Cotton Mather Quotes

That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influences of the Devil.

Wilderness is a temporary condition through which we are passing to the Promised Land.

Ah, children, be afraid of going prayerless to bed, lest the Devil be your bedfellow.

You see, a witch has to have a familiar, some little animal like a cat or a toad. He helps her somehow. When the witch dies the familiar is suppose to die too, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, if it's absorbed enough magic, it lives on. Maybe this toad found its way south from Salem, from the days when Cotton Mather was hanging witches. Or maybe Lafitte had a Creole girl who called on the Black Man in the pirate-haven of Barataria. The Gulf is full of ghosts and memories, and one of those ghosts might very well be that of a woman with warlock blood who'd come from Europe a long time ago, and died on the new continent. And possibly her familiar didn't know the way home. There's not much room for magic in America now, but once there was room. ("Before I Wake...")

This is a sappy way to put it, but the Winthrop who warns Williams is the Winthrop I fell in love with, the Winthrop Cotton Mather celebrates for sharing his firewood with the needy, the Winthrop who scolds Thomas Dudley for overcharging the poor, the Winthrop of 'Christian Charity,' who called for 'enlargement toward others' and 'brotherly affection,' admonishing that 'if thy brother be in want and thou canst help him...if thou lovest God thou must help him.

Ye monsters of the bubbling deep, Your Maker's praises spout; Up from the sands ye codlings peep, And wag your tails about

If we admit instrumental musick in the worship of God, how can we resist the imposition of all the instruments used among the ancient Jews?—yea, dancing as well as playing, and several other Judaic actions? or, how can we decline a whole rabble of church-officers, necessary to be introduced for instrumental musick, whereof our Lord Jesus Christ hath left us no manner of direction?

Now Jet could hear his voice when the wind carried as he recited a quote from Cotton Mather. Families are the Nurseries of all Societies: and the First combinations of mankind.

As Puritan Cotton Mather proclaimed, “Ignorance is the Mother not of Devotion but of HERESY.”4

The author relates the progress of inoculation against smallpox in America with the interaction between an African slave named Onisimus whose homeland knew how to treat the malady and and leading clergyman Cotton Mather who was curious and open-minded enough to listen to him.

During America’s first century, racist theological ideas were absolutely critical to sanctioning the growth of American slavery and making it acceptable to the Christian churches. These ideas were featured in the sermons of early America’s greatest preacher and intellectual, Boston divine Cotton Mather (1663–1728), our first tour guide.

Religious Society of Negroes” in Boston. It was one of the first known organizations of African people in colonial America. In 1693, Cotton Mather drew up the society’s list of rules, prefaced by a covenant: “Wee, the miserable children of Adam and Noah . . . freely resolve . . . to become the Servants of that Glorious Lord.” Two of Mather’s rules were instructive: members were to be counseled by someone “wise and of English” descent, and they were not to “afford” any “Shelter” to anyone who had “Run away from their Masters.” Meeting weekly, some members of the society probably delighted in hearing Mather cast their souls as White. Some probably rejected these racist ideas and used the society to mobilize against enslavement. The Religious Society of Negroes did not last. Few Africans wanted to be Christians at that time (though that would change in a few decades). And not many masters were willing to let their captives become Christians because, unlike in other colonies, there was no Massachusetts law stipulating that baptized slaves did not have to be freed.

Those Americans who have the power to end racism as we know it, to become tough on racism, and to build the postracial society that the postracialists actually don’t want to see—these people have known the facts throughout the storied lifetime of Angela Davis. Powerful Americans also knew the facts during the lifetimes of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is the primary job of the powerful to know the facts of America. So trying to educate knowledgeable people does not make much sense. Trying to educate these powerful producers or defenders or ignorers of American racism about its harmful effects is like trying to educate a group of business executives about how harmful their products are. They already know, and they don’t care enough to end the harm. History is clear. Sacrifice, uplift, persuasion, and education have not eradicated, are not eradicating, and will not eradicate racist ideas, let alone racist policies. Power will never self-sacrifice away from its self-interest. Power cannot be persuaded away from its self-interest. Power cannot be educated away from its self-interest. Those who have the power to abolish racial discrimination have not done so thus far, and they will never be persuaded or educated to do so as long as racism benefits them in some way.

