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 (47 page)

 
Page 271
neighborhood society when he was sixteen years old, and an account he gave of the sermon much later indicates that other organizations were in existence in the 1670's too.
26
How far the religious societies spread outside of Boston and how constantly they flourished within cannot be known. Mather addressed societies of young men off and on throughout his life; he also appeared before women's groups and societies composed of men of substance. It was such an organization that he formed in 1702 with the expectation that its members would discuss the state of religion and perhaps create proposals for encouraging piety. The second organization set up under his direction at this time included important men, a number of them justices, and gave itself to the problem of reform. This group Mather designated the "Society To Suppress Disorders." Although this initial separation of the voluntary societies persisted, there is evidence that at times the functions of the agencies blurred in actuality and in Mather's mind.
27
The religious societies probably enjoyed greater favor throughout New England than the reforming societies. So long as societies occupied themselves by listening to sermons, praying, and discussing religious subjectsand not meddling with private conductthey remained unoffensive. They had a broader appeal in any case. Societies of women could not get into the business of suppressing bawdy houses, for such behavior would have been considered unseemly. Similarly, young men might be put to investigating other adolescents, but they could not be sent into taverns to locate tipplers.
28
The societies that dealt with such matters were small in size, the first in Boston numbered around twelve or fourteen, Mather reported. For the most part their deliberations were kept secret, and they were guided by ministers and civil officials. Mather recommended that each have a minister and a justice of the peace to give it leadership and a link with Church and State, the major institutions in New England. The disorders that Mather hoped the societies would suppress included behavior that was popular, one suspects, in all ranks of societies. Three vices seem to have disturbed Mather more than othersdrunken-ness, profanity, and patronge of bawdy houses. They crop up in his
Diary
and in the sermons he delivered to the societies with a regularity that suggests that neither the magistrates nor the
 
Page 272
voluntary agencies ever coped with them. Mather recommended a number of techniques to the societies which they could use in defending pure language and conduct. Surely the most unpopular involved the use of informers. In England unsympathetic observers of the societies accused them of paying informers to tattle on offenders against the moral code. Cotton Mather never even hinted that informers should be paidthe suggestion would have horrified himbut rather that good men should tell on bad out of a sense of duty to the community and in the service of the Lord. That evil corrupted good was a melancholy truth that no one could deny. Informing on drunkards and whoremasters might keep the neighborhood healthy and perhaps persuade the Lord to withhold the punishing afflictions He commonly sent against a degenerate community. Informers should not act out of malice, however; indeed, there were times when they and grand jurymen, tithing men, and other officials charged with public responsibilities should do nothing more than admonish lawbreakers. When violators fell spontaneously into some sin for the first time, they deserved a charitable admonition, Mather believed. This was a fine line for anyone to draw of course; Mather drew it himself on a number of occasions. For example, he did not go to the public authorities when one of the societies collected the names of young men who frequented whore-houses in Boston. Instead he put the society to writing reproving letters to each of the fornicators.
29
In such cases the societies were exercising what Mather styled "Vigilant Inspection" of the laws. Understandably the victims of the inspectors did not care for this sort of vigilance. This disfavor did not trouble Cotton Mather, who urged that the societies extend their concern to lamentable omissions in private life, such as the neglect of family prayer and of religious duties. How the societies attempted to satisfy this requirement beyond spreading books and tracts which conveyed instructions on leading good lives is not clear.
30
Mather himself sent books and tracts all over New Englandand beyond. Some dealt with the conventional subjects of worship and faith; others with the treatment of the sick, the duties the fortunate owed the poor; and still others were intended for the Indians. Here Mather's society was the New England Company,
 
Page 273
as The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England was known.
31
This body had of necessity to concern itself with public policy. It was never primarily an organized lobby, however, even though it dealt with governmental bodies. Cotton Mather did not conceive of the lesser societies as lobbies either, but he did suggest that they should make the passage of wholesome laws their business. This objective was closely related to their usual concern of keeping grand jurymen and magistrates up to the mark. The step between enforcing the laws and securing the passage of other laws did not appear a long one, and Mather encouraged the societies to take it whenever necessary.
32
Despite frequent exhortations from Mather, the societies for the suppression of disorders did not flourish after the first ten years of their existence. Their first three or four years seemed to promise a long life: Mather reported so much enthusiasm that dividing the original society became necessary in 1705. Thereafter, the North end and the South end of Boston each felt the scrutiny of its own group of reformers. But by November 1711 the North end's band was languishing, and in January 1713 Mather noted that the "General" society had dissolveala reference that suggests that the combined groups no longer existed in Boston. In the next five years, Mather made a series of attempts to revive themand may have enjoyed temporary success. On the whole, however, organized reform never received popular support.
33
In contrast, the religious societies enjoyed longer lives, and in some form survived the eighteenth century. Undoubtedly several such bodies in Boston began with their reformist impulses as strong as their desires to revive piety. Yet it seems that their worship and their charitable activity held them together; reform, Mather's elliptical references in his Diary suggest, may have caused a falling out, probably because Puritans easily transformed loving reproofs into malicious backbiting.
34
The religious societies may have dispensed as much charity as any private group in Boston. Cotton Mather felt a genuine sympathy for the poor and encouraged their relief. He himself gave money, collected wood for their fires in winter, sought clothing for them, and helped organize charity schools. And
 
