American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

MATHER, INCREASE

(21 June 1639, Dorchester, MA-23 August 1723, Boston, MA). Education: B.A., Harvard College, 1656; M.A., Trinity College, Dublin, 1658. Career: Minister, Great Torrington, Devonshire, 1658-59; chaplain, English garrison, Guernsey, 1659~1; supply preacher, Massachusetts, 16614; minister, Second Congregational Church, Boston, 1664-1723; president, Harvard College, 1685-1701.

As a boy Increase Mather suffered from a dangerous illness, and in the language of an earlier time, "his thoughts were fixed more decidedly upon his immortal interests." Young Mather devoted himself to fasting and prayer and came eventually to feel close to God. He then resolved to enter the ministry, following the example of his father, Richard Mather*. He was at the time a student at Harvard, having entered the university when he was only twelve. He graduated in 1656 and preached his first sermons when he was seventeen.

Like many other young men of New England's second generation he was attracted to the possibility of becoming a minister in Britain, where the Puritans were now in control. He visited a brother in Ireland and another in England and became chaplain to the governor of Guernsey. Then came the Restoration of Charles II. If Mather had agreed to conform to the Church of England, he could have secured a lucrative post as. an Anglican cleric. But he refused to conform, and suddenly the distant Congregational commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay became more attractive.

Back in New England Mather took the conservative side on the question of the Half-Way Covenant, and when the Synod of 1662 adopted it, he continued his opposition. As he became more familiar with conditions in New England, however, a practical consideration won out over his ideal-he came to see that in order to keep up membership the Puritans needed to adopt a new standard of church admission. Mather soon emerged as the leading Congregationalist of his generation. He was influential in the Reforming Synod of 1679-80, which adopted a confession of faith and passed resolutions against vice. In his own church he preached jeremiads against sin, and ordered days of fasting and prayer.

During the political turmoil of the 1680s when policies of King James appeared to threaten religious and political freedom in Massachusetts, Mather emerged as one of the most outspoken defenders of colonial liberties. In 1688 the colonists appointed him to represent them in London; because the British authorities opposed his going, he boarded ship in disguise and sailed for England, arriving on the eve of the Glorious Revolution. In London Mather argued valiantly for the continuation of the status quo in Massachusetts, but the crown insisted on a new charter, designating a royally appointed governor and a franchise not based on church membership. Mather bowed to the inevitable, but he persuaded the crown to grant the colony a strong representative assembly. Opponents back in Massachusetts claimed that he had given up too much, but in fact he had no choice in the matter. However, the authorities in London were so taken with Mather that they let him nominate the first Royal Governor, Sir William Phips.

Increase Mather arrived back in Massachusetts in the midst of the Salem witchcraft trials. While believing in witches and the supernatural, Mather was uncomfortable with the hysteria accompanying the trials. He argued that "spectral evidence"-proof of guilt based on supernatural visions-was unreliable, and he counseled Governor Phips to halt the trials, which the Governor did. Although Mather was in advance of his time in his skepticism about the trials, he continued to be a conservative on other issues. When Solomon Stoddard. opened communion in Northampton, Massachusetts, to all but the openly scandalous, Mather was one of the chief opponents of the innovation.

Mather remained active in his ministry until the year before he died. During part of that time he also served as president of Harvard, although he refused to leave his church in Boston to take up residence in Cambridge. Mather wrote 130 books and tracts. For almost four decades of his ministry, he shared his pulpit with his son, Cotton Mather·, one of the few Puritans who ever published more books than he did. Through his thought and influence Increase" Mather did more than any other minister of his generation to represent primitive Congregationalism in the more secular climate of the eighteenth century. Near the time of his death he said, "I shall leave ministers in Boston, who, I trust, will defend the Churches, when I shall sleep with my fathers."

Bibliography
A: The Life and Death of. .. Mr. Richard Mather (Cambridge, MA, 1670); A Discourse Concerning Baptism (Cambridge, Mass., 1675); A Brief History of the War with the Indians (Boston, 1676); The Call from Heaven (Boston, 1679); Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (Boston, 1684); New England Vindicated (London, 1688); Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (Boston, 1693); The Surest Way to the Greatest Honor (Boston, 1699); A Dying Legacy of a Minister (Boston, 1722).
B: AAP 1, 151-59; DAB 12,390-94; DARB, 296-97; NCAB 6,412-13; SH 7, 248; Benjamin Colman, The Prophet's Death (Boston, 1723); Cotton Mather, Parentator: Memoirs of Increase Mather (Boston, 1724); Samuel Mather, Memoirs of the Life of Increase Mather (London, 1725); Williston Walker, Ten New England Leaders (New York, 1901), 97-134; Kenneth B. Murdock, Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan (Cambridge, MA, 1925); Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (New York, 1971); Mason I. Lowance, Jr., Increase Mather (New York, 1974); Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639-1723 (Middletown, Conn., 1987).