The phases in which the writings of Cotton Mather present their author are so varied, and the estimation in which he has been held by subsequent writers is so diverse, that there is difficulty in characterizing him to one’s own satisfaction. He was neither wholly saint, nor wholly sinner; was not unmingled wisdom, nor all folly. We do not very eagerly undertake to outline his character. But since, apart from records of courts, his pen furnished more valuable and more numerous facts pertaining to New England witchcraft in the seventeenth century than have come down from any other pen, there seems to be a call upon us to comment upon his competency and trustworthiness as observer and as reporter or recorder of facts.
In matured life he had become probably the first scholar and most learned man in the province. His mind was bright, versatile, and active, and its application to books, to the demands of his profession, and to the educational, moral, religious, and political interests of the public, was untiring. His attention was drawn to consideration of marvelous occurrences while he was quite young, and his records of witchcraft were nearly all penned by the time he was thirty years old. In 1689, being then only twenty-six, he published a small work entitled “Memorable Providences relating to Witchcraft and Possessions.”
He was a personal witness and an alert observer, through several successive months, of a rapid and prolonged stream of marvels, which were manifested through the children of John Goodwin, of Boston, in 1688, a long account of which he published quite soon after their occurrence. Four years later came on the Salem Witchcraft, and portions of its tragic and agonizing occurrences were witnessed by this Boston clergyman. He was present in the crowd around the gallows when several of the wronged victims to diabolism were executed. And he promptly furnished an extended account of much which had just intensely agitated and frenzied not only Salem and Essex County, but the whole province. The next year, 1693, brought him opportunity to be much with and to observe carefully two afflicted young, women in Boston, Mercy Short and Margaret Rule, whose maladies were deemed bewitchments. He recorded his observations and doings relating to these two persons, and his accounts are available to-day, though there is evidence rendering it probable that he never prepared either record for the press, and that both have become public without his sanction.
As has been learned from what precedes, Robert Calef, an opponent of some then prevalent beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft, found means, whether honorably or not is perhaps debatable, for putting Mather’s account of Margaret Rule before the world. This young woman was under Mather’s special watch for several weeks, while she was being acted upon by occult agents and forces; and he promptly recorded for perusal by his friends an account of what transpired around her.
From the foregoing statements it is obvious that, both directly and indirectly, very many facts and opinions, that will be adduced as our work proceeds, will have been derived from Mather’s records, and will rest, at least in part, upon his authority. Consequently, his qualifications, as observer, reporter, and recorder, are matters not only of interest, but of some importance.
Though young when attentive to witchcraft scenes, Mather was learned and influential. Probably few other persons, if any, in the colonies were then his equals in those respects. His duties as a clergyman and a citizen, and his inclination also, led him to be an extensive observer of marvelous manifestations; he obviously was a lover of such. And his records show that he was either a closer observer of the minutiæ of transpiring events of that nature, or a more willing and careful specifier of little things pertaining to them, full of important meaning to some readers now, yet probably meaningless to many others, than were most of his cotemporaries; though Lawson, Hale, and Willard were good at specification, and were more cautious commentators than Mather. An ignoring of any participation by spirits in witchcraft scenes has blinded historians in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to some decided merits in the writings of Mather.
The assumption by later commentators that no occurrences whatsoever, which required more than mortal agency for their production, ever actually transpired in cases witnessed and described by Mather, has apparently caused them, consciously or otherwise, to impute to his fancy, credulity, or other untrustworthy attributes, many things which a moderate acquaintance on their part with modern manipulations of occult forces by invisible intelligences would have suggested to them that possibly, and even probably, his statements of facts were based on positive observations by his own physical senses, and by the external senses of other observers. A class of agents are now at work whose cognition may some day turn the laugh upon overweeningly wise laughers at Cotton Mather. This circumscribed view as to the actual extent and variety of natural intelligent agents, and natural laws and forces, has caused them to draw inferences disparaging to Mather’s accuracy in places where more knowledge of the outworkings of laws and forces which spirits obey and use, would have given them trust in the essential naturalness and consequent probable occurrence of nearly or quite all the facts stated in his narrative of personal observations and experiences—we do not say in the pervading wisdom and value of his comments and inferences, but in the naturalness and consequent credibility of his facts.
