The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (48 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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ganizations would take as their purpose the advancing of history to the end of the world. Surely an objective so pure and so far removed from the disappointments encountered in trying to keep drunkards from the bottle and youth from whorehouses was one on which men could unite. Mather first expressed this simple plan in 1713 when he mused in his
Diary
on the possibility of such societies formed on the MAXIMS of the Kingdom and "uniting in them, and promoting of them, and studying of Methods to draw Mankind into their Association."
43
He had preached the MAXIMS frequently in these do-good years after having announced their essentials almost twenty years before.
44
By 1722 his exhortations brought the kind of request he always yearned for: a group in his church asked him to form such a society.
45
In the meantime he had extended the conception to evangelism and then to all of do-good. Shortly after publishing
Bonifacius
he began to receive reports from Germany of missionary activity in the East Indies. Francke wrote him, and so did others. Delighted by the news of the spread of piety throughout the world, Mather wrote the missionaries in Malabar, and received comforting replies of the success of the gospel there. What did it mean? he asked in 1717. Did he dare hope that it forecast the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that would establish the Kingdom of God? Could he hope that it was in itself the first marks of that Spirit? The answers eluded him, but his hopes continued that the MAXIMS OF PIETY, the Maxims of do-goodtruly uniting maximswould bring divine intercession.
46
Cotton Mather could imagine no higher end of doing good than the unity obtained in the Holy Spirit. This was the happy end of man's pilgrimage on earth. If the societies could work out the methods to bring in this glorious state, then work they must. No better way of giving expression to the grace of God existed. Given the intensity of Mather's piety, this blueprint for action seems almost inherent in his original schemes for doing good. Though the failure of less ambitious plans surely helped bring him to these yearnings to see the Spirit active in this world, he might well have arrived at the same point had do-good produced social reformation and a religious revival. A Puritan, especially one as active as Cotton Mather, had to exploit any avenue that led to the Divine.
47
This impulseone of the most profound in Puritanism
 
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pointed in other directions as well. Like countless Puritans before, Richard Mather had insisted that no activity was too trivial to be consecrated to God. Eating and drinkingindeed every ordinary act of consciousnessmust be done in a holy frame of mind. Increase Mather repeated these commands to his generation, and Cotton Mather, the most inventive student of all, drew on the lessons for all they were worth.
Even as he counseled good men that they might seek after the Holy Spirit and glorify God by doing good, he told them that they must concentrate too on the things of the world. Concentration on the creatures in the right spirit led one to God. And no link to the Divine should ever be ignored.
Danger lurked in this prescription. The creatures often lured men away from God and into the carnality that doomed. The world, the flesh, and the Devil all carried attractive snares. The history of the Church should instruct men of the dangers of carnality. The Church after all had been blessed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit when Christ ascended into Heaven. And it had been enlarged and governed by the Spirit for hundreds of years afterwards. "But when the
Carnal Spirit of this World
, fermented with the Venom of the
Epicurean Philosophy
, entred into the Church, and she would no more acknowledge her SAVIOUR as her Governour," the Holy Spirit withdrew and the Kingdom of Antichrist succeeded.
48
Do-good attempted to deal with carnality and vile Epicures in one way, but still they survived. The experimental philosophy offered another wayand held, as Mather discovered, dangers of carnality of its own.
 
Page 279
16
The Experimental Philosophy
By confining Church membership to those believers giving evidence of their conversions, the founders of New England had strongly endorsed experimental religion. After them, their sons had striven valiantly to maintain their fathers' faith, yielding only to half-way membership when the people proved incapable of undergoing any but the most perfunctory religious experience. And the grandsons, addressing churches empty of believers but full of hypocrites, felt themselves standing on the edge of the abyss as their generation spurned gracious experience in favor of carnal experience.
No Puritan of Cotton Mather's day studied carnality more devotedly than he, and none warned more direly against overvaluing the creatures. Yet in all Mather's tracts on worship, his explanations of the psychology of abasement, his ruminations on the covenant theology, and his calls for reformation, the assumption lurks that the experience of things can confirm one's belief in the truths of the Christian religion. In his prescriptions for worship he made this point repeatedly. And the way a man conducted his ordinary business, his day-to-day routine including such mundane activities as eating and drinking, could be made
 
