The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (59 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 345
History of the Vaudois
.
72
The eleventh chapter of Revelation, where the slaying of the witnesses is described, also predicts that they will arise and ascend to Heaven three and a half daysthree and a half years in prophetical reckoningafter their deaths. In 1692, Mather published his opinion that they had been resurrected.
73
But the discouragements of the next few years persuaded him that he had been mistaken and he retracted his conjecture that the slaying of the Vaudois fulfilled the prophecy. Whiston, however, led him to retract his retraction, and to declare in the Biblia that the Vaudois were the witnesses, that they had been slaughtered in 1868 by the French army, and that late in 1689 they had revived. The evidence he offered carne from Whiston's
Essay
, which cited the re-entry of armed Vaudois into their old homes from Switzerland where they had fled in 1686. Their resurrection was complete, as far as Whiston was concerned, when the Duke of Savoy recalled the rest in June 1690 with a new edict of toleration. Whiston's calculation of the testimony of the witnesses rested on the belief that Christ's testimony in his first ministry to the world "typified" the experience of the witnesses.
74
In a series of tortured computations, he showed the correspondence and forecast the ascension of the witnesses, not surprisingly, in 1716. And so his figuring wentthe Antichrist, the Church, the witnesses, and remnants of the Roman Empire all would experience great things in that year.
75
As Mather watched the events of the years preceding 1716, he clearly felt uneasy. For one thing, his friend Samuel Sewall, also an eager student of the prophecies, refused to share his hopes. The witnesses had not been slain, Sewall insisted; and until they were, much remained to be accomplished. There was also the matter of Anglo-French relations and the success of the High-Fliers in Englandwho, Mather believed, represented the French interestin getting their way over the nonconformists. Mather's English correspondents kept him informed of developments there, and the news was not good. To be sure, English arms won battles in the war but these victories meant nothing if French power survived. If the clichés of prophetical scholarship that described France as the tenth and last kingdom of the Roman Empire were true, its collapse in war would certainly mark a diminution of Antichristian authority. Therefore Mather followed the course of the French war eagerly, celebrating every
 
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victory, mourning each defeat. The news of Utrecht first pleased him, though he had long worried that peace might be made without an English victory When he heard of the nonconformists' despair over the peace and of their belief that the French interest in England had a voice in state councils, he too despaired. The tenth kingdom survived in 1713; Mather preferred war to this sort of peace.
76
Three years later the fateful year arrived and passed while Mather waited. It was a year of hope and, as one day gave way to another, of torture. He hopefully published
The Stone Cut Out of the Mountain
,
77
a short tract that compressed the MAXIMS OF PIETY into a few pages, maxims which Mather believed might unite godly men so firmly together that the Lord would send His Kingdom to earth for the millennium Shortly after Mather had received the first copies, he sent several to a friend in England, confessing in an accompanying letter that the work ''is of greater Expectation with me, than anything that I have ever yett been concerned in."
78
Even as he wrote these lines he was worrying that perhaps he and the others who gave their hearts to the year 1716 may have miscalculated. Sewall's skepticism about the year remained strong and he did not hesitate to announce his opinions to anyone who asked.
79
In August, with about half the year ahead, Mather began to beg the Lord to fulfill the prophecy of Joel"And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh . . . "convinced that the return of the Prophetic Spirit would introduce the Kingdom of God on earth His conception of the operations of this Spirit provides further evidence of the increasingly affective bent of his thought. As he imagined the event, the "supernatural" shower of the Spirit would be transmitted by holy angels. These angels would "enter and possess" the Lord's ministers who, inspired, would speak with a divine "Energy" and "fly through the World with the
everlasting
Gospel to preach unto the Nations. . . .''
80
Such actions, Mather asserted, would do more in a day to advance the Kingdom of Christ than an "age" had managed previously As was almost always the case when Mather prayed strenuously for his heart's desires he became convinced that he would soon see angels descending from Heaven bearing the Holy Spirit He expressed this conviction with his usual repetitions"
They are corning! They are
 
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coming! They are coming! They will quickly be upon us; and the World shall be shaken wonderfully!
"
81
When the angels did not come and 1716 finally gave way to 1717, Mather, temporarily downcast, remarked, "Doubtless, it will now be said,
The Days are prolonged and Every Vision faileth.
"
82
He renewed his supplications to his Lord, however, for a shower of the Prophetic Spirit that would make its appearance in the primitive days of the church appear as drops. In the Spring of 1717 this praying seemed lonely work and Mather confessed that sometimes he felt that he was the only man engaged in it. Yet he had to persist, thoroughly convinced by this time that all other methods of introducing piety into the world had failed. As he thought about the failures of his society to reform and to convert, he did not explain its decay simply in terms of its attachment to traditional ways of entering the covenantthose ways that exalted the power of man. He was in fact depressed by the failures of all human means to do good. Among themprominentlywas reason. We have already noted that in his disenchantment with it and in his immersion in the worship of the Spirit, Mather had exposed the anti-intellectualism of his pietism. He was less suspicious of science than reason largely because science depended, like the New Piety, on experience. (He also idolized Isaac Newton, to whom he imputed an inspired perfection.) But he was learning in these years of the limitations of science, and he was increasingly prone to point them out.
83
Now with his chiliastic hopes rising again in the Spring of 1717, he issued
Malachi
,
84
a treatise designed to present the MAXIMS OF PIETY in such a guise as to be irresistable to a world that had resisted all other appeals to prepare itself for the Second Coming. In
Malachi
, Mather proposed that all institutions be brought in conformity to piety. What this meanthe explainedwas that the languages and the sciences ought to assume a "due subserviency to piety"; ethics should promptly be consigned to "Rubbish," and with it ''All Academical Erudition" which "is but a spendid, and noisy Ignorance. . . ."
85
The import of all this was clear to him by 1717. Nothing devised by man worked and nothing that the pride of man valued led to the gracious union that would usher in the Kingdom of God. And hence the only resort that remained to man was to appeal for the
 
