Cotton Mather

(1662/3 - 1727/8)

          COTTON MATHER (1662/3-1727/8). The eldest son of New England's leading divine, Increase Mather, and grandson of the colony's spiritual founders Richard Mather and John Cotton, Mather was born in Boston, educated at Harvard (B.A. 1678; M.A. 1681), and received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Glasgow University (1710). As pastor of Boston's Second Church (Congregational), he came into the political limelight during America's version of the Glorious Revolution, when Bostonians deposed their royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros (April 1689). During the witchcraft debacle (1692-93), Mather both warns the Salem judges against admitting "spectral evidence" as grounds for indictment and advocates prayer and fasting to cure the afflicted, but he also writes New England's official defense of the court's procedures on which his modern reputation largely depends: The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693). As the Lord's remembrancer and keeper of the Puritan conscience, he writes the grandest of American jeremiads, his epic church history Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Like his father a staunch defender of Puritan orthodoxy, Mather persuades Elihu Yale, a London merchant and practicing Anglican, to endow Yale University (1703) as the new nursery of Puritanism, when Harvard seemed to become too liberal in its teaching and too independent in its thinking. If such endeavors bespeak Mather's partisan politics on the one hand and his transcendent thinking on the other, it is his chiliastic credo that leads him to champion Pietist ecumenism, his effort to unite all Christian denominations in New England, nay all Christians, Jews, and Moslems in the Orient and Occident, under the umbrella of his "3 Maxims of Piety" to hasten the Second Coming of Christ. Likewise, his interest in the New Sciences and in new medical theories distinguishes Mather from his American contemporaries. He is elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1713), defends and popularizes the new scientific theories of Henry More, William Derham, John Ray, Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, Sir Isaac Newton, and others, and staunchly advocates a new germ theory and inoculation against smallpox in the face of the united opposition of Boston's physicians during the epidemic of 1721. Whereas Increase Mather never quite made the transition into the Enlightenment, his son Cotton had come full circle; he represents the best of early Enlightenment thinking in colonial America. His contributions to the literature of the New England Errand are as diverse as his publications are prolific and inexhaustible. In all, he published more than four hundred works on all aspects of the contemporary debate: theological, historical, biographical, political, and scientific. It is therefore deplorable that Mather's reputation is still largely overshadowed by the specter of Salem witchcraft.

          No single work of Mather's gargantuan publication record does justice to his long, productive career in New England's foremost pulpit, but several representative types afford a glimpse at his overall achievement. The Diary of Cotton Mather (Vol. I, 1911; II, 1912; III, 1964) provides a more comprehensive insight into his volatile nature than his autobiography Paterna (1976). His Diary is a Puritan document par excellence. It focuses on him as an instrument of divine providence in the world. If his public persona in his sermons is overbearing and bombastic, his private persona in his Diary is modest and unostentatious: a doting son, loving father, affectionate husband, and caring Pastor Evangelicus--fully aware of his own weaknesses.