Page 280
to contribute to divine glory. Pursued in a holy frame of mind, any activity and any contact with the creatures could elevate the believer and glorify God.
At first sight, Mather's conception of experience may appear as elaborate sensationalism. Meditation on activity and spiritualizing the creatures both drew upon evidence conveyed through the senses. Mather recognized this dependence but, like Robert Boyle, from whom he learned so much about dealing with the external world, he did not confine experience to the senses. What transpired within the mind was also experience, Boyle wrote in
The Christian Virtuoso
, a book Mather pored over; and the inner perception of the data supplied by the senses, or by revelation, can recall divine glories to the mind.
1
In agreeing, Mather, as was his custom, bent the borrowed insight to his own purposes. The final reference in any process of ruminating on a text or on a creature, he said, should always be to God: whatever the data, inward experience of them should carry one to higher principles. Mather did not believe that the doctrine of the Trinity could be inferred through scientific study or that knowledge of the Day of Judgment was to be obtained through spiritualizing the creatures. The great truths of religion lay at hand only in the revealed word of God in the Scriptures. But experimental knowledge of themthe total conviction that they were truemight be enjoyed through loving experience of the things of this world. There was no iron law of necessity that men must be corrupted in the contemplation of the creatures. From an affective concentration on the meanest creation, one could be transported to Jesus Christ, the glorious Creator.
2
Mather never made the distinction that later seemed so obviousthe worship of God and the study of nature are separable endeavours. The experience of the creatures in daily spiritualizing and the perception of them under a microscope fueled the same engine of piety he so hotly admired. He was convinced that affective experience in science and worship advanced the Kingdom of God toward the Second Coming of Christ. For that reason, science, just as surely as worship, took its place in his chiliastic expectations.
3
Combining worship with an apreciation of the creatures was an old Christian practice. Puritans had always turned to nature as an exemplification of divine wisdom and power. To be sure,
 
Page 281
they had usually found the deviations from the course of nature to be more revealing of the divinity of the universe than the creation's ordinary workings. Cotton's father, Increase, found special providences fascinating and collected tales of them assiduously; and in the face of the new astronomy, he maintained that cometary motion had always been irregular and would continue to be so. Increase, like many of his generation, also tended to think of nature as an "art" which expressed the divine mind. Hence, it was comfortable for him to ascribe an emblematic character to the special providences in creation. The comets shooting across the sky were more than Heaven's handiwork; they were symbols, perhaps of God's displeasure, and a sign of a coming affliction. The earthquakes too possessed symbolic importance, and floods, and droughts; the task of a science was ultimately to recognize them for what they wereportents of the Lord's intentions.
4
Cotton Mather had no desire to repudiate his father's scientific attitudes; and maintaining throughout his life a capacity for holding conceptions inconsistent with one another, he managed to repeat them even while he embraced a different, and contradictory, set. Even as Increase wrote on comets and published accounts of special providences, the science of the day was changingand Cotton Mather came of age as it raced towards discoveries of universal laws of regularity and order. So, though like his father before him he sometimes heard God's voice in thunder and witnessed His signs in lightning, he had also to concede that the magnificent rhythm of the celestial system bespoke a God of order and regularity.
5
The problem faced by admirers of the new astronomy was to avoid being carried away by their admiration into deism or, worse, some sort of mechanism that denied the existence of God altogether. Such a possibility had dawned slowly on New England. A few years before Cotton Mather's birth in 1663, the Copernican views had made their way into Harvard's curriculum. Most of the founders had learned the Ptolemaic cosmology, but they adjusted to the new thought with remarkable ease. They may not have accepted all the tenets of the heliocentric universe, but most like John Davenport, for example, did not consider them threatening to the true religion. Galileo, Boulliau, Gassendi, Kepler, and Wing were simply names to him, Davenport
 
