Bonifacius—usually known by its running title, Essays to Do Good—has always had a better reputation than the author who published it anonymously in 1710. It is Cotton Mather's historical fate to be considered largely as a transitional figure whose prodigious but narrow mind stretched inadequately between the zealous founding of the Bible Commonwealth and the enlightened struggle for the Republic. His efforts to retain the old Puritan values along with the old Puritan power have tended to diminish him in contrast to the giants who had first established that power in Boston. His advanced ideas on medicine, botany, education, philanthropy, and family discipline look like minor departures from reactionary principles when they are set beside the beliefs of eighteenth-century secular thinkers.

The habit of viewing Mather in the shadow of his potent ancestors began with his parents, who named him for his maternal grandfather, John Cotton, and it continued to affect his life until, in his sixtieth year, he wrote the life of his distinguished father, Increase Mather. When Cotton Mather was an eleven-year-old freshman at Harvard in 1674, his father became embroiled with other members of the Board of Overseers in a public battle that nearly destroyed the college. When the boy became at fifteen the youngest Harvard graduate, the president reminded him publicly of his duty to emulate not only his father but Richard Mather and John Cotton, his two famous grandfathers. Cotton Mather eventually devoted his entire life as a pastor to the very congregation that his father served as teacher. For forty years he worked closely with his father in various political controversies and social crises, from the loss of the colony's original charter, the rebellion against Sir Edmund Andros, the acceptance of a new charter, and the witchcraft trials, through debates about church government and membership and control of Harvard and Yale early in the new century. As a prolific historian, moreover, he wrote the lives of the first governors, the first ministers, the first Harvard presidents—the monumental church-history of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana.

Thus Mather unhappily observed the dissolution of the old theocracy even while he cheerfully did his best to extend pious influence in the community through his retrospective writings and his schemes for social action. At the same time, he labored enthusiastically in behalf of the new science. He sent reports of American phenomena to the Royal Society in London, which elected him a Fellow. He collected and published in New England the discoveries of European scientists. He persuaded a medical doctor to try inoculation during a smallpox epidemic in Boston. By the time he died in 1728, it was clear that the millennium he had so confidently predicted thirty years earlier was not yet to be expected. New England would have to settle instead for the imperfect Enlightenment.

For three centuries both Cotton Mather and his works have been discussed almost exclusively in this context of change. The churchhistory, we say, looks backward to Mather's grandfathers; The Christian Philosopher and Bonifacius look forward to Benjamin Franklin. Indeed, it was Franklin himself who first stressed the value of Essays to Do Good as a transitional document. In his very first published work Franklin paid Mather the tribute of parody by adopting the pseudonym of Mrs Silence Dogood (counting on his Bostonian readers to know that the author of Essays to Do Good was rarely silent). Half a century later¹ Franklin told Samuel Mather that Bonifacius had turned his own youthful thoughts to methods of doing good, and again in his autobiography he acknowledged Bonifacius along with the works of Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan as one of the most valuable influences on his early thought. The relationship would be evident even if Franklin had not written so explicitly. Commentators have repeatedly cited it ever since George Burder quoted Franklin's letter to Samuel Mather in an English edition of Essays to Do Good (London, 1807).

Insistence on such historical relationships has taught us much about the changes from pious Puritanism to moralism, from striving in the world for the glory of God to striving for enlightened self-interest. But this perspective has also done considerable harm. Students of historical change have often blurred our understanding of Franklin's and Mather's individual minds and books. The intense light focused on one set of eighteenth-century statements has left others in the darkness. Mather, especially, has been projected so rigidly against what he looked back to, or what he anticipated, that it is unusually difficult to discover what he was.

The modern reader of Bonifacius must be prepared to recognize two influential versions of this distortion. The first concerns Puritan piety; the second, Puritan commercial ethics and benevolence.

Perry Miller's magnificent volumes on The New England Mind argue that the earliest New England Puritans temporarily united pious faith and reasoned, vigorous action under a grand modification of Abraham's Covenant. The second volume dramatizes the inevitable separation of faith from thought and the inevitable subordination of faith as the Covenant dissolves under the pressure of seventeenth-century events in Europe and America. Cotton Mather is the pivotal figure in Miller's narrative of historical change. At first he preaches jeremiads, long sermons condemning the sins of the land. But as he and other clergymen lose political power in the early decades of the eighteenth century, Mather resorts to new devices, both social and psychological. Now he abandons the jeremiad. Renouncing hope of political power, he tries instead to influence events by publishing 'pietist' instructions for communal life, including proposals for voluntary associations to reform morals. Privately, moreover, he takes emotional refuge from the religious decline of New England by retreating often to his study; there, according to Miller, Mather tries to 'stimulate' his overwrought nervous system to a factitious piety that seeks explicit, divine assurances and demands prostrate, methodical prayer and fasting. In this analysis his correspondence with such foreign reformers as Auguste Francke of Halle is an accidental consequence of Mather's compulsive scribbling and of his response to New England's needs and his own. It has nothing to do with international pietist movements of the time. Mather, indeed, is astonished to find himself in the vanguard, an agent of the new pietism.

