XVIII Cotton Mather’s Writings and Character
While compelled—by the attempt of the writer in the North American Review to reverse the just verdict of history in reference to Cotton Mather’s connection with Salem Witchcraft—to show the unhappy part he acted and the terrible responsibility he incurred, in bringing forward, and carrying through its stages, that awful tragedy, and the unworthy means he used to throw that responsibility, afterwards, on others, I am not to be misled into a false position, in reference to this extraordinary man. I endorse the language of Mr. Peirce: “He possessed great vigor and activity of mind, quickness of apprehension, a lively imagination, a prodigious memory, uncommon facility in acquiring and communicating knowledge, with the most indefatigable application and industry; that he amassed an immense store of information on all subjects, human and divine.” I follow Mr. Peirce still further, in believing that his natural temperament was pleasant and his sentiments of a benevolent cast: “that he was an habitual promoter and doer of good, is evident, as well from his writings as from the various accounts that have been transmitted respecting him.”
If the question is asked, as it naturally will be, how these admissions can be reconciled with the views and statements respecting him, contained in this article and in my book on witchcraft, the answer is: that mankind is not divided into two absolutely distinct and entirely separated portions—one good and the other evil. The good are liable to, and the bad are capable of, each receiving much into their own lives and characters, that belongs to the other. This interfusion universally occurs. The great errors and the great wrongs imputable to Cotton Mather do not make it impracticable to discern what was commendable in him. They may be accounted for without throwing him out of the pale of humanity or our having to shut our eyes to traits and merits other ways exhibited.
The extraordinary precocity of his intellect—itself always a peril, often a life-long misfortune—awakened vanity and subjected him to the flattery by which it is fed. All ancestral associations and family influences pampered it. Such a speech as that made to him, at his graduation, by President Oakes, could not have failed to have inflated it to exaggerated dimensions. Clerical and political ambition was natural, all but instinctive, to one, whose father, and both whose grandfathers, had been powers, in the State as well as Church. The religious ideas, if they can be so called, in which he had been trained from childhood, in a form bearing upon him with more weight than upon any other person in all history, inasmuch, as they constituted the prominent feature of his father’s reading, talk, thoughts, and writings, gave a rapid and overshadowing growth to credulity and superstition. A defect in his education, perhaps, in part, a natural defect, left him without any true logical culture, so that he seems, in his productions and conduct, not to discern the sequences of statements, the coherence of propositions, nor the consistency of actions, thereby entangling him in expressions and declarations that have the aspect of untruthfulness—his language often actually bearing that character, without his discerning it. His writings present many instances of this infirmity. Some have already been incidentally adduced. In his Life of Phips, avowing himself the author of the document known as the Advice of the Ministers, he uses this language: “By Mr. Mather the younger, as I have been informed.” He had, in fact, never been so informed. He knew it by consciousness. Of course he had no thought of deceiving; but merely followed a habit he had got, of such modes of expression. So, also, when he sent a present of money and tracts to “poor and bad people,” in Salem, with an anonymous letter to the Minister of the place, “desiring and empowering him to dispense the charity, in his own name, hoping thereby the more to ingratiate his ministry with the people,” he looked only on one side of the proposal, and saw it in no other light than a benevolent and friendly transaction. It never occurred to him that he was suggesting a deceptive procedure and drawing the Minister into a false position and practice.
When, in addition, we consider to what he was exposed by his proclivity to, and aspirations for, political power, the expedients, schemes, contrivances, and appliances, in which he thereby became involved in the then state of things in the Colony, and the connection which leading Ministers, although not admitted to what are strictly speaking political offices, had with the course of public affairs—his father, to an extent never equalled by any other Clergyman, before or since—we begin to estimate the influences that disastrously swayed the mind of Cotton Mather.
Vanity, flattery, credulity, want of logical discernment, and the struggles between political factions, in the unsettled, uncertain, transition period, between the old and new Charters, are enough to account for much that was wrong, in one of Mather’s temperament and passions, without questioning his real mental qualities, or, I am disposed to think, his conscious integrity, or the sincerity of his religious experiences or professions.
But his chief apology, after all, is to be found in the same sphere in which his chief offences were committed. Certain topics and notions, in reference to the invisible, spiritual, and diabolical world, whether of reality or fancy it matters not, had, all his life long, been the ordinary diet, the daily bread, of his mind.
