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

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Historical, #United States, #Leaders & Notable People, #Religious, #Christian Books & Bibles, #History, #Americas, #State & Local, #Christianity, #Religion & Spirituality, #test

The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (3 page)

11. (Boston, 1684), p. 99.
12. Mason Lowance,
Increase Mather
(New York: Twayne, 1974); Michael Hall,
The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639-1723
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
13. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).
14.
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
(New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
15.
The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian University Press, 1979).
 
Page xv
PREFACE
This study of the three leading Mathers of colonial New England should not be confused with a rounded biography, a full-scale family study, or a sociological analysis of a group of Puritan intellectuals. To some extent I have been concerned with these subjects, but only as they bear on my rather different interest the intellectual history of Puritanism. I began my research into the Mathers with this interest, and though my understanding of it has profoundly changed, it has continued to absorb me.
As subjects for study, the Mathers first attracted me because of their obvious importance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in New England, and because as intellectuals and personalities they seemed fascinating. When I began to read their work, I also had some vague sense that they were probably representative of their kindministers who were also intellectualsand that they might be made the means for a fresh telling of the history of Puritanism in America. This hunch has paid off in ways which have surprised me. Like most historians of Puritanism in New England I had thought of Puritan development as a slow accommodation to the requirements of a new ''secular'' world. The terms historians have used to describe this change suggest the lines of
 
Page xvi
this story: it is one of the degeneration of Puritan mission, of "piety" becoming "moralism," of the "covenant legalism" yielding ''Arminianism," of the gathered Church merging with society, of faith transformed by reason, science, and business, and finally becoming a mild benevolence. In the standard studies of the New England mind, these changes do not just affect laymen rushing into modernity; they also capture a clergy especially sensitive to cultural shifts by a recognition that their leadershipand their political influencewill depend upon their ability to assimilate the new secularism to the old religion.
A summary account cannot convey the sophistication of many of these histories. And I have no wish to separate completely my own work from that of other scholars. There is much of value in their studies, but I have found that the history of Puritanism in New England departs from these accounts in important matters. I have seen things differently in part because my method, or more accurately, my research, has been different. The concentration on the three great Mathersreading their private as well as their public writings, their manuscripts as well as their published work, has given me a perspective not only on the larger contours of Puritanism but on inner experience as well. Of course, I have also read the work of the Mathers' contemporariesand many of their English forebears and colleaguestoo. I have also found what the Mathers said to common men, those they faced every week and those they tried to convert and comfort, as revealing as anything they published in formal treatises and books.
This research has excited and moved me in several ways. It has proved exciting because it has convinced me that Puritanism in New England changed in rather different ways than I had believedthat Puritan mission was defined more by the second generation in America than the first, that religious psychology and covenant preaching were more "affective" than has been suspected and that they helped Puritan intellectuals use "reason" and the new science in the development of a theory of religious experience and eschatology which were anything but accommodations to or rationalizations of the existing order of things early in the eighteenth century. There was, in fact, in the Mathers' thought and feeling much that was creative. They were not original in the sense that Augustine and Calvin were, but because they were men of powerful minds and, especially, because they
 
Page xvii
were men of intense pietyeverything they did, they attempted to do in the service of Godthey succeeded at times in transcending the limits of the emerging lay culture of their time. Thus they did more than "respond"; they did more than "accommodate" their creed to the American environment. Cotton Mather went farther along this road than his father and grandfather, and in the process gave away much in the synthesis of piety and intellect that theyand heexpressed. Indeed, Cotton Mather's piety threatened to destroy his reasonhe died before it did. He is, nonetheless, I think, the most admirable of the three because he was the most daring (and the most driven). Before he died he had refashioned, with the aid of his father, much in Puritanism ecclesiastical theory, the psychology of religious experience, covenant preaching, and conceptions of Christian history and prophecy. He had failed to reconcile science and faith, but he had begun to grasp some of the difficulties of their reconciliation. He had also failed to persuade his society to reform itself, surely the easiest of his failures to understand. In success and failure he had lived up the best standards of his family.
I have been moved by this story because though all three Mathers had unattractive sides, they also had intellectualand moralcourage. Their livesand the lives of Puritan intellectuals generallyare not the stories of those sad men who find ways of giving in while they persuade themselves that they are holding fast to their principles. But perhaps my own feeling should not be discussed; it is probably clear in my work, though I hope it is not obtrusive.
I have no wish, however, to repress my feelings of gratitude to those who helped me in my work. Among them, I wish to thank the University of California Library, Berkeley, where I did most of my research; the American Antiquarian Society, for providing microfilm of manuscripts in its possession; the Massachusetts Historical Society, for the same service and for guidance in using its holdings; the Yale University Library, for aiding my work there and for providing film. (The Henry Martyn Dexter collection of Puritan tracts at Yale proved especially valuable to me.) The Henry E. Huntington Library also furnished film of several rare tracts in its collections.
The Mathers, I am certain, would regard uneasily the amount of financial aid that I have received in the course of my work.
 
Page xviii
They managed to turn out solid edification without the grants and fellowships that I have enjoyed. The University that has been my academic home for the last eight years never behaves puritanicallyat the risk of striking an unappreciative note, I might say that it might be better if it occasionally did soand has been anything but ascetic in its support of scholarship. I am grateful to the University's Regents and the Committee on Research for funds for travel, film, typing, and for a Faculty Humanities Fellowship. The American Council of Learned Societies generously provided a fellowship for the academic year 1965-66, a year I spent in research and writing.
My friends and colleagues have, as always, been extraordinarily generous and encouraging. At the University of California Gunther Barth and Richard Johnson provided several important bibliographical leads; Roger Hahn, Winthrop Jordan, and Kenneth Stampp read major portions of my study and gave me suggestions and encouragement; I am particularly indebted to two old friends, Lawrence Levine and Irwin Scheiner, for reading my work and urging me ondespite their scorn for Puritanism of any form in any century.
David Levin of Stanford University lent me notes and has given me wise counsel; Leo Marx of Amherst suggested a way of thinking about conversion (I have used some of his language in three paragraphs in Chapter One); Max Savelle, now of the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, has given me good advice in my studies over the years.
By dedicating this book to Edmund S. Morgan I hope to express something of my regard for him and my indebtedness to his inspiration and his scholarship. He has not only read my manuscript closely, he has helped me to see what was crucial in the history of Puritanism in New England.
R. M.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
NOVEMBER 1970

Other books

Whom the Gods Love by Kate Ross
Max and the Prince by R. J. Scott
Rory's Proposal by Lynda Renham
The Baker's Boy by J. V. Jones
Velocity by Abigail Boyd
Counterfeit Son by Elaine Marie Alphin