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 (57 page)

 
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For Puritans in England and America, the writings of Joseph Mede filled this need better than any others. Mede, fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Greek, was acknowledged as the most learned scholar of the prophecies in the English Church. Mede revived the theory of the millennium and cast it into the future, arguing that the present revealed progress towards that glorious period.
33
Cotton Mather pored over the commentaries of every millennialist he could lay his hands on. He copied out long passages from many on Biblical texts, and eventually incorporated them into his own great commentary, the Biblia Americana. Mather absorbed the general view of Mede and his followers: the Book of Revelation described the history of the Roman Empire and the Church within it; the millennium lay not in the past but in future; the course of history leddespite by-passes and set-backsto the Second Coming and the destruction of the Antichrist. From Mede, and especially from Pierre Jurieu, he learned, too, that Revelation must be regarded as a "paraphrase" of the seventh chapter of Daniel, where the creation of the fourth beastliterally Romeis described.
34
The influence of Mede at one end of this scholarship and of William Whiston at the other in the formation of Mather's disposition to believe that the end of all things was approaching is less clear. Each in his own way espoused the power of science to enlighten the mind and to reduce mystery including the mystery of the prophecies. Both professed to open obscure Scriptures with the new light. Like his grandfathers, Richard Mather and John Cotton, and his father, Increase, Cotton Mather connected the development of knowledge to the end of the world. John Cotton had believed, at least for a time, that Revelation had revealed its secrets in his own day. Richard Mather had told his flock that the daylight of the Gospel approached and with it the end of all things familiar to flesh and blood. And Increase Mather also saw a progressive unfolding of Scripture and the final acts of history on this earth.
35
Cotton Mather's mentality was formed in this atmosphere of millennial expectation and scientific faith. For him and for the natural theologians he admired from a distance, piety and science joined in a reliance upon experience. Of course the New Piety had advanced once again the claims of grace by holding
 
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that men must convert before they could do anything else of merit. As mysterious as the process of conversion was, it was a discernible event and it left its markslives of devotion and morality. The encounters with the Spirit in the new birth was an experience that almost any man who had it might recognizeas surely as the experience of the pangs of childbirth would leave a woman aware of herself. For conversion engaged the affections and the senses and ultimately the soul. The experimental philosophy offered a similar kind of authority to men, a study of the creatures that laid bare the divine, and devising, hand. Few menMather believedcould observe multitudes of tiny fishes in a drop of water and escape the experience with their atheism intact.
36
Yet despite their common indebtedness to experience, the experimental philosophy and piety could not claim an equality as authoritiesin Cotton Mather's mind at least. Piety rested on revelation much more than it did on reason and its truths were confirmed by the experience of revelation and its progressive fulfillment over the centuries in the history of Christ's Church. Mather elaborated this proposition for the benefit of individual Christians in his preaching on the experimental religion. He was not alone, of course, in believing that Scripture might affect men with its truthfulness when they related it to their own experience. Among others, his friend Thomas Bridge had worked out techniques of worship whose purpose was to give the believer an immediate sense of the power of Scripture. It was left to Cotton Mather, however, more than to any Puritan in New England, to extend the experimental method to prophecy. But in doing so he imparted to the method so much of his own unquestioning faith that the truths obtained through experience inevitably gave way to the truths of revelation.
37
Hence, when Cotton Mather went to the prophecies expecting to learn more than his fathers before him, he did so not primarily because he trusted the scientific method, but because he believed that the end of the world was near; and God had promised men greater light in the last age of history. There were Puritans in the seventeenth century whose piety was as passionate as Cotton Mather's but whose expectations about the end were far different. Intense piety did not necessarily end in heated chiliasm, but Mather's piety didfor reasons which ultimately defy expla-
 
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nation, I suspect. But this much can be said: if his belief that the end was imminent was not a judgment based on reason or science, neither was it the comforting escape of a clerical leader who believed that his society had gone bad. Nor was it the delusion of an alienated intellectual who saw political power in New England passing from ministers and intellectuals to hard men of business.
38
Rather, Mather's eschatology provided the supreme expression of a temperament that craved the classic reconciliation that Christianity providedunion with Christ. In all Mather's writings on the end, he managesperhaps unconsciouslyto say that the world has come apart. Men are divided from one another; interests define social relationships. The society of New England has divided into sides, groups, tribesjust as his church has. Men hate one another and act contrary to the injunction to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. They backbite, gossip, extort, oppress and glorify the self over God. Repairing this state of affairs is the task of the Second Coming and the glory of the millennium that will follow.
If Mather's studies of the prophetic Scriptures and of events which he believed represented their fulfillment were more the acts of piety than of scholarship, they rested on highly self-conscious study. If reasonas Mather believedcould give only limited aid in understanding the prophecies, what was left to a man who loved his Lord? The answerwhich took years to work outcarried him deeper into a Pietistic appreciation of experience. Reason must fail, but the working out of the prophecies over time would continue, hence one must study the history of the faithful. Eventually the study of their experience would seem a little remote to a provincial American, distant from the centers of European power, and Cotton Mather dreamed of more immediate ways of coming to a knowledge of the future. These were dangerous dreams, for they depended upon direct communication with the Holy Spirit.
39
While Mather nourished such dreams, he continued throughout his life to put to scholarship the questions of when and under what conditions Christ would come. Only Scripture could tell the time of the Second Coming, and only Scripture could reduce the events of history to order. Like almost every Protestant eschatologist of his age, Mather accepted the general lines
 
