It is a fact of general observation that hereditary talent is rare. The history of our country, whether in the ecclesiastical or secular field, shows but few instances in which prominent service has been rendered by three generations of the same lineage. There have been, indeed, conspicuous exceptions to this wellnigh universal rule. The Winthrops and the Adamses of Massachusetts, for instance, or the Edwardses in the Connecticut valley, have placed their country in debt to their successive generations. But these illustrations are noticeable for their uncommonness. They seem to defy the universal law; and we look upon there with interest because, while they reveal the possibility of an aristocracy of birth and service, they show that the democratic constitution of America accords substantially with the general principles which govern our race in its development.

     Such an instance of exceptional ability descending from father to son, which fitted four generations to hold positions of prominence and three generations of the same name to take high rank among the ecclesiastical leaders of their time, is to be found in the story of the Mathers of Massachusetts in the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth centuries. It would be far beyond the scope of the present paper to essay anything like a full biographical portrait

of these men,¹ which should set forth with adequacy the qualities which made them of service to their time or which exposed them to criticism; or even to give an account of any considerable part of their voluminous writings. The utmost that can be attempted in the brief time allotted to this theme is to point out some of the contributions of Richard, Increase, and Cotton Mather to the development, maintenance, and memory of the peculiar ecclesiastical system of New England. In this work, with much similarity of aim and method, each labored in a different way. The first of the line upon American soil, Richard, may be described as the developer of Congregational polity; to his son Increase belongs the distinction of having defended the ecclesiastical system from political dangers, while his grandson, Cotton, was pre-eminently the historian of the New England Puritans and the preserver of their memorials.

     Richard Mather came to America from a Puritan ministry at Toxteth Park, in the neighborhood of Liverpool, in 1635 when about thirty-nine years of age. A man of mature judgment, if he had not been as prominent in the mother-country as Hooker or Cotton, his talents were well known, and led to his speedy settlement (1636) over the newly organized or re-organized² church at Dorchester, where he spent his ministry till his death in 1669. But no single parish could bound his activity, nor was it the welfare of the new settlements on the Massachusetts shore alone that engrossed his thoughts. The emigrants who came from Old England to the New in the second quarter of the seventeenth century had no intention of renouncing their interests in English home-affairs, nor were they considered separated in aim and purpose from those of like faith whom they had left behind.³ They were looked upon by the Puritan party

in England as an advance-guard, the leaders in the movement for a reformed church, which was the supreme topic of thought in hundreds of English homes. Their working out of the problem of church reformation was watched with great interest and not a little concern by the Puritans of the mother-country. The settlers of Massachusetts Bay, of Connecticut, and New Haven had sailed from English shores as Non-Conformists, not as Separatists. But the churches which they established in the New World were all patterned on that of Separatist Plymouth. Such action naturally excited alarm in the minds of those in England who still hoped for the reformation of the Establishment, especially that large section of the Puritan party who were inclined toward Presbyterianism. As a result of this feeling of anxiety over the New England innovations, two series of questions were sent over the sea by English Puritan ministers in 1636 or 1637¹ making inquiry regarding the whole New England system of church government. The briefer and less important of these series, consisting of nine propositions, was answered by John Davenport of New Haven.² The more important, covering with its thirty-two questions nearly the whole practice of the Congregational churches on this side of the ocean, was replied to by Richard Mather, who, though he was one of the later comers among the ministry of these new churches, came forward as the fullest expounder of their methods.

     In this work Mather set forth the New England views as to the constitution, power, and officers of a church; the conditions of membership, the treatment of members of English churches emigrating to America, ministerial standing, voting in matters of church government, lay-preaching,

and, in fact, nearly the whole range of polity and procedure. While Mather wrote throughout the tract as if speaking in the name of the ministers of the infant colonies, the work was wholly his own¹; but it set forth, better even than the later treatises of Cotton and Hooker, the actual practice of New England during the first decade of the Puritan settlement and was doubtless to a considerable extent formative in its influence. Like most of the writings of Richard Mather, the Answer to the Thirty-two Questions, is marked by simplicity, directness, and common-sense, and an entire absence of that literary pedantry which is so conspicuous a feature of the work of his grandson Cotton.