The Jews have a saying worth remembering: "Whoever doesn't teach his son some trade or business, teaches him to be a thief." As soon as ever I can, I will make my children apprehensive of the main end for which they are to live; that so they may as soon as may be, begin to live; and their youth not be nothing but vanity. I will show them, that their main end must be, to, acknowledge the great God, and His glorious Christ; and bring others to acknowledge Him: and that they are never wise nor well, but when they are doing so. I will make them able to answer the grand question of why they live; and what is the end of the actions that fill their lives? I will teach them that their Creator and Redeemer is to be obeyed in everything, and everything is to be done in obedience to Him. I will teach them how even their diversions, and their ornaments, and the tasks of their education, must all be to fit them for the further service of Him to whom I have devoted them; and how in these also, His commandments must be the rule of all they do. I will sometimes therefore surprise them with an inquiry, "Child, what is this for? Give me a good account of why you do it?" How comfortably shall I see them walking in the light, if I may bring them wisely to answer this inquiry. -A Father's Resolutions, www.spurgeon.org/~phil/mather/resolvd...

With less exactitude but much relish, Puritan enemies marveled at the Massachusetts frenzy. They were eagerly “hanging one another” for precisely the crime, noted two Quaker merchants who visited Salem that fall, of which they liked to accuse their supposedly devil-worshipping sect. Indeed they were “hotly and madly, mauling one another in the dark,” as Cotton Mather wailed. Witch-hunting seemed to encourage you to act like the very creatures—Catholics, Frenchmen, wizards—you abhorred.

Americans are a strange breed. We love to preach, and we hate being preached at. In one hemisphere of our brains the sermons of Cotton Mather run on an infinite loop; in the other we hear the echo of Mark Twain’s laughter. When the Twain side is napping the Mather side undergoes a Great Awakening. Surges of fevered fanaticism come over us, all sense of proportion is lost, and everything seems of an unbearable moral urgency. Repent, America, repent now! The country is undergoing such an Awakening at this very moment concerning race and gender, which is why the rhetoric being generated sounds evangelical rather than political. That one now hears the word woke everywhere is a giveaway that spiritual conversion, not political agreement, is the demand. Relentless speech surveillance, the protection of virgin ears, the inflation of venial sins into mortal ones, the banning of preachers of unclean ideas—all these campus identity follies have their precedents in American revivalist religion. Mr. Twain might have found it amusing but every opinion poll shows that the vast majority of Americans do not.

In a meeting with Cotton Mather, one of the town’s most respected figures, and a former adversary, Franklin quickly illustrated just how ridiculously inflated his young ego had become. Chatting with Mather as they walked down a hallway, Mather suddenly admonished him, “Stoop! Stoop!” Too caught up in his performance, Franklin walked right into a low ceiling beam. Mather’s response was perfect: “Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high,” he said wryly. “Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you’ll miss many hard thumps.

Smallpox epidemics had devastated Massachusetts at regular intervals in the ninety years since its founding. A 1677 outbreak wiped out seven hundred people, 12 percent of the population. During the epidemic of 1702, during which three of his children were stricken but survived, Cotton Mather began studying the disease. A few years later, he was introduced to the practice of inoculation by his black slave, who had undergone the procedure in Africa and showed Mather his scar. Mather checked with other blacks in Boston and found that inoculation was a standard practice in parts of Africa.

Wrestle with the Lord. Receive no denial. Earnestly protest, Lord, I will not let thee go, except thou bless this poor child of mine, and make it your own! Do this, until, if it may be, your heart is raised by a touch of heaven, to a particular faith; that God has blessed this child, and it shall be blessed and saved forever.

The New-Englanders are a People of God 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 accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession.

