"I always foretold these two things of the Corporation: First, that, if it were possible for them to steer clear of me, they will do so. Secondly, that, if it were possible for them to act foolishly, they will do so. The perpetual envy with which my essays to serve the kingdom of God are treated among them, and the dread that Satan has of my beating up his quarters at the College, led me into the former sentiment; the marvellous indiscretion, with which the affairs of the College are managed, led me into the latter."
Mr. Sewall declined the appointment. On the eighteenth of November, the Rev. Benjamin Colman, of the Brattle-street Church, was chosen. He also declining, the Rev. Benjamin Wadsworth, of the First Church, was elected, in June, 1725, and inaugurated on the seventh of July.
It thus appears that Dr. Mather was pointedly passed over; and every other Minister of Boston successively chosen to that great office.
Of course he took, as Mr. Peirce informs us, no further part in the management of the College. While he considered, as he expressed it, the "senselessness" of those entrusted with its affairs, as threatening "little short of a dissolution of the College," yet he persuaded himself that he had never desired the office. He had, he says, "unspeakable cause to admire the compassion of Heaven, in saving him from the appointment;" and that he had always had a "dread of what the generality of sober men" thought he desired—"dismal apprehension of the distresses which a call at Cambridge would bring" upon him.—He was sincere in those declarations, no doubt; but they show how completely he could blind himself to the past and even to the actual present. Mr. Peirce explains why the Corporation were so resolute in withholding their suffrages from Mather: "His contemporaries appear to have formed a very correct estimate of his character." "They saw, what posterity sees, that he was a man of wonderful parts, of immense learning, and of eminent piety and virtue." "They saw his weakness and eccentricities." "It is evident that his judgment was not equal to his other faculties; that his passions, which were naturally strong and violent, were not always under proper regulation; that he was weak, credulous, enthusiastic, and superstitious. His conversation is said to have been instructive and entertaining, in a high degree, though often marred by levity, vanity, imprudence and puns." For these reasons, he was deemed an unsuitable person for the Presidency of the College.
XVIII.
COTTON MATHER'S WRITINGS AND CHARACTER.
While compelled—by the attempt of the writer in the North American Review to reverse the just verdict of history in reference to Cotton Mather's connection with Salem Witchcraft—to show the unhappy part he acted and the terrible responsibility he incurred, in bringing forward, and carrying through its stages, that awful tragedy, and the unworthy means he used to throw that responsibility, afterwards, on others, I am not to be misled into a false position, in reference to this extraordinary man. I endorse the language of Mr. Peirce: "He possessed great vigor and activity of mind, quickness of apprehension, a lively imagination, a prodigious memory, uncommon facility in acquiring and communicating knowledge, with the most indefatigable application and industry; that he amassed an immense store of information on all subjects, human and divine." I follow Mr. Peirce still further, in believing that his natural temperament was pleasant and his sentiments of a benevolent cast: "that he was an habitual promoter and doer of good, is evident, as well from his writings as from the various accounts that have been transmitted respecting him."
If the question is asked, as it naturally will be, how these admissions can be reconciled with the views and statements respecting him, contained in this article and in my book on witchcraft, the answer is: that mankind is not divided into two absolutely distinct and entirely separated portions—one good and the other evil. The good are liable to, and the bad are capable of, each receiving much into their own lives and characters, that belongs to the other. This interfusion universally occurs. The great errors and the great wrongs imputable to Cotton Mather do not make it impracticable to discern what was commendable in him. They may be accounted for without throwing him out of the pale of humanity or our having to shut our eyes to traits and merits other ways exhibited.
The extraordinary precocity of his intellect—itself always a peril, often a life-long misfortune—awakened vanity and subjected him to the flattery by which it is fed. All ancestral associations and family influences pampered it. Such a speech as that made to him, at his graduation, by President Oakes, could not have failed to have inflated it to exaggerated dimensions. Clerical and political ambition was natural, all but instinctive, to one, whose father, and both whose grandfathers, had been powers, in the State as well as Church. The religious ideas, if they can be so called, in which he had been trained from childhood, in a form bearing upon him with more weight than upon any other person in all history, inasmuch, as they constituted the prominent feature of his father's reading, talk, thoughts, and writings, gave a rapid and overshadowing growth to credulity and superstition. A defect in his education, perhaps, in part, a natural defect, left him without any true logical culture, so that he seems, in his productions and conduct, not to discern the sequences of statements, the coherence of propositions, nor the consistency of actions, thereby entangling him in expressions and declarations that have the aspect of untruthfulness—his language often actually bearing that character, without his discerning it. His writings present many instances of this infirmity. Some have already been incidentally adduced. In his Life of Phips, avowing himself the author of the document known as the Advice of the Ministers, he uses this language: "By Mr. Mather the younger, as I have been informed." He had, in fact, never been so informed. He knew it by consciousness. Of course he had no thought of deceiving; but merely followed a habit he had got, of such modes of expression. So, also, when he sent a present of money and tracts to "poor and bad people," in Salem, with an anonymous letter to the Minister of the place, "desiring and empowering him to dispense the charity, in his own name, hoping thereby the more to ingratiate his ministry with the people," he looked only on one side of the proposal, and saw it in no other light than a benevolent and friendly transaction. It never occurred to him that he was suggesting a deceptive procedure and drawing the Minister into a false position and practice.