     The prominence attained by Richard Mather as an expounder of the New England church-way was increased speedily after the issue of the work at which we have glanced by the publication of several pamphlets of a controversial nature, all designed to set forth more clearly the polity which he had at heart. The first of these was an exposition of that fundamental basis of the Congregational structure, the church-covenant,—the agreement into which a believer enters with his God and with his fellow-disciples, and which according to Congregational thinking is the essential bond of union which transforms a company of Christians into a church. This cogent and candid discussion, the most elaborate treatment of this single theme which early Congregationalism

produced, was doubtless intended ultimately for the press by its author; but a stray copy having reached England through some unknown channel,¹ it was put forth to the world in 1643, as an Apologie of the Chvrches in New-England . . . Sent over in Answer to Master Bernard, in the Yeare 1639,—an authoritative title which, with all its excellencies, this work of a single New England pastor did not deserve. But if the title given to these publications by friends of the New England cause in England² led to a misunderstanding of the exact extent to which he was the spokesman of the churches of the colonies across the Atlantic,³ the care of the presentation and its fairness and fullness made Mather’s work such as to render the error a venial one.

     The two other tracts to which reference has been made were liable to no such misconception and were of much less importance. They had their origin in an attack upon the Congregational polity, written in a candid spirit by Rev. Charles Herle of Winwick, England.⁴ Possibly this criticism of the New England way might have passed without reply from Mather, had it not been for the peculiar interest which he felt in Winwick parish as the place of his birth⁵; and this interest was shared by Mather’s clerical neighbor, William Tompson, of Braintree, who had been one of Herle’s predecessors in the Winwick pulpit. The result was the publication at London in 1644 of A Modest & Brotherly Answer, in which the two New England ministers take the Winwick

pastor briefly to task for his strictures on Congregationalism and set forth their conception of the constitution and powers of a church and its officers. This little tractate came to the notice of Prof. Samuel Rutherford, the able and kindly champion of the Presbyterian theories of Scotland, who took frequent occasion to criticise its teachings¹ in his own great Presbyterian treatise of 1644, The Due Right of Presbyteries, a work in which he also handled Mather’s Answer to Thirty-two Questions and his Apologie . . . for Church-Covenant. To this Mather answered as soon as he was able after the tardy intercourse of the times had brought Rutherford’s book to his study table; confining himself chiefly to the question, fundamental to the Presbyterian attack on the Congregational position, as to the authority of synods as courts of appeal and the competency of each local congregation to carry on its own government. The elaborateness with which Mather follows the turnings of Rutherford’s argument makes this Reply rather dry reading, like Hooker’s Summe of Church Discipline, to which the same treatise of the Scotch divine gave rise; but the New England apologist certainly held his own in the argument.

     Thus already in the forefront, the peer of Cotton and Hooker as an expounder of New England Congregationalism, Richard Mather was naturally one of the men first thought of to draught the polity of the churches in written form, when fear of the rising tide of Presbyterianism in England and opposition from disaffected residents of Massachusetts had led to the calling of the Cambridge synod in 1646 to formulate and consolidate the New England system to meet any threatened attack. By appointment of the synod he was directed to prepare a tentative Platform,² a task which was also laid on Rev. John Cotton of Boston

and Rev. Ralph Partridge of Duxbury, and certainly performed by the latter. But such were the excellences of Mather’s work, in view of the body whose representative he was, that when the Cambridge Platform was issued it was chiefly clothed in the language of his draught.¹ To Mather, then, more than to any other of the New England ministers, is due the form of this authoritative exposition of early American Congregationalism. In its preparation he made large use of his previous writings on matters of polity. It is the summing up of his own best thoughts on the subject, not without careful consideration of what had been set forth on the theme by other New England divines,² and the Platform, though doubtless little deserving the excessive reverence with which it has been venerated by the churches during much of this history since, is by far the best statement of Congregational principles which the seventeenth century produced, and has been largely formative in Congregational development. Had Richard Mather done nothing more than draught the Cambridge Platform he would have deserved to rank among the foremost expounders of New England polity.

