Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (18 page)

 
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Mather's tracts and polemical works. He was a direct man and he went directly to the point as, for example, in
Church-Government and Church Covenant
, he used the questions asked by English Presbyterians about New England's ecclesiastical polity to give his defense of Bay Colony practice a systematic expression. His longest treatise on this subject, a "Plea for the Churches of New England," responded directly to English criticisms and then provided a reasoned statement, embellished with scholarly citations, in Mather's own terms.
38
Increase Mather admired the plain style, praised the simplicity it gave his father's sermons, and used it himself. He was a self-conscious writer who read other men for their styles as well as their substances. He did not confess to feeling any anxiety about the forms his son Cotton employed in his writing, but he may have had Cotton in mind in several of the complaints he sounded late in his life about the new elegance that was creeping into the pulpit.
39
Increase never allowed any of these new fashions to find a place in his sermons. But he did strive for unusual effects using the conventional style. He was no more concrete than his father; indeed, in his typological references he was much less so. He sought, however, to achieve the graphic, to paint in the minds of his listeners and readers pictures of themselves and their fates. Hence, though both Richard and Increase preached about the end of the world, Richard usually limited himself to discussions of the historical process that carried nations and peoples along the line of time to the inevitable conclusion of all things. Increase shared Richard's historical sense, but he could not find contentment by focusing his sermons on anything so abstract. Rather, he provided a fare that deliberately sought to evoke the terror the unworthy should feel as they contemplated their inevitable sufferings in Hell. Throughout the seventeenth century, ordinary preaching in New England did much with this device and with a vocabulary of fire, burning, and the odor of brimstone. Richard recognized the power of such techniques but he could not have said to his listeners, as Increase did, "Thy soul is hanging over the mouth of hell by the rotten thread of a frail life: if that breaks, the devouring Gulf will swallow thee up for ever."
40
Richard and Increase both composed muscular sermons which
 
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abound in references to striving, wrestling, and laboring with sin, and searching and running after Christ. These figures evoke images of straining bodies, mortified flesh, as well as of psyches taut in the worship of God. Frequently they are accompanied by references to moral lapses which are often drawn with oblique sexual references. A Puritan layman recognized the special horror of an offense described as ''unclean" or "filthy." Richard Mather, like every minister, used these words to describe such sins as fornication and adultery. Increase Mather pushed this terminology farther, using these words to describe offenses having no connection with sex. These rhetorical, or stylistic, choices suggest a character less confident of itself, less certain of its goodness perhaps, and striving for reassurance that it measures up to the best in the past.
41
The differences in the characters of Richard and Increase may also be seen in certain instances of their applications of Puritan ideas to life. Near the end of his life and feeling his death was near, Richard attempted to recall New England to the divine mission. New England had strayed; the founders' expectations had been subjected to a good deal of battering. Had Richard been a man to insist upon the letter of the law, he would have found good company. But without weakness, he continued to make distinctions between errors that damned and those that did not. Some errors he told his church "
subvert the soul
" excluding it from Heaven, while others are not so fundamental, "but are as
hay
and rubble upon the
foundation
. . . ." Increase did not make such distinctionsan error such as a lie was criminal, even a lie told to spare your neighbor grief and which did no ostensible harm dishonored God and was a damning sin.
42
For Increase, Christian charity was a limited concept. The ungodly did not excite his sympathy; rather, he felt only revulsion from them, a feeling he expressed in his insistence that good men should avoid them. Necessity, say the demands of one's particular calling, might lead to some contacts but they should be kept to a minimum. The company a godly man kept constituted a test of his regeneration: a truly godly man, Increase said, delighted only in the company of other godly men; he resented wasting his time with sinners; he did not want them to throw his mental frame out of joint. The thrust of this attitude is towards a kind of moral separation, a fear of contamination.
43
 
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Increase's tendency to exceed the requirements of the moral lawand of pietymay also be seen in his message to children. Every child was told that a failure to experience grace implied eternal damnation. Increase assured those in his congregation that should they fail they would hear him accuse them on the Day of Judgment. His father had contented himself with reproaching the parents for their inability to bring their children to God. Increase, of course, did not neglect the parents; unless they had grace, he said, they were unfit even to pray for their children. In castigating the parents in this fashion, Increase strained the bounds of the creed, which made it a duty for all mensaints and sinners aliketo seek the mercies of the Lord in prayer.
44
As extraordinary as Increase Mather's character appears, it was in most respects typical of his generation. Increases's generation were the sons of the foundersgreat men whose achievements had to be reckoned with. In Increase's case, the burden was heavierhis father was the last great survivor of a group of distinguished divines. With the exception of four years spent in England, Increase had to face his father almost every day for the first thirty years of his life. Although there were other reasons for his decision, Increase at one point in his life left the scene of his father's fame resolved to make his way in England. Rebellion, or a simple desire to disengage himself from Richard's influence, may not have been a part of this decision. Yet the fact is that on his return, which was forced by conditions completely out of his control, he resisted a cause his father advocated, the extension of baptism to children of half-way members. Increase took a hard linesaying in effect that he would uphold his father's principles, if his father was incapable of maintaining them.
45
In some manner Increase had to deal with the fact that he was the son of a great man who was acting in a cosmic drama. The piety of both parents added to his problemhe would have to equal, if not surpass it. In a peculiar way his private success added to his public problems. As a boy he succeeded in making his mark as a scholar; he honored his mother's dying wish that he convert; in his father's footsteps he became a minister. In all these ways he satisfied his family'sand his ownexpectations. But serving God was the highest goal, and all these other achieve-
 
