We have also at this time the report which the scurrilous Ned Ward made of the puritan town and its people;[183] but it is not well to believe all of his talk about the innocence of doves and the subtile wiles of serpents, though life in Boston was not without its contrasts, as we look back upon it now. Samuel Sewall, her first abolitionist, was even then pointing the finger of doom to the insidious evil in his Selling of Joseph. Not altogether foreign to the thoughts of many were the political possibilities of the coming century, when on New Year’s Day, 1701, the bellman’s clangor was heard, as he toned Sewall’s memorial verses through the streets. There was a certain fitness in the century being ushered in, for New England at least, by the man who was to make posterity best acquainted with its life, and who as a circuit judge, coursing statedly the country ways, saw more to portray than any one else. Sewall was an honest man, if in many respects a petty one. He had figured in one of the noblest spectacles ever seen in the self-willed puritan capital, when on a fast day, January 14, 1697, he had stood up in the meeting-house, and had listened with bowed head to the reading of his penitential confession for the sin of his complicity in the witchcraft trials. Stoughton, the lieutenant-governor, and chief justice of those trials, was quite another type of the puritan fatalist, from whom it was futile to expect a like contrition; and when, at a later day (December 25, 1698), Stoughton invited to dinner the council and omitted Sewall, who was one of them, one might fancy the cause was in no pleasant associations with the remembrance of that scene in Parson Willard’s meeting-house. It is characteristic of Sewall that this social slight oppressed him for fear that Bellomont, who had not yet come, might hear of it, and count him less! But poor Sewall was a man whom many things disturbed, whether it was that to mock him some one scattered a pack of playing-cards in his fore-yard, or that some of the godly chose to wear a wig![184]
SAMUEL SEWALL.
This follows the steel engraving in Sewall Papers, vol. i. There is another likeness in N. E. H. & Gen. Reg., i. 105. Cf. also Higginson’s Larger Hist. United States, p. 208.
The smiting of the Mathers, to which reference has been made, was a business of serious moment to those theocrats. Whoever was not in sympathy with their protests fared badly in their mouths. “Mr. Cotton Mather,” records Sewall (October 20, 1701), “came to Mr. Wilke’s shop, and there talked very sharply against me, as if I had used his father worse than a neger; spoke so loud that people in the street might hear him.” There is about as near an approach to conscious pleasantry as we ever find in Sewall when, writing, some days later, that he had sent Mr. Increase Mather a haunch of very good venison, he adds, “I hope in that I did not treat him as a negro.”
The Mathers were praised highly and blamed sharply in their lifetime, and have been since. There can be little dispute about what they did and what they said; they were outspoken enough to make their motives and feelings palpable. It is as one makes or refuses allowances for their times that the estimate of their value to their generation is scaled. None ever needed allowances more. They had no conception of those influences which place men in relation to other times than their own. There was in their minds no plane higher than the existence around them,—no plane to which the man of all times leads his contemporaries. Matherism, which was to them their life, was to others a domination, the long-suffering of which, by their coevals, to us of to-day is a study. It would be unjust to say that this mighty influence had not been often of great good; but the gentle observer of an historic character does not contentedly witness outbursts of selfish arrogance, canting humiliation, boastful complacency, to say nothing of social impertinences and public indelicacies, and the bandying of opprobrious epithets in controversy. With this there was indeed mingled much for which New England had reason to be grateful. Increase Mather had a convenient astuteness, which was exerted not infrequently to her no small gain. He had learning, which usually left his natural ability and his education free from entanglements. It was too often quite otherwise with his son Cotton, whose reading smothered his faculties, though he had a native power that occasionally got the upper hand. Between them they gathered a library, which, as John Dunton said, was the glory of New England. The awe which Increase inspired knew little of that lurking rebellion which the too pitiful arrogance of Cotton incited; for the father was essentially a strong and politic man, and though his domination was waning outwardly in 1700, he had the ability to compel the Boston press into a refusal to print the Gospel Order Revised, which his opponents had written in answer to his Order of the Gospel, and to force his adversaries to flee to New York to find a printer.[185]
The old Mather theocracy was attacked on two sides. There was, in the first place, the defection within the old New England orthodoxy, by which an independent spirit had established a church. From the published manifesto of its principles this came to be known as the “Manifesto Church,” and it had invited Benjamin Colman home from England to become its pastor,[186] who, to avoid difficulties, had been ordained in England. He first preached in November, 1699. In the second place, the organization of the Church of England, which had begun in Andros’s time, was gathering strength, though Sewall got what comfort he could from the fact that Mr. Maccarty’s shop and others were not closed on Christmas Day. Attempts had been made to divert the funds of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England from their application to the needs of the Indians, to strengthen the new Episcopal movement; and the failure to do this, as well as a spirit to emulate the missionary enterprise of the French, had instigated the formation of a new Society in England for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts; but it was not long before its resources were turned into channels which nurtured the Episcopal movement and the royal authority. Strong contrasts to the simplicity of the old order were increasing; and it was not without misgivings that the old people had seen Benjamin Wadsworth, the new associate pastor of the First Church, inducted (1696) into office with an unusual formal parade. Thus the humble manners of the past were becoming in large degree a memory; and when, a little later (June 1, 1702), the new queen was proclaimed, and the representatives were allowed to precede the ministers in the procession, the wail in Sewall’s diary, as well as when he notices the raising of colors at the Castle on the Lord’s Day, betokens in another way the order of things which the new charter was making possible.
While in Massachusetts the defection grew, in Connecticut the old order was entrenching itself in the founding of Yale College, first at Saybrook, and later at New Haven, which was destined, as Harvard declined in the estimation of the orthodox, to become the rallying-point of the old school.[187]