The First American Evangelical

A Short Life of Cotton Mather

Rick Kennedy

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781467443104
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was America's most famous pastor and scholar at the beginning of the eighteenth century. People today generally associate him with the infamous Salem witch trials, but in this new biography Rick Kennedy tells a bigger story: Mather, he says, was the very first American evangelical.A fresh retelling of Cotton Mather's life, this biography corrects misconceptions and focuses on how he sought to promote, socially and intellectually, a biblical lifestyle. As older Puritan hopes in New England were giving way to a broader and shallower Protestantism, Mather led a populist, Bible-oriented movement that embraced the new century -- the beginning of a dynamic evangelical tradition that eventually became a major force in American culture.Incorporating the latest scholarly research but written for a popular audience, The First American Evangelical brings Cotton Mather and his world to life in a way that helps readers understand both the Puritanism in which he grew up and the evangelicalism he pioneered.Watch a 2015 interview with the author of this book here:

Chapter One

The Last Decades of Puritan Boston

1663-1674

The Pastor’s Study

Cotton Mather was a pastor and a scholar. In his Diary he thanked God for his “tender heart” and “active mind.” Although his scholarship made him internationally famous, his deepest influence was as a local pastor. His whole career was rooted in a small district of Boston called the “North End.” For decades, until the last five years of his life, he was what we would call an “associate” pastor of North Church. His father, the senior pastor, was a powerful minister not known for friendliness. Because of this, much of the neighborhood work of visiting among church families went to his gregarious and enthusiastic son. Cotton ­Mather’s congregation, in general, loved him. When Cotton’s exuberance took him into revolutionary politics, religious extravagance, and even the brink of financial ruin, his congregation encouraged him, defended him, and bailed him out.

Cotton took his role as shepherd of a flock very seriously. Aside from preaching, he organized and led many neighborhood groups that met on a regular schedule. These groups were often targeted: some to youth, some to black people, and some to specific collections of families. Cotton would also organize groups for a special purpose such as taking care of widows and, for at least a while, learning how to sing better. Cotton was also long a favorite guest preacher at other churches and public speaker on major civic occasions. As a pastor, Cotton regularly visited the town prison. Since the custom of the time was to allow a prisoner awaiting execution to pick the pastor who would preach at a special execution sermon, Cotton often was the prisoner’s choice. At these execution sermons, Cotton would preach an open-­air, straight-­gospel sermon, sometimes to four or five thousand listeners anxious to hear about “the wages of sin” and offer of salvation.

But as much as Cotton was out and about shepherding his sheep, the physical setting for much of his life as pastor and scholar was his study. In New England, pastors did not have offices at their church. The Puritan founders of New England had been insistent that a church was the fellowship of believers and that the building they met in was just a meetinghouse. So, because the role of a church building was consciously downplayed, the spiritual center of the daily life of a pastor and his congregation became the pastor’s house, most particularly the pastor’s study. This was where he kept a library, where he wrote sermons, and where he counseled members of his flock.

For most of his career, Cotton Mather’s study was upstairs in his house on what is today called Hanover Street, around the corner from the meetinghouse on North Square. His first study was in his parents’ house a block away across Prince Street. For the last decade of his career, the church rented an older house for him closer to the wharfs on Ship Street. There he had a public “study” on the bottom floor along with a more private “library” on the third floor.

Mather’s Diary includes many references to these pastoral studies and his beloved collection of books. He regularly thanked God for his large and ever-­expanding library. His Diary also includes many references to visitors who would come to talk, borrow a book, or gather for corporate prayer. His children and other young people were encouraged to visit him. Mather often tutored Harvard students in Hebrew and in the study they would read aloud to each other from the Hebrew Scriptures. When it became clear that his beloved oldest daughter Katy was not going to marry, he set her to studying the many medical books in his collection in the hope that she would become a doctor. Cotton’s father would often come to borrow a book just as Cotton went to his father’s. The two shared each other’s large libraries. Pastors visiting Boston were always welcome to sit for conversation or silent reading.

The Diary gives us a lively picture of the pastor’s study. Like many a pastor, Cotton had to shoo some parishioners out of his study. We are told he had a sign, “Be Short,” over his door. But, for the most part, Cotton’s study welcomed conversation. Benjamin Colman, who from boyhood through manhood often climbed the stairs to Cotton’s study on Hanover Street and later to his library on Ship Street, wrote that while Cotton’s fame came from his publications and his preaching, he excelled at simple conversation. His “wit and fancy, his invention, his quickness of thought,” along with his heart and affections, “overflowed” when talking with his friends.

Benjamin Franklin remembered being in Cotton’s study in the rented house on Ship Street. The seventeen-­year-­old Franklin, working for his brother, a printer, had come on an errand. Coming apparently into the larger downstairs study, Franklin saw Cotton’s father, “very old and feeble,” sitting in a corner chair. Cotton himself, who was at his desk, “was in the vigor of his preaching and usefulness.” After young Benjamin had concluded his business, he was surprised that Cotton, as was his custom, engaged him in “some pleasant and instructive conversation.” The two continued to chat as Cotton ushered him out down a cramped passage “which had a beam across it lower than my head.” As Franklin told it, Cotton “continued talking which occasioned me to keep my face partly towards him as I retired, when he suddenly cried out, ‘Stoop! Stoop!’ Not immediately understanding what he meant, I hit my head hard against the beam.” Cotton always liked wordplay when giving advice, and, as Franklin remembered it, Cotton, probably smiling, then said: “Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high; Stoop, young man, stoop — as you go through the world — and you’ll miss many hard thumps.”