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ments were subordinate to it. They were largely meaningless unless he furthered God's plan in New England. To be sure, Increase became the most esteemed minister of his day, the recipient of public trusts and honors, and a recognized force in the government of Massachusetts. But these attainments meant less than they might have in the face of departures from the true polity, in the shock felt at the loss of the colony's charter, and in the unhappy decline of godliness.
46
His inability to control these events seemed to mark his private experiencehis encounters with the Lord. Understandably, he sometimes confused this relationship and, forgetting to abide in divine decisions, he appealed for help in his own devices.
His eagerness to succeed, to uphold the authority of his family, to get his way with New England andimplicitlywith the Lord led him to an extraordinary concern with himself. This concern was an unavoidable developmenthis place in the family and the community, conspired with Puritan impulses to introspection, all contributed to it. Psychologically, Puritan imperatives to self-examination could never be reconciled with the ideals of humility and resignation of the self. The more Increase, or any Puritan, sought humility, the more he studied himself to discern its attainment. The result was a self-consciousness at best painful, at its most excruciating worst, unbearable, and whichin any caseimplied the value of the self.
47
Increase's self-evaluation led him, in prayers for his son Samuel, who, he believed, was near death in 1672, to approach the Lord with pleas that were as much for himself as for the boy. In several of the prayers Increase was joined by his wife and his son Cotton. Appealing to the Lord for Samuel, Increase thought of the possibility that his prayers would not be granted, and wondered what the effects of failure would be on his family. Only obliquely did he reveal his knowledge that his reputation as a man who got his prayers answered was at stake; but his pitying reference to himself in his account of what he prayeddoubtless privatelybetrayed him: "Now I thought it might be some discouragement to Cotton in case he should see that his poor sinfull Fathers prayers, were not heard; [so] I humbly pleaded that with the Lord."
48
If Increase Mather worried over his family, over how it regarded him as well as how it fared, he also received unmixed
 
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happiness from it. Though it is difficult to gain a sense of his wife's character from the conventional language used by all who described her, she seems to have given as fully of her love as of her obedience. Increase noted of her that he could always rely on her to keep the family well when he was called away, but she was clearly one who shared more with him than a concern for their children. Maria Mather understood her husband's hopes and fears for New England. When he went to England to retrieve the charter in 1688, she took his place in his study, praying and fasting for his success. Her prayers, recorded in her papers, reveal that she grasped something of the analogy of New England to Israel, and of the desperate plight of the people of God in America.
49
Increase undoubtedly shared much of his private feelings with Maria Mather, but to the world he showed a highly controlled gravity. His thin face with its long nose was not harsh, but it did not invite light and frolicsome behavior. When Increase laughed, men did not believe their ears; everything about him suggested the gravity that Puritans cultivated inwardly as well as outwardly. Increase's presence, his awesome presence, testified to his belief in life's seriousnessand tenuousness on earth.
50
Only in his church, and especially at the Lord's Table, did he unbend. There, even more than in the pulpit, he could release publicly the passion he felt for his God. The quality of his feeling cannot now be recaptured, of course, but we can gain a glimpse of his soul in these rapturous moments. Whatever else he experienced, he received an impression of the immensity of God's power and beside it the triviality of his own. His soul melted, he said, when immediately afterwards he tried to recapture the experience at the Supper. He wished God to treat him as a child; he felt like a child standing before the majesty of the Divine. Tears gushed from my eyes, he reported; and indeed, he usually wept at the Supper, wept in happiness, not in terror. He wept too, one suspects, for himself, as well as for the beauty and generosity of God in sacrificing His Son. He wept out of his sense of his imperfection, his impurity, which he could not escapeand could not hide fromin the celebration of what he considered the most perfect act in history.
51
 
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6
The Invention of New England
Richard Mather's generation settled the new land. They organized the Massachusetts Bay Company in England, raised money for ships and supplies, recruited the men and women for the venture, and transported the lot, including the Company's Charter, across the Atlantic. They suffered from heat and cold and disease and hunger while they peopled the landscape and built towns and laid out farms. As when they gathered their churches and listened to the word, they did all these things in the service of the Lord. They told themselves all their lives and they told anyone else who would listen that they had come to New England to preserve the true Church polity. In a sense, it was chance (or, as they said, Providence), that they came to New England for they would have gone anywhere to do what they did; they would have remained in England had it served the Lord's purposes.
1
The fact is that the founders had no conception of New England apart from Old England. New England was the extension of the country they had left. And the new was sent out in the hope of reclaiming the old. The founders identified themselves with Englandthey had grown up there, and they were too old

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