The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (51 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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themselves up and attempted to take up His covenant, sealed by the blood of the Savior, not as an accessory to Christ, but as a principal. Some would discover their errors too late for redemption; the fortunate few would learn that God possessed none of the accidents and qualities and faculties of the created spirits. All must learn eventually that whatever existed in God took form as "A Pure Act," "uncompounded" by any human conceptions of order and justice. In this way did Cotton Mather invest the Newtonian universe with the God of the whirlwind.
51
Reason figures in much of the natural theology either as an instrument to be used to extract the truths of nature or as a set of self-evident principles to be applied as a standard for behavior and opinion. Most writers found both categories useful and switched back and forth between them without bothering to explain what they were doing. Cotton Mather entertained both conceptions easily enough, though he proved to be more self-conscious than most. In fact he came to elevate the claims of reason as a strategy in his campaign to advance piety. He had begun to give attention to science around 1690 for the same purpose. By 1700, as his understanding of the implications of the natural philosophy for religion increased, he was becoming aware of the possibilities of recommending Christianity as a reasonable, as well as an experimental, doctrine.
52
Mather announced the new strategy in a tract,
Reasonable Religion
, published in 1700 for use on pastoral visits. Passages from this short book crop up in the sermons he preached in the years around the turn of the century, evidence of his interest in the new discovery. He admitted at the outset that New England had lightly ignored exhortations to convert that based themselves on arguments about faith and repentance. Therefore he would try something new: to make Christianity irresistible he would stop pleading "
Shew your selves Regenerate Christians
" and substitute "
Shew your selves Rational Creatures.
" Within the next ten years he began to regret this tack as he came to see its dangers.
53
The technique of making Christianity reasonable undoubtedly was imported from England and the Continent. And so perhaps was the recognition that the process held dangers of its own. Puritanism had always carefully restrained the claims of reason even while it conceded value to a rational mode in mental activity. Traditional theory about conversion described the Lord
 
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proceeding through men's understanding as well as their wills in saving them. A man ignorant of Christ could hardly expect to receive grace; and a man blind to the law surely could not depend upon his sanctification. But no man should ever delude himself by confusing mere belief in the Lord with the grace of God. The Devil himself believed in Christ but in no way accepted Him as the Savior, and despised God's grace. A man had to be assisted to the right frame of mind, and no matter how great his rational power he could never attain it from his own efforts. Restrained statements such as these limited the appreciation in Puritanism of reason in the life of the spirit. At the same time Puritans carefully defended their creed from charges of irrationalism. Nothing in it and nothing in Scripture opposed reason, they said, but parts surely transcended reason and therefore commanded belief on faith alone. The miracles performed by Christ, for example, defied rational understanding but they had to be accepted.
54
Shortly before Cotton Mather began praising the rationality of Christianity in terms such as "Scripture is reason in its highest elevation," English deists threw caution aside with claims that all statements about Christianity must be proved.
55
Nothing, they said, was above reason including the revealed truths of Scripture. John Locke, in spite of his intentions to defend Christianity, gave this challenge much of its impetus in his
The Reasonableness of Christianity
(1695). Locke thought of the Christian religion almost entirely in rational terms, holding that the truth of its teachings could be established by appeals to reason unassisted by inspiration. All the available evidence confirmed Christian truth, especially the miracles which supported the ethical principles of Christ. Morality comprised the center of Christianity for Locke, not the stark relationships described by Calvin's predestination and election. To be sure, reason could not discover everything; there was mystery in life, but Locke did not agree that it deserved much attention or that its existence compromised the essential reasonableness of Christianity. He conceded, however, that while Scripture contained nothing contrary to reason, its truths sometimes transcended reason.
56
Not all those who styled themselves his followers made this concession. John Toland denied in
Christianity Not Mysterious
, published the year following Locke's book, that there was any-
 
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thing "above reason" in the Scriptures. And religious experience itself, according to Toland, was entirely comprehensible by the intellect. Just as reason must provide the only basis of belief, ith is "entirely built upon ratiocination." Toland refrained from rejecting the Trinityhis ostensible purpose was after all to reinforce the truths of the religion of Christ by removing mystery from His worship. Other self-confessed admirers of Locke also took up this task; and still others presumed to answer along the line of orthodoxy.
57
The problems raised in these discussions attracted attention for another hundred years. Within a short time of Locke's writing, the central issues were clear: the most pressing was the question of the authority of religious truth. If revelation was not to be accepted unless it proved tractable to reason, what could be claimed for the Scriptures? Was the universe as comprehensible as Toland and the deists suggested? If it was, Cotton Mather and the English defenders of orthodoxy saw no room for either the miracles described in Scripture or such mysteries as the Trinity.
58
In England the questions forced themselves into religious discourse with the result that though there were evasions on both sides, the discussion in pulpit and press attained directness and honesty. After some understandable hesitation English clerics managed to find it possible to discuss, for example, whether the Bible really was God's Wordand why some men believed that it was and others had come to deny it. Such matters were of more than academic interest, and the discussions were pursued with more than mental exercise in mind. Indeed they were bitterly polemical, and positions taken had consequences for careers in the Church. The Trinitarian controversy, which in itself contained virtually all the questions about authority in religion, produced broken careers and ecclesiastical punishments.
59
As he read the literature of these disputes, Mather's enthusiasm for reason cooled, though it never entirely disappeared. His fears, as his enthusiasms, are always fairly clear despite his efforts to conceal them. They are not always easy to sort out, for they invariably seem tangled in shifting hopes and inconsistent standards of judgment. But his deepest values invariably reasserted themselves as he came to sense the implications of a new strategy or a changing vision. Something of this sort oc-
 
