Increase Mather Quotes

Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us.

His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for—leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power—as in the case of Increase Mather—was within the grasp of a successful priest.

[I]f a current president of Harvard were to preach the theology of Increase Mather he would be locked up as a lunatic, though he is still free (and expected) to merchant the prevailing political balderdash. Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas.

Let them no more say, God must do all, we can do nothing, and so encourage themselves to live in a careless neglect of God, and of their own souls, and salvation. Most certainly, altho' we cannot say, That if men improve their natural abilities as they ought to do, that grace will infallibly follow, yet there will not one sinner in all the reprobate world, stand forth at the day of judgment, and say, Lord, thou knowest I did all that possibly I could do, for the obtaining grace, and for all that, thou didst withhold it from me.

All too often dissenters wound up named or fined. Fifty-two-year-old Samuel Willard, Increase Mather’s only equal among ministers, had sounded notes of caution all along. He assisted the Englishes in their escape; he participated in the private fast for John Alden. In exchange, he met with “unkindness, abuse, and reproach”—and with a witchcraft accusation.

New England, would face no real Indian challenge. Indeed, the plague helped prompt the legendarily warm reception Plymouth enjoyed from the Wampanoags. Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, was eager to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.28 When a land conflict did develop between new settlers and old at Saugus in 1631, “God ended the controversy by sending the small pox amongst the Indians,” in the words of the Puritan minister Increase Mather. “Whole towns of them were swept away, in some of them not so much as one Soul escaping the Destruction.” 29 By the time the Native populations of New England had replenished themselves to some degree, it was too late to

Aarya looks increasingly flustered. "Ines, that's private-" "Wow, Aarya, who knew you had such a big heart?" Ash says, now wearing a smile as well. Aarya's mouth opens. "I have no such thing. Don't you dare even suggest it." "No sense in hiding it," Ines says. "Might as well just come out and admit the truth." Aarya's face turns bright red. "I can't wait until Jag kills us all. Then I won't have to listen to this crap for a second longer." Even though it's a morbid joke, we all laugh at her absurdity.

Samuel Willard’s account of her afflictions, widely available in published form after 1684 in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences, almost certainly influenced the statements offered eight years later during the witchcraft outbreak. The historian Jane Kamensky has cogently argued that the obsession with books (especially small, easily concealed ones) evident in the Salem records resulted from an explosion in the availability of such volumes after the mid-1680s. After decades in which the sole Bay Colony press published nothing but sermons and official documents, not only were several printers in Massachusetts and the middle colonies now producing almanacs and primers, but increasing numbers of booksellers were also importing books on such topics as astrology and fortune-telling. Because all sorts of occult practices were linked to the devil, clergymen and magistrates could readily envision the dangers potentially lurking in the pages of those volumes. Such concerns induced them to ask the leading questions of many confessors that elicited concurring responses, although Ann Sr.’s vision of the “little Red book” appears to have been her own.

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.

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.              .

At its root, The Crucible is such a terrifying and illuminating piece of work not because it involves witches and because witches do not exist, but because it depicts the gradual victory of delirium over reason and of passion over truth. In the heat of a hysterical moment, a putatively civilized community elects to abandon the vital traditions that have been slowly built up over centuries and to hand over its institutions to the transient anxieties of an unruly and jealous mob. 'It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned,' warned Increase Mather, a critic of the trials. 'Not on your life,' replied the crowd; for we have some evils to spike. Free expression? Damn you to hell. Presumption of innocence? Hie thee to a monastery. All that we have held dear? Abandon it now, for there are monsters at the gate, and they need to be destroyed post haste.