The New-England Courant brooked no censor: it was the first “unlicensed” newspaper in the colonies; that is, the colonial government did not grant it a license, and did not review its content before publication. James Franklin decided to use his newspaper to criticize both the government and the clergy, at a time when the two were essentially one, and Massachusetts a theocracy. “The Plain Design of your Paper is to Banter and Abuse the Ministers of God,” Cotton Mather seethed at him. In 1722, James Franklin was arrested for sedition. While he was in prison, his little brother and hardworking apprentice took over printing the Courant, and there appeared on the masthead, for the first time, the name BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.71

Cotton Mather lusted all his life for the presidency of Harvard, a post his father had held, and which the son affected to despise, especially after others were chosen; he was a prig and a meddler; an unscrupulous ideologue and a windy orator; a scribbler who praised simplicity in flowery circumlocutions, so anxious to see his production in print that it might be said of him, with little fear of exaggeration, that he would rather lose his soul than misplace a manuscript.

Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World

Cotton Mather, in his, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), documents the same type of apparent supernatural manifestations in the children of John Goodwin in 1688:

Cotton Mather, an American Puritan, said, “The great design and intention of the office of a Christian preacher [is] to restore the throne and dominion of God in the souls of men.”145

Puritan leaders, at least, valued an educated mind over material riches. Cotton Mather admonished his congregation with the comment, “If your main concern be to get the riches of this world for your children, and leave a belly full of this world unto them, it looks very suspiciously as if you were yourselves the people of this world, whose portion is only in this life.”30

While I knew him, he made me see--Poe did; made me understand that, unlike a bodily organ, the soul desires, even wills, its own continuance.It can be said to be the seat of will and desire and, even in its necrotic state, the root of evil. ... A Sunday school lesson or one of Cotton Mather's gaudy rants that helped to kindle the Salem bonfires is nearer to the truth of it than a fable by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. Evil's a malignancy beyond the skill and scalpel of {doctors} to heal or extirpate.

I know I seem bold, but this is new territory to me too, Josiah,” she said.  “Look, the younger people like to use the phrase ‘it’s complicated’ to try to explain away ten tons of stuff, but sometimes I think they’re probably spot-on.  We’re caught in an age where on one hand we’re embracing or sexuality, but on the other hand, we’re still clinging to Cotton Mather’s rotting corpse, and it’s a conundrum sometimes.” “On

As Puritan Cotton Mather proclaimed, “Ignorance is the Mother not of Devotion but of HERESY.

These generous donations, the sale of which helped to fund the construction of Yale College in New Haven, were vigorously encouraged by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who also vigorously encouraged the Salem Witch Trials.

And Cotton Mather viewed himself—or presented himself—as the defender of God’s law, the crucifier of any non-Puritan, African, Native American, poor person, or woman who defied God’s law by not following the rules of submission.10

Aristotle believed that Greeks were superior to non-Greeks. John Cotton and Richard Mather took Aristotle’s idea (because they, too, were followers) and flipped it into a new equation, substituting “Puritan” for “Greek.

The New England divine Cotton Mather puts it this way: "Exhibit as much as you can of a glorious Christ. Yea, let the motto upon your whole ministry be: Christ is all. Let others develop the pulpit fads that come and go. Let us specialize in preaching our Lord Jesus Christ.

Mather first shared his racial views, calling the Puritan colonists “the English Israel”—a chosen people. Puritans must religiously instruct all slaves and children, the “inferiors,” Mather pleaded. But masters were not doing their job of looking after African souls, “which are as white and good as those of other Nations, but are Destroyed for lack of Knowledge.” Cotton Mather had built on Richard Baxter’s theological race concept. The souls of African people were equal to those of the Puritans: they were White and good.