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curred in the fifteen years after his first eager pronouncement in 1700, on behalf of reasonable religion.
60
Mather's fears are clear even through the disguises he draped over the English controversy. Reading his productions for the pulpit and the press in the years after 1700, one can glimpse his distress as he learned that one after another the miracles of the Apostles, the Trinity, Christ's resurrection, the doctrine of the last judgment, were controverted by deists. Several of his colleagues outside Boston also kept abreast of the English scene, and in 1712 one of them wrote asking him to produce something to stay the epidemic of deism which threatened New England. Mather gladly responded with
Reason Satisfied: and Faith Established
, a tract very different from the happy endorsements of reason he had issued a dozen years earlier.
61
It is a work that makes many of the points, already conventional, about the uses of reason, but it also emphasizes the limitations. The sermons and books that followed in the next few years show the same cautious withdrawal from his earlier enthusiasm.
The problem in withdrawing lay in doing it in such a way as not to reveal just how fully Calvinist orthodoxy had been challenged. For the most part Mather managed to conceal the assaults on the sacredness of Scripture itself. Did Christianity give a true account of man and his Creator and Savior? He would prove that it did by verifying the central doctrine of Christianity, the resurrection of Christ. Of course the deists had proclaimed the resurrection an irrational story, but the description proved by the Gospels was irrefutable. He would prove Christ's resurrection from the testimony of the lying wretches who denied it. Did not the Roman guards insist that while they slept Christ's disciples slipped the body out of the tomb? But, Mather answered in triumph, it is not "credible" that Christ's disciples, who cowardly denied Him before His crucifixion, would develop the bravery to steal His body. And Peter, who denied Him thrice before the cock crowed, afterwards preached the news of His resurrection. Surely he would have continued to deny Christ had the resurrection not occurred. This "proof" Cotton Mather offered, convinced that it was incontestable.
62
At other points in this tract, as in other tracts, there appears a hint that the inspired basis of Scripture itself had been challenged, but the hint disappears under a flood of assertions that Scripture was
 
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the irrefutable word of God. Even as his doubts developed, Mather continued to assert that this argument was reasonable; he could not imagine any man equipped with a faculty which could put things together and dissect their relationships who could fail to acknowledge it. Turks, heathens, infidels all recognized the truth and beauty of Christ's sacrifice, and His ressurrection, even though they could not genuinely understand it and even though they rejected Him.
63
When taken as a faculty, reason could not do much more than recognize the truth of Scriptures, but as a set of principles innate in the mind, it could tell men much more. Without God's Word in the Bible, men could know from the ideas innate in their minds that there was a God. Mather always resisted the contentions of Lockeans (which Locke himself did not make) that everything that men knew, they knew from sensation. There were ideas, a moral law in fact, that God had inscribed on men's souls with a pen of iron. Mather also believed that men could learn from reason that the soul was immortal and that someday it would have to stand before the bar of judgment. All these thingsthe existence of God who created and governs the world, the moral law, the immortality of the soul, and the certainty of judgmentwere legibly written on the rational soul. The evidence of this power of inborn reason, he believed, was clear in the history of mankind. For Christianity was not the only religion that taught these things; non-Christian creeds held the same beliefs. Even the red pagans in the wilderness, Mather often said, worshipped a God, and trusted Him to give them a life after death. These religions were false and evil, but they possessed some truths because all men, however wicked and misled, were born with them. These rational truths, he said in
Reason Satisfied
, have a "native Evidence" of their own.
64
Mather returned to these points throughout the remainder of his life in both public and private utterances. What began as a means, or a strategy, certainly affected his understanding of his God. Still the changes in his views took place within rather circumscribed limits. The moral principles he told New England it could find inscribed in the hearts of men were precisely those found in the Bible. One kept cropping up in his sermons as the crowning maxim of reasonable morality. It was the Golden Rule.
65
 
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The implication was plain in this emphasis: valuable as it was, reason could only tell men something better told elsewherein the word of God. And only revelation could provide the directions for salvation. Only revelation told of the sacrifices of Christ and of the miracles He and His disciples performed. Justification by faith was certainly a reasonable doctrine, but it was not to be understood by reason. The Holy Trinity might be considered reasonable by men who studied Scriptures, but they must not believe they truly understood it. Of course reason was an "Excellent Faculty," "a Noble Thing," Mather wrote in these years of his chastened rationalism; it distinguished men from beasts. But reason should not be idolized as it is when men depend upon it for their conduct rather than consulting God; when men, listening to it, presume to advise God, rather than depending upon Him; "when men will Receive nothing that is Revealed from GOD, Except they can fathom it by Reason; when Men must Comprehend the Mysteries of the Revealed Religion, or else they will
Reject
the
Counsel
of GOD.'' Of course men must listen to their reasons and to their consciences, but they must never attribute to them the power to save. That power belongs to Christ and will remain mysterious until the end of the world.
66
As Mather knew, but hesitated to admit, the mystery that aroused extraordinary contempt among English deists was the Trinity. Cotton Mather never even outlined the dimensions of the attack on it in English circles, but his defense revealed the limitations he found in reason. While writing about the Trinity in these years, he repudiated efforts to confine reason by the rules of logicvulgar logic he saidor by scholarship. Most study, pursued in universities, he said in his
Manuductio ad Ministerium
, deserved to be consigned to the rubbish heap, and logic which only proved itself in "logomachies and altercations" merited no higher resting place. Teaching one to thinkwhich scholarship and logic presumed to doMather believed a ridiculous task; one might as well be teaching the act of eating and drinking. Reason took its origin in custom and nature, and required no tutor.
67
And not even reason freed of the dead hand of logicians could solve the mystery of the Trinity. The deistic authorities pronounced the notion of three-persons-in-one contradictory and,

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