Increase Mather, clergyman, born Dorchester, Mass., 21 June, 1639. Son of Richard. Graduated at Harvard and at Trinity College, Dublin. After preaching in various parts of England and in the island of Guernsey, he returned to America in 1661 on account of the Restoration, being unwilling to conform. He divided his time between the North Church at Boston and his father’s church at Dorchester until 1664, when he was regularly ordained pastor of the former, holding the position until his death. He was elected president of Harvard in 1681, but did not accept. Was elected acting president, 1685, became president in 1692 and served until 1701. By his own statement, he concurred in the opinion of the twelve clergymen who advised Gov. William Phips to proceed with the witchcraft trials in June, 1692, but having become convinced of the unreliability of the so-called “spectre-evidence,” he published a book called “Cases of Conscience concerning Witchcrafts and Evil Spirits personating Men” (1693), deprecating convictions for this alone. In this book, however, he expressed his approval of his son Cotton’s “Wonders of the Invisible World.” He had meanwhile rendered the colony valuable services in England. Originally a leader in the opposition to the surrender of the colony’s charter, demanded by Governor Andros in 1687, he was sent to England the year after to plead the colony’s cause. He obtained a new and fairly satisfactory charter from William and Mary, and returned with it in 1692. This instrument united the colonies of Massachusetts and Plymouth under one jurisdiction, and remained in force up to the Revolution. The list of his published volumes numbers one hundred and thirty-six, some of which are “The Life and Death of Rev. Richard Mather” (1670), “Heavens Alarm to the World” (1681), and “An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences” (1684), also known as “Remarkable Providences.” Died, Boston, Mass., 23 Aug., 1723.
Personal
In the morning, repairing to his study (where his custom was to sit up very late, even until midnight and perhaps after it) he deliberately read a chapter, and made a prayer, and then plied what of reading and writing he had before him. At nine o’clock, he came down and read a chapter, and made a prayer with his family. He then returned unto the work of the study. Coming down to dinner, he quickly went up again, and begun the afternoon with another prayer. There he went on with the work of the study till the evening. Then with another prayer he again went unto his Father; after which he did more at the work of the study. At nine o’clock, he came down to his family sacrifices. Then he went up again to the work of the study, which anon he concluded with another prayer; and so he betook himself unto his repose.
He lived to see wonderful changes in the political hemisphere. The Mathers were a race of puritans; he knew the strict sect first in his native plains of North America; but wishing to have a nearer view of it, he came to Britain when it was in its meridian splendor, in the reign of Charles I. The saints could do no other than find employment for the talents of so far-famed an apostle. He settled at Gloucester, where he remained until the brightest plumage of this sect had faded away. Leaving the city of Gloucester, he retired to Guernsey, where he acted as chaplain to a regiment; but the violence which had expelled him from Gloucester followed him even there, so that he applied himself again to the favourite seat of his beloved system of Gospel grace. There new honours, greater than Britain would have bestowed, awaited him: he was elevated to the highest seat of learning, being elected president of Harvard college in Cambridge, in New England. As an American author he has done credit to the appointment.
During his presidency of Harvard College, Mr. Mather received the title of Doctor in Divinity from the faculty of that institution. His diploma was the first of the kind issued in America, and he was a worthy recipient of that honor.
Probably he came nearer than any other man of modern times to the apostle’s requisition, of “praying always, with all prayer and supplication in the spirit.” In addition to mental ejaculations—those arrows of which his biographer tells us his quiver was full—he was habitually on his knees six times a day, in his family and closet prayers!
Here, then, was a person, born in America, bred in America,—a clean specimen of what America could do for itself in the way of keeping up the brave stock of its first imported citizens; a man every way capable of filling any place in public leadership made vacant by the greatest of the Fathers; probably not a whit behind the best of them in scholarship, in eloquence, in breadth of view, in knowledge of affairs, in every sort of efficiency. As to learning, it has been said that he even exceeded all other New-Englanders of the colonial time, except his own son, Cotton. On the day when he was graduated at our little rustic university, he had the accomplishments usual among the best scholars of the best universities of the old world; he could converse fluently in Latin, and could read and write Hebrew and Greek; and his numberless publications in after life bear marks of a range of learned reading that widened as he went on in years, and drew into its hospitable gulf some portions of nearly all literatures, especially the most obscure and uncouth. His habits as a student were those of the mighty theologians and pulpit-orators among whom he grew up. He had the appalling capacity of working in his study sixteen hours a day.
General
But though less learned than his son, and possessing less exuberance of fancy, he had more sound, practical judgment—more common sense. His publications many of them are still extant. The style will compare with that of the best authors of the seventeenth century. As a preacher, Dr. Mather was at the head of his profession in this country.
Mather was a learned man, and a solid and (we are told) effective sermonizer, whose printed discourses have a wide range, abound in quotations, after the fashion of the time, served their purpose, and really were not worth typographical perpetuation. Most printed sermons are like letter-files or bound volumes of daily newspapers, never referred to, save for a date, and for controversial purposes, and those of this great Boston figure are not exceptions. Increase Mather apparently had a deeper knowledge than that of Cotton, with less facility, less fondness for display, and less bungling inaccuracy.
He was learned, sober, and accurate; and curiously bound up in his massive character was a taste for the supernatural, which found literary expression in the only noticeable work of his that has reached our day, “An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences.” It is a bundle of strange coincidences, escapes, punishments and ghost-stories, each bearing an obtrusive moral. The book served as a sort of introduction to the Salem witchcraft delusion, which ran its course a few years later. In modern after-type, without the morals, is the “Phantasms of the Living,” recently published by the English Society for Psychical Research.
The last of the clerical autocrats.