Cotton Mather was born Feb. 12, 1663 in Boston, Massachusetts where he would spend all of his life until his death on Feb. 13, 1728. The son of the well-known preacher and academic Increase Mather, Cotton exhibited unusual intellectual gifts. At 12 he entered Harvard, receiving his MA at the age of 18 from the hands of his father, who was president of the college at the time. He preached his first sermon in his father’s church in August 1680 and was formally ordained in 1685 becoming his father’s colleague. While believing in witchcraft, he sided with Samuel Willard on trying to bar the legality of spectral evidence.

yea that we never assemble without a Satan among us. As there are some Divines, who do with more uncertainty conjecture, from a certain place in the Epistle to the Ephesians, That the Angels do sometimes come into our Churches, to gain some advantage from our Ministry. But be sure our Demonstrable Interpretations may give Repeated Notices to the Devil, That his time is almost out; and what the Preacher says unto the Young Man, Know thou, that god will bring thee into Judgment! THAT may our Sermons tell unto the Old Wretch, Know thou, that thy Judgment is at hand.

the spirit of an Heylin, who seems to count no obloquy too hard for a reformer; and the spirit of those (folio-writers there are, some of them, in the English nation!) whom a noble Historian stigmatizes, as, “Those hot-headed, passionate bigots, from whom, ’tis enough, if you be of a religion contrary unto theirs, to be defamed, condemned and pursued with a thousand calumnies.

Since the Devil is come down in great wrath upon us, let not us in our great wrath against one another provide a Lodging for him.

Have not many of us been Devils one unto another for Slanderings, for Backbitings, for Animosities? For this, among other causes, perhaps, God has permitted the Devils to be worrying, as they now are, among us. But it is high time to leave off all Devilism, when the Devil himself is falling upon us: And it is no time for us to be Censuring and Reviling one another, with a Devilish wrath, when the wrath of the Devil is annoying of us.

and had occasion to think on the Italian proverb, “ To wait for one who does not come; to lye a bed not able to sleep; and to find it impossible to please those whom we serve; are three griefs enough to kill a man.

Now, upon a deliberate review of these things, his Excellency first reprieved, and then pardoned many of them that had been condemned; and there fell out several strange things that caused the spirit of the country to run as vehemently upon the acquitting of all the accused, as it by mistake ran at first upon the condemning of them.

Hereupon there was appointed an able and faithful committee of gentlemen, who printed, from copper-plates, a just number of bills, and flourished, indented, and contrived them in such a manner, as to make it impossible to counterfeit any of them, without a speedy discovery of the counterfeit: besides which, they were all signed by the hands of three belonging to that committee. These bills being of several sums, from two shillings to ten pounds, did confess the Massachuset-colony to be endebted unto the person in whose hands they were, the sums therein expressed; and provision was made, that if any particular bills were irrecoverably lost, or torn, or worn by the owners, they might be recruited without any damage to the whole in general. The publick debts to the sailors and soldiers, now upon the point of mutiny, (for, Arma Tenenti, Omnia dat, qui Justa negat!)[161] were in these bills paid immediately: but that further credit might be given thereunto, it was ordered that they should be accepted by the treasurer, and all officers that were subordinate unto him, in all publick payments, at five per cent, more than the value expressed in them. The people knowing that the tax-act would, in the space of two years at least, fetch into the treasury as much as all the bills of credit thence emitted would amount unto, were willing to be furnished with bills, wherein it was their advantage to pay their taxes, rather than in any other specie; and so the sailors and soldiers put off their bills, instead of money, to those with whom they had any dealings, and they circulated through all the hands in the colony pretty comfortably.

The gentleman that succeeded Mr. Endicot was Mr. Richard Bellingham, one who was bred a lawyer, and one who lived beyond eighty, well esteemed for his laudable qualities, but as the Thebans made the statues of their magistrates without hands, importing that they must be no takers;

He has sometimes said that he could be willing to walk twelve miles on his feet, on condition he might have an opportunity to preach a sermon: and he seldom did preach a sermon without tears.

Samuel Sewall, Cotton’s former tutor and future close friend, was unknowingly picked for a husband by sixteen-year-old Hannah Hull when she watched him present his commencement address in Latin. Her father was not an alumnus, but he was rich — very rich. He brought his daughter to commencement in order to take stock of the prospects, and she set her sights on Sewall. Later she found a way to meet him, and only after they were married did Hannah explain to Samuel that she had picked him out rather than the other way around.

