“Cotton was acute and subtile. The son of a Puritan lawyer, he had been eminent at Cambridge as a student. He was quick in the nice perception of distinctions, and pliant in dialectics; in manner persuasive rather than commanding; skilled in the fathers and the schoolmen, but finding all their wisdom compactly stored in Calvin; deeply devout by nature as well as habit from childhood; hating heresy and still precipitately eager to prevent evil actions by suppressing ill opinions, yet verging in opinion towards progress in civil and religious freedom. He was the avowed foe of democracy, which he feared as the blind despotism of animal instincts in the multitude. Yet he opposed hereditary power in all its forms; desiring a government of moral opinion, according to the laws of moral equity, and ‘claiming the ultimate resolution for the whole body of the people.’”[795]
Cotton was, if not the originator, then the main mover of the theocratical idea. “When he came,” says Mather, “there were divers churches in America, but the country was in a perplexed and divided state; points of church order he settled with exactness; and inasmuch as no little of an Athenian democracy was in the mould of the colonial government, by the royal charter which was then acted upon, he effectually recommended that none should be electors or elected except such as were visible subjects of Christ personally confederated in the church. In this way, and in others, he propounded an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel.”[796]
Cotton was a man of much personal humility. “He learned the lesson of Gregory, ‘It is better, many times, to fly from an injury by silence, than to overcome it by replying;’ and he used that practice of Grynæus, ‘To revenge wrongs by Christian taciturnity.’ On one occasion he had modestly replied to one that would much talk and croak of his insight into the revelations: ‘Brother, I must confess myself to want light in these mysteries.’ The man went home and sent Cotton a pound of candles.”[797]
He was iron in his doctrines, but personally he had the nimia humilitas which Luther sometimes lamented in Staupitz; so much so, indeed, that Mather marvels that “the hardest flints should not have been broken on such a soft bag of cotton.”[798]
Cotton, on landing, in 1633, at once assumed that leading position to which his intellect entitled him, and his pulpit at Boston speedily became a leading power in Massachusetts.
Hooker was settled, during his sojourn in the Bay plantation, at Cambridge.[799] He was a man “of vast endowments, a strong will, and an energetic mind. Ingenuous in temper, he was open in his professions. He had been trained to benevolence by the discipline of affliction, and to tolerance by his refuge from home persecution in Holland. He was choleric in temper, yet gentle in his affections; firm in faith, yet readily yielding to the power of reason; the peer of the reformers, without their harshness; the devoted apostle to the humble and the poor, severe only to the proud, mild in his soothings of a wounded spirit, glowing with the raptures of devotion, and kindling with the messages of redeeming love. His eye, voice, gesture, and whole frame, were animated with the living vigor of heart-felt religion; he was public-spirited and lavishly charitable; and ‘though persecution and banishment had awaited him as one wave follows another,’ he was ever serenely blessed with ‘a glorious peace of soul’—fixed in his trust in Providence, and in his adhesion to the cause of advancing civilization, which he cherished always, even while it remained to him a mystery.
“This was he whom, for his abilities and services, his contemporaries placed ‘in the first rank’ of men; praising him as the one rich pearl with which ‘Europe more than repaid America for the treasures from her coast.’ The people to whom Hooker had ministered in England had preceded him in exile; as he landed, they crowded about him with their cheery welcome. ‘Now I live,’ exclaimed he, as with open arms he embraced his flock, ‘now I live if ye stand fast in the Lord.’”[800]
Hooker was an apostle of great boldness and of singular charity. He had fine tact and a habit of discrimination. He had a saying that “some were to be saved by compassion, others, by fear, being pulled out of the fire.” He knew how to reach the heart; once, when a settlement twenty leagues from his habitation was suffering from hunger, he sent a ship-load of corn to relieve the sufferers, thus demonstrating his Christianity by what Chrysostom calls “unanswerable syllogisms.”[801]
Whitfield once said of him: “Hooker is one in whom the utmost learning and wisdom are tempered by the finest zeal, holiness, and watchfulness; for, though naturally a man of choleric temper, and possessing a mighty vigor and fervor of spirit, which as occasion served was wondrous useful to him, yet he had as much government of his choler as a man has over a mastiff dog in a chain; he could let out his dog or pull him in, as he pleased.”[802]