Cotton Mather

“ Mather is inclined to superstition, but I hardly think he believes in ghosts and witches. I am quite sure his father would not sanction such folly, and the father and son are not much inclined to differ in opinion.'
'I have no very high opinion of Cotton Mather. He may be a good man; he is certainly forcible and impressive in the pulpit; and it is thought his rising greatness will soon eclipse that of his father; but in my belief Dr. Mather, if not a greater man, is a far better one, and the son, with all his eccentric brilliancy, can never rival the father. ”

“ Cotton Mather, though born and constantly residing in this remote corner of America, has yet for near these forty Years made so rising and great a Figure in the learned World, as has attracted to him while alive, the Eyes of many at the furthest Distance ”

“ There was Cotton Mather, the holy man, the champion against the Evil One, the saint who walked with God, and daily lifted up his voice in prayer and defiance and thanksgiving—he was ever at hand, to cross-question, to insinuate, to surmise, to bluster, to interpret, to terrify, to perplex, to vociferate: surely, this paragon of learning and virtue must know more about the devil than any mere layman could pretend to know ”

“ A study of the Cotton, Stoddard, Eliot, Williams, Edwards, Chauncey, Bulkeley, and Wigglesworth families, and, above all, of the Mather family, will show mutual kinship among the ministers, as well as mutual religious thought.
Richard Mather took for his second wife the widow of John Cotton. Their children, Increase Mather and Mary Cotton, grew up as brother and sister, but were married and became the parents of Cotton Mather. The sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of Richard Mather were ministers. His daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters became the wives of ministers. ”

“ They look like men who could come home from fighting the French in Canada, or from chasing the whale among the icebergs of Labrador, to be scared by the menaces of a pontiff like Cotton Mather. They look like men who would take it seriously, and not laugh at all, when Cotton Mather denounced the Franklins, for poking fun at him in their newspaper, as guilty of wickedness without a parallel. ”

“ The duty of reparation for the great wrong was thrown off upon others, than those particularly and prominently responsible.
Nothing has led me to suppose that Cotton Mather was cruel or heartless, in his natural or habitual disposition. He never had the wisdom or dignity to acknowledge, as an individual, or as one of the Clergy, or to propose specific reparation for, the fearful mischiefs, sufferings and horrors growing out of the witchcraft prosecutions. ”

“ On the witches, on religion, on colonial history with a controversial purpose ("Magnalia") , and on many other themes, Cotton Mather wrote at enormous length. He was a Bostonian, a Harvard man, and learned; in fact, he was the counterpart of his correspondent, Wodrow, the author of the "History of the Sufferings of the Kirk under the Restoration". His style is Jacobean rather than late Caroline, and the curious will find him "full of matter". ”

“ Mather," the elder is meant. Cotton Mather, being the youngest of the Boston Ministers, would not be likely to be the first named, in such a list. Besides, he was considered, as he himself complains, as the "doer of all the hard things, that were done, in the prosecution of the witchcraft." Whoever concludes that Increase Mather was the person, in Proctor's mind, will appreciate the fact that Cotton Mather is omitted in the list. ”

“ Cotton Mather is such an author as Fuller would have been if the old English Worthy, instead of having been from a child trained up in the way he should go, had been calvinisticated till the milk of human kindness with which his heart was always ready to overflow had turned sour. ”

“ It is far better to know the man as he was, rough-hewn, hasty, unlettered, but simple and honest as daylight, than to accept the false and silly epitaph of Cotton Mather, that "he was a person of so sweet a temper that they who were most intimately acquainted with him would commonly pronounce him the Best Conditioned Gentleman in the World." ”

“ Local tradition, of less value, in some respects, for reasons given in my book, in reference to this affair than most others, but still of much weight, has identified Cotton Mather with these scenes. The family, of which John Proctor was the head, has continued to this day in the occupancy of his lands. Always respectable in their social position, they have perpetuated his marked traits of intellect and character. ”

“ Having always given himself up to the contemplation of diabolical imaginations, Cotton Mather was led to take the part he did, in the witchcraft proceedings; and it cannot be hidden from the light of history. The greater his talents, the more earnestly he may, in other matters, have aimed to be useful, the more weighty is the lesson his course teaches, of the baleful effects of bewildering and darkening superstition. ”

“ They reflect with certainty an assurance, running in an unbroken course over a century and a half. Their family connections, social position, conversance with events, and familiar knowledge of what men thought, believed, and talked about, give to their concurrent and continuous testimony, a force and weight of authority that are decisive; and demonstrate that, instead of my having invented and originated the opinion of Cotton Mather's agency in the matter now under consideration, I have done no more than to restate what has been believed and uttered from the beginning. ”

“ In early years his voice was a commanding one, but he was destined to see his popularity wane and to live most of his long life in comparative isolation and neglect in the very community where Increase Mather had been a high priest indeed. In such men as Cotton Mather the old spirit lived on, sharply accentuated by defeat; and transformed, in such men as Jonathan Edwards, by dint of morbid introspection and brooding on the sins of a perverse generation, into a kind of disease, or spiritual neurasthenia. Such men could but look back with poignant regret to the golden age that was past. ”

“ Very likely they were taken to see the “celebrated Cotton Mather,” as the man who had not long before “brought in another tongue to confess the great Saviour of the world,” as he himself said of a tract in the language of the Iroquois, which he had printed in Boston (1707) and supplied to the Dutch and English traders among that people. ”

“ Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase for a model female,—"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an "ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his parish thought by no means a model female, but from whom it took three days of solitary fasting and prayer to wean him at last.
He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat strangely. ”

“ This interfusion universally occurs. The great errors and the great wrongs imputable to Cotton Mather do not make it impracticable to discern what was commendable in him. They may be accounted for without throwing him out of the pale of humanity or our having to shut our eyes to traits and merits other ways exhibited. ”

“ In the midst of all this delusion and terrorism stood Cotton Mather firm as ever. His efforts to uphold the declining superstition were heroic. But he at last went one step too far. Being himself possessed of a mania for myth-making and wonder-mongering, and having described a case of witchcraft with possibly greater exaggeration than usual, he was confronted by Robert Calef. Calef was a Boston merchant, and appears to have united the good sense of a man of business to considerable shrewdness in observation, power in thought, and love for truth. ”

“ It denounces, in unreserved language, "the Magistrates, Ministers, Juries," as under the "delusion of the Devil, which we can term no other, by reason we know, in our own consciences, we are all innocent persons;" and is couched in a bold, outspoken and trenchant style, that would have shocked and incensed Cotton Mather to the highest possible degree. It is absolutely certain, that if Cotton Mather had been Proctor's "friend and counsellor," a more prudent and cautious tone and style would have been given to the whole document. ”

“ It may safely be said, that no historical fact has ever been more steadily recognized, than the action and, to a great degree, controlling agency, of Cotton Mather, in supporting and promoting the witchcraft proceedings of 1692. That it has, all along, been the established conviction of the public mind, is proved by the chronological series of names I have produced. Thomas Hutchinson, John Eliot, William Bentley, and Josiah Quincy, cover the whole period from Cotton Mather's day to this. ”

“ But neither Cotton Mather, nor his enlightened friend, Zabdiel Boylston, were men to be easily daunted. The zeal which thirty years before had made Mather a knight-errant against witchcraft, sustained him now, even though the general court itself seemed inclined to prohibit inoculation by legal enactment. Fortunately, however, humanity and science prevailed; the bill was thrown out of the council, and the same remedy being at the very same period introduced into England, no further opposition was made. ”

“ Cotton Mather may be taken as a characteristic specimen of the more intelligent and devout thinkers among the men of the second generation, and for him the whole daily life of the colony was a spiritual warfare. The very object of his greatest work, the “Magnalia Christi,” is to show the special workings of Divine Providence in favor of the people of Massachusetts, and to exhibit how they had battled against “principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” ”

“ Another New England man who is constantly called a Roundhead is Cotton Mather; with equal inconsequence and inaccuracy he is often referred to, and often stigmatized, as “the typical Puritan colonist,” a narrow, bigoted Gospeller. I have open before me an editorial from a reputable newspaper which speaks of Cotton Mather dressed in dingy, skimped, sad-colored garments “shivering in the icy air of Plymouth as he uncovered his close-clipped Round-head when he landed on the Rock from the Mayflower.” He was in fact born in America ”

“ As he encountered the madness and violence of the people, when they were led by Cotton Mather, in the witchcraft delusion, it is a singular circumstance, constituting an honorable distinction, in which they shared, that, in a later period of their lives, they stood, shoulder to shoulder, breasting bravely together, another storm of popular fanaticism, by publicly favoring inoculation for the small-pox. ”

“ They are answerable, as I have shown, more than almost any other men have been, for the opinions of their time. It was, indeed, a superstitious age; but made much more so by their operations, influence, and writings, beginning with Increase Mather's movement, at the assembly of the Ministers, in 1681, and ending with Cotton Mather's dealings with the Goodwin children, and the account thereof which he printed and circulated, far and wide. For this reason, then, in the first place, I hold those two men responsible for what is called "Salem Witchcraft." ”

“ However, by the time he was launched into German student-life, dividing his time fitfully between his university and his music, young Cotton Mather was forced to admit that an ancestral fortune was no despicable addition to the stock in trade of a man starting in life. ”

“ The people grew to be disenthralled in large numbers. There was a growing belief that there could be graces even in dogma,—a gospel that never a Mather preached. The rude Bay Psalm Book, and the nasal cadence of the meeting-house, were beginning to pass when the Franklins, in that obnoxious sheet the Courant, were printing the hymns of Isaac Watts.
A year after the father died, there was a new election of president of Harvard College. Cotton Mather was as anxious as before. The governing board picked out in succession three Boston ministers, and never seem to have considered Cotton Mather. ”

“ Of one given to this habit Cotton Mather writes that he "had so nimble a faculty of putting his devout thoughts into verse that he signalized himself by . . . sending poems to all persons, in all places, on all occasions, . . . wherein if the curious relished the piety sometimes rather than the poetry, the capacity of the most therein to be accommodated must be considered." ”

“ Consequently, my wife must still have ascribed my singular conduct to a mind disordered, not by ghosts, but by punch. For my own part as I lay in bed watching the sun in the panes, I began to think that much midnight reading of Cotton Mather was not good for man; that it had a morbid influence upon the nerves, and gave rise to hallucinations. I resolved to put Cotton Mather permanently aside. That done, I had no fear of any return of the ticking. Indeed, I began to think that what seemed the ticking in the room, was nothing but a sort of buzzing in my ear. ”