Personal peace and affluence became more important to many than the ideas and ideals that made such aspirations possible in the first place. As Cotton Mather asserted, the Christian faith had brought the colonies prosperity, but “the daughter destroyed the mother—there is a danger, lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness: to build a city on a hill, an illumination for all the world.

Your God reigns! John Piper quotes Cotton Mather, who said three hundred years ago, "The great design and intention of the office of a Christian preacher [is] to restore the throne and dominion of God in the souls of men." And Piper asks, "Is this what people take away from worship nowadays - a sense of God, a note of sovereign grace, a theme of panoramic glory, the grand object of God's infinite Being? Do they enter for one hour in the week ... into an atmosphere of the holiness of God which leaves its aroma upon their lives all week long?"9 New Testament writers as well as Jesus himself clearly teach us that Christ-centered preaching must aim at the glory of God.

Real estate might seem to be all about moving and picking up stakes and disruption and three-moves-equals-a-death, but it’s really about arriving and destinations, and all the prospects that await you or might await you in some place you never thought about. I had a drunk old prof at Michigan who taught us that all of America’s literature, Cotton Mather to Steinbeck—this was the same class where I read The Great Gatsby—was forged by one positivist principle: to leave, and then to arrive in a better state.

§ 10. If the reader would know, how these good people fared the rest of the melancholy winter, let him know, that besides the exercises of Religion, with other work enough, there was the care of the sick to take up no little part of their time. ’Twas a most heavy trial of their patience, whereto they were called the first winter of this their pilgrimage, and enough to convince them and remind them that they were but Pilgrims.

11. The doleful winter broke up sooner than was usual. But our crippled planters were not more comforted with the early advance of the Spring, than they were surprized with the appearance of two Indians, who in broken English bade them, welcome Englishmen! It seems that one of these Indians had been in the eastern parts of New-England, acquainted with some of the English vessels that had been formerly fishing there; but the other of the Indians, and he from whom they had most of service, was a person provided by the very singular providence of God for that service.

He was a person for study as well as action; and hence, notwithstanding the difficulties through which he passed in his youth, he attained unto a notable skill in languages: the Dutch tongue was become almost as vernacular to him as the English; the French tongue he could also manage; the Latin and the Greek he had mastered; but the Hebrew he most of all studied, “Because,” he said, “he would see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty.

§ 3. There was another most wonderful preservation vouchsafed by God unto this little knot of Christians. One Mr. Weston, a merchant of good note, interested at first in the Plymouth design, afterwards deserted it; and in the year 1622 sent over two ships, with about sixty men, to begin a plantation in the Massachuset-Bay. These beginners being well refreshed at Plymouth, travelled more northward unto a place known since by the name of Weymouth; where these Westonians, who were Church of England-men, did not approve themselves like the Plymotheans, a pious, honest, industrious people; but followed such bad courses, as had like to have brought a ruin upon their neighbours, as well as themselves.

4. A certain gentleman [if nothing in the following story contradict that name] was employed in obtaining from the Grand Council of Plymouth and England, a Patent in the name of these planters for a convenient quantity of the country, where the providence of God had now disposed them. This man, speaking one word for them, spake two for himself: and surreptitiously procured the patent in his own name, reserving for himself and his heirs an huge tract of the land; and intending the Plymotheans to hold the rest as tenants under him.

The people have a negative upon all the executive part of the civil government, as well as the legislative, which is a vast priviledge, enjoyed by no other plantation in America, nor by Ireland—no, nor hitherto by England it self.

The wiser people being troubled at these trifles, they took the opportunity of Governour Winthrop’s being there, to have the thing publickly propounded in the congregation: who in answer thereunto, distinguished between a theological and a moral goodness; adding, that when Juries were first used in England, it was usual for the crier, after the names of persons fit for that service were called over, to bid them all, “Attend, good men and true;” whence it grew to be a civil custom in the English nation, for neighbours living by one another, to call one another “good man such an one;” and it was pity now to make a stir about a civil custom, so innocently introduced.

