Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
The passage throws a good deal of light on the psychology of Cotton
Mather. Such visions were clearly the result of abnormal stimuli,
acting on a neurotic temperament. From both sides of his family he
inherited a tense nervous system that was aggravated by precocity and
an unnatural regimen. The inevitable result was a hothouse plant of
Puritan forcing. His religious exaltation flowered from the root of
egoism. His vanity was cosmic. He esteemed himself a beacon set on
a hill, a divine torch which the very hand of God had lighted. The
success or failure of God’s plan for New England, he believed, rested
on his shoulders; and with such heavy responsibilities devolved upon
him he was driven, hot-haste, by the prick of urgency. The king’s
business requireth haste. The work of the Lord cannot wait upon
sluggards. “O then _To work_ as fast as you can,” he wrote in _The
Magnalia_, “and of soul-work and church-work as much as ever you can.
Say to all _Hindrances_ ... ‘You’ll excuse me if I ask you to be short
with me, for my work is great and my time is but little.’” And so with
an amazing activity that was little short of neurosis, he gave himself
over to the great business of managing the affairs of New England in
accordance with God’s will.
In undertaking so difficult a job, he frequently came into conflict
with other interpreters of God’s plan for New England, and partisan
venom gathered about him wherever he passed. Tact was never a Mather
virtue, and Cotton made two enemies to his father’s one. His quarrels
trod on each other’s heels, and a downright vindictiveness breathes
through his private records of them. He railed at whoever disagreed
with him, and imputed silly or malignant motives. The pages of his
diary are filled with epithets that he flung privately at his enemies;
one marvels that so many in the little town of Boston could be singled
out as “strangely and fiercely possessed of the Devil.” Robert Calef,
whose _More Wonders of the Invisible World_ was an inconvenient reply
to his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, was set down as “a very
wicked sort of a Sadducee in this Town, raking together a crue of
Libels ... an abominable Bundle of Lies, written on purpose, with a
Quil under a special Energy and Management of Satan, to damnify my
precious Opportunities of Glorifying my Lord Jesus Christ.”[110] When
an anti-Mather group of Cambridge men set up the Brattle Street Church,
and invited Benjamin Colman, who had received Presbyterian ordination
in England, by way of reply to the Mather group, to become their
pastor, Cotton wrote in his diary:
A Company of Head-strong Men in the Town, the cheef of whom, are
full of malignity to the Holy Waye of our Churches, have built in
this Town, another Meeting-house. To delude many better-meaning Men
in their own Company, and the Churches in the Neighbourhood, they
past a Vote ... that they would not vary from the Practice of these
Churches, except in one little Particular.... But a young Man, born
and bred here, and hence gone for England, is now returned hither,
at their Invitation, equip’d with an _Ordination_, to qualify him,
for all that is intended.
On his “returning and arriving here, these fallacious People” gave
themselves over, in short, to “Their violent and impetuous Lusts,
to carry on the Apostasy,” and Cotton Mather prayed God to make
him an instrument to defeat the “Designs that Satan may have in
the Enterprise.”[111] Similar passages of extravagant abuse of men
so wicked as to disagree with him flowed from his pen in copious
abundance. Although he constantly prayed that his daily life might
be “a trembling walk with God,” he was clearly a difficult fellow to
get on with; and in the opinion of many he was justly described by a
contemporary, as a “malecontent priest,” consumed with an “Hereditary
rancour” that made him “everlastingly opposite” to every will but his
own.
The diary of Cotton Mather is a treasure-trove to the abnormal
psychologist. The thing would be inconceivable if the record were not
in print. What a crooked and diseased mind lay back of those eyes that
were forever spying out occasions to magnify self! He grovels in proud
self-abasement. He distorts the most obvious reality. His mind is
clogged with the strangest miscellany of truth and marvel. He labors
to acquire the possessions of a scholar, but he listens to old wives’
tales with greedy avidity. In all his mental processes the solidest
fact falls into fantastic perspective. He was earnest to do good, he
labored to put into effect hundreds of “Good devices,” but he walked
always in his own shadow. His egoism blots out charity and even the
divine mercy. Consider his account of an “execution sermon” preached
to a nameless girl condemned for killing her natural child, and the
light it throws on both minister and congregation:
The Execution of the miserable Malefactor, was ordered for to have
been the last Week, upon the Lecture of another. I wondred then
what would become of my _Particular_ Faith, of her condition being
so ordered in the Providence of God, that it should furnish me,
with a _special Opportunity_ to glorify Him. While I was entirely
resigning to the wisdome of Heaven all such Matters, the Judges,
wholly without my seeking, altered and allow’d her Execution to
fall on the Day of _my Lecture_. The _General Court_ then sitting,
ordered the Lecture to bee held in a larger and a stronger House,
than that _old_ one, where ’tis usually kept. For my own part, I
was weak, and faint, and spent; but I humbly gave myself up to the
_Spirit_ of my Heavenly Lord and Hee assured mee, that Hee would
send His good Angel to strengthen mee. The greatest Assembly, ever
in this Countrey preach’d unto, was now come together; It may bee
four or five thousand Souls. I could not gett unto the _Pulpit_,