Page 282
admitted; and if they contended that we lived on a revolving planet, there was no harm done. Scripture told a different story, and he would believe the old scheme "till more cogent arguments be produced then I have hitherto met with!"
6
This easy tolerance had never existed in Europe, and even as Davenport spoke, the fears about the meaning of science for religion were finding their way to America. Cotton Mather may have learned of them while he was still a boy in Harvard College. Robert Boyle, who published a book asserting the compatibility of the new experimental philosophy and the Christian religion in the year of Cotton's birth, was his father's friend. Increase's own ideas on the subject must have been clear to Cotton by the time he left Harvard. Cotton, of course, did not absorb the new science in a mood of shock; it was well established when he entered college; and he learned to sneer at Ptolemy with an aplomb that would have recommended him to any society of virtuosi.
7
Still, the immensity of the universe with its pluralities of stars and planets moved him deeply. He revealed his awe as he attempted to estimate the number of stars he and other observers had seen through telescopes. The distances between stars defied comprehension, and surely the void that surrounded each particle in the chaos that existed before God fashioned the earth and the heavens out of the original stuff must have been incalculable. Once formed, this matter made a universe of "so many
Worlds
, that swallow up all our Conjectures at the Circumstances of them, and of their Satellites."
8
One could not help thinking of the earth in this sea of stars and space. The fixed stars took on a size "vastly greater" than "this poor Lump of Clay.'' Their number defied the power of the mind to countthey are "like the
Sand
of the sea, innumerable." In these pluralities ''this Globe is but as a Pins point, if compared with the mighty
Universe
. Never did any man yet make a tolerable guess at its Dimensions: but were we among the
Stars
, we should utterly lose the sight of our Earth, although it be above twenty six thousand
Italian
miles in the compass of it." The varieties of living creatures on the earth also astonished him; as he counted them in 1690, there were "above six Thousand
Plants,
" and one vegetable alone had often in the past proved so intriguing as to elicit a scholarly treatise. What, he asked, "might then be said upon
 
Page 283
the Hundred and fifty
Quadrupeds
, the Hundred and fifty
Volatils
[birds], the five and twenty
Reptiles
, besides the vast multitudes of
Aquatils
, added unto the rich variety of
Gems
and
Minerals
, in our World?"
9
One of the things that might be said was that this variety extended to a world hidden from ordinary eyes. As early as 1685 Mather had gazed at drops of water through a microscope where he spied "little
eels
""incredible hundreds playing about in one drop of water."
10
A few years later he was still confessing his ''Astonishment'' at this sight: even whales, those "moving Islands, are not such
Wonders
as these minute Fishes are."
11
The meaning for men of these wonderful works of God appeared clear to the young Mather. The immensity of the universe with its marvelous pluralities of stars and satellites, "Regular to the Hundredth part of a minute" in their motions, the complex structure of the animalcula, thousands of which would not equal a grain of sand, suggested irresistibly the presence of a master hand. Indeed all the created wonders of the universe argued for the existence of God"There is not a Fly, but what may confute an Atheist."
12
These reactions to nature and the conclusions from them were of course genuine. But they were not original with the young Mather, who not only accepted the new science but also the natural theology that followed hard on its heels. Robert Boyle had said it all before him in a book published in 1663,
The Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy
.
13
Mather read the book closely some time in the 1680's, and his early works on science and worship borrowed from it heavily, even to the use of almost identical language; Boyle, for example, marvels at the "fishes" in a drop of water, and in noting the immensity of the universe, compares the earth to a mere "point" in it. Boyle also made the argument from design.
14
In all his early tracts that take up scientific subjects, Mather located himself in the context of the natural theology. The argument from design in these years before 1700 seemed especially powerful, as he learned more of the intricacy of the heavens and the minute fishes under a microscope. It was probably in these years that looking through a microscope he saw what so many of his peers observed: the "seeds" of plants and animals "are no other than the
Entire Bodies
themselves in
parvo.
"
15

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