Nevertheless, there was one civil custom used in (and in few but) the English nation, which this gentleman did endeavour to abolish in this country: and that was, the usage of drinking to one another.

Moreover, he successively buried three wives;

There was a time when the court of election being, for fear of tumult, held at Cambridge, May 17, 1637, the sectarian part of the country, who had the year before gotten a governour more unto their mind, had a project now to have confounded the election, by demanding that the court would consider a petition then tendered before their proceeding thereunto.

But though I know that the reverend elders of this church, and some others, do very well apprehend that the church cannot enquire into the proceedings of the court; yet, for the satisfaction of the weaker, who do not apprehend it, I will declare my mind concerning it. If the church have any such power, they have it from the Lord Jesus Christ; but the Lord Jesus Christ hath disclaimed it, not only by practice, but also by precept, which we have in his gospel, Matt xx. 25, 26. It is true, indeed, that; magistrates, as they are church-members, are accountable unto the church for their failings; but that is when they are out of their calling. When Uzziah would go offer incense in the temple, the officers of the church called him to an account, and withstood him; but when Asa put the prophet in prison, the officers of the church did not call him to an account for that. If the magistrate shall in a private way wrong any man, the church may call him to an' account for it; but if he be in pursuance of a course of justice, though the thing that he I does be unjust, yet he is not accountable for it before the church.

This acknowledging disposition in the governor made them all acknowledge, that he was truly “a man of an excellent spirit.” In fine, the victories of an Alexander, an Hannibal, or a Caesar over other men, were not so glorious as the victories of this great man over himself, which also at last proved victories over other men.

Nor would I have you to mistake in the point of your own liberty. There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected both by men and beasts, to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty, Sumus Omnes Deteriores;[109] ’tis the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good; for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives; and whatsoever crosses it is not authority, but a distemper thereof. This liberty is maintained in a way of subjection to authority; and the authority set over you will in all administrations for your good be quietly submitted unto, by all but such as have a disposition to shake off the yoke, and lose their true liberty, by their murmuring at the honour and power of authority.

But after all, his humility appeared in having always but low expectations, looking for little regard and reward from any men, after he had merited as highly as possible by his universal serviceableness.

4. Well may New-England lay claim to the name it wears, and to a room in the tenderest affections of its mother, the happy Island! for as there are few of our towns but what have their name-sakes in England, so the reason why most of our towns are called what they are, is because the chief of the first inhabitants would thus bear up the names of the particular places there from whence they came.

Hence, though he were a zealous enemy to all vice, yet his practice was according to his judgment thus expressed: “In the infancy of plantations, justice should be administered with more lenity than in a settled state; because people are more apt then to transgress; partly out of ignorance of new laws and orders, partly out of oppression of business, and other straits. [Lento Gradu][103] was the old rule; and if the strings of a new instrument be wound up unto their heighth, they will quickly crack.

And there was one passage of his charity that was perhaps a little unusual: in an hard and long winter, when wood was very scarce at Boston, a man gave him a private information that a needy person in the neighbourhood stole wood sometimes from his pile; whereupon the governour in a seeming anger did reply, “Does he so? I’ll take a course with him; go, call that man to me; I’ll warrant you I’ll cure him of stealing.” When the man came, the governour considering that if he had stolen, it was more out of necessity than disposition, said unto him, “Friend, it is a severe winter, and I doubt you are but meanly provided for wood; wherefore I would have you supply your self at my wood-pile till this cold season be over.” And he then merrily asked his friends, “Whether he had not effectually cured this man of stealing his wood?

He was, indeed, a governour, who had most exactly studied that book which, pretending to teach politicks, did only contain three leaves, and but one word in each of those leaves, which word was, MODERATION.