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drawn by Mede (the "great Mede," Mather's usual form of address, indicates the respect he felt).
40
If Mede had done nothing more than connect the Revelation of St. John and the Book of Daniel, he would have gone a long way toward satisfying Protestant scholars. His contention that Revelation simply offered an elaboration of Daniel's seventh chapter, which describes the appearance of the fourth beast of ten horns "diverse from all the rest," linked a series of baffling prophecies.
41
This fourth beast, Mede wrote, referred to the Roman Empire, the last and fourth, of the great empires which followed the Babylonian, Persian, and Ancient Greek. This beast appears in Revelation where, Mede argued, its fate was projected into the future. Grotius, Hammon, Thorndike, all respected commentators, had held that these passages referred to the destruction of carnal Jerusalem and therefore should be understood as history rather than prophecy. Mede not only discarded their assumptions but also suggested that Revelation contained two prophetic systems: the first, announced in Chapter 5 in the ''sealed book," dealt with the Roman Empire; the second, in Chapter 10, in the "little book open,'' revealed the future of the Church of Christ in the wilderness. These two systems of prophecies intersected in the second half of Revelation, Mede believed, but as far as rational understanding was concerned the visions of the prophet had to be considered separately until it was clear that he referred to a mingling of secular and ecclesiastical affairs.
42
Until Mather read William Whiston's
Essay on Revelation
, shortly after it was published in 1706, he seems not to have questioned Mede's general view.
43
He continued to accept its main outlines throughout his life, though Whiston convinced him that the two sets of prophecies in the sealed book and the open little book referred to the Church within the empire, and that the distinction Mede made between
Res Imperii
secular affairsand
Res Ecclesiae
ecclesiastical affairswas unnecessary. What Revelation revealed, Whiston argued, was the condition of the Church within the Roman Empire from its beginning to its latter-day forms. To a twentieth-century mind, the entire matter reeks of antiquarianism, but as Whiston pointed out, the separation of the two sets of visions led Mede to make other errors of interpretation. The one that interested Cotton Mather revolved around the pouring of the vials (described in Chapter 16 of Reve-
 
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lation) which was widely taken as an allegorical account of the wrath of God against Rome and its Church. Mede believed that all but the seventh vial, the last, had already been poured and Cotton Mather agreed with himuntil Whiston's book came into his hands. Whiston argued that the vials would not be poured on Rome until the sounding of Seventh Trumpet, which would not occur until the Antichrist was destroyed.
44
The complicated details of Whiston's argument which changed Mather's mind need not concern us, but the sense they convey of the cast of his thoughtand feelingabout prophecy is worth study. In the Biblia, where his most ambitious discussion of Revelation appears, Mather confesses his admiration for the "precision" Whiston introduces into the interpretation of these issues. This comment suggests his indebtedness to the experimental philosophy and its offspring, natural theology, which Whiston espoused with his Arian slant; but Mather had something else in mind. The precision he esteemed had fewer connections to the experimental philosophy than to the ancient science of numerology. If the vials were yet to be poured, as Whiston believed, they might be understood as being a part of the prophecy of the sealed book which has seven seals, and by consequence under the seven trumpets and by extension the seven thunders of Revelation. What delighted Mather was Whiston's precision" in bringing together, and giving coherence to "all the prophetic visions, that go successively by Sevens.''
45
There was still another reason for Mather's satisfaction in Whiston's account of the vials: Whiston's interpretation was a part of a larger one that forecast the imminent end of the world. Mede's discussion of Revelation implied that the end was far off (the pouring of each vial, as his account had it, had taken hundreds of years; the seventh vialif it were to equal the others in its power to afflict the Beastmust take at least as long as the first six, a period of many hundreds of years). Cotton Mather desired nothing as much as he did reasons to believe that the end would occur in his lifetime. Whiston gave him hope that he would see this glorious day as early as 1716.
46
Predicting the date of the end, of course, depended upon one's general interpretation of the prophecies and the conditions this interpretation required for their fulfillment. Mather's studies persuaded him that all the prophecies were linked to three great
 
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eventsthe birth and sacrifice of Christ, the substitution of the Gentiles for Israel as God's chosen people, and finally, the Second Coming of Christ. Seeing the propecies in this light, he said, provided the "key" that would unlock their mysteries. And since only the Second Coming of Christ remained in the future, the Scriptures, the signs that would anticipate His coming, and the events through which history would unfold had to be studied.
47
Mather sometimes professed to be astonished that anyone could believe that the millennium had already passed; as far as he was concerned one did not need scholarship to realize that the Church had not enjoyed a thousand years of purity and holiness during any period of its long existence. He conceded that great men, among them ripe scholars and theologians, had long entertained this belief. His own variety of premillennialism rested on the premise that the millennium not only still remained in the future but that Christ's Second Coming would give it a glorious beginning. And so he studied the signs that might hint the dawning of this final period of history.
48
The first sermon Mather published on the end of the world
Things To Be Look'd For
(1691)revealed a technique of study that he would use for the rest of his life, a careful juxtaposition of prophecies and public events. Indeed, events in New England and abroad had a good deal to do with the production of the sermon. Given to the Artillery Company of Massachusetts at their annual meeting, June 1, 1691, the sermon offered "Good News in Bad Times."
49
The colony badly needed some good news, for it was suffering from Indian raids; its ambitious and expensive expedition against the French in Canada had recently failed; and it was feeling the effects of a currency crisis while its foreign trade was drying up. As if all this were not bad enough, it still did not have a charter of government (the old one had been annulled in 1684) and it had just passed through a revolution against its governor, Sir Edmund Andros. This last event was of course a happy one, though Massachusetts' leaders were understandably nervous about the next governor.
50
These occurrences by themselves did not persuade Mather that the end which he yearned for was about to come. He was much too cosmopolitanor to self-conscious a provincialever to suggest that America occupied more of the Lord's concern than

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