     After the Cambridge Platform no contributions of equal moment came from Richard Mather’s pen. But he was not a conservative in the sense in which his son Increase and his grandson Cotton were conservatives. The great problem of polity which, though held in the background at the Cambridge Synod, refused to be quieted, and which turmoiled the sixth and seventh decades of the seventeenth century throughout New England, was that regarding the rights of those children of church-members who, though born of parents in covenant church-relation and baptized, could not lay claim to a personal regenerative work of God. Such persons were a growing factor in the New England population as the second generation attained maturity, and the

religious fervor of the first emigration spent its force. Their desire for recognition by the churches has often, but most erroneously, been represented as primarily political. But the demand was as earnest in Connecticut where no political disabilities attached to the non-church-members, as in Massachusetts where membership was a condition of the franchise. And the desire of the majority of New England ministers to have churchly privileges extended to this class of the community was greater than any impulse which went out from the persons whose status was in debate. That this was the case was natural. These children of the church, though not professing Christians, were yet reckoned as church-members by right of the covenant relations of their parents. If their right to transmit the same degree of membership was denied, as it had been by most of the expounders of Congregational polity in the early days of the settlements, a large class of the community would be released from the watch and control of the churches. Yet it was not thought wise to admit them to the Lord’s Table, because they were not possessed of personal religious experience. And hence after long debate, and in spite of earnest opposition, the majority of the New England churches settled down on the view that these non-regenerate children of church-members were sufficiently church-members themselves to transmit the same status of covenant relationship and its accompanying seal of baptism to their offspring; and yet not members enough to partake of the Lord’s Supper, or to vote in church affairs. This compromise, since it admitted this great class of persons to a part of the privileges of the churches while excluding them from the rest, was not inaptly nicknamed the Half-Way Covenant. But the interest of this debate for our present story is through the part taken in it by Richard Mather. Though he had expressed himself in opposition to the baptism of children whose parents, or at least one of them, were not professing Christians,¹ he was one of the earliest to embrace the newer views, and one of the strongest advocates of the Half-Way

practice.¹ After the Synod of 1662, of which, as well as of the Ministers’ Meeting of 1657, he was a member, he defended its result against the strictures of John Davenport of New Haven.² In spite of the fact that his sons Eleazar³ and Increase⁴ at first opposed him, his voice was doubtless one of the most potent in favor of the larger baptism, more especially as the death of Hooker in 1647 and of Cotton in 1652 had left him the sole survivor of the three great early leaders of American Congregational thought. But though influential in the community at large, it is curious to note that, in spite of frequent debate, and the well known views of the pastor, Richard Mather’s Dorchester church did not adopt the Half-Way practice till 1677,⁵ when he had been released from his earthly labors for more than seven years. His death-bed exhortation to his son was fidelity in the administration of the Half-Way Covenant as a means of Christian nurture for the young.⁶

     Taken all in all, no one of the early ministers of New England exercised a more potent, and none so protracted an influence on the development of Congregational polity, as it existed in the seventeenth century, as Richard Mather. He was the recorder of its actual practice, the framer of its standards, and one of the prime movers in the attempts of his age for its modification and further adaptation to the needs of the time, as those needs were then understood. He may have turned in a direction at times which later generations think no line of progress, as when he supported the Half-Way Covenant movement, but there can be no doubt that he was largely instrumental in guiding the growth of Congregationalism in his own lifetime, and in giving to it tendencies which continued long after he was gone.

     The leadership of Richard Mather in the ecclesiastical life of the new colonies was shared with several others of equal ability, like Cotton and Hooker,—the pre-eminence of his youngest son, Increase, in the next generation was without a rival. Richard Mather left several sons of distinction, two of whom, Samuel and Nathanael, exercised protracted ministries in Dublin and London, and one, Eleazar, died in the beginnings of a pastorate of promise in Northampton, Mass., but none of them compared in ability or reputation with Increase. He has been most variously judged. He was by no means universally popular in his lifetime. He was essentially a conservative in his own thinking. His ideal was the doctrinal system of the New England of his early youth, and his view of civil government held as best the ministerial influence in the counsels of the colonies which he saw pass away in his own lifetime. It was his fate to see the town where he exercised his pastorate, and the college which was the object of his solicitude, slip from his grasp during his later life, and move in the direction of a theologic liberalism which he believed fatal to the churches. He pushed his plans with an uncompromisingness which made him many enemies in his own lifetime, and which has exposed his memory to charges of self-seeking narrowness.¹ But when all deductions have been made, there is no man who compares with him in the New England of his day in ability, leadership, or influence, or who more sincerely labored for what he deemed the abiding interests of the Kingdom of God. The champion of a conservative cause is always exposed to the charge of illiberality while he labors, and his memory to detraction by a world which has moved in: the direction against which he has fought. Increase Mather was no exception. But he well deserves the description of Prof. Wendell, “the greatest of the native Puritans.”²

