always under review, but not for more than a century really shaken.

To secure this preeminence all other social activity had been sacrificed; whatever could question or oppose the rule of the church was ruthlessly crushed. With the ocean on one side closing a free intercourse with Europe, and the unexplored wilderness on the other, the community stood in danger of intellectual atrophy. "That result the clergy - the dominant influence courted. They, as men are apt to do under such circumstances, looked on change with suspicion and dreaded innovation as concealed heresy." After 1647 their ascendancy was undisputed, and for a full century under the supreme rule of orthodoxy the result was not only benumbing and provincial, but produced a morbid general condition. The preaching must be highly seasoned to be palatable, and the great importance attached to theology made real progress impossible. The period was sterile-glacial.1

Cotton Mather well represented the scholarship, the theology and practically the thought of the community in which he lived. The Puritan had passed out of the active, formative stage into the fixed and unchangeable. Mather was the young man of promise; in him the community saw the qualities it regarded as its highest and most perfect attributes. He reflected the Puritan spirit as it had hardened, become ossified, and thus his writings serve to preserve the methods, expressions, and life generally of that day.

If the second generation of elders suffered in mind and in influence by the changes introduced by the supposedly hostile forces, the third generation, to which Mather

'This has been developed in Charles Francis Adams, Massachusetts: its Historians and its History, and some of his very words have been used in these paragraphs.

belonged, was even more subject to disrupting movements among the people. The dangers that surrounded the congregations formed one of the most frequent subjects of discussion, and the decay of piety, the corruption of morals, the presence of strange doctrines, the danger of incurring the displeasure of the Almighty by departing from his ordinances, and the frequent display of his anger, were dwelt upon in Sunday sermon, Thursday lecture, and election discourse. The magistrates and people were loudly called to the rescue of the colony and church. Fast days multiplied as occasion called for such expression of public humiliation for general wrong-doing.

It was in this transition period that Mather held sway. In the beginning of his public ministry Church and State were still practically one, working together and in full confidence of their rectitude and devotion to public welfare. The elder was still the great man of the community, consulted on all occasions, the source of a wisdom to which ordinary mortals could not aspire. Before Mather died, this supremacy had been sadly shaken, and no one felt it more keenly than he felt it himself. He draughted fast day proclamations; he clamored importunately for the maintenance of church authority; he spent a lifetime in devising schemes for advancing piety and religion; he deplored the formation of new churches and the introduction of ideas which did not entirely conform to his own; and he shrank from whatever seemed to injure his own position or methods in the vineyard. He regarded his father and himself as above criticism, and often used the elders of the former generation as a shield against those who attacked him, and, as he believed, the church through him. It was all in vain, for nothing he devised or performed could stem the natural current of the non-conformity, or the dissent, of the day. He felt his influence slipping away, and interpreted it as something personal to himself.

In this he did not err, and in Mather will be found much to repel and little to attract. In the course of time his earnestness becomes painful, his resignation and self-abasement ring hollow, his cries become strident, his postures and prayers seem mechanical. Believing himself to be the favorite of God he established communication with Deity, either through the agency of an Angel or even more directly, and received encouragements which fortunately he was unable to express in human language, and which become little less than ridiculous in his attempts to express them, unless allowance is made for his mental and physical condition. He indulged in prophecy, and, if he only waited a sufficient time, he could find some happening that would fit his prophecy. The practice involved dangers that sometimes returned upon him to his discomfiture. These communications and the apparent success now and again attending them, reacted upon an already well developed vanity, and he lived in an atmosphere of self-complacency, as misleading as it was unreal. His mind fed upon material clearly innutritious, and he resorted to fasts, vigils, and self-mortifications in the belief that he was thereby assuring to himself this intercourse with divine beings, and so increasing his usefulness to the world. In reality he was drawing heavily upon a not very strong vitality, and inducing a state of mental intoxication, believed to be of ecstasis, a state of rapture in which the body became insensible to surrounding objects, while the soul was engaged in the contemplation of things divine. This involved an intoxication of the senses, and an indulgence in prophetic inspiration. He took his religious observances as men take opium, and under their action he was convinced that he felt, saw, and heard things beyond the apprehension of ordinary men. That the means of inducing rapture were crude, that they acted upon a man incapable of high imagination, and that the results were not commensurate with the intentions of the act, at times

produce a touch of absurdity. Consciously or unconsciously Mather records his experiences in the very words and experiences of earlier mystics and elders, and these frequent borrowings awaken some doubt upon his ability to produce a real ecstasy, one that could be oblivious to pain, or neglectful of the effect to be produced upon others by its display. The mechanism is too obvious, and the concernment over self is too marked to escape attention. Indeed the impression gained is that his periods of transport were far removed from true religious rapture or frenzy, and more closely resembled a physical cataleptic state.

In inducing these sensuous conditions and in surrendering himself entirely to their numbing effects, he believed he was giving himself completely into the hands of divine power, to be directed wholly by that power. Such surrender may arise from a weakness of mind or body, which dislikes to contend strongly against temptation or against the annoyances that pertain to any station in life, and which seeks refuge and relief in giving the responsibility of decision to another. Such natures are apt to be credulous and easily imposed upon, for they have not passed through that strengthening process that would enable them to stand alone. Mather's training had been a sheltered one, and he early stepped into a place already prepared for him, and in which he was still in great part protected. That he should have been carried too far in the witchcraft delusion is not strange, for many much stronger than he gave way to it; but it is somewhat strange that he should so often have been imposed upon by little incidents, as his Diary proves, and that he should so seriously accept the mystical explanation of a very commonplace fact. The solemnity of record adds not a little to what is essential to an apprehension of the man, but it leaves an impression of positive weakness. No one can read the issues of that day and fail to recognize that strange beliefs were held, strange objects seen, and strange

interpretations applied; but, after all due allowance, for the atmosphere in which men then lived, it is still difficult to accept Mather at his own estimation. That he was the special subject of divine favor, and the special object of satanic buffetings, sums up this estimate. An overweening vanity lay at, the basis of it.

Under such stimulus the church over which he presided, the town in which he lived, and even the Colony of Massachusetts proved too narrow a field for his endeavors. His restlessness, made the more impelling by his habits, led him to look abroad for objects of his care. The ungospellized plantations adjacent to Massachusetts, the colonies to the southward and in the West Indies, the concerns of European countries, the conditions in the Spanish American countries, and the captives in North Africa, these were some of the objects of his activities. He wrote in French to produce a reformation in France; he wrote in Spanish to subvert the colonies of Catholic Spain; and he urged the translation of his writings into other tongues, that they might bear witness to his desires to remodel mankind upon the lines of his beliefs. As an ardent proselytizer he sought the reformation of the world, and the instruments were to be prayers and printed books. His advocacy of inoculation for the smallpox was greatly to his credit.

This leads to a notice of a notable phase of his activity, for no man, before or since his day, sought and enjoyed so many opportunities to print what he wrote. On this phase nothing could be more eloquent than the Diary now printed. The eagerness to see his compositions in print grew with his years, and his industry was turned to the regular manufacture of matter for the press. Having completed a study, tract, or discourse the printing of it became an object of his thought, a subject of his prayers. At times his very religion seems to be subordinated to this passion for seeing his productions in type, and as the number of issues increased, the

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