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RELIGIOUS REPRESSION

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the ruling clique was natural enough. A deeper slur on the good name of Massachusetts is the treatment accorded to the Quakers. It is true that the Quakers had been roughly handled in England, and that toleration was not yet recognised anywhere; but there was a special brutality in the persecution employed by Massachusetts, involving in several cases the punishment of death, and there was a complete ignorance of the fact that the raison d'être of New England was the assertion of the principle of religious toleration against the intolerant attitude of the English established Church. Undoubtedly the action of Massachusetts greatly scandalised well-wishers in England, both Presbyterian and Independent, and some of the wisest words in favour of toleration were spoken by Oliver Cromwell. Such, then, was the religion of New England that dominated the social life of the colony so far as it was articulate, a grey, grim religion, full of denunciation and repression, breathing the spirit of the Old Testament in its severest moods and wholly devoid of that spirit of Christianity which had called into existence another world.

To understand the life of a generation no better means can be found than to study the intimate diaries of representative men. In the case of Samuel Sewall we are singularly fortunate. For more than fifty years Sewall kept a diary of his daily life, and, though the light thrown on contemporary politics is very small, for our present purposes this does not matter. Sewall was assuredly no hypocrite; but he had become so steeped in the prejudices of his time and place that he was unable to notice the distinction between genuine and conventional wrongdoing. Thus, in his belief, to wear a periwig was to commit a heinous offence, and to keep holy the day on which Christ was born was a serious sin. So touchy was Sewall's conscience that he seriously proposed to abolish the names of the days of the week. The week only, he urged, of all parts of time was of divine institution, erected as a monumental pillar for a memorial of the Creation perfected in so many distinct days. It must be remembered, Sewall was no mere average New Englander. He was an M.A. of Harvard and for a short time was a fellow and tutor of that college. In 1684 he was chosen a magistrate. In 1692 he was appointed by William and Mary a member of the first council under the new charter, and was afterwards elected year by year a member of that body until 1725, when he refused to be again elected, having outlived all the others nominated in the fundamental constitution. In 1692 he was made a judge and in 1718 Chief Justice, remaining in that position for ten years. On several questions he showed great sagacity. He advocated the cause of sound money with exceptional vigour and acumen. He was one of the earliest and most enlightened opponents of the African slave trade, and wrote an able pamphlet against its continuance. He showed his weakness indeed in falling a victim to the witchcraft delusion, but his public recantation when once he had

realised his error was a singularly noble and dignified declaration of repentance.

Such then being the man, what kind of life did he lead? In fact the world into which he introduces us seems mainly concerned with funerals and church meetings. On one occasion he solemnly enumerates the times he has acted as bearer at funerals; and he never attends church or meeting without giving the text and generally adding a short synopsis of the sermon. On the subject of toleration Sewall did not rise above the level of his contemporaries. Quakerism seemed to him "a devil worship". The merciful vagueness of the English Church burial service seemed a blasphemy to Sewall. "The office for burial is a lying, a very bad office; makes no difference." And yet what was the behaviour of this man of most tender conscience in the rough and tumble of everyday life?

If there is a question which concerns the higher side of human nature, it is surely that of marriage. But no worldling could approach that subject from a lower standpoint than did this devout exponent of orthodoxy. For forty years he had lived with his first wife who had been the mother of fourteen children, of whom only four survived. She died in October 1717, and in the following February we find him wondering whether to lead a single or married life; and nothing can be more repellent than the story of his successive courtships, wherein worldly interests always played a considerable part. The same coarseness of fibre was still more conspicuous in his attitude towards historical buildings. He visits England and comments on Canterbury Cathedral that it is very lofty and magnificent but of little use. What appealed to him in Oxford seems mainly to have been the good fare in New College. Yet more characteristic is a conversation with Dudley wherein Sewall maintained the necessity of the belly playing its part in the Resurrection body. We shall note in dealing with Cotton Mather how the absence of the spiritual was the keynote in the development of the New England character. Not less significant was the attitude of superiority which boded ill for the future, and the significance of Sewall's journal is that it discloses to us in an easy and handy form the causes of the dissonance of feeling between old England and New England. When Englishmen appear on the scene, roystering and behaviour scandalising the unco' guid are sure not to be far away. Nicholson was an excellent example of a hardworking patriotic English official, but how he must have fluttered the dovecotes of precise New England. The degeneracy of Joseph Dudley must have seemed to Sewall the direct outcome of English influences; when Shute arrived as governor, who had been brought up under nonconformists, the governor's going to Dudley's house made Sewall fear that he could no longer be trusted. In spite of Sewall's cautious and conservative temperament his speech when Dummer became acting-governor on the departure of Shute for England shows the

