The Liberal leaders, John Leverett (1662-1724), William Brattle (1662-1713)—who graduated with Leverett in 1680, and with him as tutor controlled the college during Increase Mather’s absence in England—William Brattle’s eldest brother, Thomas Brattle (1658-1713), and Ebenezer Pemberton (1671-1717), pastor of the Old South Church, desired an “enrichment of the service,” and greater liberality in the matter of baptism. In 1697 the Second Boston Church, in which Cotton Mather had been his father’s colleague since 1685, upbraided the Charlestown Church “for betraying the liberties of the churches in their late putting into the hands of the whole inhabitants the choice of a minister.” In 1699 Increase Mather published The Order of the Gospel, which severely (although indirectly), criticized the methods of the “Liberals” in establishing the Brattle Street Church and especially the ordination of their minister Benjamin Colman by a Presbyterian body in London; the Liberals replied with The Gospel Order Revived, which was printed in New York to lend colour to the (partly true) charge of its authors that the printers of Massachusetts would print nothing hostile to Increase Mather.[5] The autocracy of the Mathers in church, college, colony and press, had slipped from them. The later years of Mather’s life were spent almost entirely in the work of the ministry, now beginning to be a less varied career than when he entered on it. He died on the 23rd of August 1723. He married in 1662 Maria, daughter of Sarah and John Cotton. His first wife died in 1714; and in 1715 he married Ann Lake, widow of John Cotton, of Hampton, N.H., a grandson of John Cotton of Boston.
Increase Mather was a great preacher with a simple style and a splendid voice, which had a “Tonitruous Cogency,” to quote his son’s phrase. His style was much simpler and more vernacular than his son’s. He was an assiduous student, commonly spending sixteen hours a day among his books; but his learning (to quote Justin Winsor’s contrast between Increase and Cotton Mather) “usually left his natural ability and his education free from entanglements.” He was not so much self-seeking and personally ambitious as eager to advance the cause of the church in which he so implicitly believed. That it is a mistake to consider him a narrow churchman is shown by his assisting in 1718 at the ordination of Elisha Callender in the First Baptist Church of Boston. Like the most learned men of his time he was superstitious and a firm believer in “praesagious impressions”; his Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences: Wherein an Account is Given of many Remarkable and very Memorable Events which have Hapned in this Last Age, Especially in New England (1684) shows that he believed only less thoroughly than his son in witchcraft, though in his Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1693) he considered some current proofs of witchcraft inadequate. The revulsion of feeling after the witchcraft delusion undermined his authority greatly, and Robert’s Calef’s More Wonders of the Spiritual World (1700) was a personal blow to him as well as to his son. With Jonathan Edwards, than whom he was much more of a man of affairs, and with Benjamin Franklin, whose mission in England somewhat resembled Mather’s, he may be ranked among the greatest Americans of the period before the War of Independence.
The first authority for the life of Increase Mather is the work of his son Cotton Mather, Parentator: Memoirs of Remarkables in the Life and Death of the Ever Memorable Dr Increase Mather (Boston, 1724); there are also a memoir and constant references in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia (London, 1702) especially vol. iv.; there is an excellent sketch in the first volume of J. L. Sibley’s Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University (Cambridge, 1873), with an exhaustive list of Mather’s works (about 150 titles); there is much valuable matter in Williston Walker’s Ten New England Leaders (New York, 1901) and in his Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York, 1893); for literary criticism of the Mathers see ch. xii. of M. C. Tyler’s History of American Literature, 1607-1676 (New York, 1878), and Barrett Wendell’s Cotton Mather (New York, 1891). Mather’s worth has been under-estimated by Josiah Quincy, Justin Winsor and other historians out of sympathy with his ecclesiastical spirit, who represent him as only an ambitious narrow-minded schemer.
(R. We.)
[1] He was so christened “because of the never-to-be-forgotten increase, of every sort, wherewith God favoured the country about the time of his nativity.” He often latinized his name, spelling it Crescentius Matherus.
[2] That is, King Philip’s War, the Boston fires of 1676, when Mather’s church and home were burned, and 1679, the threatened introduction of Episcopacy, and the general spiritual decay of the country.
[3] He had previously been arrested and acquitted on a charge of having attributed the forged letter to Randolph.
[4] Mather led the resistance to the royal demand instigated by Edward Randolph in 1683, for the annulment of the college charter, and after its vacation in 1684 strove for the grant of a new charter; King James promised him a confirmation of the former charter; the new provincial charter granted by William and Mary confirmed all gifts and grants to colleges; in 1692 Mather drafted an act incorporating the college, which was signed by Phips but was disallowed in England; and in 1696, 1697, 1699, and 1700, Mather repeated his efforts for a college charter.
[5] Mather was made a licenser of the Press in 1674 when the General Court abolished the monopoly of the Cambridge Press.