The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (16 page)

Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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Whatever anxiety Richard Mather felt, striving in the moral order of God's sovereignty, his piety continued to burn brightly. In his last few days of life, blind in one eye, suffering painfully from the stone, he insisted on spending as much time in his study as his strength allowed, pushing his mind and spirit in the Lord's service. Among his last words to Increase was a plea that the children of New England should be baptized and brought into the Church.
51
Increase's generation proved no less determined to serve the Church, but their resolve was inevitably affected by the fact that their origins were in New England. They could not summon the detachment that kept the founders' eyes fixed on the Church above all things. Exile made the founders suspicious of place and reminded them that the elect might survive anywhere. The sons inevitably saw men and the Church not only as parts of a reformed tradition but as part of New England's history as well. As it turned out, this narrowed vision brought its own anxieties, but it also helped to sustain the piety so profoundly felt by the founders.
 
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BOOK TWO
INCREASE MATHER (1639-1723) TYPOLOGY
 
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5
An Unripened Puritan
A prophet, Benjamin Colman carefully explained in a sermon mourning the death of Increase Mather in 1723, was one of those great figures in the Scriptures who performed such miracles as revelation of "things secret and future." The word still appeared useful to Colman, who suggested that in a "lax and improper Sense" it might be applied to the preaching ministry. Colman teetered on the edge of saying that it was in this ''improper" sense that he would call Increase Mather a prophet, but finally drew back before the plunge. There was no need to extend the definition explicitly to Increase anyway; simply making the distinction between ancient and modern prophets left the mourners in no doubt of what he meant.
1
On the face of it, Colman did not diminish Mather's immense reputation; Increase Mather could not claim prophetical powers for himself nor could anyone else. But Mather was someone "dear to God" as the Puritans sometimes said; and he had long insisted upon a particular version of New England's history and an extraordinary vision of its future. Colman's labored distinctions about prophets served notice to the community that he, for one, dissociated himself from Mather's views of New England.
2
 
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The remainder of Colman's message rehearsed old themes in a conventional way. At the time of Increase Mather's death, funeral sermons had taken a form which everyone understood and approved. The minister giving the sermon improved his opportunity to give moral instruction, directed either at individuals or the land and on some occasions, at both. Death, he might tell his listeners, should remind them of their mortality; and when they considered their own impending deaths they should seize the chance to repent and reform and to believe on Christ. If the public concern was uppermost in his mind, he might use the occasion to suggest that God sometimes took some of the living from the people as a kind of chastisement; their recourse in such times was a general reformation.
3
Benjamin Colman followed this line in his sermon. Little that Colman said could have surprised his listeners. Increase deserved praise as a Christian, a scholar, a minister; he had served his God and his people with wisdom and strength for over fifty years. They knew that Mather was a great man, and it seemed natural to look upon their loss as an affliction from Godeven though the dead man had reached his eighty-third year.
This part of Colman's eulogy contained nothing that was not safely within the conventions of the funeral sermon. Increase had preached many similar sermons warning the people of the dread meaning of the loss of leaders. He had also regularly predicted his own death for thirty years. And although he accepted his death as inevitable, he clearly considered it as evidence of God's displeasure with New England.
4
Colman's agreement would have pleased him, but Colman's subtle rejection of his view of the meaning of New England would not. But he would not have been surprised by it; Colman, with others, had said as much before in terms unrestrained by the occasion of a funeral sermon. Increase had grown accustomed to such rejection, but it always frustrated him.
The first half of Increase Mather's life, though hardly free of tension and struggle, was largely free of such frustrations. When he was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on June 21, 1639, his father was already recognized as a good man who could be depended upon to serve the colony. Richard not only filled an important pulpit, he also possessed a mind fruitful of Congregational theory. Encouraged by his fellow ministers, he was
 
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engaged in explaining the New England way to its critics in England. Busy as he was, Richard took the time to help in his son's education: first by teaching him to write and then by giving him instruction in Latin and Greek.
5
Increase's mother, Katharine Mather, began her son's education, teaching him to read when he was a small boy. There is not much known of herPuritan men usually did not mention women except as models of piety in the way of Ruth or as agents of the Devil in the way of Jezebel. Richard praised his wife's devotion to God, her loving care of her family; and Increase described her as a "very Holy praying woman." There is evidence that she harbored a strength that these conventional descriptions fail to suggest. Early in her life when Richard began to court her she was not discouraged by her father's opposition. Her father, Edward Holt, may not have liked Puritans and especially disliked the notion of his daughter's marrying one, but when Katharine declared her love for Richard and persisted in her attachment to him, Holt gave way.
6
In Richard, Katharine married a very strong man, and if before her marriage she was not wholly disposed to share his religion, after it, she was. She became a Puritan wife lavishing care on her six sons, helping them to learn to read and worship, and seeking after God in the way of her husband. These things were expected of a wife; anything less from one married to a minister would have been unthinkable. But Katharine Mather did more, at least in the case of Increase, her youngest child, and probably in the cases of the others too. She told Increase that all she prayed for him when he grew up was that God should give him grace and learning. Although there is no way of calculating the effects of Katharine Mather's hopes, Increase, we know, remembered them all his life.
7
Writing as an adult, Increase admitted that he could not understand why as a boy in school he had proved the best in class. We can discount his characterization of himself as a boy of "dull wit" but there is no reason to discount his claim that he cared nothing for his studies until he was fourteen years old. Yet as he said, "I was much forwarder in learning than any Boy in the school my age." A bright boy he surely was, but bright boys did not do well in Latin and Greek grammar without steady application. Something must have pushed Increase Mather very hard;
 