COTTON MATHER

799 trend of his sympathies. "Although the unerring providence of God has brought you to the chair of government in a cloudy and tempestuous time; yet you have this for your encouragement that the people you have to do with are a part of the Israel of God and you may expect to hear of the patience and prudence of Moses communicated to you for your conduct. It is evident that our Almighty Saviour counselled the first planters to remove hither and settle here; and they dutifully followed His advice, and therefore He will never leave and forsake them now....Difficilia quia pulchra." Nothing can be plainer, England is still Egypt, the land of darkness from which the chosen people took their flight. It was not likely that the children of Israel should look for light and leading, for a Moses or Joshua, from among the sons of the land of their captivity. The very moderation and geniality of Sewall's nature makes more impressive the strength of his conviction and all that such conviction implied. On the face of it to a man of Sewall's temperament rebellion would seem as the sin of witchcraft; and yet if the choice were to be between religion and political obedience is there a doubt upon which side Sewall's choice would have finally come down?

We have dealt at some length with a New Englander of more than average ability and goodness, because in his diary we find a singularly vivid picture of the outlook of such an one upon the social circumstances surrounding him. Turning to another diary of a distinguished divine, we can look upon another aspect of the New England character. Cotton Mather was a singular instance of a mystic whose mysticism did not lift him to a spiritual world above that of the senses. No doubt he injured his health by continuous fasting and wrestling with the powers of evil. But unfortunately such wrestling left little mark upon his moral character, and in spite of several professions of goodwill towards all that might have injured him, we find him in the individual cases displaying a spirit of rancour and malevolence that showed little of the Christian character. Thus one Calef having ventured to question Mather's views on the witchcraft question, he breaks out in a fit of unbridled passion, the elder Mather burning the book1 in the quadrangle of Harvard.

It must always be remembered that Cotton Mather lived at a time of transition. The reign of the divines was coming to its close, and though the Mathers professed to approve the new charter because the elder Mather had been one of its creators, its effect was none the less to subvert in the long run the dominant theocracy. Once political power ceased to rest on theological convictions, social emancipation was bound to follow upon political. Again and again we find Mather lamenting the fallen estate of the clergy. After a meeting of ministers on 15 January 1722 he maintained that (except amongst a few of his own little remnant of a flock) religion appeared to be almost entirely 1 Calef, Robert, More Wonders of the Spiritual World (1700).

