with his usual explicitness, in “Psalterium Americanum,” which is simply “The Book of Psalms” translated from the Hebrew into English blank-verse. In his introduction to the work, he laments that in all the many versions of the Psalms before his own, “those rich things which the Holy Spirit of God speaks in the original Hebrew,” are confounded with the rubbish of human inventions, and all this “merely for the sake of preserving the clink of the rhyme, which after all is of small consequence unto a generous poem, and of none at all unto the melody of singing,—but of how little, then, in singing unto the Lord.”¹

     Probably the most vigorous and entertaining book that

he ever wrote, is one that is also the most characteristic expression of his later mental development, “Manuductio ad Ministerium,”—a manual of “directions for a candidate of the ministry,” published at Boston in 1726, only two years before the author’s death. It describes, first, what the religious character of the candidate should be; secondly, what course he should take for his intellectual improvement; and, thirdly, what should be his “conduct after his appearance in the world,”—all intended to make him “a skilful and useful minister of the gospel.” The book is written heartily, with real enthusiasm for the subject, and with greater directness and simplicity of style than the author has shown in any other work. Of course, being written by Cotton Mather, it is ostentatious of his vast reading and of his heroic grasp of all studies; it is, also, in some measure, an index to the state of literature, of science, of criticism, of general culture, in New England at that time; and, in many places, it is positively sprightly and amusing.

     As would be expected, he draws out a generous scheme of study for his clerical protégé; summons him to make all knowledge tributary to his splendid vocation; bids him scorn the shallow and ignorant notions of professional attainment then spreading in New England. He urges him, for instance, to become a master of Hebrew; although that language “is fallen under so much disrepute as to make a learned man almost afraid of owning that he has anything of it, lest it should bring him under the suspicion of being an odd, starved, lank sort of a thing, who had lived only on Hebrew roots all his days.”¹

     He urges upon the young minister the need of mastering the lessons of history, and yet to be on his guard against the falsehoods of history—a theme on which Cotton Mather had an uncommon right to speak: “The instances wherein false history has been imposed upon the

world are what cannot be numbered. Historians have generally taken after their father, Herodotus; . . . though they have not all of them always been such mercenary villains . . . as that scandalous fellow, who . . . hired himself out as an history-writer for the highest bidder. . . . Yea, there are historians of whom one can scarcely tell, which to admire most, the nature of their lies, or their manner of telling them—I mean, the impudence with which they tell them. . . . Be sure, the late historians that pretend unto an History of England, . . . write with such flagrant partialities, and are such evident leasing-makers, . . . that one may as well believe the ‘True History’ of a Lucian, as yield any credit unto them. . . . Indeed, the historians never keep closer to the way of lying, than in the relation they give of those twenty years which passed after the beginning of our Civil Wars. . . . Among these, the romance that goes under the title of ‘The History of the Grand Rebellion,’ and is fathered on the Earl of Clarendon, I would have you more particularly treat with the disregard that is proper for it.”¹

     In directing his pupil to the study of natural philosophy, he passes into a satirical denunciation of Aristotle: “When I said natural philosophy, you may be sure I did not mean the Peripatetic. . . . It is, indeed, amazing to see the fate of the writings which go under the name of Aristotle. First, falling into the hands of those who could not read them, and yet for the sake of the famous author were willing to keep them, they were for a long while hid under ground, where many of them deserved a lodging. And from this place of darkness, the torn and worn manuscripts were anon fetched out, and imperfectly and unfaithfully enough transcribed, and conveyed from Athens to Rome. . . . The Saracens by and by got them. . . . When learning revived under Charlemagne, all Europe turned Aristotelian; yea, in some universities they swore allegiance to

him; and, O monstrous! if I am rot misinformed, they do, in some universities at this day, foolishly and profanely on their knees continue to do so. With the vile person that made himself the head of the Church at Rome, this muddy-headed pagan divided the empire over the Christian world; but extended his empire further than he, or even Tamerlane. The very Jews themselves became his vassals. . . . And though Europe has, with fierce and long struggles about it, begun to shake off the shackles, he does to this day . . . continue to tyrannize over human understanding in a great part of the oriental world. No mortal else ever had such a prerogative to govern mankind as this philosopher, who, after the prodigious cartloads of stuff that has been written to explain him, . . . he yet remains in many . . . things sufficiently unintelligible, and forever in almost all things unprofitable. Avicen, after he had read his Metaphysics forty times over, and had them all by heart, was forced after all to lay them aside in despair of ever understanding them.’”

     In this fatherly talk of an elderly prophet with one of his professional sons, he does not always succeed in keeping upon the level of ordinary discourse, but occasionally ascends to the grand style that is most natural to him; as when he imparts to the youth this consoling assurance “I will not now suppose a quinquarticular controversy, but rather propose a ternaticular period of all controversies.”²

     The true place of Cotton Mather in our literary history is indicated when we say, that he was in prose writing, exactly what Nicholas Noyes was in poetry, the last, the most vigorous, and, therefore, the most disagreeable representative of the Fantastic school in literature; and that, like Nicholas Noyes, he prolonged in New England the methods of that school even after his most cultivated contemporaries there had outgrown them, and had

come to dislike them. The expulsion of the beautiful from thought, from sentiment, from language; a lawless and a merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent; strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase;—these are the traits of Cotton Mather’s writing, even as they are the traits common to that perverse and detestable literary mood that held sway in different countries of Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its birthplace was Italy; New England was its grave; Cotton Mather was its last great apostle.

