All though but one the onely in thine Eyes All Queen and Concubines that bear the bell. Transcends as doth the Sun a pinking Star. She is the Onely one her mother bore Jerusalem ever above esteems Her for her Darling her choice one therefore Thou holdst her for the best that ere was seen. ΙΟ 15 And she that bore her Made her hers most Choice. 1718 That power of thine that made the Heavens bow, And blush with shining glory ever cleare Hath taken her within his glorious brow And made her Madam of his Love most Deare She is thy Dove, thy Undefiled, she shines In thy rich Righteousness all Lovely, White The Daughters saw and blessed her, the Queens Thy Love that fills the Heavens brimfull throughout In Streams from heaven, Oh! what love like this? Make me a member of this Spouse of thine I humbly beg deck thus, as Tenis Ball I shall struck hard on th'ground back bounce with Shine I Kings i: 1-6 and I Kings ii: 17. When King David, Solomon's father, lay stricken with the chill of age, his courtiers, as was customary, "sought a young virgin✶✶✶ throughout all Israel, and found Abishag, a Shunamite" [Shulamite]. Young Solomon saw that she "was very fair and cherished the King, and ministered to him, but he knew her not." After David named Solomon to succeed him and was dead, Solomon ordered the death of his half-brother who, having failed in an attempt to seize the throne plotted to secure David's handmaiden. The Shulamite appears no more in the record, but she was still in Solomon's 20 25 30 35 40 1960 memory when he wrote the Canticles. Meditation 142 is based on stanza ix of Canticle VI. Here Solomon, at the height of power and splendor, and in spite of the luxury of his household (cf. lines 10 and 29-30), holds in memory a discourse with the "onely one," which Taylor expresses in terms of Christ and the mortal. Meditation 146 is based on stanza xiii, in which the lover, or Solomon, recognizes the anguish of long and hopeless separation from this "one." Taylor, again in religious terms, expresses the anguish of mankind's search for God. Meditation 146, Second Series Canticles VI:13. Return, oh Shulamite, return return. My Deare Deare Lord, I know not what to say: My Love to thee in or it to array, Or make a mantle. Wouldst thou not such loath? When as thy Love doth Touch my Heart down tost And as a Child when it his nurse hath lost Rent out on Use thy Love thy Love I pray. My Love to thee shall be thy Rent and I There's none Extortion in such Usury. I'le pay thee Use on Use for't and therefore But yet the principall I'le neer restore. The Same is thine and mine. We shall not Jar. Most profitable both to thee and mee. And shouldst thou hide thy shining face most fair My trembling beating heart brought nigh t'dispare 5 10 15 20 25 1718 COTTON MATHER (1663-1728) 1960 From his own day to the present, few of his critics have been able to express unalloyed enthusiasm for Cotton Mather, either as man or writer. Yet it is impossible to ignore the fantastic bulk of his writing, his contemporary influence, or the international reputation of his best works. In fact, in spite of the colossal mass, dullness, and personal bias of his work as a whole, it has been a valuable source for knowledge of the history and the men of colonial New England, while a number of his writings possess genuine and enduring power. Mather himself has been viewed as a pedantic egotist, a reactionary, and a bigoted witch-hunter; yet it seems only just to remember also that he was fighting a losing battle for the survival of an ideal and a theology that to him were life itself, while the tide of a new age, secular and materialistic, crumbled the defenses about his zealot's Zion. The way of life that he belatedly defended was symbolized by the dynasty of which he was the last, in succession to his grandfather, Richard, and his father, Increase Mather. This priesthood had represented the dominant hierarchy of New England during more than a half century. Cotton Mather was enrolled in Harvard at eleven, already prodigious for his command of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and soon to become saturated with self-conscious piety and learning. Receiving his Master of Arts degree at eighteen, he entered the ministry at the Second Church in Boston as assistant to his father, whom he succeeded in due course. There he spent his life in a superhuman ferment of activity and publication which carried far beyond his parish duties into public issues, decorum, and morals, as well as theological dogma. His personality, however, was not likely to sustain his chosen rôle even under favorable circumstances, and Boston was no longer the Puritan community of his father's youth. Encouraged by inherited authority and by his early reputation of unearthly genius, convinced that God had ordained him vicar by removing a speech defect, he became, as Moses Coit Tyler says in A History of American Literature, 1607-1765, a victim of circumstances, "stretched every instant of his life, on the rack of ostentatious exertion, intellectual and religious, *** in deference to a dreadful system of ascetic and pharisaic formalism, in which his nature was hopelessly enmeshed." In his allconsuming study he amassed two thousand books, the largest of the colonial libraries; his scientific speculations secured his election to the Royal Society; his ceaseless writing produced 444 bound volumes, fourteen of them in one year in which he also continued to perform his duties as pastor and observed twenty vigils and sixty fasts. It is reported that he kept 450 fasts during his life, and once publicly humiliated himself for his sins. In modern terms this suggests a state of hysteria, a Puritan tragedy of genius. When he died in 1728, he had survived three wives-the last died insane-he had outlived all but two of fifteen children, and one of the survivors had gone far astray. His public leadership had failed, yet his own faith had never wavered, however narrow it may seem to modern thought. Mather's great literary defect