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 (29 page)

 
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Calling on the Devil for help constituted evidence, in Perkins' eyes, of a league; and divination, or a supposed conference with the Devil, who most likely appeared as a creature, say a cat or a mouse, provided evidence of the entertaining of a familiar spirit. These grounds satisfied Increase, though the scientific writers he professed to admire agreed that confessions under any condition should not be accepted, and implied that brains deluded by illness might seem to call on the Devil, or hold a conference with his agents.
45
The doubts about the authenticity of the experience of the afflicted girls that medical opinion introduced shook Increase, but did not persuade him that the meaning of Salem could be explained by scientific rationalism. In the thirty years following, he often returned to the problems of understanding the invisible world, especially the difficulty of separating fancies produced by sickness from genuine apparitions. Though in these years he remained faithful to his first insights, he reread the medical commentatorsCotta and Casaubonand studied fresh accounts of the appearance of demons and evil spirits. From these authorities he learned that melancholy, epilepsy, an imbalance of the humors, and disease, all might contribute to the delusions of men. But Increase refused to believe that such afflicted persons were suffering from physical disorders alone. Physicians might satisfy themselves that the afflicted were simply deluded, but he would not be so easily convinced; by reducing such cases to physical terms such explanations reduced the power of God. The facts were, he said, that in virtually every report he had received, the Devil had taken advantage of physical weakness to insert himself or his agents into the mind of the sick. The sufferers at Salem had even sometimes been deceived by devils impersonating good angels; the sickIncrease arguedwere especially prone to the delusion that they were attended by angelical apparitions, while in fact only their imaginations were affected and then only by diabolical illusions. Increase did not raise the possibility that the Salem girls had only imagined that they were afflicted by the agents of the Devil. That experience had not been illusory.
46
Increase put most of these truths into print in a book about angels published only five years after Salem.
47
He was not altogether comfortable with them because he knew that they did
 
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not remove suspicions that a terrible crime had been committed in the Salem episode. If delusions had physical origins, who was to say that some bodily disorder had not been at the root of the whole business? No one could deny that the judges had made use of spectral testimony at least in their pre-trial examinations; and Increase admitted that they had used it in the trials themselves. Minds disordered by diseasehe concededsometimes ''imagine that they see and hear wonderful things." Increase wrote this line in 1706, when he was clearly still troubled by what had happened almost fifteen years earlier. But by this time he had worked out a view of the actions of spirits that must have eased his mind. Sometime after 1694 he had come across
An Essay upon Reason, and the Nature of Spirits
by Richard Burthogge, an obscure English physician, who was deeply influenced by the Cambridge Platonists.
48
Increase recognized in Burthogge a "master in reasoning" and especially admired his argument that the apparitions of spirits, of which a witch's spectre was one type, did not affect the senses of men however much they seemed to, but struck directly into their imaginations. Burthogge did not "prove" this assertion, nor did Increase, though he pointed out that it agreed with the ancients who called appartions ''Phantasms" and "Images." But he hastened to add they are not "meer Phansies or Imaginations," they are "real."
49
This was the line that Increase held to for the rest of his life. It was, of course, entirely compatible with all his instincts and his contention announced in
An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences
that some subjects were not susceptible to scientific study. Science, after all, dealt with the evidence of the senses. But Increase, with the assistance of Burthogge, lifted witchcraft out of this realm. For if apparitions and spectres of of witches do not affect the senses but jump across them directly into the imagination, what could science tell men of Salem? In this world the invisible controlled the visible. Men in New England now had been reminded of this factthat was one meaning of Salem.
There were other meanings. But it was not Increase who made them clear to the land. Cotton Mather took up that task in the
Wonders of the Invisible Wrorld
, written as the whole dreadful affair ended in the Fall of 1692.
50
Increase endorsed the book's version of what happened at Salem, and thereby joined his son
 
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in the gallery of villains who attempted to excuse the bloody trials. There is no need to defend either Mather for his part in the trials or in the public discussions that followed. Neither of course took part in the judicial proceedings, though Increase observed for himself the trial of George Burroughs who, he reported, was justly convicted on the evidence of two witnesses. And Increase, more than any other man, was responsible for stopping the prosecutions. But he defended the judges for acting according to their lights and he denied that the guilt of innocent blood hung over the land.
It is clear that in 1692 both Mathers
felt
, whatever they
believed
or said they believed, that the judges had made a horrible mistake in permitting the evidence of the spectres to be used against the accused. Both admitted that this testimony was received in court, but argued that it alone was never allowed to convict. They knew better and five years later Cotton Mather said so publicly: "Nevertheless, divers were condemned, against whom the chief evidence was founded in the spectral exhibitions." Increase made no such public confession.
51
If the Mathers are guilty of not being honest with themselves and the court in time to save the lives of the innocent, they were sincere in proclaiming that the incursion of the witches was a judgment of God sent to punish the land for its violation of the covenant. Neither ever repudiated this interpretation of the outbreak; each continued to believe it as long as he lived. Cotton, who first announced it as he called for reform and repentance in the
Wonders
, has been charged with having "prostituted a magnificent conception of New England's destiny" to save "the face of a bigoted court."
52
Certainly New England's destiny did not shine more brightly as a result of the killing of the witches in Salem. Yet the fault was not the Mathers' who understood the whole miserable affair no more clearly than anyone else. Nor was Cotton Mather the first to conceive of the witches as a judgment of God on the land for its sins. The people in Salem Village reacted almost instinctively in a way that revealed their own convictions on the matter. They held fast days, and days of humiliation, all calculated to move the Lord to forgive them their sins and to lift His judgments. Shortly after these attempts the General Court proclaimed a general day of fasting throughout the colony with the same purposes in mind. Cotton Mather followed
 
