MATHER, COTTON
(12 February 1663, Boston, MA-13 February 1728, Boston, MA). Education: B.A., Harvard College, 1678. Career: Minister, Second Congregational Church, Boston, 1685-1728.
Cotton Mather, the grandson and namesake of Richard Mather* and John Cotton*, is the most famous of all Puritan New Englanders, and rightly so. He could not match Jonathan Edwards* as a theologian or John Eliot* as a missionary, or George Whitefield* as a preacher, or his own father, Increase Mather*, as a politician. But he was deeply involved in each of these activities and was devoted to preserving the ideals of the original Puritans. That devotion was sometimes extreme and contributed to the negative image that he acquired during his own lifetime and that remains with his memory today: he was said to be a bigot, a prig, an egotist. And yet there was something impressive about the man, recognized then and now.
A brilliant youth, Cotton Mather entered Harvard when he was twelve. At graduation President Oakes said of him, "Should he resemble and represent his venerable grandfathers, John Cotton and Richard Mather, in piety, learning, elegance of mind, solid judgment, prudence and wisdom, he will bear away the palm, and I trust that, in this youth, Cotton and Mather will be united and flourish again." Young Mather was then fifteen. Given the pressure of such expectations, it is no wonder that he stammered so much that he doubted he could ever be a minister. And so he studied medicine, an interest that remained with him for the rest of his life. But he overcame his stammer and settled as second minister in his father's church.
Soon afterwards he became interested in witchcraft, and took an apparently bewitched girl into his house for observation. Like most New Englanders of that time, he believed that the invisible world contained both angels and devils. Girls in Danvers, near Salem, began accusing their neighbors of witchcraft, and Mather concluded that the devil was at work in Massachusetts. When a crowd appeared to sympathize with a condemned man at the gallows who said the Lord's Prayer, Mather told them the devil could use the tools of the Lord to fool innocent people. The man was promptly hanged. Mather's reputation suffered during his own lifetime for his part in the witchcraft delusion, and has suffered since, but many intelligent men and women in England and America at the time shared his views.
During somewhat more than four decades as a minister, Mather was involved in practically every religious movement and controversy that touched New England. Did America need men of science to study their land? Mather sent observations to England, and was made a member of the prestigious Royal Society. Were the young people impious? Cotton Mather established a society to reform them and wrote tracts to inspire them. Did slaves need more religious leadership? Mather conducted meetings for them and published a book about their condition. Were there too many drunken disorders and too many law suits? Mather founded societies for suppressing disorders and for preventing lawsuits. Were Bostonians divided on the wisdom of inoculation for smallpox? Mather wrote a tract explaining why the practice was safe.
Mather also sought to fill his personal life with devotion, to the point of obsessiveness. During one year he kept sixty fasts and twenty vigils. When he poked the fire, he would pray that his piety might also be kindled into a flame. When at table, he watched a woman carving the meat, and prayed, "Lord, carve a rich portion of thy comforts and graces to that person." Walking the streets he sought appropriate blessings for those he passed. Seeing a tall man, he said, "Lord, give that man high attainments in Christianity." And seeing a cripple-"Lord, help that man to walk uprightly."
To find time for all these activities Mather scheduled his hours carefully, and he put over his study door a sign the like of which many a harried minister or professor can envy, if not emulate: "Be Short." Cotton Mather published roughly 450 books in his lifetime, ranging from simple guides to Christian living, to huge tracts of up to eight hundred pages on Christian history. He knew Iroquois and Spanish and published tracts in each language. His Bonifacius, also known as "Essays to do Good," has been credited with anticipating modem plans of Christian benevolence.
Still, many Bostonians regarded Cotton Mather as an eccentric, a kind of Don Quixote tilting at windmills in his effort to create a Christian commonwealth. New England would never be the holy community he envisioned. And yet even those who scoffed must have known that his dream of universal piety was" rooted in their own Puritan heritage.
Cotton Mather died in the winter of 1728. On his deathbed he delivered an impassioned speech, and tears came to his eyes. His wife wiped them away, and Mather said, "I am going where all tears will be wiped away." A country minister, Ebenezer Parkman* came to Boston for the funeral, which was attended by a huge crowd. He confided to his diary, "It looked very sad-almost as if it were the funeral of the country."
Bibliography
A: Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (Boston, 1689); The Present State of New England (Boston, 1690); A Midnight Cry (Boston, 1692); Pastoral Letter to the English Captives in Africa (Boston, 1698); A Family Well-Ordered (Boston, 1699); Reasonable Religion (Boston, 1700); Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of New England from its First Planting (London, 1702; and subsequent editions); The Negro Christianized (Boston, 1706); Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good (Boston, 1710; Cambridge, MA, 1981); Winter Piety (Boston, 1712); An Account ... of Inoculating the Smallpox (London, 1722); The Angel of Bethesda (New London, Conn., 1722); Ratio Disciplinae (Boston, 1726); Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681-1724, 2 vols. (Boston, 1911-12; New York, n.d.).
B: AAP I, 189-95; DAB 12, 386-89; DARB, 294-95; NCAB 4, 232-33; SH 7, 248; SHG 3, 6-158; Samuel Mather, The Life of the Very Reverend and Learned Cotton Mather (Boston, 1729); Barrett Wendell, Cotton Mather (New York, 1891); Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (New York, 1971); David Levin, Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1703 (Cambridge, Masso, 1978); Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1985); Winton U. Solberg, "Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher, and the Classics," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 96 (1986), 323- 66.
