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 (5 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 8
with weaned affections and concentrate on God. His model for living existed in his sinful makeup, but he should seek to conform to Christ. The imperative which Puritans most insisted upon was that as helpless as man was, he should act, and act according to divine prescriptions. The total self had to be enlisted in God's cause. Every life must be lived with this requirement in mind; inwardly and outwardly men were to conform to Christ in "our soules, our bodies, our understanding, will, memorie, affections, and all we have to the service of God, in the generall calling of a Christian, and in the particular callings in which hee hath placed us."
6
Probably no Puritan understood these injunctions in exactly the way any other Puritan did. From these differences in understanding came differences in styles of life. The more literally the command "live with the self fixed on God" was taken, the greater religious intensity life had.
The three distinguished Mathers of the seventeenth century Richard, his son Increase, and his, Cottonall took this injunction to heart as a standard of life. And none confined intensity to inner experience. Their general callings as Christians affected everything they did and thought and felt, but their particular callings as ministers were hardly less important. In fact the two cannot be separated, for the voice of God was clearly heard in both.
These three men lived passionate lives, but their determination to get the best out of themselves for the glory of God did not rest on untutored enthusiasm. All three respected ideas and knowledge; all three proved themselves as scholars as well as ministers. Perhaps in the long history of their service to New England, their ideas about the conduct of life influenced their society more than anything they did. Yet, most of their contemporaries seem to have been as impressed by the sustained example of their religious devotion. And a few sensed what was significant in all three Matherstheir desire to fuse piety and intellect, to pursue ideas with the heart as well as with the mind, and to bring their thinking constantly to bear on their love of God.
Inevitably they did not all love God in the same way and inevitably they chose, or were forced to choose, different ways of expressing their love of God's glory. Inevitably they differed in their abilities to sustain the union of mind and spirit. And in-
 
Page 9
evitably because their faith was deep and because they strove so mightily in God's service, their differences reflected in most ways the intellectual development of three generations of clerical intellectuals in New England.
This development, which includes much of the intellectual history of Puritanism, is usually taken to parallel the transformation of Puritan into Yankee, a process that sees piety replaced by secular values. Surely the process of secularization of society began in the seventeenth century as business and the market, farms and fields, and styles of life separated from the meeting-house, assumed an increasing importance. The State gave ground, too, as internal diversity and external imperatives forced the abandonment of an official policy of intolerance. And while these changes occurred, children were born and reared who experienced distress, incomprehension, and indifference at their inability to recapitulate in their lives the religious psychology of their fathers.
But just as surely as it began, this process was not completed. Standing apart from it, though not unaffected by it, were Puritan laymen and divines, who continued to maintain that life must be shaped by the necessity of advancing God's glory and who persisted in measuring every alteration in society against what they could conceive of as its effects on the true religion. These men did notas much of the written history of Puritanism has it accommodate or rationalize the gradual decline of religious faith. Those who hold that they did describe them as unself-conscious Arminians, subtle exponents of the free will of man, who encouraged the drift from the Calvinist creed by preaching a covenant legalism. Such preaching did occur within the Congregational churches of New England, though it is significant that the group commonly taken to be the most worldly in New England, the merchants trading overseas, found their way into the Church of England, an institution far more committed than the Congregational churches to the power of human abilities. A more prevalent preaching upheld the old creed, however. This preaching represented a largely clerical culture increasingly at variance with the chief dispositions of society in New England.
The Mathersparticularly Increase and Cottonfelt the gradual divergence of religious and secular life with great acuteness. Their responses came out of their hearts and minds. As they
 
Page 10
watched their society move from what they considered the true road to God's glory, they suffered and resisted and sought the means to bring it back. They were not reactionaries or even conservativesthe words have no value in this contextfor they attempted to contain within their thought what they considered the best in the new science and social organization. They proved remarkably resourceful in discovering "unessentials" in religion and Church polity which, they said, ought to be sacrificed to rally men to the Lord's cause. And in the end they both compromised and still held fast.
All this cost Increase and Cotton much. Yet their piety, which was only slightly more intense than most of their ministerial colleagues', had probably increased over that of the founders. Certainly it had assumed more extravagant forms and had carried them into rapturous dreams of the next world. These changes reached their highest expression in the mind and heart of Cotton Mather. Within him the old balance had collapsed in favor of the spirit. The society in which he died, the society of the Franklins, the
Courant
, the Hell-Fire Club, and much more that he despised, may have been as "reasonable" as it claimed and as he for a brief time acknowledged. But that sort of reasonableness he learned could not be incorporated into the spirit to which he finally gave himself. At the end of his life then, he had given over the synthesis of piety and intellect which had so distinguished his grandfather's era. And in the process he had transformed the life of passionate commitment, and contributed to the alteration of Puritanism itself.
The founder of the family in America, Richard Mather, established this pattern of passionate commitment. Increase and Cotton Mather felt his moral authority and commented on it throughout their lives. Had they wished to escape it they could not have done so, for what gave Richard's example its compulsive power was, of course, the fact that it measured up to the highest Puritan ideals. Richard embodied as fully as any man among the fathers of New England the reasoned intensity all Puritans held before themselves as a model for living.
Richard Mather was born in a substantial, timbered house in 1596 in the village of Lowton, not far from Liverpool in Winwick Parish in Lancashire. Richard's father, Thomas, seems to have
 