was his style-pedantic, heavy with literary allusions and quotations in several languages, often arrogant, violent in its images, language, and bursts of passion. This "fantastic" style had flourished for a time in various European literatures from Italy to England, and Mather was among its last defenders. When he was deeply moved, however, he could make of it an impressive instrument, particularly in the biographical sketches (of which one is included in this volume) in Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), his best-known production. This ponderous work comprises seven books, including a history of the New England settlements, “lives" of governors, magistrates, and "sixty famous divines," records of "divine pated in the bloody trials of the previous year, but his influence then was on the side of the prosecution, although in 1700 he repudiated some of the convicting evidence as invalid. Bonifacius (1710), later called Essays to Do Good, quite remarkably establishes a practical system for the daily transaction of good deeds and benevolence—and delighted Franklin's rationalistic mind. Psalterium Americanum (1718), a translation of the psalms, advanced Mather's liberal leadership in the movement to restore psalm singing to worship. Parentator (1724), his life of his father, vies with his sketch of Eliot in Magnalia for gentleness and insight; and these qualities are again present in Manuductio ad Ministerium (1726), a manual of guidance for young ministers. There is no collected edition of the works of Cotton Mather. Editions are listed in J. T. Holmes, Cotton Mather: A Bibliography of His Works, 3 vols., with analyses and notes, 1940. Carefully chosen and edited is Kenneth B. Murdock's Selections from Cotton Mather, 1926. Magnalia Christi Americana; or The Ecclesiastical History of NewEngland, was published in London, 1702, and in Hartford, 1820, new ed., 2 v., 1853-55. Wonders of the Invisible providences" and the "wars of the Lord" against Satan, witches, heretics, Quakers, and Indians— a pastiche of brilliance, beauty, and botchwork. The earlier Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) is a vigorous analysis of the validity of evidence against World, reprinted as Witchcraft, ap witches, which still evokes the morbid fascination of reasoned error. Mather had not partici peared in 1956, and the Diary, 2 v., in 1957. A full-length biography is Barrett Wendell's Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest, 1891, 1926. From Magnalia Christi Americana, Book III1 HIS FAMILY-GOVERNMENT The Apostle Paul, reciting and requiring Qualifications of a Gospel Minister, gives Order, that he be The Husband of one Wife, 1. In 1691, Mather had published separately The Life and Death of the Rcnown'd Mr. John Eliot. Eliot came directly from Cambridge University to America (1631) and was called at once to the ministry at Roxbury, Massa chusetts. As an Indian missionary, he established fourteen villages, inhabited by at least eleven hundred converted Indians, and he instigated the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. His Indian translation was the first complete and one that ruleth well his own House, having his Children in subjection with all gravity. It seems, that a Man's Carriage in his own House is a part, or at least a sign, of his due Deportment in the House of God; and then, I am sure, our Eliot's was very Exemplary. That one Wife which was given to him truly from the Lord, he loved, prized, cherished, with a Kindness that notably represented the Compassion which he (thereby) taught his Church to expect from the Lord Jesus Christ; and after he had lived with her for more than half an Hundred Years, he followed her to the Grave with Lamentations beyond those, which the Jews from the figure of a Letter in the Text, affirm, that Abraham deplored his aged Sarah with;3 her Departure made a deeper Impression upon him than what any common Affliction could. His whole Conversation with her, had that Sweetness, and that Gravity and Modesty beautifying of it, that every one called them Zachary and Elizabeth.* His Family was a little Bethel, for the Worship of God constantly and exactly maintained in it; and unto the daily Prayers of the Family, his manner was to prefix the Reading of the Scripture; which being done, 'twas also his manner to make his young People to chuse a certain Passage in the Chapter, and give him some Observation of their own upon it. By this Method he did mightily sharpen and improve, as well as try, their Understandings, and endeavour to make them wise unto Salvation. He was likewise very strict in the Education of his Children, and more careful to mend any error in their Hearts and Lives, than he could have been to cure a Blemish in their Bodies. No Exorbitancies or Extravagancies could find a Room under his Roof, nor was his House any other than a School of Piety; one might have there seen a perpetual mixture of a Spartan and a Christian Disciple. Whatever Decay there might be upon Family-Religion among us, as for our Eliot, we knew him, that he would command his Children, and his Houshold after him, that they should keep the Way of the Lord. HIS WAY OF PREACHING Such was he in his lesser Family! And in his greater Family, he manifested still more of his Regards to the Rule of a GospelMinistry. To his Congregation, he was a Preacher that made it his Care, to give every one their Meat in due Season. It was Food and not Froth; which in his publick Sermons, he entertained the Souls of his People with, he did not starve them with empty and windy Bible printed in the colonies. The Puritan embodiment of gentle piety and sainthood, he died in 1690 at the age of eighty-six. 3. Genesis xxii: 2. 4. Zacharias the priest, and his wife Elizabeth, were permitted to be the parents of John the Baptist because "they were both righteous before God" (Luke i: 5-14). 5. Meaning "the house of God." Abraham and Jacob each gave this name to the place of his vision (Genesis xii: 8, and Genesis xxviii: 19). |