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his family's expectations as his mother expressed them doubtless provided the force.
8
Increase matriculated at Harvard in 1651, when he was twelve years old, but he left Cambridge after about six months in his freshman year. His parents had decided that because of his "weak natural constitution of Body," he should be entrusted to the Reverend John Norton of Ipswich who would tutor him in the regular college curriculum. In April 1653 Increase followed Norton to Boston and lived and studied with him until the year 1656, when he rejoined his class, then seniors.
9
The year before he was graduated, Increase went through conversion. Long afterwards he said that the process began with a serious illness in 1654. As far as the observable experience was concerned he was right in dating its beginnings. But in another sense, he was mistaken: his conversion began much earlier, at the time his mother told him that she desired only that God should give him grace. In the language customarily used to describe the conversion, the period between the moment that he became aware of his mother's hope and the first quickening of grace in his soul was preparation. His mother's desires were presented as hopes for him, but they were also expectations as he must have realized even as a child who supposedly cared nothing for his studies. He cared very much (for he had made his mother's wish his own), but in conversion he had to recognize his own inclinations.
10
Katharine Mather's death in March 1655 followed hard on the heels of his return to health. On her deathbed his mother thrust upon him another great burden, a wish expressed in great emotion, that if it were God's will, Increase should become a minister. Filled with doubt that he was even one of God's own, Increase shook before his mother's parting words; as he later recalled, "the Lord broke in upon my conscience with very terrible convictions and awakenings." For almost three months he suffered dreadfully from his sense of sin and his worry that he was not one of God's chosen. His behavior reflected his uneaseon several days he shut himself up in a room and listed his sins while appealing to God for mercy. His occasional isolation probably would have gone unnoticed by his friends, except that it was accompanied by "preciseness" and a ''tender conscience." Increase's altered behavior made his companions uneasy; and they
 
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made him feel their scorn for his new scrupulosity. The changes in actions doubtless amounted to little in behaviorhe was always a good boybut a greater seriousness in attitude and a conscientiousness in observing the simple pieties of Puritan life would have been enough to alarm his friends.
11
Their derision did not deter Increase from his new purpose and his quest for God continued. Increase respected, even revered, his tutor John Norton, but something prevented him from seeking comfort from Norton. He loved his father and it was to him that he turned, asking for his prayers. The end to this agony came on election day in May 1655. Norton and his family left the house for the day and Increase, after hours in prayer, finally attained peace and the assurance that he had received God's grace. Assurance came after he achieved a complete sense of psychological dependence upon God: "At the close of the day, as I was praying, I gave my selfe up to Jesus Christ, declaring that I was now resolved to be his Servant, and his only and his forever, and humbly professed to him that if I did perish, I would perish at his feet. Upon this I had ease and inward peace in my perplexed soul immediately; and from that day I walked comfortably for a considerable time, and was carefull that all my words and wayes should be such as would not offend God."
12
As in the case of most of the converted, pangs of doubt returned after this initial exaltation. The words of Christ, "Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out," had helped give him assurance, but now the words of one of Christ's ambassadors frightened him.
13
Norton said that one might repent of his sins and still not be converted; Norton here was making a distinction between legal and gracious repentance as Increase knew. But how to detect the difference in one's own soul between the two? Happily, at this time Richard Mather preached a sermon answering the question to Increase's satisfaction. His father showed that new and genuine obedience to God, and an actual change in the heart, or the will, which might be detected if love of God replaced love of sin, indicated that true conversion had occurred. Increase studied himself, applying these subjective tests, which seemed objective to him and other Puritans, and decided that he had experienced real conversion.
14
A little more than a year after these momentous happenings, Increase was graduated from Harvard. Commencement offered
 
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an opportunity to candidates for the bachelor's degree to distinguish themselves in arguing a thesis. Increase, of course, presented one, but the Ramean logic he selected to demonstrate his views displeased the President, Charles Chauncy, who favored the Aristotelian logic. The President was on the verge of cutting Increase short when Jonathan Mitchell, afterward tutor and Cambridge minister, and one of the leading divines among the founders, pleaded "
Pergat, Quaeso, Nam-doctissime disputat
" (Let him go on, I beg, for he is arguing like a great scholar).
15
The question of a career for Increase does not seem to have come up when he was graduated. For a long time, perhaps from the time of his mother's death, he was pledged to the pulpit. In June 1657, after a year of further study, he was ready to preach. He delivered his first sermon in a small village belonging to Dorchester, and the next week he filled his father's pulpit in the town. Increase's maiden effort very nearly became his swan song in New England, for two weeks later he was on board a ship sailing for England. At this time he seems to have planned to make his way in the service of the Lord in the mother country.
16
His destination was Trinity College, Dublin, where Samuel, his older brother, a nonconformist minister, had arranged for his entrance to pursue studies leading to an M.A. degree. Increase reached Dublin after stops in Portsmouth, London, and Lancashire, where he visited the former parishioners of his father. Trinity College received Increase but it did not accept him with open arms. The proctor, several fellows, and most of the students disliked his Puritanism. His scholarship and his obviously sincere application won them over to at least a grudging acceptance, however, by the time he received the M.A. in 1658. To cap his success he was offered a fellowship.
17
Increase turned the fellowship down for the pulpit: as the son of a minister and with three brothers preaching, he wanted to serve within a church. Serve he did, in Torrington in Devonshire, and as the chaplain of the garrison on Guernsey from April 1659 to March 1661, with a short interruption early in 1660 when he served a Gloucester church. None of these places was very secure, and Guernsey proved dangerous. The time was wrong for a Congregationalist anywhere in England because Episcopacy promised to return with Charles II. And Charles had been awaiting his chance on the throne for years. With his

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