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satisfaction of Joel's prophecy, the pouring out of the Spirit upon all flesh.
86
In this mood he pondered the meaning of the experience of German missionaries in Malabar in the East Indies who had been sent there as early as 1705. After encountering resistance to the Gospel among the natives, they had begun to convert them. Mather learned of their trials in correspondence with them and with Francke. These German Pietists preached the Maxims of the Everlasting Gospel, he assumed; and their success, he dared hope, hinted that the Holy Spirit was once more making itself felt, perhaps as Joel had forcast.
87
For the remainder of Mather's life, a period of about ten years, this mood persisted as he strained to persuade the Lord to send the Spirit in all its glory. His methods, the familiar ones of his worship, saw him confess his sin and attempt to divest himself of pride"I annihilate myself before the Lord"; then followed his appeals for the Holy Spirit guided in its operations by the angels who would also accompany Christ on His return. Rapturous interviews with angels sometimes followed these appeals and Mather felt delights he could not express even in the privacy of his
Diary
. But the most satisfying returns of these efforts appeared after the death of his father. Increase had not been in the grave a year when Cotton revealed that in these interviews he had learned of how things would really be in the Kingdom. And about the same time, it was now Summer 1724, he repudiated his father's belief that the conversion of national Israel was a necessary condition of the Second Coming. This break with Increase's theory may have strengthened his conviction that the end of the world was imminent. He "daily looked for" Christ's coming, he admitted in July 1724; all the signs of the end had been givenrepeatedly. The frequent earthquakes of the last thirty years, the comets, the political upheavals in Europe, all signified the closeness of the end. He found reassurance in nearby New York where the Governor, William Burnet, a friend of Newton, wrote that the Antichrist's destruction had begun in 1715. It would not be finished for years, perhaps not until 1790 by Burnet's calculations, but it had begun.
88
A single confusion ate into Mather's confidence. What of the witnesses? Did their slaughter lie in the future as Sewall and
 
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others argued? As much as he wanted to believe that the signs were "ALL FULFILLED" as he shouted in "Triparadisus," he confessed his fear at the prospect of a great slaughter. But the fear notwithstanding, he was convinced that only an angelic possession of men could bring on the Saviorand so he continued to plead with his Lord for the pouring out of the Spirit on all flesh.
89
These exalted hopes for an angelic possession, these feverish desires for a Union of Saints saturated with the Holy Spirit, reveal how far Cotton Mather had travelled from the provincialism of his father's generation, the generation that had invented New England. His father had sustained a splendid chiliastic vision throughout his life, and he always entertained some hope that New England might play a part in bringing on Christ's return. The types that described the history of one peculiar people dazzled Increase, and he could not help but strive to make them speak of another, better people in the wilderness.
Like his father before him, a good New Englander, Cotton Mather loved, and despised, the people of the land. Both feelingslove and hatehad found expression in calls on the land to reform, to give up its evil ways. But after years of begging his people to change their sinful hearts, Cotton Mather admitted that New England should not be confused with the New Jerusalem and that perhaps the seers who said that New England had "done the most that it was intended for" were right.
90
This saddened him but his sadness was not free of satisfaction in the afflictions he saw ahead for the people of New England. For Cotton Mather hated them, even as he loved them. His hatred made it easier perhaps to lift his eyes to a vision of the end that transcended New England's history, and New England's ecclesiastical forms. But ultimately it was Mather's love of his Godnot his hatred of menthat made him plead for the fulfillment of Joel's prophecy, and gave him the extraordinary dream of the glory that awaited good men wherever they were.
 
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19
"On the Borders of Paradise"
While he awaited the end of the world, Mather kept up the active life. The years that followed the disappointment of 1716 until his death in 1728 saw him continue his attempts to do good. But sometimes when one of his proposals miscarried or drew opposition he felt discouraged. Early in 1722, still suffering from the savage abuse he had received for his part in attempting to stay the recent smallpox epidemic, he threatened in a speech before a meeting of Boston ministers to withhold all his proposals. In the past, he said, he had done his best for his community only to encounter opposition from all ranks of men no matter what he proposed. This situation baffled him; confessing his bewilderment, he noted how odd it was that his opportunities to do good"the Apple of my Eye"inevitably evoked angry responses from almost everyone. And he had to admit that if a proposal came to be known as his, it drew a "Blast." This public intractability did more than confuse Matherit angered him so much that he announced to the Boston ministers that he had "done treating" them to any more suggestions for good works. He had decided to limit his proposals to far off places, where, he might have added, he was not known. As for doing good at home,

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