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turned. No one dreamt of denying the devilish fact of witchcraft, acknowledged by the law of the period as a capital crime. The only doubt was how it might legally be proved. A question arose whether what was called spectral evidence should be accepted; that is, whether the testimony of bewitched persons, concerning what they saw and felt in the paroxysms of their possessions, was valid against the accused. Cotton Mather's personal records declare that he warned the court against the dangers of spectral evidence in cases of life and death; but that when against his protest the court decided to accept it, he felt bound, believing witchcraft diabolical, not publicly to oppose the decision. It was mostly on spectral evidence that the witches were hanged; when spectral evidence was rejected, the prosecutions soon came to an end. Then arose that deep revulsion of feeling which posterity has so bitterly cherished. For two hundred years, there has been little mercy shown the theocratic ministers who devotedly urged on the prosecution of the witches; and, whatever his actual responsibility, Cotton Mather, the least forgotten of these ministers, has borne the brunt of all the evil which tradition has fixed on the period.

The collapse of the witch trials in 1692 may be said to mark the end of theocracy in New England. Nine years later, in 1701, the orthodox party in the church had another blow. Increase Mather, after sixteen years' incumbency as President of Harvard College, was finally removed to be replaced by a divine of more liberal tendencies. This really ended the public career of both father and son. In the public life of New England, as in that of the mother country, we may say, the ideal of the Common Law finally supplanted the biblical ideal of the Puritans, and at the oldest of New England seminaries the ideal of Protestantism finally vanquished that of priesthood.

Cotton Mather lived on until 1728, preaching, writing numberless books, and doing much good scientific work;

among other things, he was the first person in the Englishspeaking world to practise inoculation for small-pox. Untiringly busy, hoping against hope for well on to thirty years, he died at last with the word Fructuosus on his lips as a last counsel to his son. Undoubtedly he was eccentric and fantastic, so reactionary in temper that those who love progress have been apt to think him almost as bad as he was queer. For all his eccentricity, however, and perhaps on account of the exaggeration of his traits in general, he seems on the whole the most complete type of the oldest-fashioned divine of New England. He was born in Boston, and educated at Harvard College; he lived in Boston all his life, never straying a hundred miles away. Every external influence brought to bear on him was local. Whatever else his life and work means, then, it cannot help expressing what human existence taught the most intellectually active of seventeenth-century Yankees. Here, of course, we are concerned with him only as a man of letters. His literary activity was prodigious. Sibley's "Harvard Graduates" records some four hundred titles of his actual publications; besides this, he wrote an unpublished treatise on medicine which would fill a folio volume; and his unpublished "Biblia Americana" - an exhaustive commentary on the whole Bible—would fill two or three folios more. He left behind him, too, many sermons, not to speak of letters and of diaries, which have never seen print. Until one actually inspects the documents, it seems incredible that in fortyfive years any single human being could have penned so many words as we thus see to have come from the hand of one of the busiest ministers, one of the most insatiable scholars and readers, and one of the most active politicians whom America has ever known.

To discuss in detail such a mass of work is out of the question; but, though many of Cotton Mather's writings were published after 1700, his most celebrated and considerable book, the "Magnalia," which was made toward the

middle of his life and which includes reprints of a number of brief works published earlier, typifies all he did as a man of letters, before or afterwards. It was begun, his diary tells us, in 1693; and although not published until 1702, it was virtually finished in 1697. These dates throw light on what the book really means; they come just between the end of those witchcraft trials which broke the political power of the clergy, and the final defeat of the Mathers in their endeavour to retain the government of Harvard College. Though Harvard tradition still holds this endeavour to have been chiefly a matter of personal ambition, whoever comes intimately to know the Mathers must feel that to them the question seemed far otherwise. What both had at heart was a passionate desire, based on fervent, unshaken faith, that New England should remain true to the cause of the fathers, which both believed indubitably the cause of God. In the years when the Magnalia" was writing, there seemed a chance that if contemporary New England could awaken to a sense of what pristine New England had been, all might still go well. Despite the fact that the "Magnalia" is professedly a history, then, it may better be regarded as a passionate controversial work. Its true motive was to excite so enthusiastic a sympathy with the ideals of the Puritan fathers that, whatever fate might befall the civil government, their ancestral seminary of learning should remain true to its colours.