Miller presents Bonifacius as a milestone on the downward road from John Winthrop to Dickens' caricature of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, Thomas Gradgrind, and he contends that Cotton Mather was further from Winthrop than from Gradgrind. Bonifacius, he concedes, is 'not quite a surrender of piety to business', but he declares that Mather found in Bonifacius 'a new form of marketing religion'. He describes Mather's appeal to the inherent reward of doing good as a sentimental invitation to luxuriate in the 'delicious swooning joy of the thing itself'. He sees Mather's voluntary associations not as part of an effort to liberate New Englanders but as an attempt to reassert clerical control, and he associates Mather with those service clubs (from the Y.M.C.A. to the Rotary) that work for conformity of various kinds in modern America.²

The chief trouble with this interpretation is that it is almost completely subservient to a generalization about the decline in piety. It cannot admit the possibility that Cotton Mather was as pious as his ancestors; it insists on explaining his piety as a neurotic, belated reaction to historical events that occurred when he was past thirty.

The consequent distortion of Bonifacius begins at the beginning, with Mather's title. Because of our modern interest in placing Mather on the line from Puritanism to utilitarianism, scholars have customarily shortened the original title of Bonifacius in a way that changes its significance. Bonifacius, they have called it; an Essay upon the Good that is to be Devised and Designed by Those who Desire … to Do Good While they Live. This seems in any case a strangely illogical title—as if there were others, besides those who desire to do good, who should devise and design good! The important distortion, however, is the change in Mather's purpose. He did not really write for those who desire to do good but for those who desire 'to Answer the Great End of Life', and who therefore desire to do good while they live.

The great end of life, for Cotton Mather as for John Winthrop before him and Jonathan Edwards after, was not to do good but to glorify God. Mather had made this plain from the beginning of his career as a preacher, and at the height of his political power. Just after he had served as one of the chief conspirators to overthrow the tyrant Sir Edmund Andros in 1689, he published a volume of sermons at the request of his wealthy father-in-law, John Phillips, who on recovering from a serious illness had offered to subsidize the publication of four sermons on 'Practical Godliness'. None of these sermons is a jeremiad. All relate devotional piety to doing good:

The chief end of man is to glorify Good … To praise God is to render and procure a due acknowledgment of His excellence … This, this praise of the LORD is the end of our life in the world.

This is the end of our being. We are told that we have our being in God. Of all things whatever this is then most reasonable, that we should have our being for God; and our being Him, is not expressed without our praising of Him … Every man should say: 'I live that God who is worthy to be praised, may have the praises of my obedience to Him.'

The saints in Heaven, Mather says in the same sermon, have their appropriate way of praising God, by 'shouting Hallelujah, Hallelujah, before the Throne'; but men living on earth have special, additional ways of praising Him here: 'by the discharge of many relations, which the dead saints are strangers unto. We may now praise God as parents, as masters, officers in the Church or Common-wealth. All those capacities shall die with us.'³

In these sermons there is no tension between doing good and praising God. Doing good is one way of praising Him. Of course, we can find sentences that support the emphasis on practical striving in the world: 'To serve God was the very errand which we were brought into the wilderness upon'; 'the service of God is His worship'; 'there are two things incumbent upon us, to do good and to get good'. But the good we are to get is the capacity to enjoy God. Lifting such statements out of their pious context is a serious error. Although it may indicate those subtle changes of emphasis that eventually prevailed in American life when the idea of God's sovereignty had been weakened, it can misrepresent not only individual books and the condition of individual minds, but at last the very history that such abstractions were meant to serve.

As early as 1689, then, Cotton Mather had set forth the principle on which he would organize Bonifacius twenty years later.⁴ He would begin with the reformation of the self and would then move outward into the community, suggesting methods of service in the various 'relations' of life. In the intervening years he often followed this procedure in composing biographies. Thus his life of John Eliot opens outward from personal piety to family government to preaching in the church, and finally to Eliot's evangelism among the Indians.