but by climbing over _Pues_ and _Heads_: and there the Spirit of my
dearest Lord came upon mee. I preached with a more than ordinary
Assistance, and enlarged, and uttered the most awakening Things,
for near two hours together. My Strength and Voice failed not; but
when it was near failing, a silent Look to Heaven strangely renew’d
it. In the whole I found Prayer answered and Hope exceeded, and
Faith encouraged, and the Lord using _mee_, the vilest in all that
great Assembly, to glorify Him. Oh! what shall I render to the
Lord![112]
Straightway thereafter, he rendered the Lord another characteristic
service. No sooner was the girl hanged--for whose safekeeping no good
angel seems to have been available after the minister had bespoken
his--than he hastened to the printer to arrange for printing the
sermon, and “annexed thereunto, an History of Criminals executed in
this Land, and effectually, an Account of their dying Speeches, and
of my own Discourses with them in their last Hours.... I entitled the
Book, +PILLARS OF SALT+.” Clearly this was the time to peddle his
wares, when all Boston was talking of the great event; and with a
nose for publicity as keen as Defoe’s, he flung together a jumble of
material, and trusted to its timeliness to sell. Some such origin, no
doubt, accounts for a good many of the small library of titles that
bore his name, an output that seems to have justified the angelic
prophecy of “the books this youth should write and publish.” With a
very lust for printer’s ink, he padded his bibliography like a college
professor seeking promotion; but in spite of all the prayers poured
out in behalf of them, they would seem for the most part to have been
little more than tuppenny tracts, stuffed with a sodden morality, that
not even an angel could make literature of.
Holding so strong a conviction of apostleship, Cotton Mather would
certainly play the politician, and quite as certainly blunder and go
wrong. Far more than his father he was a bookman, who believed that
all knowledge was shut up between pigskin covers. He was as lacking in
worldly wisdom as a child, and in his ecstatic contemplation of the
marvels wrought by God in primitive New England he never discovered
that that older world had passed away. Another age was rising, with
other ideals than ecclesiastical, which the three thousand books in his
library told him nothing about. He was an anachronism in his own day.
Living in an earlier age, when the hierarchy was in its prime, he would
have been carried far on the tide of theocratic prestige; a generation
later, when lay-power had definitely superseded clerical, he would have
taken his place as a stout defender of Tory ways. But at the moment
when a critical realignment of parties was under way in Massachusetts;
when the villagers were becoming democratized and the gentry toryized;
when even the clergy were dividing--Cotton Mather was a general without
an army. He was a primitive Puritan in a Boston that was fast becoming
Yankee, and his love for the theocracy grew stronger with every defeat.
The judgment of after times finds little in his political activities
to approve and much to condemn. After all allowances are made the fact
remains that he was a leader of reaction; and no protestations can
obscure the motive of personal ambition. His own prestige was involved
with that of the theocracy. It was due to the traditional authority
of the ministry that he enjoyed the distinction of being a “Person,
whom the Eye and the Talk of the People is very much upon,” and any
lessening of that authority would hurt him cruelly in his vanity. This
remains the sufficient explanation of his varied political activities
in the course of which he trimmed his sails to different winds. He
first essayed a frontal attack on the secular power, but suffering a
personal slight, he shifted and struck in the dark at an exposed flank;
and finally, receiving only further mortification, he made overtures of
peace and found his way back to the tables of the great. It was against
the administration of the wily and unscrupulous Dudley that he waged
his bitterest warfare. Failing to make headway by open hostility, he
seized upon a current trade scandal, poured out his grievances in an
anonymous pamphlet sent to London to be published, and awaited the
result. It was a slashing attack, done in the tone of a lover of the
ancient rights and privileges of New England, and it must have cut
Dudley to the quick. A quotation or two will suffice to reveal the
nature of the charges:
But, when the President [Dudley] was pleased, out of an Active
and Passive Principle, to tell our Countreymen, in open Council,
_That the People in_ New-England _were all Slaves; and that the_
only _Difference between Them and Slaves, was their not being_
Bought _and Sold: And that they must not think the Privileges_ of
Englishmen _would follow them to the end of the World_. I say,
when the People heard this, they lookt upon themselves in a manner
Lost....
All the People here are Bought and Sold, betwixt the Governour and
his son Paul....
This is the _Third Time_ that he has been Trusted with Power from
the _Crown_ in _America_, and he has constantly Abus’d it, to the
Dishonour of the Government, and almost Ruin of the People he was
sent to Govern.[113]
There was enough truth in the charges to make them serious, but the
spleen was quite too evident. The author was at once discovered and
Cotton Mather suffered a vigorous counter-attack that damaged a
reputation already undermined. Perhaps even worse was the social slight
put upon him by those in government. What it cost him to be left out of
the invitations of the great he reveals in the _Diary_:
2 _d._ 7m. [September] Friday. [1709] The other Ministers of the
Neighbourhood, are this Day feasting with our wicked Governour;