The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (58 page)

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Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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Europe. And it was in Europe that blows had just been struck which signalled to him that the time of the millennium approached. What impressed him most in the European scene was what impressed European students of the prophecies: the renewal of persecution of Protestants in France with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. France, most eschatologists believed, was the tenth kingdom of the Roman Empire. There the slaying of the witnesses described by Revelation might take placeindeed, perhaps, had just occurred in the slaughter of Protestant innocents by Louis XIV's dragoons. One who offered this interpretation of the French persecution was Pierre Jurieu, a Professor of Divinity in France and Holland who had been ordained in the Church of England, whom Mather read at this time (and cited in his Artillery Company sermon). Jurieu ventured to suggest that other evidence also testified to the nearness of the end. The vials of wrath had been poured upon the Antichrist, he insisted, and after them all that remained was the glorious blast of the seventh trumpet. Mather paused lovingly over Jurieu's careful reconstruction of the Biblical past, and his collation of prophecies and contemporary affairs; he wanted to believe that all the preliminary prophecies had been accomplished and that all the signs had been given but he dared not give himself completely to this theory. Yet, he told himself, the end must come soon!
51
He was encouraged in this view by other eschatologists who held that the Antichrist had entered the last half-time of his 1260 years at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. A half-time, of course, equaled a period of 180 years; according to simple addition, the end of the Antichrist might well commence in 1697, with Christ, who would destroy the Beast, appearing simultaneously.
A skillful scholar, Mather believed, might test these calculations a few years hence by studying Turkish affairs. One of the commonplaces among the followers of Mede was that the second woe trumpet had signalled the beginning of the irruptions of the Turks upon the Empire, which began around the year 1300 with the Ottoman forces. Most commentators agreed that the Turkish woe would continue for almost four hundred years. Like many others, Mather believed that the time of the woe could be determined with precision to be 397 years. If the elaborate math-
 
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ematics of the eschatologists were true, Turkish power would collapse around 1697. Cotton Mather told the Artillery Company that a truce in the war between Turks and Imperial soldiers might indicate the passing of this woe. This comment had inspiration of its owneight years later, in 1699, the Austrians and the Turks concluded the Peace of Carlowicz.
52
In the years after the sermon to the Artillery Company, Mather revised his computations but he never yielded the conviction that the end was nearso near in fact that he might live to experience the Second Coming. In the early 1690's he fastened his hopes for the end on the year 1697. Since many prophecies said that the millennium's opening would be marked by earthquakes, Mather recorded every quake that came to his attention. He was convinced, he remarked in
A Midnight Cry
, that the world had entered upon a period of earthquakes which would "assist" in the resurrection of the witnesses, one of the last events before the Second Coming.
53
He expected the earthquakes to increase in frequency and violence, and he was gratified by reports of the disastrous ones felt in Italy and Jamaica.
54
Later in the same year, 1692, he discovered evidence in New England of the imminence of the end. To Mather, whatever else the Salem witchcraft episode indicated, it surely testified to the pervasiveness of evil in the world. The Devil, he said in
The Wonders of the Invisible World
,
55
was desolating mankind. And the evil that was abroad, he believed, was the last gasp the Lord would permit the Devil until the assaults of Gog and Magog at the end of the thousand years. Mather listed less oppressive signs too in this time of trouble: the slaughter of the witnesses had clearly passed and with it the end of persecution of the true religion in England. He would lose this certainty in the next ten years, but in 1692 he was still delighted by the Glorious Revolution and hopeful of Mary's intentions to lift proscriptions against nonconformity. In this mood he detected the completion of the second woe, which he said was clear in the military reverses the Turks had recently experienced. Mather would soon repent of that certainty, too.
56
When Christ failed to descend from Heaven in 1697, Mather did not despair. It was widely believed in the seventeenth century that eschatological computations always carried an inherent inexactness because of the shadowy state of knowledge of the
 
