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
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      • 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

COTTON, JOHN

(4 December 1584, Derby, England-23 December 1652, Boston, MA). Education: B.A., Trinity College, Cambridge University, 1603, M.A., Trinity College, 1606; B.D., Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, 1613. Career: Fellow and sometime dean, Emmanuel College, 1607-12; rector, St. Botolph's Anglican Church, Boston, England, 1612-33; minister, Congregational Church, Boston, MA, 1633-52.

John Cotton is the essential Congregationalist. In his life as well as in his thought and writings he exemplifies Congregationalism in its formative years. He began his Puritan career surreptitiously, quietly introducing Reformed elements into his services at St. Botolph's in Boston, England, while an associate led more traditional Anglican services. For two decades friendly bishops allowed him to go his own way. But when William Laud became archbishop in 1633, men like Cotton could not live so comfortably. Cotton's Puritan style, including standing at communion, resulted in a summons to appear before a court of high commission. He preferred to set sail for New England.

During almost twenty years as a minister in Boston, Massachusetts, Cotton helped give shape to the compromises between piety and order that resulted in a fully articulated system of Congregational thought and administration. Emphasizing religion of the heart, he at first supported Anne Hutchinson* in her emphasis on the covenant of grace. But when her Antinomianism threatened disorder, he withdrew his favor. He encouraged a contemporary innovation, the confession of faith as a requirement for church membership, in part to encourage piety, but also to assure that those in authority would be authorized to distinguish between true piety and enthusiasm.

Similarly Cotton developed other ideas in a series of confrontations with Roger Williams·. Although he had himself been the victim of religious persecution, he approved of Williams's exile from Massachusetts, and published pamphlets arguing against religious toleration. Like other Puritans he saw nothing inconsistent in believing that only the "true" religion should be accepted by the state.
Cotton's most important contribution to the church was his tracts explaining Congregational beliefs and practices. He wrote a popular catechism for children, Milk for Babes. And to guide their parents he wrote works on polity, such as Keys of the Kingdom. He is generally credited with great personal warmth-a useful asset to any leader in church or state.

Bibliography
A: The Way of Life (London, 1641); The Pouring Out of the Seven Vialls (London, 1642); The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (London, 1644); Milk for Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments (London, 1646); The Bloudy Tenant, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (London, 1647); The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (London, 1648); Of the Holinesse of Church-members (London, 1650); A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace (London, 1659).
B: AAP 1, 25-30; DAB 4, 160-62; NCAB 7, 27-28; SH 3, 278; Samuel Whiting, "Life of John Cotton," in Alexander Young, Chronicles of the First Planters of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1856); Williston Walker, Ten New England Leaders (New York. 1901); Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton, N.J., 1962); Everett H. Emerson, John Cotton (New York, 1965); "John Cotton and the Shaping of Election," in Theresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying (Athens, Ga., 1987).