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“Experimental Christians”: Mather’s Philosophical and Biblical Vitalism

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Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment

Part of the book series: Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World ((CTAW))

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Abstract

Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was the most copious and learned biblical exegete in colonial New England. Like his Puritan forefathers, he labored to bring biblical scholarship in service of experimental religion. He read the Word with the theological lens of his Reformed Protestant tradition, which was above all Trinitarian, covenantalist, Christocentric, and practical-oriented. At the same time, he frequently wandered outside his camp for inspiration from diverse sources: including Protestant exegetes of various theological and denominational backgrounds, early church fathers, rabbinical scholars, mystics, Catholics, occult writers, and poets. Though he never once crossed the ocean, he was deeply immersed in the intellectual and religious currents of the wider North Atlantic world and did all an American colonial could to engage the latest European fashions in philosophy, science, biblical scholarship, and religious reform. He found the times he lived in invigorating, but also precarious. He deemed the fruits of the new learning auspicious providences for the advancement of Christian knowledge and God’s kingdom, but he worried that they would be squandered in the vain pursuits of man. Especially unsettling for Mather was the increasing audacity of those who used the new learning to advocate mechanistic and materialist philosophies, question Christian orthodoxy, minimize God’s immediate supernatural action in creation, undermine spiritual experience, and compromise the authority and divine inspiration of Scripture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For Mather’s biography and thought, see especially David Levin, Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord’s Remembrancer, 1663−1703 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Lovelace, American Pietism of Cotton Mather; Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596−1728 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 191−368; and Kennedy, The First American Evangelical. Mather’s son Samuel left behind a hagiography of his father, Samuel Mather, The Life of the very Reverend and Learned Cotton Mather, D.D. & F.R.S., Late Pastor of the North Church in Boston (Boston: Samuel Gerrish, 1729). For a fuller list, see Smolinski, “Editor’s Introduction,” in BA, 1:7−8, fn. 10. For an assortment of his writings, see Reiner Smolinski and Kenneth P. Minkema,eds., A Cotton Mather Reader (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).

  2. 2.

    Mather, The Diary of Cotton Mather, ed. W. C. Ford (New York: F. Ungar Publishing, 1957), 2:339−40.

  3. 3.

    Mather, The Christian Philosopher [1721], ed. Winton U. Solberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

  4. 4.

    See Smolinski, “Editor’s Introduction,” BA, 1:59−61. For the literature on Mather’s “Biblia” and his exegesis, see the citations in the Introduction, as well as Reiner Smolinski, “Authority and Interpretation: Cotton Mather’s Response to the European Spinozists,” in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603−1714: The Atlantic Connection, ed. Wiep Van Bunge and Wim Klever (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 191−211; Smolinski, “How to Go to Heaven, or How Heaven Goes? Natural Science and Interpretation in Cotton Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana’ (1693−1728),” New England Quarterly 81.2 (2008): 278−329; Harry C. Maddux, “God’s Responsibility: Narrative Choice and Providential History in Mather’s Biblia Americana Commentary on Ezra,” Early American Literature 42 (2007): 305−21; Mitchell R. Breitwieser, “All on an American Table: Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana,” American Literary History 25:2 (Summer 2013): 381−405; Edward M. Griffin, “A Singular Man: Cotton Mather Reappraised,” Early American Literature 50:2 (May 2015): 475–94; Jan Stievermann, “Reading Canticles in the Tradition of New England Millennialism: John Cotton and Cotton Mather’s Commentaries on the Song of Songs,” in Prophecy and Eschatology in the Transatlantic World, 1550−1800, ed. Andrew Crome (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 213−38; “The Debate Over Prophetic Evidence for the Authority of the Bible in Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana,” in Bible in American Life, ed. Goff, Farnsley II, and Thuesen, 48−62; and Grace Sarah Harwood, “‘Perhaps No One General Answer Will Do’: Cotton Mather’s Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels in ‘Biblia Americana’” (PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2018).

  5. 5.

    Mather, Diary, 2:169−71. His son, Samuel Mather, praised the “Biblia” as “by far the greatest amassment of Learning that has ever been brought together to illustrate the oracles of God.” S. Mather, Life of Cotton Mather, 73.

  6. 6.

    See Ward, Early Evangelicalism, 7−23.

  7. 7.

    Mather’s disciplined devotional life is evident throughout his Diary; see also Lovelace, American Pietism, Chap. 4.

  8. 8.

    Thomas J. Holmes, Cotton Mather: A Bibliography of his Works, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940; Reprinted, Newton, MA: Crofton, 1974).

  9. 9.

    See Julius H. Tuttle, “The Libraries of the Mathers,” Publications of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series, 20 (1920): 269–356; William H. Bond and Hugh Amory, eds., The Printed Catalogue of the Harvard College Library 1723–1790 (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1996).

  10. 10.