     During all the earlier part of his ministry Increase Mather was the prime mover in all that was done in the churches of Massachusetts. He had gone to England in 1657, soon after his graduation from Harvard, and had met with a good degree of acceptance as a preacher, but, unlike his two brothers, he returned to the New World soon after the Restoration. Here he began preaching at once to the Second Church in Boston, though he did not accept the office of teacher till 1664, and here he remained till his death in 1723. The post was probably the most prominent in influence of any in the colony, especially after the crippling and division of the First Church in Boston in 1669, consequent upon the Half-Way Covenant discussion and the settlement of John Davenport. But Increase Mather’s prominence was not due to his position, but to himself. He was in the forefront of every ecclesiastical action of the last three decades of the seventeenth century. It was he who, brought to his father’s views by the arguments of Rev. Jonathan Mitchell of Cambridge,¹ became the leading expounder of the Half-Way Covenant. He it was who, after New England had been ravaged by Philip’s War and by pestilence, procured from the Massachusetts General Court the summons of the last religious synod that met by state authority in that colony,-the so-called “Reforming Synod” of 1679-80²; and when that body assembled for the first session in 1679 it was Increase Mather who drew up the result³ in which the synod set forth the evils which, in its judgment, had brought the wrath of God on the land, and pointed out the remedies by which the Divine anger could be averted. The synod also chose Increase Mather one of the committee to prepare a creed for the churches, and when the body reassembled for its second session in May, 1680, and adopted the Savoy modification of the Westminster Confession as the doctrinal expression of Massachusetts, its deliberations were guided by Increase Mather from the Moderator’s chair, and the Confession

was commended to the churches in a preface written by his pen.¹ Indeed, during the waning years of the government under the old charter in Massachusetts, Increase Mather was in some sense a spiritual mentor to those in authority. It was to him that they often turned for the draughting of proclamations appointing days of fasts and thanksgivings.² He was equally conspicuous in his connection with the educational interests of the colony. The presidency of Harvard was declined by him in 1681, but was accepted in 1685, and in this post he remained till his opponents made his non-residence in Cambridge the pretext for his ejection in 1701. When it is remembered that practically all ministerial candidates in New England then passed through the training of the one college which the Puritan colonies possessed till the year of Increase Mather’s retirement, it will readily be seen that the presidency of Harvard was a post of the first importance for its influence upon the churches. Increase Mather was a man of weight in ecclesiastical affairs always. A most conspicuous illustration of his power is the formation, chiefly through his agency exerted in the intervals of leisure in an arduous political mission to England, of the Union of Presbyterian and Congregational ministers in and about London—a body which, indeed, soon quarrelled and fell apart after he had returned to Boston; but which was, while it lasted, the only extensive association of Congregationalists and Presbyterians which the seventeenth century beheld.³ It was the confession of this Union, the Heads of Agreement, which became in 1708 one of the legally established bases of the Connecticut state churches.

     The greatest of the services of Increase Mather to the churches of his native province was not, however, in any of these matters, but in a political agency of value at a trying

moment of Massachusetts history. The Massachusetts charter which rendered that province locally self-governing, had long been looked upon with disfavor by the Stuart sovereigns. It had been earnestly defended by the early settlers against the encroachments of the government of Charles I.; but Charles II. was now attacking it, and the situation both in Old England and New favored such an onslaught. In the mother-country the Puritan party was in disgrace, the opponents of the religious system of New England were in authority; in the province the old sturdy Puritan type of the Winthrops and Dudleys had, to some extent, given place to a society swayed by prospects of political advantage, or commercial interest, especially in the chief towns,¹—a society whose aspirations and affiliations favored rather than discountenanced closer connection with the royal authorities. But Increase Mather opposed these tendencies with all his power. In 1683 that enemy of Massachusetts, Edward Randolph, succeeded in serving upon the colonial government a writ summoning it to show cause before the English courts why the charter should not be vacated. Such a loss of charter rights would be the imperilling of all that Massachusetts held dear in civil liberty, ecclesiastical polity, or even personal property. But the weak-kneed upper House of the Legislature favored submission to such a revision of the charter as the King might choose. The lower House, however, representing as it did the still strongly Puritan sentiment of the common people and the country towns, refused; and there is every reason to believe that their refusal was largely aided by the arguments of Increase Mather,² who also showed himself conspicuously the defender of the older order in an address in the Boston town meeting.³ This refusal to submit to the royal pleasure removed the last hope of the abandonment of the proceedings in England against the charter; and in June, 1684, the Court of Chancery at London declared it

void: and swept away at one blow the legal basis of all Massachusetts institutions. The next year saw the accession of James II. to the English throne; and then followed speedily the tyrannous rule of the younger Dudley and of Andros in Massachusetts, with its violations of long-cherished personal and property rights, and what was almost equally offensive to the .New England Puritan, its introduction of Episcopal worship into Boston.

