Mather

“ He was watching her now, as he had watched Mather, out of narrow eyes. Mather's words meant a declaration of interest in Judith, confirming gossip. She was supposed to have refused him, and yet she was biting her lip—would she be quite so moved if Mather had not the power to do it? Ellis promised himself that he would remember this.
"He will know better some day," he said. "But at least he is out of the question. Can you not suggest some one else?"
"There is Mr. Pease," she answered. ”

“ Keep a good heart, Cotton Mather! your opponent's eye begins to glare and flicker with a terrible yet uncertain light—his speech grows less coherent, and his arguments are mixed up with wild glimpses at wilder revelations made to himself alone. He has touched on the limits,—he has entered the borders of blasphemy, and with an awful cry of horror and reprobation the congregation rise up, as one man, against the blasphemer. Dr. Mather smiled a grim smile, and the people were ready to stone Manasseh, who went on, regardless, talking and raving. ”

“ No young man can bear to sit down idly under misfortune; but though the chief results of Mather's work were lost to him, and his great plans—his subway—swept away, and though his defeat rankled, he had not suspected personal feeling in Ellis's action. The promoter had merely stretched out his hand and taken, repudiating the pledges of those who spoke in his name.
Therefore, in spite of the little shock which Mather felt when he saw Ellis with Judith, he came forward and greeted politely. ”

“ Mather is magnified as having great power over evil spirits. A young man in his family is represented so holy, that the place of his devotions was a certain cure of the young virgin's fits. Then his grandfather's and father's books have gained a testimony, that, upon occasion, may be improved one knows not how far. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a Postscript to Cases of Conscience, Increase Mather says that he hears that "some have taken up a notion," that there was something contradictory between his views and those of his son, set forth in the Wonders of the Invisible World. "Tis strange that such imaginations should enter into the minds of men." He goes on to say he had read and approved of his son's book, before it was printed; and falls back, as both of them always did, when pressed, upon the Advice of the Ministers, of the fifteenth of June, in which, he says, they concurred. ”

“ In New England, for many generations, the dominant sect had things all its own way—a condition of things which is not healthy for any sect or party. Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very much like so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives, magnifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their authority over the laity. Mather had an appetite for the marvelous, and took a leading part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an account in his Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693. ”

“ Enough has been presented to show that Mather stated several facts which, to the mass of men, must seem astounding—such facts as bespeak performances beyond what embodied men could enact. The wondrous facts, such as her prophecy of danger about to wait upon the impressed sailor—her long fast without pining—her being lifted by invisible force to the ceiling above her, &c., constitute the important parts of Mather’s narrative of what he personally witnessed and knew. ”

“ Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but, as literary fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother-country, that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner. Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Brown, Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the Greek and the Latin. ”

“ It is probable Stoughton and Mather carried this delusion in part to their graves; and it is scarcely possible to contemplate these [Pg 197] characters with complacency. There is no monument along the track of succeeding years, which redeems their memory from its deserved reproach. Mather was learned and industrious beyond any man of that age in New England; but he was credulous to the last degree; of a bold and fiery temper, deeply tinctured with fanaticism, rash in his judgment, severe in his rebukes, and overbearing in his conduct. ”

“ Always respect William Mather, Annie, for what he has been to me. Pray that prosperity may attend him all his days, and that at the last he may find a place in Heaven. He is thinking of these things, I know, and from the 154dreary hours spent with me there may yet spring up plants of everlasting growth.
“My mind begins to wander, darling. There’s a rushing sound in my ears, while thoughts of you and thoughts of that terrible Sabbath battle are blended together. Good-bye, my precious one. Don’t cry too much when you read this. It is not good-bye forever. ”

“ Increase Mather was President of the College and head of the Clergy. The prevalent impression that he had, to some extent, disapproved of the proceedings, made men unwilling to wound his feelings by severe criticisms upon his son; for, whatever differences might be supposed to exist between them, all well-minded persons respected their natural and honorable sensitiveness to each other's reputation. Reasons like these prevented open demonstrations against both of them. Nevertheless, it is easy to gather sufficient evidence to prove my point. ”

“ It is rather by men than by books that these times are remembered, but it is by the men who were writers of books. In general, the career of the three Mathers coincides with the history of the older Puritanism, and their personal characteristics reflect its stages as their writings contain its successive traits. Richard Mather, the emigrant, had been joint author in the composition of The Bay Psalm Book, and served the colony among the first of its leaders. ”

“ No one knew how this miracle had happened, for Doris Mather’s brains were above the ordinary; she had a discriminating taste in books and a knowledge of pictures, and just before dinner, upstairs in a burst of confidence she had given her surprised hostess an idea of what a man should be. ”

“ Mather was a man of firm decision, and long before he broached the subject to his wife, his mind had been made up that his country called for him,—not for somebody else,—but for him personally; that if the rebellion were to be crushed out, men of wealth and influence must help to crush it, not alone by remaining at home and urging others on, though this were an important part, but by actually joining in the combat, and by their presence cheering and inspiring others. ”

“ So day after day found her in that comfortless dwelling, while the frequent callers at the Mather mansion wondered where she could be. It came out at last that she was nursing William Baker, lying dangerously sick of typhus fever in his mother’s dilapidated home, and then, as villagers will, the Rockland people wondered and gossiped, and wondered again how the aristocratic Rose Mather could sit hour after hour, in that poverty-stricken cottage, ministering to the wants of despised Bill Baker. ”