    Kenneth Silverman, ed., Selected Letters of Cotton Mather (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1971). For Mather’s connections to German Pietism, see Kuno Francke, “The Beginning of Cotton Mather’s Correspondence with August Hermann Francke,” Philological Quarterly 5 (1926): 193−95; “Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke,” Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 5 (1896): 57−67; “Further Documents Concerning Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke,” Americana Germanica 1 (1897): 31−66; Ernst Benz, “Pietist and Puritan Sources of Early Protestant World Missions (Cotton Mather and A. H. Francke),” Church History 20:2 (June, 1951), 28−55; Benz, “Ecumenical Relations between Boston Puritanism and German Pietism (Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke),” The Harvard Theological Review 54.3 (1961): 159−93; Lovelace, American Pietism, 32−40; Ward, Early Evangelicalism, 92−93; Wolfgang Splitter, “The Fact and Fiction of Cotton Mather’s Correspondence with German Pietist August Hermann Francke,” New England Quarterly 83.1 (2010): 102−22; Oliver Scheiding, “The World as Parish: Cotton Mather, August Hermann Francke, and Transatlantic Religious Networks,” in Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana, ed. Smolinski and Stievermann, 131−66. Cotton Mather, The Heavenly Conversation (Boston, 1710), Preface; Nuncia Bona et Terra Longinqua: A Brief Account of Some Good & Great Things A Doing For the Kingdom of God, In the Midst of Europe (Boston: B. Greene, 1715); India Christiana (Boston: B. Greene, 1721), 56−87.

  11. 11.

    See, for example, the preface from Thomas Prince in S. Mather, Life of Cotton Mather; and Isaac Watts, An Humble Attempt Toward the Revival of Practical Religion Among Christians… (London: E. Matthews, 1731), 114−15. For a reception history of Mather’s writings, see E. Brooks Holifield, “The Abridging of Cotton Mather,” in Mather and Biblia Americana, Smolinski and Stievermann, eds., 83−109.

  12. 12.

    For more on this transitional period, see, among others, Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1953); Landsman, Colonials to Provincials; E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2003); and Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 159−86.

  13. 13.

    Thomas Kidd, The Protestant Interest: New England After Puritanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Mather, Suspiria Vinctorum: Some Account of the Condition to which the Protestant Interest in the World is at this Day Reduced (Boston: T. Fleet, 1726).

  14. 14.

    See Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636−1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981); John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Kenneth P. Minkema, “Reforming Harvard: Cotton Mather on Education at Cambridge,” The New England Quarterly 87:2 (June 2014): 319−40.

  15. 15.

    Silverman, Life and Times, 146−56; Benjamin Colman, A Manifesto Or Declaration, Set forth by the Undertakers of the New Church Now erected in Boston in New England, November 17th 1699 (Boston: B. Green, 1699); Mather lays out his ecclesiology in his Ratio Disciplinae Fratrum Nov-Anglorum (Boston: S. Gerrish, 1726). He originally wrote it in 1701 closer to the Brattle Street affair.

  16. 16.

    The literature on the trials is extensive; however, two recent studies include Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), and Benjamin C. Ray, Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

  17. 17.

    Kennedy, First American Evangelical, 78−105.

  18. 18.

    Fisher, “Evangelicals and Unevangelicals,” 193−94. See also Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  19. 19.

    See Lovelace, American Pietism, Chap. 6, and a sampling of works from Mather such as Methods and Motives for Societies to Suppress Disorders (Boston, 1703); Lex Mercatoria: Or, The Just Rules of Commerce Declared (Boston: Timothy Green, 1705); The Negro Christianized (Boston: B. Green, 1706); Family Religion: Excited and Assisted (Boston, 1707), Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good [1710], ed. David Levine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Orphanotrophium: Or, Orphans Well-provided for (Boston: B. Green, 1711); The Resort of Piety … An Essay Offered unto a Society of Young Men, United in the Intentions of Early Piety (Boston, 1716); Piety and Equity United (Boston: John Allen, 1717); Nuncia Bona e Terra Longinqua; Religious Societies: Proposals for the revival of dying religion (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1724); and for his comments on the societies for religion and education of black people see his Diary, 2:24, 379, 500, 663, and Diary, 1:176−77, in which he devised formal “Orders” for a religious society for black people which were later published in a 1706 broadside. For more on how Mather’s thinking about Native Americans and blacks intersected with his exegesis, see Jan Stievermann, “The Geneaology of Races and the Problem of Slavery in Cotton Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana,’” in Mather and Biblia Americana, ed. Smolinski and Stievermann, 515−76.

  20. 20.

    See Middlekauff, The Mathers, Chaps. 13 and 14; Lovelace, American Pietism, Chap. 3; and Cotton Mather, The Call of the Gospel (Boston, 1686), Unum Necessarium: Awakenings for the Unregenerate (Boston, 1693), A Conquest over the Grand Excuse (Boston: Timothy Green, 1706), The Greatest Concern in the World (Boston: Timothy Green, 1707), The Everlasting Gospel. The Gospel of Justification (Boston, 1710); Heavenly Conversation; A Soul Well-Anchored (Boston: B. Green, 1712); Free-Grace, Maintained and Improved (Boston, 1716); The Salvation of the Soul Considered (Boston: B. Green, 1720); and The Converted Sinner (Boston, 1724).

