149 



MATHER, COTTON. 



MATHER, COTTON. 



160 



Boston, 1689. Everywhere in the colony it waa greedily read, and in 

 England it was republished with a preface by Richard Baxter, as 

 sufficient to convince all but the most obdurate Saddueees. In the 

 pulpit, and in his intercourse with both magistrates and people, 

 Mather urged the necessity of eradicating the sin. That he fully 

 believed in the reality of witchcraft which indeed comparatively few 

 then doubted there can be little question, but the narrative he gives 

 of his own ' experiments,' as he calls them, is sufficient proof of his 

 almost infantile credulity. By these ' experiments ' he arrived at 

 some rather curious ' conclusions.' One was that though the devils 

 understood Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as English, there was 

 one ' inferior ' Indian language which they could not comprehend. 

 A blunder made on one occasion led him to conclude that " perhaps 

 all devils are not alike sagacious." " Whether devils know our thoughts 

 or no ? " was a question he was anxious to solve, and though he does 

 not undertake positively to decide the point, he shows that his 

 opinion is in the affirmative. He found too tbat while the spirits had 

 a vehement antipathy to the regular meeting-house, they rather 

 enjoyed a visit to a Quakers' meeting. So again they found pleasure 

 in the Roman Catholic service, and whilst a "minister's prayer" was 

 torture to them, they took a marvellous delight in that abomination 

 of the puritans, the Book of Common Prayer ; nay, what was more 

 wonderful still, although they could not endure to hear a passage 

 read from the Bible, they had no objection at all to listen quietly to 

 either gospel, epistle, or psalms, when read from the " episcopal 

 service-book." 



Mather's book was not slow in producing its fruit. In the begin- 

 ning of 1692, the children of Mr. Samuel 1'arris, a minister of Salem 

 village, about three miles from Boston, became strangely afflicted. 

 They accused an Indian servant, who appears to have actually used 

 some Indian incantations with a view to their relief, of having bewitched 

 them. She was cast into prison, and brought to confess that she 

 was guilty. But this, instead of putting an end to the mischief, was 

 but its commencement. The girls now began to accuse others of 

 being witches ; and becoming as it were clairvoyant only one of 

 the points of resemblance between the Salem witchcraft and more 

 modern 'manifestations' found tbat they were possessed of the faculty 

 not only of discovering witches, but also of seeing their familiar 

 spirits. The magistrates applied to Mather for advice, and he urged 

 them to adopt the most rigorous measures. Ho doubts occurred to 

 his mind. That there were evil spirits abroad was one of the most 

 cherished articles of his creed, and that they should especially prevail 

 in New England was what he thought was quite to be expected. 

 " The New Englanders," he had written in his ' Memorable Provi- 

 dences,' " are a people of Uod settled in those which were once the 

 devil's territories ; and it may easily be supposed that the devil was 

 exceedingly disturbed when he perceived such a people here accom- 

 I ii-huig the promise of old made unto our blessed Jesus ' that he 

 should Lave the utmost parts of the earth for his possession.'" And 

 he thought himself in a more particular manner bound to be zealous 

 in the matter, for in the course of his ' experiments ' with the girl 

 Goodwin, one of the spirit* had been driven to acknowledge that 

 Mather himself, by his " little books," with which as he says he had 

 " filled the country," had brought this visitation upon the people 

 " that this assault of the evil angels upon the country was intended 

 by Hell as a particular defiance upon my poor endeavours to bring the 

 souls of men unto Heaven." 



What is known as the ' Salem Tragedy ' followed. What with con- 

 stant preaching against witchcraft, prayer-meetings, fasts, and public 

 examinations, the people of Salem soon came to be in a state of the 

 most fervid excitement. Nothing hardly but witchcraft and demoniacal 

 possession was spoken of. Every unusual form of disease in people 

 or cattle was attributed to this cause; and Mather, as the chief 

 minuter, was constantly among them, stirring up their already too- 

 ardent zeal. By May, in that small town, above 100 persons were in 

 jail, and the infection soon spread to the surrounding villages. The 

 deputy-governor and five magistrates went over from Boston to 

 conduct the preliminary examinations; and when the new charter 

 arrived, a special court was at once appointed to try the accused. 

 The first trial waa of a poor old woman named Bridget Bishop. Her 

 guilt was declared ' notorious,' and the evidence adduced, though of 

 the moit ridiculous kind, was received as though any evidence was 

 scarcely necessary. She was declared guilty, and, protesting her 

 innocence, was hanged. The game measure was dealt out to others 

 similarly suspected. Such as confessed their guilt, and professed 

 penitence, had their Uves spared; those who persisted iu denying 

 their guilt, were, upon conviction, hanged. One poor man named 

 Cory, eighty years old, whose wife had been executed as a witch, 

 refused to plead, and was by the barbarous punishment of the ' peine 

 forte et duro' (which was permitted long after to disgrace the 

 English criminal code) pressed to death the last instance of the 

 kind in North America. By September twenty persons had been put 

 to death ; eight more were under sentence of death ; fifty-five had con- 

 fessed their guilt, and so escaped hanging ; above a hundred more were 

 lying iu jail, and twice that number were at large under suspicion. 

 The last execution had produced a deep impression on the country. 