Cotton Mather, the grandson and namesake of Richard Mather* and John Cotton*, is the most famous of all Puritan New Englanders, and rightly so. He could not match Jonathan Edwards* as a theologian or John Eliot* as a missionary, or George Whitefield* as a preacher, or his own father, Increase Mather*, as a politician. But he was deeply involved in each of these activities and was devoted to preserving the ideals of the original Puritans. That devotion was sometimes extreme and contributed to the negative image that he acquired during his own lifetime and that remains with his memory today: he was said to be a bigot, a prig, an egotist. And yet there was something impressive about the man, recognized then and now.
A brilliant youth, Cotton Mather entered Harvard when he was twelve. At graduation President Oakes said of him, "Should he resemble and represent his venerable grandfathers, John Cotton and Richard Mather, in piety, learning, elegance of mind, solid judgment, prudence and wisdom, he will bear away the palm, and I trust that, in this youth, Cotton and Mather will be united and flourish again." Young Mather was then fifteen. Given the pressure of such expectations, it is no wonder that he stammered so much that he doubted he could ever be a minister. And so he studied medicine, an interest that remained with him for the rest of his life. But he overcame his stammer and settled as second minister in his father's church.
Soon afterwards he became interested in witchcraft, and took an apparently bewitched girl into his house for observation. Like most New Englanders of that time, he believed that the invisible world contained both angels and devils. Girls in Danvers, near Salem, began accusing their neighbors of witchcraft, and Mather concluded that the devil was at work in Massachusetts. When a crowd appeared to sympathize with a condemned man at the gallows who said the Lord's Prayer, Mather told them the devil could use the tools of the Lord to fool innocent people. The man was promptly hanged. Mather's reputation suffered during his own lifetime for his part in the witchcraft delusion, and has suffered since, but many intelligent men and women in England and America at the time shared his views.
During somewhat more than four decades as a minister, Mather was involved in practically every religious movement and controversy that touched New England. Did America need men of science to study their land? Mather sent observations to England, and was made a member of the prestigious Royal Society. Were the young people impious? Cotton Mather established a society to reform them and wrote tracts to inspire them. Did slaves need more religious leadership? Mather conducted meetings for them and published a book about their condition. Were there too many drunken disorders and too many law suits? Mather founded societies for suppressing disorders and for preventing lawsuits. Were Bostonians divided on the wisdom of inoculation for smallpox? Mather wrote a tract explaining why the practice was safe.
Mather also sought to fill his personal life with devotion, to the point of obsessiveness. During one year he kept sixty fasts and twenty vigils. When he poked the fire, he would pray that his piety might also be kindled into a flame. When at table, he watched a woman carving the meat, and prayed, "Lord, carve a rich portion of thy comforts and graces to that person." Walking the streets he sought appropriate blessings for those he passed. Seeing a tall man, he said, "Lord, give that man high attainments in Christianity." And seeing a cripple-"Lord, help that man to walk uprightly."
To find time for all these activities Mather scheduled his hours carefully, and he put over his study door a sign the like of which many a harried minister or professor can envy, if not emulate: "Be Short." Cotton Mather published roughly 450 books in his lifetime, ranging from simple guides to Christian living, to huge tracts of up to eight hundred pages on Christian history. He knew Iroquois and Spanish and published tracts in each language. His Bonifacius, also known as "Essays to do Good," has been credited with anticipating modem plans of Christian benevolence.
Still, many Bostonians regarded Cotton Mather as an eccentric, a kind of Don Quixote tilting at windmills in his effort to create a Christian commonwealth. New England would never be the holy community he envisioned. And yet even those who scoffed must have known that his dream of universal piety was" rooted in their own Puritan heritage.
Cotton Mather died in the winter of 1728. On his deathbed he delivered an impassioned speech, and tears came to his eyes. His wife wiped them away, and Mather said, "I am going where all tears will be wiped away." A country minister, Ebenezer Parkman* came to Boston for the funeral, which was attended by a huge crowd. He confided to his diary, "It looked very sad-almost as if it were the funeral of the country."
Bibliography
A: Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (Boston, 1689); The Present State of New England (Boston, 1690); A Midnight Cry (Boston, 1692); Pastoral Letter to the English Captives in Africa (Boston, 1698); A Family Well-Ordered (Boston, 1699); Reasonable Religion (Boston, 1700); Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of New England from its First Planting (London, 1702; and subsequent editions); The Negro Christianized (Boston, 1706); Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good (Boston, 1710; Cambridge, MA, 1981); Winter Piety (Boston, 1712); An Account ... of Inoculating the Smallpox (London, 1722); The Angel of Bethesda (New London, Conn., 1722); Ratio Disciplinae (Boston, 1726); Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681-1724, 2 vols. (Boston, 1911-12; New York, n.d.).
B: AAP I, 189-95; DAB 12, 386-89; DARB, 294-95; NCAB 4, 232-33; SH 7, 248; SHG 3, 6-158; Samuel Mather, The Life of the Very Reverend and Learned Cotton Mather (Boston, 1729); Barrett Wendell, Cotton Mather (New York, 1891); Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (New York, 1971); David Levin, Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1703 (Cambridge, Masso, 1978); Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1985); Winton U. Solberg, "Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher, and the Classics," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 96 (1986), 323- 66.