It may, perhaps, be said with truth, that the theological imagery and speculations of that day, particularly as developed in the writings of the two Mathers, were more adapted to mislead the mind and shroud its moral sense in darkness, than any system, even of mythology, that ever existed. It was a mythology. It may be spoken of with freedom, now, as it has probably passed away, in all enlightened communities in Christendom. Satan was the great central character, in what was, in reality, a Pantheon. He was surrounded with hosts of infernal spirits, disembodied and embodied, invisible demons, and confederate human agents. He was seen in everything, everywhere. His steps were traced in extraordinary occurrences and in the ordinary operations of nature. He was hovering over the heads of all, and lying in wait along every daily path. The affrighted imagination, in every scene and mode of life, was conversant with ghosts, apparitions, spectres, devils. This prevalent, all but universal, exercise of credulous fancy, exalted into the most imposing dignity of theology and faith, must have had a demoralizing effect upon the rational condition and faculties of men, and upon all discrimination and healthfulness of thought. When error, in its most extravagant forms, had driven the simplicity of the Gospel out of the Church and the world, it is not to be wondered at that the mind was led to the most shocking perversions, and the conscience ensnared to the most indefensible actions.
The superstition of that day was foreshadowed in the ferocious cannibal of classic mythology—a monster, horrific, hideous in mien, and gigantic in stature. It involved the same fate. The eye of the intellect was burned out, the light of reason extinguished—cui lumen ademptum.
Having always given himself up to the contemplation of diabolical imaginations, Cotton Mather was led to take the part he did, in the witchcraft proceedings; and it cannot be hidden from the light of history. The greater his talents, the more earnestly he may, in other matters, have aimed to be useful, the more weighty is the lesson his course teaches, of the baleful effects of bewildering and darkening superstition.
There is another, and a special, explanation to be given of the disingenuousness that appears in his writings. He was a master of language. He could express, with marvelous facility, any shade of thought. He could also make language conceal thought. No one ever handled words with more adroitness. He could mould them to suit his purposes, at will, and with ease. This faculty was called in requisition by the special circumstances of his times. It was necessary to preserve, at least, the appearance of unity among the Churches, while there was as great a tendency, then, as ever, to diversity of speculations, touching points of casuistical divinity or ministerial policy. The talent to express in formulas, sentiments that really differed, so as to obscure the difference, was needed; and he had it. He knew how to frame a document that would suit both sides, but, in effect, answer the purposes of one of them, as in the Advice of the Ministers. He could assert a proposition and connect with it what appeared to be only a judicious modification or amplification, but which, in reality, was susceptible of being interpreted as either more or less corroborating or contradicting it, as occasion might require. This was a sort of sleight of hand, in the use of words; and was noticed, at the time, as “legerdemain.” He practised it so long that it became a feature of his style; and he actually, in this way, deceived himself as well as others. It is a danger to which ingenious and hair-splitting writers are liable. I am inclined to think that what we cannot but regard as patent misstatements, were felt by him to be all right, in consequence, as just intimated, of this acquired habit.
His style is sprightly, and often entertaining. Neal, the author of the History of the Puritans, in a letter to the Rev. Benjamin Colman, after speaking with commendation of one of Cotton Mather’s productions, says: “It were only to be wished that it had been freed from those puns and jingles that attend all his writings, before it had been made public.”—Massachusetts Historical Collections, I., v., 199.—Mr. Peirce, it has been observed, speaks of his “puns,” in conversation. It is not certain, but that, to a reader now, these very things constitute a redeeming attraction of his writings and relieve the mind of the unpleasant effects of his credulity and vanity, pedantic and often far-fetched references, palpable absurdities, and, sometimes, the repulsiveness of his topics and matter.
The Reviewer represents me as prejudiced against Cotton Mather. Far from it. Forty-three years ago, before my attention had been particularly called to his connection with alleged witchcrafts or with the political affairs of his times, I eulogized his “learning and liberality,” in warm terms.—Sermon at the Dedication of the House of Worship of the First Church, in Salem, Massachusetts, 48.
I do not retract what I then said. Cotton Mather was in advance of his times, in liberality of feeling, in reference to sectarian and denominational matters. He was, undoubtedly, a great student, and had read all that an American scholar could then lay his hands on. Marvellous stories were told of the rapidity of his reading. He was a devourer of books. At the same time, I vindicated him, without reserve, from the charge of pedantry. This I cannot do now. Observation and reflection have modified my views. He made a display, over all his pages, of references and quotations from authors then, as now, rarely read, and of anecdotes, biographical incidents, and critical comments relating to scholars and eminent persons, of whom others have but little information, and of many of whom but few have ever heard. This filled his contemporaries with wonder; led to most extravagant statements, in funeral discourses, by Benjamin Colman, Joshua Gee, and others; and made the general impression that has come down to our day. Without detracting from his learning, which was truly great, it cannot be denied that this superfluous display of it subjects him, justly to the imputation of pedantry. It may be affected where, unlike the case of Cotton Mather, there is, in reality, no very extraordinary amount of learning. It is a trick of authorship easily practised.