     Under these circumstances some of the more influential men of the colony determined to see what could be done by a direct personal appeal to James II., a king whose desire for Catholic emancipation in England inclined him to seek the favor of those other sufferers from English uniformity, the Non-Conformists. For such a purpose Increase Mather was the most representative man; at once the foremost minister of the colony, and a vigorous political defender of the old charter, his power as a preacher would win him friends among the English Dissenters, by whom his earlier stay in England was pleasantly remembered, and his wide experience in life made him as well fitted to appear to advantage among the courtiers who surrounded the Stuart throne. Accordingly, Increase Mather slipped out of New England early in April, 1688, having to use secrecy to avoid arrest by the Andros government, and by the end of May was in London. Here he presented his case before James¹ and was received with personal favor, though the requests which he and his associates² made in behalf of Massachusetts were not granted. But meanwhile he diligently cultivated the friendship of the leading Non-Conformists, and obtained, to some extent, the favor of the Whig leaders, so that when the revolution of the autumn of 1688 drove James, from his

throne and substituted the joint sovereignty of William and Mary, Increase Mather was able to approach the new government with some prospect of favorable hearing. At first William proved almost as intractable as his Stuart predecessor, and it was soon evident that a full restoration of the ancient privileges of Massachusetts was out of the question.¹ But though he failed in doing all that he desired, Mather accomplished much. He defeated the plan to restore Andros, and to unite the New England colonies under a single royal governor. He prevented the annexation of Plymouth Colony to New York, and secured its incorporation in Massachusetts, and finally, in the summer of 1691, in spite of the opposition of the agents whom Massachusetts had associated with him,² and who impracticably held for the old charter or nothing, Mather obtained a charter which, though distasteful to him in its limitations, though it reserved to the King the appointment of the highest officers of government, and a right to reject obnoxious laws, though it swept away any ecclesiastical test for the franchise, and granted freedom of worship to Protestants of all shades, left to Massachusetts a legislature whose lower House was directly chosen by the people, and whose upper House was still largely under the control of the popular representatives, a legislature too which held the purse, and hence had a potent means of control over all branches of the government. The old local governments of the towns were left undisturbed, and this, with the power of taxation which was in the hands of the legislature, insured the ascendancy of the form of ecclesiastical polity which had heretofore been dominant in New England. An express provision, confirming all grants made by the General Court in time past, assured to individuals and churches the possession of their lands, and the maintenance as far as possible of the old order of

affairs. Such was the charter which Increase Mather obtained for his native colony.

     The constitution was, as I have said, not wholly satisfactory to Increase Mather; it was not satisfactory to a considerable party in the colony, who wished nothing less than the restoration of the ancient semi-independence, and who were not sufficiently familiar with the difficulties of the political situation to see how impossible of realization their wish was. This party criticised Mather for his work. But there can be no doubt that no Massachusetts man of that day could have secured so much. The old charter of Charles I. was an anomaly as soon as the colony grew powerful enough to be in any sense a rival to the mother-country. The privileges which it granted were too nearly those of independence to have continued in a large colony in the seventeenth century without civil war. A modification was sure to come at some time, and it was well in some respects for church and state alike, that certain of the old ecclesiastical privileges should be abolished.¹ But James II. had swept away the defences of every New England institution by his arbitrary officials after his brother’s courts had abolished the ancient charter. It was a question whether anything could be saved, or whether Massachusetts should become a province, ruled in every detail by the whim of the King. It was the work of Increase Mather, unaided by his more unpractical associates, to rescue for Massachusetts the larger part of her civil liberties, and to put her churches and her schools beyond the danger of forcible conversion to Episcopal uses by the agents of the English government. And there can be no doubt as to the greatness of Mather’s service.² It is not too much to say that he did more than any man of his generation to maintain essentially operative, and to hand down to his successors, the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of New

England, which without his efforts could not have escaped far more serious modification then they actually underwent. But though Increase Mather’s efforts in defence of the ecclesiastical and civil constitution of New England put the colonies, and especially Massachusetts, under great obligations to him, they cannot be said to have added to his happiness. The English authorities conferred on him the very unusual distinction, a distinction which shows most clearly their estimate of his ability, of making him the nominator of the first appointments under the new charter. It would be too much to affirm that all his choices were wise; they certainly were such as to arouse a good deal of hostility to him, from the effects of which he suffered all his later life, and which contributed not a little to his loss of the presidency of Harvard College in 1701.