The organization communicates the central purpose: to praise God in every act of life. By 1688 Mather had adopted the 'delightful and surprising way of thinking' that he attributed to his deceased younger brother Nathanael. His language suggests that he was perhaps as close to Jonathan Edwards and to Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman as he was to Thomas Gradgrind: Nathanael Mather, Cotton Mather wrote, 'considered that the whole Creation was full of God; and that there was not a leaf of grass in the field, which might not make an observer to be sensible of the Lord. He apprehended that the idle minutes of our lives were many more than a short liver should allow: that the very filings of gold, and of time, were exceeding precious; and, that there were little fragments of hours intervening between our more stated businesses, wherein our thoughts of God might be no less pleasant than fre quent with us.'⁵ Just as Henry Thoreau would later tell New England's time-passing knitters that it is impossible to kill time without injuring eternity, Mather warned busy Bostonians that God would 'find an eternity to damn the man that cannot find a time pray'.⁶

The terms in which Mather implored Christians to 'redeem time' show that his pietism was in full vigor in 1682, before he was twenty and before the original charter of Massachusetts Bay had been revoked. He was taking John Winthrop's original message to the community but with a new emphasis on method, on the deliberate saturation of one's life in pious action, and especially on ingenuity. 'Thus be zealous of good works, work for God', he said in 1689. 'Let even your eating, your trading, your visiting, be done as a service for the Lord, and let your time, your strength, your estates, all the powers of your spirits and all the members of your bodies be ingeniously laid out in that service. Often ask your own souls, What is there that I may do for God? Even court, and hunt advantages to be serviceable.'⁷

The origins of Mather's interest in such hunting lie deep in seventeenth-century Protestant pastoral work. To understand his career we must remember that Cotton Mather was the pastor in the Boston church which his father served as teacher, and that he therefore had a special duty to attend to the people's daily needs. From the beginning of his professional life, he had a remarkable opportunity to apply his great energy over the whole range of Bostonian life. His social action began with secluded meditations in which, with the occasional aid of specific assurances from an angel, he prayed for divine support of afflicted parishioners and of Massachusetts battles against the Devil and the French; it extended to the writing of histories and biographies, to joining the leadership of a revolution, to advising governors, addressing the legislature, offering medical advice, curing the bewitched child of a parishioner, making pastoral visits, catechizing children, administering church discipline to offending members of the congregation, and writing books to teach the most ordinary people methods of becoming Christians and then practicing Christianity in their daily lives.

For some of this work a number of English writers had provided valuable guides. Cotton Mather and his brother Nathanael were especially fond of Joseph Hall's Occasional Meditations (3rd edition, 1633), William Waller's Divine Meditations (1680), Henry Scudder's The Christian's Daily Walk (1628). Cotton Mather also borrowed from Richard Baxter's immense folio Christian Directory (1673) and How to Do Good to Many; or, the Public Good is the Christian's Life (1682).

All these books have in common with Mather's efforts a determination to bring the common into touch with the divine. Hall's meditations, which both Nathanael and Cotton Mather emulated, drew religious lessons from such conventional earthly experiences as 'the sight of a grave digged up', 'gnats in the sun', 'the sight of a drunken man', 'bees fighting', 'the sight of a piece of money under water', 'a defamation dispersed'. Ready to let every leaf of grass make him sensible of the Lord, Nathanael Mather notes that a kettle of water taken from the fire in a cold New England room is quickly 'seized with lukewarmness'. So, he concludes, are Christians after they have been warmed by some awareness of God's glory. When John Winthrop interprets the killing of a snake during a synod meeting or Nathanael Mather jumps from his 'bed of security', braving the cold to put on 'Christ's garments' and walk to the fire, the lesson in this literary form is always made explicit, and the value of the meditation depends on the aptness of explicit parallels. This is a principle Benjamin Franklin kept in mind when he perfected a quite different kind of anecdote a century later in his autobiography.

In a book like Bonifacius the method is reversed. The pastor, accustomed to studying minor events for evidence of God's will, now uses his ingenuity to find explicit ways in which a Christian can express the benevolence with which grace has endowed him. Christians need to be told how to do good, especially when they live outside the traditional authority of a hierarchical church and in a swiftly changing society. Yet the movement should not be seen simply as a weakening of old Calvinist reliance on faith and predestination. It seems instead a natural extension of the kind of impulse that led Puritans to establish the New England colonies in the first place. Once the community of saints has established its right to exist, it must set about expanding God's work in the world. 'Though God set up lights so small as will serve but for one room, and though we must begin at home, we must far more esteem and desire the good of multitudes', Baxter said, and we must set 'no bounds to our endeavors, but what God and disability set'. Bonifacius echoes: the magistrate is 'the Minister of God for good. His empty name will produce a cruel crime, if he don't set himself to do good, as far as ever he can extend his influences.' Americans in the second half of the twentieth century have seen this kind of rhetoric applied to vast proposals for a Great Society at home and for aid to multitudes in Asia.