     His writings, in fact, are an immense reservoir of examples in Fantastic prose. Their most salient characteristic is pedantry,—a pedantry that is gigantic, stark, untempered, rejoicing in itself, unconscious of shame, filling all space in his books like an atmosphere. The mind of Cotton Mather was so possessed by the books he had read, that his most common thought had to force its way into utterance through dense hedges and jungles of quotation. Not only every sentence, but nearly every clause, pivots itself on some learned allusion; and by inveterate habit he had come to consider all subjects, not directly, but in their reflections and echoes in books. It is quite evident, too, that, just as the poet often shapes his idea to his rhymes and is helped to an idea by his rhyme, so Mather’s mind acquired the knack of steering his thought so as to take in his quotation, from which in turn, perhaps, he reaped another thought.

     That his manner of writing outlived the liking of his contemporaries, especially his later contemporaries, is plain. The best of them,—Jeremiah Dummer, Benjamin Colman, John Barnard, Mather Byles, Charles Chauncey, Jonathan Mayhew, rejected his style, and formed themselves, instead, upon the temperate and tasteful prose that had already come into use in England; while, even by his most devoted admirers, the vices of his literary expression were acknowledged. Thomas Prince, for example, gently said

of him: “In his style he was something singular, and not so agreeable to the gust of the age.”¹ Even his own son, Samuel Mather, regretted his fault of “straining for far-fetched and dear-bought hints.”²

     But Cotton Mather had not formed his style by accident, nor was he without a philosophy to justify it. In early life he described his compositions as ornamented “by the multiplied references to other and former concerns, closely couched, for the observation of the attentive, in almost every paragraph;” and declared that this was “the best way of writing.”³ And in his old age, nettled by the many sarcastic criticisms that were made upon his style by presumptuous persons even in his own city, he resumed the subject; and in a simple and trenchant passage, of real worth not only for itself but for its bearing upon the literary spirit of the period, he proudly defended his own literary manner, and even retorted criticism upon the literary manner of his assailants: “There has been a deal of ado about a style. . . . There is a way of writing, wherein the author endeavors that the reader may have something to the purpose in every paragraph. There is not only a vigor sensible in every sentence, but the paragraph is embellished with profitable references, even to something beyond what is directly spoken. Formal and painful quotations are not studied; yet all that could be learned from them is insinuated. The writer pretends not unto reading, yet he could not have writ as he does if he had not read very much in his time; and his composures are not only a cloth of gold, but also stuck with as many jewels as the gown of a Russian ambassador. This way of writing has been decried by many, and is at this day more than ever so, for the same reason that in the old story the grapes were decried, ‘That they were not ripe.’ A lazy, ignorant, conceited set of authors would

persuade the whole tribe to lay aside that way of writing, for the same reason that one would have persuaded his brethren to part with the encumbrance of their bushy tails. But, however fashion and humor may prevail, they must not think that the club at their coffee-house is all the world. But there will always be those who will in this case be governed by indisputable reason, and who will think that the real excellency of a book will never lie in saying of little; that the less one has for his money in a book, ’tis really the more valuable for it; and that the less one is instructed in a book, and the more of superfluous margin and superficial harangue, and the less of substantial matter one has in it, the more ’tis to be accounted of. And if a more massy way of writing be never so much disgusted at this day, a better gust will come on. . . . The blades that set up for critics, appear to me, for the most part, as contemptible as they are a supercilious generation. . . . Nor can you easily find any one thing wherein they agree for their style, except perhaps a perpetual care to give us jejune and empty pages. . . . There is much talk of a florid style obtaining among the pens that are most in vogue; but how often would it puzzle one, even with the best glasses, to find the flowers. . . . After all, every man will have his own style, which will distinguish him as much as his gait.”¹

     SAMUEL MATHER, the son of Cotton Mather, was born in 1706; was graduated at Harvard College in 1723; and in 1732, became one of the pastors of the church in the service of which his father and his grandfather had spent their lives. In 1741, in consequence of disaffection in that church, he led off a portion of it, and formed a new church, of which he continued to be the pastor until his

death, in 1785. In him, evidently, the ancestral fire had become almost extinct. He had abundant learning; was extremely industrious; published many things—discourses, a biography of his father, theological and historical treatises, even a poem; but there was not in them, as there was not in him, the victorious energy of an original mind, or even the winning felicity of an imitative one. In the strifes of the Revolution his course was both patriotic and bitter: he differed from some of his kindred, by taking the side of the colonies against the king; he disinherited his only son for loyalty to the Crown; he described his loyalist brother-in-law, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, as a “misguided and avaricious” man, and as “doomed to perpetual infamy;” and the whole “body of Tories and Refugees,” he denounced, in the language of William Pitt, as “the most infamous scoundrels on the face of the earth.”¹ He was a sturdy and a worthy man. He left no successor to continue the once-splendid dynasty of his tribe. He was the last, and the least, of the Mathers.