“ Every soldier’s wife and every soldier’s mother was looked after, and the Mather carriage was oftener seen in the muddy Hollow and by lanes in Rockland, than at the gates of more pretentious dwellings. Harry’s mother and Bill’s, and others of her standing, blessed the little lady, for the sunshine brought so often to their squalid homes, while Annie and Widow Simms prayed from a full heart that no evil should befall the husband or the brother of the heroic Rose. ”

“ Increase Mather's younger sons were Nathaniel Mather (d. 17 Oct. 1688, aged 19) ; and Samuel Mather, presbyterian minister at Witney, Oxfordshire, author of ‘A Discourse concerning the Godhead of the Holy Ghost,’ 1719, 8vo, and other tracts. ”

“ Judith exclaimed before Ellis had completed his offer. "Such an opportunity!"
Mather himself looked at Ellis in surprise. It was an opening which, coming from any other source, he would have accepted eagerly, as a task in which he could give free play to all his powers. Did Ellis really mean it? But the promoter, having swiftly asked himself the same question, was sure of his own wisdom. The place needed a man: here was one. Besides, Ellis would have given much to tie Mather to him. ”

“ It is true we have such painful and precocious records as that of young Nathaniel Mather, who happily died before reaching manhood, but not before he had scaled the heights of self-esteem, and sounded the depths of despair. ”

“ How fast William Mather rose in the estimation of those who, never having known him intimately, had looked upon him as a cold, haughty man, whose loyalty was somewhat doubtful, and how proud Rose felt, even in the midst of her tears, as she heard on every side her husband’s praise. Even the Widow Simms ventured to the Mather mansion, telling her how glad she was, and offering to do what she could for the volunteer, while Annie, unable to do anything for herself, could only pray that God would bring Mr. ”

“ MATHER, RICHARD (1596–1669) , congregational divine, son of Thomas and Margaret Mather, was born in 1596 at a house still standing in Mather Lane, Lowton, in the parish of Winwick, Lancashire. His parents were of good family, reduced by ‘unhappy mortgages.’ At Winwick grammar school he was under William Horrocke, a good but severe master, who dissuaded his father from apprenticing the lad to a Roman catholic merchant. ”

“ It was often his delight, after his school was dismissed in the afternoon, to stretch himself on the rich bed of clover, bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there con over old Mather’s direful tales, until the gathering dusk of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he wended his way, by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whippoorwill from the hill-side ”

“ He showed them to some of Mather's particular friends. Whereupon Mather preached about him; sent word that he should have him arrested for slander; and called him "one of the worst of liars." Calef wrote him a letter, on the twenty-ninth of September; and, in reference to the complaints and charges Mather was making, proposed that they should meet, in either of two places he mentioned, each accompanied by a friend, at which time he, Calef, would read to him the minutes he had taken, of what had occurred on the evenings of the thirteenth and nineteenth. ”

“ No writings of Mather have ever received more evidence of public interest or favor. First printed in London, Calef's volume has gone through four American editions; the last, in 1861, edited by Samuel P. Fowler, is presented in such eligible type and so readable a form, as to commend it to favorable notice.
It may be safely said that few publications have produced more immediate or more lasting effects. It killed off the whole business of Margaret Rule. Mather abandoned it altogether. In 1694, he said "the forgetting thereof would neither be pleasing to God nor useful to men." ”

“ And the busy tide of life rolled on in Rockland just the same as if in the churchyard there was no new-made grave, holding the buried love of Annie, who, in Rose Mather’s beautiful home, was surrounded with every 165possible comfort and luxury, and treated with as much consideration as if she were a born princess, instead of the humble woman, who, a few months before, was wholly unknown to the little lady of the Mather Mansion. ”

“ Increase Mather’s “Remarkable Providences”; the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden; the “Vis{294}ions of Piers Ploughman;” the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the “Hymns and Songs” and the “Hallelujah” of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Selden’s “Table-Talk”; the “Enchiridion” of Quarles; the dramatic works of Marston, Webster, and Lilly; Chapman’s translation of Homer; Lovelace, and four volumes of “Early English Poetry”! The volume of Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same shelf with the “Magnalia” of his book-suffocated son. ”

“ On behalf of the ministers, Increase Mather came out with his Cases of Conscience concerning Witchcraft, in which, while he argued with great learning that spectral evidence was not infallible, and that the devil might assume the shape of an innocent man, he yet strenuously maintained as sufficient proof confession, or "the speaking such words or the doing such things as none but such as have familiarity with the devil ever did or can do." As to such as falsely confessed themselves witches, and were hanged in consequence, Mather thought that was no more than they deserved. ”

“ Mather wondered, after a few unusual appearances of Pease at the mill, if the banker was overseeing his work; but as on each occasion Pease went farther up the hill Mather put the visits down to the right cause.
As most people are gifted with that kind of insight which the manager thus exercised, others as well came to note Pease's actions, and their cause, before the banker did himself. Miss Cynthia, who spent summer as well as winter in the city (for since her poor people could not get away, neither would she) , came early to know what seed she had planted in her cousin's breast. ”