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past and the prophecies. The calendar introduced still further difficulties to those who presumed to calculate the precise date of the Second Coming, or the birth of the Antichrist, or his destruction, or any of the schedule of events in the grand cosmic drama. Even Whiston, who claimed that astronomical science gave his chronology a new exactness, prefaced his treatise on Revelation with a little disquisition on the problems of translating the prophetical year into the Chaldean and the Julian year. So, although precision was always to be sought in figuring where the world stood on the line of time, it was not to be expected.
57
The next year there seemed cause for fresh hope. In the Spring of 1698 Mather received news of William's Proclamation Against Profaneness, one of a series periodically issued late in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
58
Nonconformists in England also wrote of other promising developments: further reformation of the Scottish Church and Protestant recovery in Orange"in the Bowels of France," Mather exulted in his
Diary
.
59
About this time through strenuous prayer he also received a particular faith that a "wondrous Revolution" was about to begin in England, Scotland, and Ireland, which could only mean that the Kingdom of God was near to realization on earth.
60
During the next five years his speculations continued to range over the prophecies and the news from Europe with unvarying intensity. He shared his father's interest in occasional hints that the Jews might now return to the true religion. Increase Mather, of course, had long argued that the Jews must be converted before the Second Coming and that once they had been reclaimed from apostasy the climactic moment would follow. With his father, Cotton Mather shouted hosannas every time he heard of a Jew who had been gathered into a Protestant church. To advance this good work he wrote
Faith of the Fathers
in 1699 and prefaced it with an address calling out "Return, O backsliding Israel!"
61
He could not have been more pleased a few months later when he heard from the Carolinas that his little book had been a "special Instrument" in the conversion of a Jew there.
62
Still, this instance and others like it were isolated. Moreover, Mather soon had to admit that though the second woe, the affliction by the Ottoman Turks, was passing, it had not ended. The Peace of Carlowicz gave his hopes a boost, but he could not bring himself to say flatly that the Turks had finally been
 
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stopped. By 1703, when he completed a study, "Problema Theologicurn," which argued that Christ would appear at the beginning of the millennium, he had advanced the time of the Second Coming to 1736. This date was suggested in a tentative spirit not at all characteristic of Mather's normal chiliastic moodand he would soon revise it.
63
One other question troubled Mather in these years as he waited expectantly for a national conversion of Israel: what part would America take in the final scenes of the cosmic drama? European scholarship returned a frightening answer to this question, for Mede had predicted that America might escape the burning of the earth, not however because it was pure, but because it was evil. So evil in fact that it had been chosen to house Gog and Magog, those horrible hosts in the Devil's army who would attack the City of God at the end of the millennium. Not even Mede could find a sound scriptural basis for this theory, and Mather, in "Problema Theologicum," rejected it without the customary references to prophecies: "I that am an American must needs be Lothe to allow all
America
still unto the Devils possession, when our Lord shall possess all the rest of the world."
64
Although he continued to oppose Mede's view throughout his life, the matter remained one of uneasy concern. He knew that his own views were prompted by loyalty to New England, which for the most part, meant America to him; and the origins of Gog and Magog went unexplained in his writings for years afterwards. Eventually he brought himself to accept the argument of another European, M. Poiret, a French divine who held that the Devil's hosts hid in Hell until their dreadful assault on the New Jerusalem. In ''Problema Theologicum" Mather had dismissed Poiret's opinion as a "Fancy" that one might expect to find in a poem of Milton's rather than in a treatise of divinity.
65
Mather's uneasy resolution of the question of where Gog and Magog would rise reflected his belief that the area of cosmic history lay in Europe rather than in America; in rejecting Mede, the best that he could permit himself to hope for his own land was that it might be a "part" of the New Jerusalemnot its center. Poiret had drawn his scorn because he discovered the nest of the Devil's armies in Hell rather than in Europe.
66
These speculations were largely the products of the years be-
 
