 | 3.
Ibid
. 145.
|
| 4. Mather treats the despair felt by men in
Ibid
. 88-89 and
passim
; and in
The Summe of Certain Sermons
, 23-24. Despair and deadness are also discussed in many sermons by Increase and Cotton Mather. The latter's
Diary
contains accounts of his personal encounters with such feelings. At times laymen also complained of the harshness of Calvinist doctrine. See Thomas Shepard,
The Sincere Convert: Discovering the Small Number of True Believers, And the Great Difficulty of Saving Conversion
(4th ed., London, 1646), where complaints are recorded that the ministers' insistence on predestination sometimes were enough to drive a man "out of his wits," 125; see, too, 128, 133.
|
| 5. The quotations in this paragraph are from
Summe of Certain Sermons
, 23-24.
|
| 6. There is a searching discussion of the covenant theology in Perry Miller,
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass., 1954); Miller's
From Colony to Province
discusses the Arminian implications of the theology.
|
| 7. Summe of Seventie Lectures, 70-76, 85-88, 91, 120.
|
| 8.
Ibid
. 138.
|
| 9.
Ibid
. 393.
|
| 10. Richard Mather,
A Farewel-Exhortation to the Church and People of Dorchester
(Cambridge, Mass., 1657) 16.
|
| 11. Summe of Seventie Lectures, 105, 109, 112-13, 131-32, 237-39, 242.
|
| 12. Mather discusses preparation and "legal" preaching in
Ibid
. 62, 65-67, 131-32, 292. For scholarly studies of the doctrine of preparation see Perry Miller, " 'Preparation For Salvation' In Seventeenth-Century New England,"
Journal of the History of Ideas
IV (June 1943) 253-86; Norman Pettit,
The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life
(New Haven, Conn., 1966).
|
| 13. These views are clear in Mather's Summe of Seventie Lectures.
|
| 14.
Ibid
. 105-8, 112-13, 265-66.
|
|