Franklin’s story is a famous anecdote that reflects pleasantly on both men. Two other famous stories of Cotton’s pastoral study are more ominous. When he was just beginning his career, he and his wife helped heal a demon-­possessed girl by having her live in their house. While she was there, Cotton discovered that his library had a calming effect on her. She could sit and read for a good part of an afternoon as he sat across from her doing his own work. Satan discovered this too and demons would throw her into fits in order to bar her from entering the study. Cotton surmised that Satan hated the pastor’s study on Hanover Street. Later in his career, during a smallpox epidemic, a bomb was lobbed up from the street into Cotton’s first-­floor study at the rented house. The fuse fell out and the bomb failed to explode. In the great spiritual war between the hosts of heaven and hell, it was obvious to Cotton that Satan thought of his study as enemy territory.

More than a spiritual battlefield, Cotton believed his study was a kind of holy ground. The Bible sitting on the desk, he believed, was a type of burning bush, a book from which God talked. Cotton viewed his bookshelves as a heavenly choir supporting the primary revelation of the Bible on his desk. More than a room for reading, writing, and receiving visitors, Cotton treated his study as the place where he and God talked most freely. Of course Cotton believed in praying all day long wherever he was. He tells us that he would pray in his latrine. He prayed while brewing his tea. He prayed while walking down busy streets. He tells us that he had a previously prepared set of quick prayers for situations that would arise while walking in town. For example, every time he caught himself admiring a particularly beautiful woman, he trained himself to immediately pray: “Lord, beautify the soul of that person with thy comeliness.” Cotton prayed everywhere. His study, however, was a special place for particularly intense prayer. He would go there when great matters were weighing on him — a dying child or a particular petition. He would often lie prostrate on the floor. His Diary tells us that he would put his mouth in the dust.

More than simply a place to lay his particular petitions before God, his study was a place where God’s communication with him was most lively and direct. Angels came to him in his study with messages from God. The Holy Spirit would often overwhelm him with divine presence as he prayed midst his books. Sometimes he wrote his sermons while kneeling at his desk chair. Day in and day out, the Bible was God’s best means of communication with him. Cotton would, at times, open the Bible randomly to let God give him a distinct message for a particular situation. Mostly he simply read the Bible every morning and evening to learn what God wanted him to know. Cotton believed that the Bible coordinated all the knowledge that filled his bookshelves. Daily, from 1693 to his death thirty-­five years later, he worked on a massive Biblia Americana that would not only illuminate the Bible’s teaching but also show how the Bible illuminated knowledge of ancient human and natural history. But just because God spoke through the Bible, that did not mean that the Bible was always understandable. Cotton heartily affirmed that the Bible was filled with “evangelical mystery.” One expected mysteries when God communicated. In the Biblia Americana Cotton offered a witty little circularity: “the gospel is full of this mystery, and the Bible is not understood without it.”

In order to understand Cotton Mather we have to understand the way he listened to the Bible, meditated on the Bible, relied on the Bible, and even wildly abandoned himself to the Bible. As he told young Ben Franklin to stoop, he himself stooped to the Bible. He went to the Bible to trust and obey. We should start his biography with a picture in our mind: Saturday night during a cold March in 1685. The unmarried twenty-­two-­year-­old Cotton was up in the small study that his parents had cleared out for him until he got married and had his own house. Cotton was not yet settled on a career as a pastor, but he was regularly preaching at North Church. Whatever he was going to do with his life, he knew he wanted to live for the Lord. The only way he knew how to live such a life was to radically embrace the Bible. In that makeshift study, most likely a cold room without a fireplace, he asked himself the crucial question: “Why do I believe the Scriptures to be the Word of God?” In his Diary he described what followed: “I took into my hands the Bible . . . and presenting myself with it, on my knees before the Lord, I professed unto Him, that I did embrace the precious book, as His Word; resolving ever therefore to credit all the revelations of it: that I would love it, prize it, converse with it, as His: that I would be so awed by the promises, and threatenings and histories of it, as to study a conformity unto the precepts of it, while I have my being. So, I blessed Him, for His vouchsafing of this invaluable Word unto me.”

There on his knees among the books of his start-­up library he set the foundation for his life as a pastor and a scholar. In this he was not abnormal. Many a pastor-­scholar had done this before him and would do this after him. What made him the first in a long tradition of evangelical scholar-­pastors is the outward circumstances of this affirmation. Within a few years of this prayer the Puritan charter of Massachusetts would be revoked and the course set in New England toward a broader, more moderate, Protestantism. People of an “evangelical interest” wanting to find their way in this new situation needed leadership. Cotton took for himself the role of leader. He was not shy. At one point he noted in his Diary: “I am exceedingly sensible that the Grace of Meekness is very defective in me.”

Home School and Catechism

Cotton Mather was born February 12, 1663, in the house of his maternal grandfather on a rise just beneath Beacon Hill. Boston was then a small but growing port town of about three thousand people. The house overlooked the First Church meetinghouse where his grandfather was minister. Standing on the porch of this house, this young family could look to the north, across a muddy gully spanned by two wooden bridges, and see the meetinghouse of North Church. The summer following Cotton’s birth, Increase Mather, his father, began a long career as a minister of that church. Cotton would also become a pastor of that church. Visible behind the meetinghouse to the left was Copp’s Hill where he and his mother and father would be buried.

The Mather family moved in 1670 to a church-­owned house on what we call today “North Square.” Today, as back then, the square is actually a s...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Last Decades of Puritan Boston
• 2. Cambridge: City of Books in the Republic of Letters
• 3. Listening for a Call
• 4. Entanglements of Church and State
• 5. The Birth of the American Evangelical Tradition
• 6. A Biblical Enlightenment
• 7. The Practice at the Top of Christianity
• Acknowledgments and Bibliography
• The Cotton Mather Trail: A Walking Tour in Boston Connected to the Freedom Trail
• Index