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fore he read Whiston, who published his
Essay on Revelation
in 1706. Mather admired Whiston's scientific credentials, his association with Newton, his ability to provide "incontestable demonstration" of his prophetical theories, his revision of Mede's interpretation of the open and closed books of Revelation.
67
But even more, Mather admired Whiston's chronology of final events, which revived Mather's hopes, after 1697 failed to bring Christ, that only a slight miscalculation had been made and that the Redeemer would almost certainly appear in 1716. Mather did not accept every feature of Whiston's argument about the end: he reluctantly agreed that the affliction of the Roman Church in the pouring of the vials was still to be accomplished but left the way clear for a change of mind with the comment that the Lord sometimes fulfilled the prophecies in a more "Exquisite" manner than anyone anticipated.
68
With this disclaimer he found it all the more gratifying to believe in the minute set of computations Whiston proposed. Years before, Increase Mather had recommended caution to anyone who attempted to plot the location of the Lord's hand on the line of time, a warning which had been given by others before and would be repeated later, Cotton Mather among them. Whiston had not the advantage of having Increase Mather as a father and he shrank before neither prophetical mystery nor orthodox doctrine. The climactic year in history for him would be 1716; everything he examined in the prophecies, in the past, and in the events of recent years pointed towards that year. Though not a humble man, Whiston was sometimes a careful one; and he knew the danger of attempting to predict with exactness the date of the complete destruction of the Antichrist and the Second Coming of the Savior. By the opening of the eighteenth century the list of unsuccessful predictions had grown long. Hence Whiston used the technique of commentators who wished to introduce precision but not to appear ridiculous: he made a distinction between the beginning of the destruction of the Antichrist and the final end itself when the Antichrist would lose his life. Whiston agreed with most writers who periodized prophecy in this way that the beginning of the end would see the Antichrist lose his power, and his effective reignWhiston called it tyrannywould close. After some indefinite period, but not a lengthy one assuredly, the forces of God would totally
 
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destroy the Antichrist, stamping out every shred of life from his body. If this moment could not be precisely dated, the beginning could be, and it fell in the year 1716.
69
Mather admired this method of periodization and adopted it. For a few years after reading Whiston, probably shortly after the
Essay
's publication in 1706, he accepted Whiston's contention that the second woe, the Turkish hostilities against the Romans Empire, had passed. (Whiston's self-confidence is nowhere clearer than in his commentary on this matter: the second woe, he wrote, began with the Ottoman becoming Sultan on May 19, 1301, and it ended with the victory of Eugene of Savoy over the Turks on September 1, 1697.) This news delighted Mather for it meant that the seventh trumpet (which in the prophetical scheme was the third woe trumpet) would soon sound signalling the appearance of Christ. And before that, the beginning of the end of the Antichrist would occur with the destruction of his power everywhere in the world.
70
Mather discussed Whiston's chronology most fully in the Biblia Americana, which he began well before reading the
Essay on Revelation
and continued to revise until a few years before his death. Although by 1717 the failure of Whiston's prediction was clear, Mather never got around to expunging the excited passages he wrote on the wonderful developments to be expected in 1716. Every prophecy, Whiston had written, pointed to that glorious year. For example, John's first vision under the "little book open" had forecast the future state of Christ's Church. The primitive Church, Whiston said, had been pure until 456 A.D. when it was infested by Antichrist. When one added the 1260 years prescribed for his reign to that date, the result was 1716, when Antichristian idolatries were to be cast from the temple. This was one result of his "precision," indicating that 1716 was the yearand the slaying of the witnesses provided another.
71
The second vision, the slaying of the two witnesses, had always confused theologians, who divided over the question of whether it had already occurred or was still to come. With many other scholars, Mather had announced his belief in 1690 that with the Edict of Nantes and the slaughter that followed, particularly in France, the prophecy had been fulfilled. He acknowledged the influence of Pierre Jurieu on his thinking, and of Peter Boyer's

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