The Mathers by Robert Middlekauff

Author:Robert Middlekauff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1999-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

13

The Psychology of Abasement

Although Cotton Mather knew that Christ would return with His Kingdom at a time of His own choosing, he also believed that men must prepare. They must hold Christ’s Church in readiness, maintaining its purity and supporting its ordinances; and surely ministers must never cease their attempts to convert the elect. None of these acts, in fact nothing that men could do, Mather had to admit, would affect the timing of Christ’s reappearance in history. And yet he could hope that the efforts of good men might move the Lord. Logic, Scripture, theology all testified against his hopes but did not dampen them. The Lord worked in mysterious ways, Mather told New England, and in fact had chosen since the defection of the children of Israel to deepen the mystery surrounding His dealings with men. Did He not often reward the wicked with temporal riches and plunge the good into poverty? Did He not sometimes ignore the best efforts of faithful servants?1

Mather regarded the spread of the Christian Union as a necessary part of the preparation for the Second Coming. Throughout the last twenty-five years of his life this conviction helped suppress most doubts he had about the importance of ecclesiastical differences. What he had come to see by the opening of the eighteenth century was that the important fact in cosmic history was not the organizational distinctions which had long held men separate from one another, but the saving faith that joined them in Christ. Hence in all his dreams about a united Christendom, he always returned to the point from which Protestantism had begun: the problem of the individual.

A minister charged by his calling to convert the unregenerate and to nourish the faithful faced difficult problems in a society pledged to Calvin’s version of the universe. Just as his father and his grandfather, and hundreds of ministers before them did, Cotton Mather listened to troubled men asking the question—what could a man do for himself in a world of predestination? By Cotton Mather’s time the answer that the “preparationists” formulated almost a century before was widely accepted. Unable to agree on much, even Increase Mather and Solomon Stoddard agreed that men must “prepare” themselves for conversion. By preparation they—like Ames, Preston, Perkins, Thomas Hooker, Richard Mather, and John Norton before them—meant moral actions men might take before grace was infused into their souls. All these divines broke the conversion process into discernible stages which occurred over time. All agreed that a man predestined for Hell might traverse a number of them. Hooker helpfully explained this possibility by distinguishing between “legal” and “evangelical” preparation.2 The law, he wrote, should inform all men of correct standards of conduct, and simple examination of the self would produce contrition in those who deviated from those standards. Man might even feel terror when the law successfully informed him of his departures from morality; and humility might follow. According to Richard Mather grace sometimes assisted these natural operations of the soul; grace thus might have a hand in legal preparation.

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