For Cotton Mather, moreover, the millennium was not a metaphor for secular achievement. It was literally imminent. He wrote quite seriously, on the one hand, about exactly how the righteous in America might be spared from the fires sweeping the earth before the establishment of the Kingdom here.⁸ And he did his best, in the year he wrote Bonifacius, to see that Bostonians accepted 'the true doctrine of the Chiliad' so that, by eliminating all 'base dealing'—all 'dirty ways of dishonesty'—from the market place, they might make their street as golden as the one promised in the Book of Revelations from which he had taken his text. He preached this sermon to the General Assembly of the colony, before whom he 'proclaimed unto all the world' that 'ill-dealings are not at all countenanced; no, they are vehemently disallowed, by the religion of NEW-ENGLAND'. The gold he referred to was not profit but precept: 'The street of the city is pure gold' meant to him that 'the business of the CITY, shall be managed by the Golden Rule. The things that use to be done in the market-place, shall be done without corruption.'⁹

It is in this context that we must consider the second historical distortion of Mather's ideas. Just as emphasis on the decline of piety may overlook his concentration on divine glory, so efforts to trace the Protestant Ethic can ignore not only the divine object of human striving but also his thorough conviction of community. A. Whitney Griswold, in an important essay published more than thirty years ago,¹⁰ cited impressive evidence to show that Mather stressed the Christian's obligations to work diligently in his calling; Mather repeated the biblical promise (so effective with Benjamin Franklin) that the young man who was diligent would stand before kings, and he urged the young man who wished to rise by his business to rise to his business. But although Griswold scrupulously links this personal calling with the general vocation of a Christian, his interest in linking Mather's advice to the 'rugged individualism' of a later time ignores the perfectly explicit condemnation of all sharp dealing and dishonesty in financial affairs. Mather insisted that New England's professions of extraordinary religion would be worthless if its 'dealing' should be 'defective in honesty … Let a man be never such a professor and pretender of religion, if he be not a fair-dealer, THAT MAN'S RELIGION IS VAIN. A noise about faith and repentance, among them that forget MORAL HONESTY, 'tis but an empty noise. The men are utter strangers to faith and repentance … Woe, woe, woe, to you professors, and HYPOCRITES, who can make a show of this and that piety, and purity; but can cheat, and cozen, and oppress, and wrong other people in your dealing with them!'¹¹

Far from supporting rugged individualism, Mather declared that the golden rule should have its application to business through the scriptural command of Paul (I Corinthians 10:24): 'Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth.' Lying was to be forbidden, all dealings were to be 'transparent glass', and neither the foolish nor the poor were to be exploited: 'For men to overreach others, because they find them ignorant, or screw grievously upon them, only because they are poor and low, and in great necessities; to keep up the necessaries of human life (I say the necessaries, which I always distinguish from the superfluities) at an immoderate price, merely because other people want them, when we can easily spare them; 'tis an abomination!' For necessities, at least, the law of supply and demand was not supreme.¹²

Thus, although Mather confessed that he knew neither the niceties nor the mysteries of the market place, he did not rest content with prescribing the golden rule. Stating that imperative even in its most positive form¹³ would hardly forbid ruthless competition if the individual merchant should be willing to have his neighbor compete just as fiercely as himself. Mather did not supply an ethic fit for the mysteries and niceties, but he did condemn many commercial 'abominations', from the slave trade ('one of the worst kinds of thievery in the world') to the adulteration or misrepresentation of a large number of specified products.¹⁴

It was a theological principle that gave Mather's sense of community its importance in practical affairs, in his day as well as through the later teachings of Franklin. To consider the principle we must enter that dizzy world of circular argument and begged questions in which Puritans struggled to distinguish faith from works without becoming either antinomians or (to use a word from Bonifacius) meritmongers.

In that world a Christian must recognize a central paradox: his assurance of salvation depends on his renouncing all claims to salvation that place any confidence or value in himself. He must become convinced that he does not deserve salvation and that he cannot earn it. If convinced of his inadequacy but unable to attain a conviction of faith, he may fall into the sin of despair, a beginning of hell on earth. If he does find a conviction of Christ's power and willingness to redeem him, he must test the conviction by regularly examining his attitude and his conduct. Good works cannot save him—indeed, no works are truly good unless they proceed from a justifying faith—but the consequence of true faith is a benevolence that impels the converted sinner to praise God through obedient service. Bonifacius declares, therefore, that 'a work less faith is a worthless faith'.