Page 11
been a yeoman whose family had lived in Lowton for several generations. His mother, Margarite, must have come from yeoman stock, and she too traced her family back over several generations of Lowton stock. Thomas and Margarite were probably not Puritans for they once considered apprenticing Richard to Catholic merchants. Neither were they wealthy but they resolved to give their son an education and sent him off to grammar school in nearby Winwick.
7
Lowton boys usually did not get much schooling. Their parents were poor and the longer a boy stayed at his books, the longer his father had to feed and clothe him without any return. Richard studied with a Mr. Horrocke who, if he observed the conventions of most schoolmasters, expected his charges to read and write English almost immediately after beginning school, if indeed they had not come with such skills, and who spent most of his time exercising them in Latin and Greek. Latin came first and remained the center of the curriculum. Lily's
Grammar
, a book first authorized under Henry VIII and continued by Elizabeth, furnished the text. Boys memorized the rules of grammar, translated Latin into English and then turned their versions back into Latin, wrote themes in Latin and acted out Latin plays and spoke dialogues. As their facility in Latin increased, the scholars turned a part of their attention to Greek grammar. There the favorite text was the New Testament.
8
This regimen did not permit much variety, and masters did not encourage their students to develop their capacities for originality, especially since the prevailing view held that in boys as in all men these capacities were depraved. Masters who grew tired of their lives and their charges sometimes became more exacting, and they sometimes accompanied their increasing demands with increasing punishments.
9
Mr. Horrocke may have been such a master. In any case his scholars discovered that as he laid on the grammar he also laid on the rod. Resenting harsh treatment and hoping to escape it, Richard appealed to his father to take him out of the school. But Thomas Mather, indulgent as he was in other ways, refused and contented himself with a talk with the master in which he evidently appealed for less severity.
10
Thomas Mather handled the interview tactfully and Richard continued in school with his standing unimpaired. Perhaps the
 
Page 12
episode forced Horrocke to look more carefully at him, for a little later, when Thomas Mather was about to apprentice his son to Catholic merchants from Wales, it was Horrocke who interceded on the boy's behalf. The merchants were looking for "pregnant wits," and they had heard that young Richard Mather was a very bright youth.
11
Keeping his son in school was costly, and Thomas Mather thought that he could reduce his expenses by signing his son over to these merchants. At this point William Horrocke stepped in and reminded the parents that their son had considerable talent and should be kept in school. Besides, he pointed out, apprenticing Richard to these merchants assured that he would be "undone by Popish Education."
12
Horrocke's appeal turned the elder Mathers from their resolve, and their son continued in Mr. Horrocke's school until 1611, the year of his fifteenth birthday, when he left the school as the result of another friendly act of Master Horrocke. The schoolmaster, asked by citizens of nearby Toxteth Park to recommend someone who might conduct a grammar school for their children, named Richard Mather. Horrock's opinion carried weight; Richard Mather was given the job.
13
Serving as a schoolmaster marked another decisive point in Richard Mather's life. From the scholar's dependency he moved, though still a boy, to the independence and responsibility of a master. He now had to exercise others in grammatical studies; he had to maintain discipline; and he had to give an accounting to the community. As far as we know, he did these things ably; yet there must have been considerable strain and exertion. He did not break down, but in 1614, three years after beginning, he experienced the agonizing and exhilarating crisis of conversion.
14
It began simply enough. Mather was living with Edward Aspinwall and his family. He took his meals at the Aspinwall table and saw much of the household. Edward Aspinwall did not rule the household rigidly nor did he make unusual demands upon his boarder. Still, he and his family, in their quiet piety, exerted a subtle influence upon Richard. What impressed the boy most, he later recalled, was the difference between the spiritual condition of the Aspinwalls and his own. They evidently felt God's grace working in themselves; he did not, though he hoped to feel it. The Aspinwalls were not the only ones affecting his spiritual condition. In these years Richard was listening to the min-
 
Page 13
ister of nearby Hyton, a Mr. Harrison, who was preaching the Pauline doctrine of the new birth. Richard was especially moved by Harrison's explication of the statement of Jesus that "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God."
15
What he meant was simply that men had to experience regeneration. They could not be satisfied with knowing that their lives were moral or that intellectually they believed in Christ. They must feel the spirit in themselves; they must believe on Christas it was customarily phrased. They must accept Christ's sacrifice as payment for their sins and feel themselves joined to Him.
Feeling of this sort bewilder and perhaps frighten most men who experience them. For Richard they were most intense in his eighteenth year. He later described them in the language of birthhe felt, he said, "terrible pangs."
16
His misery arose in part from his feeling that he would not be saved; in his worst moments he avoided everyone, staying away from meals and nursing his sorrow and grief. Encouraging this process and perhaps ultimately helping him escape his despair was a book by William Perkins.
Born in 1558 Perkins had lived only until 1602, but in his brief life he became one of the two or three most important divines in the English Church. Perkins, like many preachers of his day, attempted to comprehend the mysterious working of grace in men. As he saw it, ordinary men were baffled by the problem of separating natural feeling from divine. Only God could save men, of course, and He drew only those He elected. But common sense told a man that he had some power over his own feelings and that these feelings Were affected by impressions supplied by his senses. How could a man determine the origins of what exactly he was feelingespecially when God worked through his senses too, sending His grace as a passenger on the vehicle of a minister's words or shooting into a man's heart with the message of the Gospel. And a man might bring himself to believein a certain mannerthat Christ died to save men, that Christ was the son of God, and that men required Christ's intercession for their salvation. Even reprobates might go this farand farther: they might succeed in leading moral lives in the eyes of the world, though not in the eyes of God.
17
Perkins schooled ordinary Englishmen in these facts and explained to them how God's workings might be identified. He
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