Any one reading Latin with facility, having a good memory, and keeping a well-arranged scrap-book, needs less than half a dozen such books as the following, to make a show of learning and to astonish the world by his references and citations—the six folio volumes of Petavius, on Dogmatic Theology, and his smaller work, Rationarium Temporum, a sort of compendium or schedule of universal history; and a volume printed, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, at Amsterdam, compiled by Limborch, consisting of an extensive collection of letters to and from the most eminent men of that and the preceding century, such as Arminius, Vossius, Episcopius, Grotius, and many others, embracing a vast variety of literary history, criticism, biography, theology, philosophy, and ecclesiastical matters—I have before me the copy of this work, owned by that prodigy of learning, Dr. Samuel Parr, who pronounced it “a precious book;” and it may have contributed much to give to his productions, that air of rare learning that astonished his contemporaries. To complete the compendious apparatus, and give the means of exhibiting any quantity of learning, in fields frequented by few, the only other book needed is Melchior Adams’s Lives of Literati, including all most prominently connected with Divinity, Philosophy, and the progress of learning and culture, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and down to its date, 1615. I have before me, the copy of this last work, owned by Richard Mather, and probably brought over with him, in his perilous voyage, in 1635. It was, successively, in the libraries of his son, Increase, and his grandson, Cotton Mather. At a corner of one of the blank leaves, it is noted, apparently in the hand of Increase Mather: “began Mar. 1, finished April 30, 1676.” According to the popular tradition, Cotton would have read it, in a day or two. It contains interesting items of all sorts—personal anecdotes, critical comments, and striking passages of the lives and writings of more than one hundred and fifty distinguished men, such as Erasmus, Fabricius, Faustus, Cranmer, Tremellius, Peter Martyr, Beza, and John Knox. Whether Mather had access to either of the above-named works, except the last, is uncertain; but, as his library was very extensive, he sparing no pains nor expense in furnishing it, and these books were severally then in print and precisely of the kind to attract him and suit his fancy, it is not unlikely that he had them all. They would have placed in easy reach, much of the mass of amazing erudition with which he “entertained” his readers and hearers.
Cotton Mather died on the thirteenth of February, 1728, at the close of his sixty-fifth year.
Thirty-six years had elapsed since the fatal imbroglio of Salem witchcraft. He had probably long been convinced that it was vain to attempt to shake the general conviction, expressed by Calef, that he had been “the most active and forward of any Minister in the country in those matters,” and acquiesced in the general disposition to let that matter rest. It must be pleasing to all, to think that his very last years were freed from the influences that had destroyed the peace of his life and left such a shade over his name. Having met with nothing but disaster from attempting to manage the visible as well as the invisible world, he probably left them both in the hands of Providence; and experienced, as he had never done, a brief period of tranquillity, before finally leaving the scene. His aspiration to control the Province had ceased. The object of his life-long pursuit, the Presidency of the College, was forever baffled. Nothing but mischief and misery to himself and others had followed his attempt to lead the great combat against the Devil and his hosts. It had fired his early zeal and ambition; but that fire was extinguished. The two ties, which more than all others, had bound him, by his good affections and his unhappy passions, to what was going on around him, were severed, nearly at the same time, by the death of his father, in 1723, and of his great and successful rival, Leverett, in 1724. Severe domestic trials and bereavements completed the work of weaning him from the world; and it is stated that, in his very last years, the resentments of his life were buried and the ties of broken friendships restored. The pleasantest intercourse took place between him and Benjamin Colman; men of all parties sought his company and listened to the conversation, which was always one of his shining gifts; he had written kindly about Dudley; and his end was as peaceful as his whole life would have been, but for the malign influences I have endeavored to describe, leading him to the errors and wrongs which, while faithful history records them, men must regard with considerate candor, as God will with infinite mercy.
It is a curious circumstance, that the two great public funerals, in those early times, of which we have any particular accounts left, were of the men who, in life, had been so bitterly opposed to each other. When Leverett was buried, the cavalcade, official bodies, students, and people, “were fain to proceed near as far as Hastings’ before they returned,” so great was the length of the procession: the funeral of Mather was attended by the greatest concourse that had ever been witnessed in Boston.