Historians gain some value from turning this process around (as some busy, conscientious sinners must have done) to mean not only that worklessness proved worthlessness but also that works proved worth. Often, however, the reversal costs too much, for it blocks appreciation of the great power in one of the chief articles of American faith. The great power comes from the conviction that what is right, works. Both Mather and Franklin worked to propagate this conviction, and both appealed to the reader's self-interest, but neither man ever contended that whatever works is right. Mather and other Puritans actually believed that prosperity could be as threatening a providential judgment as calamity. Merciful dispensations, Mather said, 'are so many trials whether we will hear God speaking in our prosperity; or whether when we wax fat we will kick against the Lord'.

For many people, at least, the drama of guilt, self-doubt, and self-accusation was a terrible reality, and so, too, was the kind of faith that Mather preached. (Even Franklin recognized it during the Great Awakening.) Once that reality stands at the center of our attention, we need not be religious to understand Mather's declaration that good works are a part of, as well as prescribed steps along the way to, 'the great salvation'. The penitent sinner who wanted to join the church might be crushed (in Edward Taylor's phrase) between desire and fear—between a longing to profess his conversion and fear that it is delusory. Having experienced this kind of paralysis, the conscientious sinner might well be grateful for rescue, even in this world, from the psychological self-torture of futility. The ability to act might well be the worldly consequence of such faith.

Not only the motive but the social consequence, too, is a principle or a power rather than a quantitative fact. Just as Mather and Franklin, despite their obvious differences, worked outward from the idea of virtue, gratitude, duty, and wisdom to acts of service, so they conceived of the good done to others as a beginning rather than as charity in the limited sense of alms. Bonifacius cites the primitive church's doctrine that the sin of a Christian's neighbor is a sin by the Christian himself. As Richard Baxter ordered Christians to succor poor men's bodies in order to make it possible to save their souls,¹⁵ Mather argues that the American Indians must be 'civilized' so that they can be 'Christianized'. He praises the English philanthropist Thomas Gouge for finding work for the poor, and he commands his own readers to 'find 'em work, set 'em to work, keep 'em to work'. Benjamin Franklin says it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.

In these years both Old and New England had need of the ingenuity to which Mather appealed. The vigorous new capitalist organizations in 'this projecting age' gave such different authors as Richard Baxter, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Cotton Mather, and (by the early 1720s) Benjamin Franklin examples of mutual cooperation that might be used for the public good. Baxter's Christian Directory directed Christians 'How to Improve all Helps and Means' toward a Christian life in the world. Defoe's Essay on Projects (1697) proposed Friendly Societies for several kinds of life and medical insurance; Swift's ironic A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) suggested a scheme for institutionalizing virtue through the Queen's power of preferment and the Court's leadership of fashion.

In England the Societies for the Reformation of Manners had already come under suspicion as petty meddlers by the time Swift published this proposal, but the social need for such organizations seems more interesting than the modern temptation to think of their motives as simply repressive. Systematic welfare programs were of course unknown. Widespread drunkenness seems to have been a relatively new problem, and it existed in a context that may now be difficult to imagine. Wine was often poisonously adulterated; alcoholic and other debtors and petty criminals were locked up indiscriminately in prisons in which conditions were far more abominable than the worst kind of do-gooding. Epidemics in these foul places sometimes made the punishment for civil offenses as lethal as the capital penalty officially attached to so many crimes. There was no effectively organized, properly trained, or trustworthy police force to prevent the growing number of violent crimes on city streets, which were generally unlighted. Private citizens armed to defend themselves. Two years after Bonifacius was published, a group of drunken young men who called themselves Mohocks terrorized London with atrocious beatings and mutilations that seemed the more terrible because they were apparently unmotivated.

I do not mean to contend that life in Queen Anne's London was a nightmare. The point is that specific needs in the society, needs unmet by government or other established organizations, encouraged the new techniques for organized benevolence and that in the absence of better preventive methods religious writers naturally encouraged Christians to set an individual example. Nor should we forget, even when considering the restrictive nature of some actions, the disastrous consequences of indiscretions that may seem minor today. Under the prevailing Canon Law, for example, it was easy to find oneself entrapped in a virtually indissoluble marriage, and many Londoners—sailors and young gentlemen alike—suffered from a lucrative conspiracy of clergyman, landlord, prostitute, and lawyer. In such circumstances advice against drinking, which neither Cotton nor Increase Mather ever opposed in its moderate form, and advice against falling into debt need not be officious. Meddlesomely repressive though they might become, societies like Mather's Young Men's Associations, Count Zinzendorf's Slaves of Virtue, and Benjamin Franklin's projected Society of the Free and Easy grew out of a positive desire to free men for the practice of virtue in this world.