     One more enterprise of importance remains to be noticed to obtain a fair estimate of Increase Mather’s relations to the churches, though it shows him in a less successful and in many ways less agreeable undertaking. In doctrine and polity alike Increase Mather was a conservative. Could he have had matters to his liking he would have perpetuated the New England of his early Boston ministry. But no time is a period of absolute rest in the ecclesiastical or political world, and there were those in Boston and in the board of instruction of Harvard College who looked for change, and, as it seemed to them, a liberalization of the usages of earlier New England.¹ These men desired the abandonment of public relations of religious experience in admission to church membership, and they wished that all baptized adults who shared in the minister’s support should have a voice in his election. These were the two main features of their innovations, but they desired also the baptism of all children presented by any Christian sponsor, the reading of the Scriptures without comment, and the liturgical use of the Lord’s Prayer. The first two of these changes were opposed

by Increase Mather with great vigor, and in a way to provoke his liberalizing associates in the Harvard faculty and their sympathizers in Boston. The result was the building of a new meeting house in Boston in 1698, and the call and settlement over the newly organized Brattle Church, in 1699, of a minister who was willing to put these innovations into practice. All this was done without countenance from the other churches of Boston, and much against Mather’s will, and in the heat of the dispute he put forth, in the spring of 1700, a vigorous defence of the older New England practices, The Order of the Gospel. This little work had not, of course, the formative value of the writings of the fathers of New England Congregationalism; it had not the prophecy of the future which was wrapped up, all unconsciously to the writer, in Wise’s expositions of what he fancied the early New England ideals a few years later. But no work of the second New England generation so ably sets forth or so vigorously champions the Congregationalism of the last half of the seventeenth century as this tract of Increase Mather. To him it was the source of controversy enough. Replied to by sympathizers with the innovators, it led to a bitter personal discussion, and contributed in a measure to his expulsion from the management of Harvard at the hands of his political enemies and the ecclesiastical liberalizers who succeeded him in the control of the college. It seems to have been the occasion also of the publication by Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton of his famous Doctrine of Instituted Churches, in which he advanced the theory that the Lord’s Supper was a saving ordinance designed for all those, whether regenerate or not, who were of the covenant fellowship of the church by Christian parentage and baptism. Against Stoddard, as against the leaders of the Brattle Church movement, Increase Mather wrote and labored; and to prevent future innovations, Cotton, if not Increase, tools part in a widespread, though futile, attempt to establish in Massachusetts a system of Consociationism,—an attempt which apparently furnished the model to Connecticut in 1708. But though the majority of Massachusetts

churches remained of Increase Mather’s way of thinking, he had to see the college slip into what he deemed a dangerous liberalism, and to behold the extensive spread of Stoddardean views in the Connecticut valley. To some extent passed by, in the drift of events, his old age was a period of disappointment; but he was never without influence, and was as long as he lived the foremost of the New England ministry, alike in the merit of the services which he had rendered to his country and its churches, and the reverence which his abilities compelled.

     Cotton Mather, the third of this distinguished line, the eldest son of Increase, has attracted more popular attention, and is more generally, if not always accurately, known to the casual reading public of the present age than any other citizen of colonial New England. By reason of this public interest, too, he has been more the subject of careful biography than his father or grandfather.¹ Yet that this has been the case has been rather the result of his faults and eccentricities than of his virtues. Talented as he undoubtedly was, he had neither the ability of his father as a leader of men, nor the sound common-sense which always marked the writings of his grandfather. In influence on the age in which he lived he did not compare with his two predecessors. He is not so worthy of careful commemoration as they. Yet his literary style, carrying the faults of his age to grotesqueness, his self-esteem, the voluminousness of his writings on every subject, and the technical language of Puritan religious expression in which he uttered his thoughts, have always caught the popular fancy, and made Cotton Mather appear more typical of the land and age in which he lived than he really was. But when all necessary abatement from his fame is made, and when his very considerable limitations are distinctly recognized, he still remains one of the men to whom New England Congregationalism is conspicuously indebted.