 It was that of a Mr. Burroughs, formerly a minister at Wells, who 

 had occasionally preached at Salem, and seems to have been regarded 



by Parris the chief prosecutor in all the trials with professional 

 as well as personal hatred. On evidence the futility of which he 

 made perfectly clear in his defence, the unfortunate man was con- 

 victed, and his execution took place in spite of the general expression 

 of public sympathy. His speech at the gallows deepened the feeling, 

 notwithstanding, or perhaps the more, that Cotton Mather had the 

 extreme bad taste to address the crowd in answer to the poor man's 

 appeal, and after repeating the evidences of his guilt, to warn the 

 people against being misled by his seeming piety, since " even 

 Satan could, if occasion were, transform himself into an angel of 

 light." But now beyond the influence of the excitement a cry of 

 horror was raised. The grand jury of Andover ventured to throw 

 out a bill though the evidence was direct. A reaction was evidently 

 in progress, which Cotton Mather in vain attempted to arrest. With 

 the concurrence of the governor, the deputy governor, the president 

 of Harvard University, and the ministers, he drew up and published 

 an elaborate justification of what had been done, and an expression 

 "of pious thankfulness to God for justice being so far executed among 

 us," under the title of ' The Wonders of the Invisible World ; 

 Observations upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of 

 the Devils ' (8vo, Boston, 1693). But it was too late. In the adjourned 

 court of sessions more than half the bills were thrown out ; and in 

 the twenty-six trials which followed all the accused were acquitted, 

 though the evidence was stronger than in the previous convictions. 

 A sturdy opponent, one Robert Calef, met Mather on his own ground 

 by the publication of 'More Wonders of the Invisible World,' in 

 which he tried to show that the whole was a delusion ; and though 

 Mather caused the pamphlet to be publicly burned, the author was 

 not silenced. The trials were now at an end ; the accused were all 

 set at liberty ; the convicted were pardoned. Some of the judges 

 even went so far as to stand up publicly in the religious assemblies 

 whilst their prayers for pardon if they had shed innocent blood were 

 read aloud. But Mather evinced no signs of penitence or even regret. 

 In his 'Magnalia Christi,' published nine years later, he does indeed 

 admit tbat there had perhaps been " a going too far in that affair," 

 but this was evidently a concession to public opinion rather than to 

 conviction. Mr. Bancroft seems to decide against Mather's good faith 

 in these proceedings ; but we thiuk that they will arrive at a more 

 correct as well as charitable conclusion who look at his whole 

 character who remember that his education had been of the sternest 

 order of Puritanism that he regarded New England as iu some 

 measure under theocratic government, and that he drew all his notions 

 of public nm and punishment from the Old Testament who remember 

 also tbat in his own person he was accustomed to look for immediate 

 spiritual guidance by some sign or token in all his conduct, that his 

 prayers and fasts and vigils were all with a view to direct provi- 

 dential interposition, and that as a consequence he looked on the 

 direct interposition of evil spirits as constant and certain. 



From this time his public influence declined. Twice even when a 

 president of Harvard College had to be chosen he was to his great 

 mortification passed over, though not only universally regarded as the 

 most learned of its alumni, but as a man of almost unequalled genius. 

 But he lived and laboured on with all his wonted zeal. In 1713 he 

 was elected, on accouut of his ' Curiosa Americana,' a Fellow of the 

 Royal Society of London (being the first American who received that 

 distinction), and some letters appearing in its ' Transactions ' in 1721, 

 giving an account of the practice of inoculation, then recently intro- 

 duced from Constantinople by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, deter- 

 mined him to endeavour to render inoculation available for the benefit 

 of his countrymen. Small-pox was then raging in Boston, and Mather 

 convoked a meeting of the physicians of the city, but they with one 

 exception declared against the innovation. Mather and his convert 

 Dr. Boylston persisted, and though they were assailed by every kind 

 of professional and popular invective, they succeeded in persuading 

 247 persons out of 5589 who suffered from the epidemic in Boston in 

 1721, to submit to the operation, some of the younger members of 

 Mather's family being the first upon whom it was tried. The result 

 was found to be that of the inoculated only one in forty-two died, while 

 of those not inoculated one in seven died: and inoculation became a 

 part of the established medical treatment in America. Cotton Mather 

 survived till the 13th of February 1728 ; and it is a noteworthy 

 circumstance that in his later years the chief actor in the terrible witch 

 tragedy was the friend and adviser of Benjamin Franklin, the great 

 American representative of so entirely opposite a school of philosophy. 



We spoke of Cotton Mather as the author of a prodigious number of 

 works. He himself mentions having published above 300; their 

 actual number is said to be 3S2. How with his busy public and minis- 

 terial engagements he could have written so much it is difficult to 

 imagine, for he was also an indefatigable reader. Dr. Chauncey, a 

 learned contemporary, declared of him that there were " hardly any 

 books in existence with which Cotton Mather was not acquainted," 

 but he also says of him that he was " the greatest redeemer of time he 

 ever knew." Many of his publications were sermons aud "little 

 books," but some are of considerable bulk : his greatest work, the 

 'Scripture Illustrations,' on which he laboured from his thirty-first 

 year to bis death, still remains in manuscript in the archives of the 

 Massachusetts Historical Society. For a long period his " practical 

 works " were great authorities with certain religious sects. Benjamin 