What we need to remember, then, is the firmness with which Mather's good-doing is tied to the praise of God, the certainty with which his exhortations to be diligent rely on traditional ethics. Bonifacius is addressed to Christians; Mather invites unbelievers to close the book until, by repentance, they begin to live. He is not marketing religion but bringing religion into the market.

Besides a few specific ideas, which deserve separate attention, the key value of Bonifacius lies in the resourceful application of methodical ingenuity to pious affairs. Christians, Mather says, should employ their wits for God's service. As Thoreau will later complain that farmers speculate in herds of cattle in order to acquire shoestrings, Mather charges New Englanders with wasting grand capacities on trivial ends. He exhorts them to apply to good works the same ingenuity noted in their business affairs, to equal the degree of contrivance (without the deception) employed by the Devil and the wicked in pursuit of evil ends.

Bonifacius thus appeals simultaneously to one of the most powerful traits in the New England character and to one of the strongest intellectual forces of the eighteenth century. Mather invokes for his divine purpose the desire to invent new means, to contrive, devise, experiment. Nor does he content himself with precepts. He repeatedly sets the example, for the impulse has come from one of the most powerful sources of his own conduct.

Scholarship has rarely found a less appropriate figure than the cliché that says Cotton Mather's knowledge was undigested. Ever since the early 1680s Mather had been scribbling in private as well as for publication, and he worked hard to reduce his experience and his knowledge to usable form. In his Quotidiana, copybooks in which he recorded scraps of quotations, scientific curiosities, and historical anecdotes, he laboriously compiled indexes so that he would be able to call on the information in his sermons and other works. In his conversation, moreover, he was remarkably quick to apply his diverse knowledge with an ingenuity that was sometimes startling. His diary, 'Paterna',¹⁶ and Bonifacius demonstrate that this quality was more than a natural aptitude. He hunted advantages for pious service in conversation, in idle moments of dinner parties, in the observance of various people as he walked the streets. And of course he wrote down the suggestions, which ranged from prayers to be said on seeing a beautiful woman, and resolutions to drop the name of a poor parishioner when visiting a rich one, to planning the conversation at his family's meals so that the children would be instructed.

It is easy to treat this carefully nurtured habit as comically tasteless by selecting one detail, such as Mather's resolution to meditate while urinating. Even when we supply the context for this example and notice that Mather feared the excruciating pain of kidney stones, which had tortured his grandfather, many of us will find it difficult to accept his resolution to offer up thanks, while urinating, for the grace that has spared him from his grandfather's affliction. Such a meditation can be defended, too, but the criticism misses the point. What matters is the total concentration on developing the discipline of pious resourcefulness. For every ludicrous example there is a passage that seems successful. Benjamin Franklin reports that when he accidentally hit his head on a beam in Mather's house, Mather told him to stoop always as he walked through life, so that he would save himself many a hard thump. Mather resolves in 'Paterna' never to offer his children play as a reward for hard work, lest they come to consider diversion better than diligence. Instead he contrives to punish them by refusing to teach them something, and he resolves to reward them by teaching them 'some curious thing'.

Nor was there any hesitation to work out a much more elaborate meditation relating to recent scientific theories. A long paragraph from 'Paterna' will illustrate the kind of personal resolution that led Mather to write his Christian Philosopher. Here he comes very close to using eighteenth-century science in precisely the way that ennobles the works of Jonathan Edwards:

I am continually entertained with weighty body, or matter tending to the center of gravity; or attracted by matter. I feel it in my own. The cause of this tendency, 'tis the glorious GOD! Great GOD, Thou givest this matter such a tendency; Thou keepest it in its operation! There is no other cause for gravity, but the will and work of the glorious GOD. I am now effectually convinced of that ancient confession, and must effectuously make it, 'He is not far from every one of us.' When I see a thing moving or settling that way which its heavy nature carries it, I may very justly think, and I would often form the thought, 'It is the glorious GOD who now carries this matter such a way.' When matter goes downward, my spirit shall therefore mount upward, in acknowledgment of the GOD who orders it. I will no longer complain, 'Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him: on the left hand, where He does work, but I cannot behold Him: He hideth Himself on the right hand, that I cannot see Him.' No, I am now taught where to meet with Him; even at every turn. He knows the way that I take; I cannot stir forward or backward, but I perceive Him in the weight of every matter. My way shall be to improve this as a weighty argument for the being of a GOD. I will argue from it, 'Behold, there is a GOD, whom I ought forever to love and serve and glorify.' Yea, and if I am tempted unto the doing of any wicked thing, I may reflect, that it cannot be done without some action, wherein the power of matter operates. But then I may carry on the reflection: 'How near, how near am I to the glorious GOD whose commands I am going to violate! Matter keeps His laws; but, O my soul, wilt thou break His laws? How shall I do this wickedness and therein deny the GOD, who not only is above, but also is exerting His power in the very matter upon which I make my criminal misapplications!'¹⁷

