MATHER, INCREASE, and MATHER, COTTON

(Increase: 1639-1723; Cotton: 1663-1728), prominent Puritan ministers and leaders. Increase Mather, son of Richard Mather, first pastor of the Dorchester Church, assumed his father's position of prominence in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and became an effective ambassador for the colony's interests at the courts of James II and William III when its original charter was being renegotiated. At first opposed to the Half-Way Covenant, which loosened the requirements for baptism, he reversed his position and in 1675 published an influential book, The First Principles of New England, asserting the founders' latitude on the question of who was entitled to be baptized. Author of more than one hundred works—sermons, political tracts, chronicles of the Indian wars, ecclesiastical treatises—Increase played a moderating role during the Salem witchcraft crisis, reflecting on the events in his Cases of Conscience concerning Evil Spirits (1692). In later years he was involved in the founding of Yale College, which he hoped would become the bastion of orthodoxy that Harvard had ceased to be.

Cotton Mather, an even more prolific writer and controversialist than his father, published nearly five hundred works, of which the most important is the Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), a massive history of New England under the aspect of divine providence. Though born to the Puritan purple (he was a grandson of John Cotton on his mother's side), Mather was in some respects more an Enlightenment figure than an orthodox Calvinist. He played an important role in disseminating scientific knowledge to the New England community (he wrote a treatise on medicine, The Angel of Bethesda, that remained unpublished in his lifetime), and, with Increase, he was at the forefront of the battle for acceptance of the smallpox vaccine. He also shared the pulpit of Boston's Old North Church with his father. The two fought against ecclesiastical innovation as New England was forced into toleration and some of the basic practices of the founders' generation (such as restricted communion and public profession of faith) came under attack. He remains best known, however, for his support of the witchcraft persecution, which he explained in his Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), a book that can be read—more sympathetically now than then—as a poignant assertion of New England's continuing centrality as the battleground between God and Satan.

Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639-1723 (1988); Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (1971); Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (1984).

Andrew Delbanco

See also Half-Way Covenant; New England Colonies; Puritanism; Religion; Salem Witch Trials.