Of all which catastrophe’s, I suppose none was more sudden than that of Monsieur Finch, whom in a ship from France, trucking with the Massachuset-Natives; those bloody salvages, coming on board without any other arms, but knives concealed under flaps, immediately butchered with all his men, and set the ship on fire. Yea, so many fatalities attended the adventurers in their essays, that they began to suspect that the Indian sorcerers had laid the place under some fascination; and that the English could not prosper upon such enchanted ground, so that they were almost afraid of adventuring any more.

Well, it was not long before the Council of Plymouth in England had, by a deed bearing date March 19, 1627, sold unto some knights and gentlemen about Dorchester, viz: Sir Henry Rowsel, Sir John Young, Thomas Southcott, John Humphrey, John Endicott, and Simon Whetcomb, and their heirs and assigns, and their associates for ever, that part of New-England which lyes between a great river called Merrimack, and a certain other river there called Charles’ River, in the bottom of the Massachuset-Bay.

They then sent their agents to view the country, who returned with so advantageous a report, that the next year there was a great remove of good people thither: on this remove, they that went from Cambridge became a church upon a spot of ground now called Hartford; they that went from Dorchester, became a church at Windsor; they that went from Watertown, sat down at Wethersfield; and they that left Roxbury were inchurched higher up the river at Springfield, a place which was afterwards found within the line of the Massachuset-charter.

So they jogged on for many years; and whereas, before the year 1644, that worthy gentleman, George Fenwick Esq., did, on the behalf of several persons of quality, begin a plantation about the mouth of the river, which was called Say-brook, in remembrance of those right honourable persons, the Lord Say and the Lord Brook, who laid a claim to the land thereabouts, by virtue of a patent granted by the Earl of Warwick; the inhabitants of Connecticut that year purchased of Mr. Fenwick this tract of land.

The well-known Mr. Davenport, and Mr. Eaton, and several eminent persons that came over to the Massachuset-bay among some of the first planters, were strongly urged, that they would have settled in this Bay; but hearing of another Bay to the south-west of Connecticut, which might be more capable to entertain those that were to follow them, they desired that their friends at Connecticut would purchase of the native proprietors for them, all the land that lay between themselves and Hudson’s River, which was in part effected. Accordingly removing thither in the year 1637, they seated themselves in a pleasant Bay, where they spread themselves along the sea-coast, and one might have been suddenly as it were surprised with the sight of such notable towns, as first New-Haven; then Guilford; then Milford; then Stamford; and then Brainford, where our Lord Jesus Christ is worshipped in churches of an evangelical constitution; and from thence, if the enquirer make a salley over to Long-Island, he might there also have seen the churches of our Lord beginning to take root in the eastern parts of that island.

Fifthly, The schools of learning and religion are so corrupted, as (besides the unsupportable charge of education) most children, even the best, wittiest, and of the fairest hopes, are perverted, corrupted, and utterly overthrown, by the multitude of evil examples and licentious behaviours in these seminaries.

the gospel has carried with it a fulness of all other blessings; and (albeit, that mankind generally, as far as we have any means of enquiry, have increased in one and the same given properties and so no more than doubled themselves in about three hundred and sixty years, in all the past ages of the world, since the fixing of the present period of humane life) the four thousand first planters, in less than fifty years, notwithstanding all transportations and mortalities, increased into, they say, more than an hundred thousand.              .

which Varo distinguished unto Incognit and fabulous, preceding the historical, and we should shortly have as wretched narratives of the first persons and actions in this land, as Justin gives of the Jews, when he makes Moses the son of their Joseph, and the sixth of their kings, or when he makes them expelled from Egypt, because the gods would not otherwise allay a plague that raged there; or such as are given by Pliny, when he makes Moses a magician; or Strabo, that makes him an Egyptian priest; if no speedy care be taken to preserve the memorables of our first settlement;