The very repetitiousness of Mather's inexhaustible pen demonstrates the persistence of his search for advantages to do good methodically, ingeniously. Besides recording his resolutions, drawing up proposals, preparing indexes, he completely revised his annual diaries so that they might be useful to other readers. Then he copied the relevant portions of these revised versions into 'Paterna', for his son, and he copied relevant incidents, some of them extensive, into Bonifacius, making appropriate revisions. At his death he left two grand unpublished books, 'The Angel of Bethesda' and Biblia Americana, which form part of this same resolute plan. 'The Angel of Bethesda' is a collection of medical advice and cures incorporating the kind of spiritual usefulness proposed' in Bonifacius, and Biblia Americana condenses, with Mather's own contributions, centuries of commentary on the Bible.

The energy that performed such prodigies undoubtedly drew some strength from vanity as well as from piety. Although Bonifacius was published anonymously, Mather's effort to seem expert in varied professional subjects will seem amusingly pretentious to modern readers, especially when he alludes to legal authors. Yet the conscious purpose of such allusions is to win the respect of those to whom the author offers moral advice useful in their professions, and to exemplify the kind of ingenuity he has been prescribing. The author of Bonifacius has taken the trouble to inform himself of at least a few good books and a few specific means for lawyers to do good. In medicine, Mather had no less training and was better read than many practicing physicians.

The pastor's concern with social health leads Mather to express in Bonifacius a number of ideas that would be interesting to modern readers even outside the context I have tried to establish. He declares that none but a good man really lives, and that one becomes more alive as one acts for good. Concern for the soul and interest in method led him to encourage rewards rather than punishment in educating children. He opposes beating except for the most serious offenses. He condemns tyrannical schoolmasters as a curse. He advises ministers to preach on subjects of particular use to their congregations and to ask the people to suggest topics for sermons. He favors the practical education of girls. He advises physicians to treat the poor without charge and to attend not only to the patient's soul but also to the 'anxiety' that may be causing his illness. He tells lawyers never to appear in a dirty cause, always to eschew sharp tricks, and to defend the principle of restitution. He condemns that usury which charges interest for money that the debtor never gets to use. He tells the rich to use their money for good while they live, rather than leave large estates.

All these proposals issue from the same pious concern that asks landlords to oblige their tenants to pray, pious societies to look out for their neighbors' sins, schoolmasters to teach Duport's verses on Job instead of Homer. What we must seek if we wish to know Mather is the man who could believe in both these kinds of proposals at once. For him witches, devils, angels, remarkable interventions of Providence, and the certainty of eternal judgment were as real as gravity. For his mind there was no contradiction between working for social justice and spending two or perhaps three days a week in secret fasts; no conflict between hailing Copernicus and Newton and preaching the imminence of the millennium, now that the seven last plagues of the Vial are about to be poured out on the Papal Empire; no conflict between studying the Talmud and preaching the Covenant of Grace.

Evaluation of Mather's literary achievement ought to profit from the same kind of attention to his prose style, which has too often been dismissed as fervid and pedantic. The remarkable quantity of his work, the cleanness of his manuscripts, and the testimony of his son all indicate that he wrote very rapidly, but the charge that his writing is fervid seems superficial. Although a small portion of his work fits the description, its importance has been exaggerated by the typographical devices used in his books and by the dubious belief that he was 'neurotic' and therefore unable to control his rhetoric.

The prevalence of learned allusions and foreign quotations has also been exaggerated, partly because Mather defended these useful ornaments and partly because readers of his history of New England must traverse an unusually thick jungle of classical fact and lore, with a name dropping from every tree, before they can escape from his self-conscious introduction into the history itself. All this may be of little comfort to readers of Bonifacius, who will find that Mather studded some pages with what he liked to consider jewels of Latin and Greek. Those who are not completely antagonized may take some comfort in noting how aptly many of these come forth from the index of Mather's Quotidiana or the electronic computer of his extraordinary mind. Repeatedly, the quotation is apt, and Mather's comment repeatedly makes it so.