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this lead in the
Wonders
, and a few years later others, even more profoundly convinced than he that the court had erred, did the same. Eighty-two-year-old John Higginson of nearby Salem Town in 1698 said simply that the witches had been sent by God as an affliction "for the Punishment of a declining People."
53
Higginson wrote this in a preface to a book by the Reverend John Hale of Beverly. Long a student of witchcraft, Hale had questioned the accused at Salem and studied their judges and the evidence they accepted. He agreed with almost everyone else that the court had tried to do the right thing, but he, more clearly than anyone else, understood the extent of its failure. He did not shrink from saying that the innocent had been destroyed. Nor did he hesitate to say that not only had his generation proceeded on mistaken grounds against witches, but so had the founders. In summing up one meaning of Salem, Hale likened New England to Israel in the Wilderness punished by famine for a breach of the covenant made four hundred years before by the patriarchs. And he asked: "Why may not the Lord visit upon us the misguided zeal of our Predecessors about Witchcraft above forty years ago, even when that Generation is gathered to their fathers?" The children had also sinned according to Hale, and the larger meaning of the witchcraft at Salem lay in this long-standing judgment of God on the land for its sins.
54
Although Increase Mather could not bring himself to speak so forthrightly, he remained as troubled as Hale was about what the crisis at Salem portended for New England. His generation had created the noble myth of the Puritans' errand into the wilderness. His generation had uncovered the meaning of New England, a magnificent enterprise typifying the purity of the millennium. That meaning had now apparently been seriously challenged by the incursion of the witches. Increase knew better: the corruption of New England had brought on the judgment of the witches and threatened its typological significance. In this knowledge of the evil abroad in the land, Increase dreaded the immediate future and yearned for the conversion of the elect and the coming Kingdom of God.
 
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9
The Word in Boston
From his pulpit in the North Church, Increase Mather looked out upon a congregation of solid citizens. Some of Boston's best sat before him every Sabbath, merchants who regularly sent ships to London and the Levant, rich men with their handsome wives, officials of the town and the colony who professed that they wished only to serve God and their people. There were others too, less exalted men, not so well endowed with money and position, who worked with their hands in markets and workshops. A sprinkling of the poor also attended, and here and there a black face appeared.
01
As their minister, Increase owed them muchnot because they paid his salary but because he occupied an office created by God. His understanding of his responsibilities as one of the Lord's ambassadors did not differ from his colleagues' or from what his father before him had taken to be the minister's calling. Though Increase commented throughout his life upon the heavy burdens the clergy carried, what he emphasized most were the great opportunities the vocation offered and how the minister should strive to train himself to seize them. Any ordinary Church member could recite the duties of his callingto convert the sinners
 
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and to nourish the faithful. And the qualifications necessary were well-accepted too. A minister must be a man of pietyhe ought to be converted at least in the judgment of the Churchand he must have learning. Increase's insistence upon these standards was unvarying throughout his ministry, and by the most rigorous application of them, he was superbly qualified to lead his church. To lead them meant more than anything else to preach to them. The Word as preached was the most important component in his, or any other teacher's, ministry.
2
The Word was clear to Increase and his friends in New England's pulpits; they were the heirs of a complex theology that embraced every aspect of man's relation to God. But how the Word appeared in their sermons was insensibly affected by the reality they experienced. Among New England's leaders, none surpassed Increase in the ability to sense the direction of social change. Increase did not usually comprehend the forces altering New England but he sensed the slightest slippage in the foundations laid by the fathers. Throughout his life Mather was prone to take any departure from ancient practice as evidence of declension; and objectively he knew that considerable political power had shifted from the devout to less pious menin England as well as in America.
If these alterations dismayed him they also encouraged him, for the sin in customs and manners and the upheavals in Church and State indicated to the hopeful student of the prophecies that the end of the world was imminent. Hence the peculiar tensions in his preaching, tensions born of despair and hope. To the unconverted in his flock he must convey his sense of the passing of time; the day of grace for them was growing short. Once passed it would never return, and a man who went to his grave without the Spirit would never look upon Christ. To the saints he must point out the necessity of growing in grace and in making their callings sure. For a man might deceive himself as well as others as to his internal state, or he might be deceived by the Devil and his agents. The joy available to the converted in this world ought not to be despised either; a saint could enrich his own life and that of others if he worked and strived and labored.
In the first half of his ministry, Increase often spoke to his people of their souls in the context of New England's mission in the New World and of their responsibilities to the land. Their

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