5. After a discouraging series of disasters attending the endeavours of the English to swarm into Florida, and the rest of the continent unto the northward of it, called Virginia, because the first white born in those regions was a daughter, then born to one Ananias Dare, in the year 1585, the courage of one Bartholomew Gosnold, and one captain Bartholomew Gilbert, and several other gentlemen, served them to make yet more essays upon the like designs. This captain Gosnold in a small bark, on May 11, 1602, made land op this coast in the latitude of forty-three; where, though he liked the welcome he had from the Salvages that came aboard him, yet he disliked the weather, so that he thought it necessary to stand more southward into the sea. Next morning he found himself embayed within a mighty head of land; which promontory, in remembrance of the Cod fish in great quantity by him taken there, he called Cape-Cod, a name which I suppose it will never lose,

The self-denying gentleman, who had imployed his commission of governour so little to the disadvantage of the infant-colony at Connecticut, was himself, ere long, by election made governour of that colony.

Jewish proverb, Ne Habites in urbe ubi caput urbis est Medicus:

Ubi praeses fuerit Philosophus, ibi Civitas exit Foelix,

preached in meat and potatoes style, or fire and brimstone to some, which is to say that he preached to a lot of older in spirit Christians who didn’t need all that pap about their best life or whatever that some mega-church pastors preached. When he was in the Air Force, Brian had attended those kinds of churches, but never felt like he grew as a Christian while attending. In fact, he felt like he’d regressed. In Omaha, Brian and his family attended a church that was the combination of the two. The first service was for traditional folks who wanted their spirits refreshed and the other service is for the people who need their fleshly tastes, mostly in music, satisfied. Brian’s mom used to say that their family probably could’ve fit right in at churches run by Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, or even the Amish and Mennonites.

COTTON MATHER WAS in college when he detached Metacomet’s jaw from his skull and heard about Bacon’s Rebellion.

Revivals at Edwards’s Massachusetts church in Northampton jump-started the First Great Awakening around 1733. In awakening souls, passionate evangelicals like Edwards spoke about human equality (in soul) and the capability of everyone for conversion. “I am God’s servant as they are mine, and much more inferior to God than my servant is to me,” the slaveholding Edwards explained in 1741. But the proslavery Great Awakening did not extend to the South Carolina plantation of Hugh Bryan, who was awakened into antislavery thought. Bryan proclaimed “sundry enthusiastic Prophecies of the Destruction of Charles Town and Deliverance of the Negroes from servitude” in 1740. His praying captives stopped laboring. One woman was overheard “singing a spiritual at the water’s edge,” like so many other unidentified antiracist, antislavery Christian women and men who started singing in those years. South Carolina authorities reprimanded Bryan. They wanted evangelists preaching a racist Christianity for submission, not an antiracist Christianity for liberation.20 Hugh Bryan was an exception in the missionary days of the First Great Awakening, days Cotton Mather would not live to see. Though

Cambridge professor William Perkins rested at the cornerstone of British Puritanism in the late sixteenth century. “Though the servant in regard of faith and the inner man be equal to his master, in regard of the outward man . . . the master is above the servant,” he explained in Ordering a Familie, published in 1590. In paraphrasing St. Paul, Perkins became one of the first major English theorists—or assimilationist theologians, to be more precise—to mask the exploitative master/servant or master/slave relationship as a loving family relationship. He thus added to Zurara’s justifying theory of Portuguese enslavers nurturing African beasts. For generations to come, assimilationist slaveholders, from Richard Mather’s New England to Hispaniola, would shrewdly use this loving-family mask to cover up the exploitation and brutality of slavery. It was Perkins’s family ordering that Puritan leaders like John Cotton and Richard Mather used to sanction slavery in Massachusetts a generation later. And it was Perkins’s claim of equal souls and unequal bodies that led Puritan preachers like Cotton and Mather to minister to African souls and not challenge the enslavement of their bodies.4

The good tidings of the preacher, the peace and salvation that he publishes, are boiled down into one sentence: “Your God reigns!” Cotton Mather applies this, with full justification, to the preacher: “The great design . . . of a Christian preacher [is] to restore the throne and dominion of God in the souls of men.

As Cotton Mather would write some time later, “Better whip’t than damned.”*