Notice, too, how much of the prose in Bonifacius is plain, forceful, precise. Mather's speed makes his paragraphs repetitious, and it is difficult for us to avoid overemphasizing his italics, but I am convinced that much of Mather's writing is plainer than any by Thomas Hooker or John Cotton. Even in Bonifacius this passage on brutal schoolmasters seems as representative as the more elaborate classical quotations:

Ajax Flagellifer may be read at the school. He is not fit for to be the master of it. Let it not be said of the scholars, 'They are brought up in the school of Tyrannus. ' Pliny says that bears are the fatter for beating. Fitter to have the conduct of bears than of ingenuous boys, are the masters, that can't give a bit of learning, but they must give a knock with it. Send 'em to be tutors of the famous Lithuanian school, at Samourgan. The harsh, fierce, Orbilian way of treating the children, too commonly used in the school, is a dreadful curse of God upon our miserable offspring, who are born children of wrath. It is boasted now and then of a schoolmaster, that such and such a brave man had his education under him. There is nothing said, how many that might have been brave men, have been destroyed by him; how many brave wits, have been dispirited, confounded, murdered, by his barbarous way of managing them.

Bonifacius is an important historical document because it brings to bear on the world of affairs all the piety and ingenuity that New England Puritanism had been nourishing, despite theological and political troubles, for eighty years. Without wavering from the central conviction of Puritans that man exists to glorify God, Cotton Mather exhorts all Christians to hunt opportunities to do good in the world. It is from this perspective, rather than by focusing on practical rewards, that we can best understand Puritan influences on Benjamin Franklin, later reformers, and American benevolence in the twentieth century. We continue to say, with the author of Bonifacius, that the ways of honest men are simple and the ways of the wicked are subtle, but we seek to devise a similar ingenuity for doing good around the world. We may also find it especially interesting that Mather the American, unlike his English predecessor Richard Baxter, says not a word about the danger that our efforts to do good may lead to disaster.

Notes

¹ 12 May 1784.

² Perry Miller, The New England Mind: from Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 402-16.

³ Cotton Mather, Small Offers toward the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness. Four Discourses accommodated unto the Designs of Practical Godliness (Boston, 1689), pp. 108-11.

⁴ Here Mather seems clearly to have been following Richard Baxter's How to Do Good to Many: or, the Publick Good is the Christian's Life. Directions and Motives It (London, 1682), p. 5: 'But as all motion and action is first upon the nearest object, so must ours; and doing good must be in order: First we must begin at home with our own souls and lives, and then to our nearest relations, and friends, and acquaintance, and neighbors, and then to our societies, church, and kingdom, and all the world. But mark that order of execution, and the orders of estimation and intention differ. Though God set up lights so small as will serve but for one room, and though we must begin at home, we must far more esteem the desire and good of the multitude, of city and church and commonwealth; and must set no bounds to our endeavours, but what God and disability set'.

⁵ Cotton Mather, Early Piety, Exemplified in the Life and Death of Mr. Nathanael Mather … (London, 1689), p. 39.

⁶ Mather, Small Offers, p. 37.

⁷Ibid., pp. 19ff.

⁸ See Theopolis Americana. An Essay on the Golden Street of the Holy City: Publishing a TESTIMONY against the CORRUPTIONS of the Market-Place. With some Good HOPES of Better Things to be yet seen in the AMERICAN World (Boston, 1710), p. 48.

⁹Ibid., p. 5. The text was Revelations 21:21. The sermon was preached on 3 November 1709.

¹⁰ See A. Whitney Griswold, 'Three Puritans on Prosperity', New England Quarterly, VII (1934), 475-93.

¹¹Theopolis Americana, pp. 13-14.

¹²Ibid., p. 21.

¹³ He did not say, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you', but rather: 'All things whatsoever ye would, that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them.' He cited Matthew 7:12. See Theopolis Americana, pp. 14-16.

¹⁴Ibid., pp. 18-22.

¹⁵ Baxter, How to Do Good to Many, p. 15.

¹⁶ A book-length autobiographical manuscript addressed to Mather's son and concentrating on the father's devices for piety. The manuscript is in the Alderman Library, University of Virginia. Many of these passages had been copied in turn from Mather's Reserved and Revised Memorials, which have since been published as The Diary of Cotton Mather, two vol., ed. Worthington C. Ford, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, seventh ser., VII-VIII (Boston, 1911-12).

¹⁷ This passage is quoted, with the permission of the University of Virginia, from the manuscript 'Paterna', pp. 304-5. I have modernized the spelling and capitalization.