Page 274
under his supervision schools opened for Negroes and Indians in the evenings. He also sent a steady stream of Bibles and sermons to schools and families.
35
Mather's most ambitious project for the religious societies began in late 1712, a time when organized activity in Boston appeared near collapse, and when the Protestant interest in Europehe believedfaced disaster. At home the societies were languishing; in Europe, Roman Catholic power seemed on the ascent, and Mather feared the Queen's government was on the verge of making peace with France. In October 1712, Mather confided in his
Diary
that he had recently learned of groups of English dissenters, probably in London, who had begun to hold a weekly hour of prayer in which they beseeched the Lord to rescue the Protestant interest. The English dissenters published their "Brotherly Agreement" in a letter in August 1712. Mather received a copy shortly afterwards and began planning for similar activities in America. He must have been stimulated in part by the English appeal to the "Godly People" in the colonies to join. In urging a transatlantic effort, the English sounded one of Mather's deepest convictionsthe ecumenical interest was world-wide, ''And this the rather because
they
are all bound up with us in the same
Bundle of Life
, and their fate is likely to be involved in ours."
36
Mather had organized joint meetings of the religious societies of Boston for prayer and discussion before this time. He looked to these meetings to yield ideas about tactics and projects. Organized activity had always pleased him, and long after these hours of common prayer he would urge that combinations of saints gather to beg the Lord to intercede for Christ's Church on earth.
The readiness that Mather showed in these years to enlist in pietistic efforts throughout the world as, for example, in these concerts of prayer, does not mean that he had given up on the traditional Congregational way. He had of course long since confessed that the founders' use of the State to crush other religious persuasions was a mistake. But if the State would no longer enforce conformity he expected it to punish blasphemers and offenders against the moral code. The MAXIMS OF PIETY stripped morality down to its essentials, according to the exponents of do-good, but PIETY implied no indifference to the
 
Page 275
old violations of the law. Here the State, acting with the churches, still might play its part. Mather's expectations that in a nation committed to do-good the old alliance would retain its value is clearly put in
Bonifacius
: "When
Moses
and Aaron join to
do good
, what can't they do?"
37
To seal the league and infuse it with pietistic purposes he urged that every reforming society should have among its members a magistrate as well as a minister. The societies themselves would act as the arms of justice, reaching out to warn the tempted and to inform on lawbreakers. Mather himself reprinted an abstract of the most important laws regulating behavior. Along with each offense, the penalty was carefully listed, obviously with intention of demonstrating the force of the State behind, as he explained, "the worthy Designs of REFORMATION."
38
The entire system of societies embracing all ranks of men which act on one another to produce conformity in thought and behavior has the odor, as Perry Miller points out, of nineteenth-century midwestern small-town Protestantism. No one is neglected in the scheme, all those incapable of doing good must resign themselves to have it done to them. And yet this appraisal does not recognize the deepest impulses of the Pietists whose primary concerns were not social, or even moral, but religious. After all, only converted men could do good. At no point in the secrecy of his
Diary
, in his letters to Francke or to the English Pietists or in his published work, did Mather hint that any action of the unconverted was acceptable to God. They must live according to the law and carry out all His commandments so far as their natural state permitted, but nothing that they did could satisfy the Lord. Only those with grace could do that and they must be up and be doing, not just to curb evil and to relieve the sufferings of the poor and the afflicted. Mather's plans for easing the distress of such unfortunates surely constituted a social gospel, but the end of such works was never just to make life more endurable for such people. The good in doing good lay in the glorification of God, and apart from God's glory, good had no meaning.
39
Christian Union had been associated in Mather's mind with the glory of God long before his plans for do-good and the societies were fully developed. Now in the first years of organizing the societies he realized that they and the entire range of do-
 
Page 276
good activities might be made the instruments of Christian unity. The attempts to do good that he and these groups undertook might miscarry, yet in time they might succeed in uniting all Christians in benevolenceand in the Holy Spirit. As the reforming societies fell into disrepair after 1710, this hope assumed more importance for him. The societies might fail to relieve the poor, they might not succeed in dissuading young men from frequenting bawdy houses, but they could persist in propagating the faith by spreading the Maxims of the Everlasting Gospel (as he sometimes called the MAXIMS OF PIETY). Mather never faced the paradox in his hope that do-good might accomplish most at a time when its chief mechanism, the voluntary society, languished. The societies did not reform vicious habits, and they did not bring a widespread revival of religionand Mather knew it. But still he hoped that do-good might bring a Christian Union that had escaped the United Brethren and the associations.
40
The opportunity in do-good lay not in its power to change men, Mather tacitly admitted in the years after he published
Bonifacius
. Rather it offered the basis of unity for the saints in this world. The Christian religion is not ''meer
Theory,
" he declared in a letter written in 1717; it is a "Practical
Thing
" which animates a vital piety and calls the saints into righteous lives.
41
They must continue to actto do goodwhatever the consequences, or the lack of results in a polluted world. Mather did not regard this injunction as an admission of defeat, nor did he ever suggest that the pious should give up their attempts to reform the world. They must never stop. The concealed implication in what Mather was propounding was that the doing was as important as the good achieved. Be up and be doing, he urged, and let the results come if God approved. The good resided finally in the action.
42
This feeling, as much as the frustration he endured in attempting to revive languishing societies, drove him into his ultimate plan for reformation. Men, he had to concede, would resist those human agencies which were determined to make them over. But should they resist the Divine at the end of the world, they would be destroyed by the shakings and overturnings of the final revolution. Societies of men who recognized this cosmic fact, and in effect eschewed any effort to do more than prepare for the end, might be formed to bring on the Kingdom of God. These or-

Other books

Dry Bones by Margaret Mayhew
Viper: A Hitman Romance by Girard, Zahra
What You Have Left by Will Allison
More than Passion by JoMarie DeGioia
Barbara Stanwyck by Dan Callahan
No Time to Cry by Lurlene McDaniel
The Strawberry Sisters by Candy Harper
Murphy by Samuel Beckett