 | 17. Cotton Mather,
The Salvation Of The Soul Considered
(Boston, 1720), 15.
|
| 18. See above, Chapter 13.
|
| 19. Cotton Mather,
The Resort of Piety
(Boston, 1716), 7, 8, 10, and
passim
.
|
| 20. Mather sometimes used these figures in other ways too, as for example in this reference to ministers: "
Death
is a
Wolf
, that will Sieze, even on the
Shepherds of
the
People,
" in
Orphanotrophium
(Boston, 1711), 15.
|
| 21. I have not been able to discover when Mather first read Thomas à Kempis. He wrote an ambitious preface to Samuel Lee,
A Summons Or Warning To The Great Day of Judgment
(Boston, 1692) in which à Kempis is mentioned. Mather was reading Kempis in 1719. See
Diary
, II, 582-83. It is worth noting again the enormous force of Increase Mather's
Christology
.
|
| 22. Cotton Mather,
Addresses To Old Men, and Young Men, and Little Children
(Boston, 1690), 7-8.
|
| 23. Cotton Mather,
Christianity To The Life
(Boston, 1702), 17.
|
| 24. Cotton Mather,
The Heavenly Conversation
(Boston, 1710), 13; and see also 16-25.
|
| 25.
Ibid
. 23-24.
|
| 26. The
Diary
is full of his attempts at the imitation of Christ. I have discussed some of them in "Piety And Intellect In Puritanism",
William and Mary Quarterly
3d. Ser. (July 1965), XXII, 457-70.
|
| 27. The terms "vital", "strengthen", "quicken", ''overpower'', in this context, all connotative of a new energy, appear repeatedly in Mather's sermons of the eighteenth century.
|
| 28. For these themes, see Cotton Mather,
A Life of Piety Resolv'd Upon
(Boston, 1714);
The Stone Cut Out Of The Mountain
(Boston, 1716);
The Resort of Piety; Utilia; Genethlia Pia
(Boston, 1719);
The Words of Understanding
(Boston, 1724).
|
|