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At the time when the "Magnalia" was conceived, the New England colonies were about seventy years old. Broadly speaking, there had flourished in them three generations, — the immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren. The time was come, Cotton Mather thought, when the history of these three generations might be critically examined; if this examination should result in showing that there had lived in New England an unprecedented proportion of men and women and children whose earthly existence had given signs that they were among the elect, then his book might go

far to prove that the pristine policy of New England had been especially favoured of the Lord. For surely the Lord would choose His elect most eagerly in places where life was conducted most according to His will.

In this mood the "Magnalia" was written. Its first sentence sounds the key-note of the whole :

"I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand: And, assisted by the Holy Author of that Religion, I do, with all Conscience of Truth, required therein by Him, who is the Truth it self, report the Wonderful Displays of His Infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faithfulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath Irradiated an Indian Wilderness."

So it proceeds through its hundreds of pages, dwelling most on those traits of New England which Cotton Mather believed especially to indicate the favour of God. He tells first the story of the colonies, giving little space to what he thinks the evil side of it :

"Though I cannot approve the conduct of Josephus; (whom Jerom not unjustly nor inaptly calls 'the Greek Livy,') when he had left out of his Antiquities, the story of the Golden Calf, and I don't wonder to find Chamier, and Rivet, and others, taxing him for his partiality towards his country-men; yet I have left unmentioned some censurable occurrences in the story of our Colonies, as things no less unuseful than improper to be raised out of the grave, wherein Oblivion hath now buried them; lest I should have incurred the pasquil bestowed upon Pope Urban, who, employing a committee to rip up the old errors of his predecessors, one clapped a pair of spurs upon the heels of the statue of St. Peter; and a label from the statue of St. Paul opposite thereunto, upon the bridge, asked him, 'Whither he was bound?' St. Peter answered, 'I apprehend some danger in staying here; I fear they'll call me in question for denying my Master.' And St. Paul replied, 'Nay then I had best be gone too, for they question me also for persecuting the Christians before my conversion.""

Cotton Mather's scale of values, then, considerably differs from that of a critical modern historian. In his general narrative, for example, he hardly mentions the Antinomian con

troversy, and has little to say of such subsequently famous personages as Roger Williams or Mrs. Anne Hutchinson. On the other hand, he details at loving length, first the lives of those governors and magistrates who seemed especial servants of the Lord, from Bradford and Winthrop and Theophilus Eaton to Sir William Phips; and next the lives and spiritual experiences of a great number of the immigrant clergy and of their successors in the pulpit. He recounts the history of Harvard College during its first sixty years; and he lays down with surprising lucidity the orthodox doctrine and discipline of the New England churches. These matters fill five of the seven books into which the "Magnalia" is divided. The last two books portray the reverse of the picture; one deals with “Remarkable Mercies and Judgments on many particular persons among the people of New England," and the other with "The Wars of the Lord - the Afflictive Disturbances which the Churches of New England have suffered from their various adversaries; and the Wonderful Methods and Mercies, whereby the Churches have been delivered." Full of petty personal anecdote, and frequently revealing not only bigoted prejudice but grotesque superstition, these last two books have been more generally remembered than the rest. One commonly hears the " Magnalia" mentioned in terms which seem to assert these least admirable parts of it to be the most characteristic of work and writer alike. Characteristic they are, but little more so than the Clown in "Hamlet" is of Shakspere; no one but their author could have written them, yet in the whole body of his work they are a minor feature. For whoever grows familiar with the "Magnalia" must feel that it goes far toward accomplishing the purpose which Cotton Mather intended.

The prose epic of New England Puritanism it has been called, setting forth in heroic mood the principles, the history, and the personal characters of the fathers. The principles, theologic and disciplinary alike, are stated with clearness, dig

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