     Throughout most of his life Cotton Mather was intimately associated with his father, Increase. Born in Boston in 1663, he was brought up in his father’s home, and to that home he returned after his graduation from Harvard in 1678, and soon became his father’s assistant in the care of the Boston Second Church, to the pastorate of which he was ordained, after some years of previous service, in 1655. From that time, till his death in 1728, Boston was his home, and for all except the last five years of that long period he was the companion, assistant, and confidant of his father in all pastoral work. The father and son were remarkably sympathetic, and in many ways singularly alike. No breach of feeling appears ever to have brought a shade of coolness between them. But the temperament of the son had not the balance of the father’s disposition; he had missed that best of schooling which comes from mingling with men of prominence in a large community,—a schooling which the father richly enjoyed during two prolonged residences in England. The circumstances of his early life, too, emphasized his natural self-esteem. Valuable as his companionship with his father was, it gave him a prominence in youth that would not otherwise have been his, a prominence all the more dangerous because he had not his equal in talent among his contemporaries in the little provincial capital which was his life-time home.¹ And this intimacy of association with his father made him also no independent force in New England ecclesiastical development. He fought side by side with his father in the controversies for the maintenance of the system of older New England; and his father’s defeats and successes were his own. In the arena of politics, where his father’s services were so conspicuous, he never gained distinction, though on the occasion of the arrest of Andros and other officers of the hated tyranny by the insurgent people of Boston in 1689, he was instrumental in averting disorder which might have cost the colony dear.² His conspicuity in the witchcraft

excitement of 1692 was as much religious as political, and the activity which he evinced, while in all probability the result of the honest convictions of an imaginative mind fully persuaded of the reality of unseen workings of evil, though it made him the popular leader for the time, was not such as to benefit the community while it lasted, or to add to his own repute after the excitement had died away.

     But while in so much of his activity Cotton Mather simply did that which his father did better, or that which it were well that he had not done, in one department his service to New England was pre-eminent. He was the biographer of her worthies of the first two generations, and the perpetuator of the spirit of her founders. I am well aware that Cotton Mather’s accuracy as an historian has often been criticised, and with some degree of justice also; for, judged by the demands of modern antiquarian carefulness, he took neither the time nor the pains always to give to his work that precision in the designation of date and place, the absence of which is so exasperating to those who make use of other men’s labors. Nor were his portraits always photographically correct likenesses of the men whom he sketched. He overlooked the weaknesses of the Puritan leaders more often than a conscientious modern biographer would do. He not infrequently sought to make a padding of pious reflection or pedantic quotation conceal the poverty of fact. But what a loss New England history would experience were the Magnalia and the minor historical sketches of Cotton Mather blotted out. When all deductions from the merits of his historical writings have been made, they remain a priceless picture of the men of early New England, and even more a truthful reflection of the Puritan spirit. Whatever may be their error in detail, the sketches of the Magnalia give the best insight anywhere to be obtained into the thought and aspirations of seventeenth-century New England. In them we see the self-denial and the deep consciousness of spiritual things which marked these men, their conviction of divine favor and displeasure in the occurrences of every-day life, their determination to submit

church and state to the Word of God as they understood it, and withal their narrowness and intolerance. It is this faithfulness in the delineation of the spirit of Puritan New England that must ever give the Magnalia its highest value. But it is not merely for its reproduction of the general atmosphere of that great movement that Cotton Mather’s work has worth. When he knew the facts, and in a large proportion of cases he did, his biographical portraits are sketches of men of flesh and blood, possessed of individual characteristics, not mere lay-figures on which to hang draperies substantially similar in effect. Nor is the least of the merits of Cotton Mather’s historical work the general readableness of his narratives, in spite of their conspicuous faults of style. One has but to compare his writings with those of his son Samuel to appreciate how much his work owes to skill and clearness in presentation.¹