Where forlorn and wretched old women, together with tricksy and roguish girls, and a few low-lived, malicious mortals of both sexes are regarded as the actual authors of all witchcraft phenomena, Mather’s reports of that class of occurrences are an offense—are a stumbling-block in the pathway of satisfactory solution. So long as his statements are left unimpeached, such agents as witchcraft has of late been imputed to are incompetent to the work ascribed to them. That author, therefore, must needs be discredited; consequently sneer, and slur, and ridicule have been brought to bear against his accuracy and trustworthiness. Some modern commentators have made savage use of such weapons upon this original describer of witchcraft scenes. He has been by innuendoes caricatured and metamorphosed to an extent which seems distinctly reprehensible. Brightest minds may sometimes lack knowledge of some existing agents and forces; good men may be actual, though unintentional perpetrators of great wrong, when they depict the characters of some predecessors whose words seem extravagant to such as limit natural actors and forces to those which the external senses and human science have long been familiar with.
Our recent readings have led us to regard Mather as a man of more than common efficiency in acquiring information, and more than common despatch in putting his acquisitions before the public. We find evidences in his works that, if he did not acquire, he put forth both more minute and more extensive knowledge of the marvelous phenomena of his times, than any other person then living in America of whom we have knowledge. Portions of his creeds helped him to frankness in description of marvels. His faith embraced many unseen intelligent agents, both good and bad, moving to and fro among men, ever walking the earth and influencing its affairs both “when we wake and when we sleep.” Consequently he never had occasion to inquire whether anything whatsoever was possible which his senses or the senses of other witnesses seemed to cognize. He doubted not that unseen powers competent to anything whatsoever were around both him and all other human beings. His only question was, did the thing occur? If it did, it was proper to describe it as it appeared to its beholders. How it could occur was a question which he, as recorder, was not called upon to answer; and he did not permit it to modify his record. This weakness(?) of his was fraught with latent strength which becomes beneficent in our day by its revealing to us the former mysterious irruption upon society of precisely such outré and seemingly unnatural antics and doings, not only of animated human forms, but of lifeless household utensils and ornaments, as we are witnessing. History by him repeats itself to-day, and to-day’s marvels give credibility to his statements. Mather furnished broader and better bases for judging of the real sources, nature, character, and extent of witchcraft facts, than we generally get from other persons of his day. Over-cautious witnesses and reporters often mislead very widely by failing to tell “the whole truth.”
Some of Mather’s statements and doings which were slurred even by his cotemporary Calef, and have been by later writers also, may deserve more respectful consideration than has usually been accorded to them. We are alluding to his manipulations of the afflicted, and other like acts. These indicate that either his observances and care of bewitched persons, or his intuitions, were giving him hints of the existence of natural laws and special conditions which permit mortals to loose, what he conceived to be,—or at least spoke of as being,—the devil’s hold upon human instruments. We apprehend that he had at least vague surmises that some things which we now call mesmeric passes and psychological forces might be so applied by himself as to thwart the purposes and powers of possessing spirits. We are ready to grant that his use of dawning knowledge or of inflowed suggestions, whichever of them it was that set his own hands in motion over the obsessed, and prompted him to influence others to do the like, produced movements so unskillful that they were seldom very efficacious; yet we perceive that he moved in direction toward later discoveries which at this day enable many mortals to exercise much power toward both inducing and abolishing the control of human beings by disembodied spirits. There hang about Mather slight indications that he received some knowledge or some impulses, mediumistically, impressionally, or intuitively. The fact that, though having much to do with both Mercy Short and Margaret Rule during the months of their affliction in the year immediately following the executions at Salem, he refrained from advising or procuring their prosecution, or the prosecution of any whom they named as their afflictors, the facts that prayers, fastings, manipulations, and protracted and unflagging kindnesses and attentions, were his only appliances, and that both the girls were brought back to their normal condition, speak very distinctly in favor of Mather’s sagacity and philanthropy, in relation to the bewitched and the bewitchers, that year.