extinguished in Massachusetts. He would have to apply his faculties in projects to do good in more distant places. Assuredly whatever accusations may be brought against Cotton Mather, he cannot be accused of idleness. There was hardly a country in Europe where Protestants existed which did not come under his anxious ken. He combined the character of the practical propagandist with that of the literary man. His first studies had been in the medical line and his scientific capacities were thought sufficient to cause him to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, but it is eminently characteristic that Mather used the letters some time before he was formally elected. Although he professed no fondness at all for applause and honour in the world, even in his acknowledgment of mercies received there is an egotistical twang which is singularly unpleasant. "My auditory is always one of the greatest that is ordinarily given among the people of God." He extols the serviceableness of his writings. In this connection it is curious that the Erastian mother country showed often greater readiness to publish his works than did the publishers of Massachusetts. What, however, he considered his magnum opus, the Biblia Americana, fortunately for conscientious students of such works, was never published. A fair estimate of Mather's powers may be obtained from a glance through his greatest work, Magnalia Christi Americana. The author himself had no doubts as to its merits. He looks forward to animadversions of calumnious writers just as poetasters dealt with the Bucolics and the Aeneid. It never occurred to him that his amorphous work might be neither accurate in its facts nor distinguished for its style. As an example of his capacities as an historian we may note the manner in which the dull and self-willed Sir W. Phipps is given a high place in the Olympus of Massachusetts worthies. Nothing can be more jejune or lifeless than the account of Harvard. Harvard was in other ways a sore point with Mather. He seems with some reason to have expected that he would be elected President, and great was his disgust when his expectation was disappointed. Yet the House of Representatives in the General Assembly and as full a house as has been ordinarily known unanimously voted the most unworthy man in the world as President (March 1703). Nor was he more successful twenty-one years later, but he had then the consolation that the affairs of the college had been so mismanaged that to remedy things would be an almost impossible task.

Meanwhile things were not moving generally in a direction favoured by Mather. Boston, he writes in 1721, has become a Hell upon earth, a city full of lies, murders and blasphemies. Satan seems to take a strange possession of it in the epidemic rage against that notable and powerful and successful way of saving the lives of the people from the dangers of smallpox. The gallant stand he made on behalf of inoculation must always be entered to the credit of Cotton Mather. In other ways he showed himself active in the ranks

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of reform. The singing had become so great a scandal in the New England churches that an organised effort was made to set on foot decent choirs. In Boston the change was accepted readily, but in some of the country churches it led to scandalous scenes. The zeal of some congregations transported them so far that they not only used the most opprobrious terms and spoke of the singing of these Christians as worshipping of the devil, but also they would run out of the meeting house at the beginning of the services. As an instance of Christian charity note the language with which Mather comments on the illness of Dr Oliver Noyes: "Within these few days God has in a marvellous manner and at a very critical moment smitten with apoplexy one who has been and still would have been the greatest hinderer of good and misleader and enchanter of the people that there was in the whole House of Representatives." That he died the next day was no doubt a further proof of divine interposition. The extreme bitterness of Mather's comments makes it difficult to know how far his statements may be accepted as true. When the ungodly doings in the new North Church caused the building of a new and very large brick meeting house, the finest in the country, and when by this a certain number of Mather's flock were lost to him, his comment is that the religion of pews, which with a proud, vain, formal people seemed to be now the chief religion, was the only motive at work; and yet in a letter to a correspondent he had written that his congregation hardly missed any of its members and the church collections were larger than before the secession. Within a few months another new church would be formed in the south part of the city, and then there would be seven Congregational churches in Boston besides a High church, a synagogue and one of the Baptists, together with the French Church with which they lived in all decent communion. Mather drew a melancholy picture of Christianity outside New England.

For one must make very free with that worthy name if it be said that Christianity is yet well introduced into the English Plantations. Our islands are indeed inhabited by such as are called Christians. But alas! how dissolute are their manners and how inhuman the way of their subsistence on the sweat and blood of slaves treated with infinite barbarities. What little worship of God they have, as it is confined within the English liturgy, so it is too commonly performed by persons of a very scandalous character. On the continent the colony of Carolina was in a fair way to have been filled with a religious people until the Society for the Propagation of Religion in Foreign Parts unhappily sent over some of their missionaries thither, and I am informed that with them and from that time a mighty torrent of profaneness and wickedness carried all before it.1

It would seem that this statement is wholly false. The Carolina clergy never reached a high level of efficiency; but as between the native product and the missioners sent out by the Society the latter seem to have been in every way superior.

1 Letter of 6 August 1716, The Diary of Cotton Mather, pt 1, Mass. Hist. Coll. ser. vii, vol. viii.

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