     One other work of Cotton Mather deserves a place beside the Magnalia as a source of ecclesiastical history, the Ratio Disciplinæ Fratrum Nov-Anglorum, which he gave to the public in 1726. Eighty-seven years before, his grandfather, Richard, had sent to England the manuscript of his description of New England ecclesiastical usages as they were in that day of beginnings, the Answer to the XXXII. Questions. It was a similar service that Cotton Mather did for his own age. There was, indeed, great dissimilarity in the importance of the two works to the times in which they were written, but that dissimilarity was due rather to change in circumstances than to any inferiority in the work of the younger Mather. In 1639 New England institutions were still plastic; a great party in England, bent on the reformation of the English Establishment, looked with eager curiosity for the results of the experiments across the sea, and the work of Richard Mather was a formative force in the two Englands. By 1726 New England had outworn its interest in questions of church polity, its forms had largely crystallized, and such changes as there were in progress

were leaving Cotton Mather in the rear, a representative of an epoch which had passed away, rather than finding in him a leader. But, from the point of view of church history, Cotton Mather’s Ratio Disciplinæ loses nothing of value. It is our best picture of the state and practices of the Congregational churches at the close of their first century on American soil. It is full and clear, minute in detail, if sometimes somewhat gossipy in style; and it answers all the more important questions which may be asked regarding the customs of the churches. Certainly the services of Cotton Mather to the memories of the two generations which had gone before him, and to the ecclesiastical history of his own age, areas deserving of remembrance as the contributions of Richard Mather to Congregational polity or the efforts of Increase for the defence of New England institutions.

     In one department of activity, of much more importance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than now, the story of these three generations is one of increasing power. It is in the publication of writings designed for the upbuilding of the Christian life. Though the New Englanders were a well educated people, judged by the low standards of European countries two hundred years ago, books in the ordinary New England household were few. The first newspaper in the Puritan colonies did not begin its feeble existence till 1707¹; the whole range of periodical literature was yet to be. Into households, therefore, whose sole literary store was drawn from the commentaries of the Puritan divines, and whose only specimen of what might be called current literature was the almanac, the sermons and exhortations of the New England ministers came with a welcome now inconceivable. And foremost in the number and variety of such publications stand the Mathers, especially Increase and Cotton. It was not mere desire to see themselves in print that urged them on to such continuous publication. The want which they supplied was a real one, one which

had been felt by all the leaders of Puritan thought; and this ministration was of value to the community at large. But the amazing thing is the abundance with which these publications were poured forth by these men, sufficiently engrossed, one would suppose, in the cares of an active ministry and the obligations of public affairs. Richard Mather was not largely a publisher, perhaps because the colony possessed scanty facilities for printing till late in his life; but in the fifty-four years of the career of Increase Mather from 1669 to his death in 1723 he sent forth some 159 works of all sorts, and his son Cotton between 1682 and 1728 no less than 451.¹ Among this vast number were some controversial tracts, and some treatises of larger ecclesiastical and historical moment which have already been noted, but the vast majority were designed to arouse Christian feeling, to carry conviction of the truths of the Christian faith, to commemorate events which seemed to the writers peculiarly providential in their nature, or to upbuild the young in the principles of ethics. A large proportion were sermons on special occasions, elections, funerals, ordinations, executions, some were prefaces to works commended to the New England churches, others letters on practical topics as remote from theology as the management of infectious diseases. But all this mass of printed matter, commonplace as most of it is to a modern reader, helped to meet a real want in the day of its issue. Even so little of a sympathizer with those interests of religion which Cotton Mather held chief as Benjamin Franklin, declared that one of these tracts had had a permanent influence upon his own character²; and what was Franklin’s experience must have been that of thousands of humbler fame and more Christian feeling.

     Three such men of one lineage are certainly a remarkable line to be interwoven in the story of any religious body. It

was Cotton Mather’s hope that there should be a fourth, but that was not to be. The son whose intellectual gifts promised prospect of the continuance of the succession, Increase, made moral shipwreck, and died in early youth. Another son, Samuel, followed in his father’s steps, entered the colleague pastorate of the Second Boston Church, which his father and grandfather had served, four years after Cotton Mather’s decease, and remained a respectable if not very popular Boston minister till his death in old age in 1785. There were in his outward circumstances of birth and position all the opportunities necessary for the perpetuation of the family prominence. But the ability was lacking, and the influence of Samuel Mather upon the churches was nothing. One trace of the old desire to be of service in the larger concerns of the body to which he belonged is to be seen in the Apology for the Liberties of the Churches in New England, which he put forth in 1738, and which is not without merit as a treatise on Congregational polity. But it was only a spark of the old fire which had burned so brightly in his three ancestors. It is of them, rather than of Samuel Mather, that we think when we consider the services of the Mathers in the religious development of New England.