  21. 21.

    For more on Mather’s global networks and his vision for international Protestantism, see Peterson, “Theopolis Americana”; Andrews, “Tranquebar: Charting the Protestant International”; Stievermann, “Imagining Global Protestantism”; and Nan Goodman, Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 135−62. For Mather’s ecumenical connection with French Protestants, see Catherine Randall, From a Far Country: Camisards and Huguenots in the Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 80−100.

  22. 22.

    See Middlekauff, The Mathers, Chap. 12; Cotton Mather, Blessed Unions (Boston: B. Green, 1692); Stone Cut Out of the Mountain (Boston, 1716); Malachi. Or, The Everlasting Gospel, Preached unto the Nations (Boston: T.C., 1717); Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity (Boston: S. Gerrish, 1718). In 1717 Mather even preached the ordination sermon for a Baptist minister in Boston and expressed regret for the persecution from earlier generations against Baptists and other Dissenters.

  23. 23.

    See Benz, “Pietist and Puritan Sources”; Hermann Wellenreuther, “Pietismus und Mission: Vom 17. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 168−76; Cotton Mather, A Letter about the Present State of Christianity Among the Christianized Indians of New England (Boston: Timothy Greene, 1705); and India Christiana.

  24. 24.

    Cotton Mather, Reasonable Religion (Boston: T. Greene, 1700); Reason Satisfied (Boston: J. Allen, 1712); and A Man of Reason: A Brief Essay to demonstrate that All Men Should Harken to Reason (Boston: John Edwards, 1718).

  25. 25.

    Cotton Mather, Christianity Demonstrated… (Boston: Timothy Green, 1710), 23.

  26. 26.

    Mather, Diary, 1:146−47.

  27. 27.

    Miller, New England Mind: Colony to Province, 214. See Lovelace, American Pietism, 41−42; Middlekauff, The Mathers, 231−46. Kennedy’s account emphasizing Mather’s evangelical identity undervalues his Calvinistic commitments. Kennedy, First Evangelical, 28, 50.

  28. 28.

    Miller, New England Mind: Colony to Province, 214.

  29. 29.

    Cotton Mather, Suspiria Vinctorum, 20−21. For more on Mather and the jeremiad, see Winship, Seers of God, 190n. 46; Lovelace, American Pietism, 239−41; Reiner Smolinski, “Israel Redivivus: The Eschatological Limits of Puritan Typology in New England,” The New England Quarterly 63:3 (Sept., 1990): 357−95.

  30. 30.

    Cotton Mather, Vital Christianity: A Brief Essay on the Life of God in the Soul of Man (Charlestown, 1725), “Dedication,” unpaginated.

  31. 31.

    Cotton Mather, The Salvation of the Soul Considered (Boston: B. Green, 1720), 22.

  32. 32.

    Mather, Things to be more thought upon (Boston, 1713), 94; also Stone Cut Out of the Mountain.

  33. 33.

    Mather, Malachi, 34−35; India Christiana, 52−55.

  34. 34.

    See Daniel L. Brunner: Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Boehm and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993); Arno Sames, Anton Wilhelm Böhme (1673−1722): Studien zum Ökumenischen Denken und Handeln eines Halleschen Pietisten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989).

  35. 35.

    Silverman, Selected Letters, 92, 215, 260−61; Mather, Diary, 2:23, 332−33, 406−407, 411−13, 563; India Christiana, 62−87.

  36. 36.

    Mather, Diary, 2:411−13.

  37. 37.

    Mather, Heavenly Conversation, Preface, unpaginated; Diary, 2:23.

  38. 38.

    Cotton Mather, Nuncia Bona e Terra Longinqua, 2, 8. As Ward notes, the OED shows that Mather was one of the earliest to use the word “revival” in the sense of a communal religious awakening accompanied with conversions and renewal in fervent piety. In the Magnalia, Mather reported how Francis Higginson (1588−1630), a gifted preacher in Leicester (who later emigrated to New England), promoted above all else “a thorough Conversion … among his people.” He attracted large crowds from the area, and thanks to the “Divine Presence” and “Blessing” on his ministry, “there was a notable Revival of Religion among them” and many were converted. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (London: Parkhurst, 1702), Book III, p. 71; Ward, Early Evangelicalism, 93.

    To facilitate their calls for increased devotional reading of Scripture, the Pietists produced and distributed millions of Bibles over the eighteenth century at an affordable price. See especially Karl Hildebrand von Canstein, Ohnemaßgeblicher Vorschlag / Wie GOTTES Wort denen Armen zur Erbauung um einen geringen Preiß in die Hände zu bringen (Berlin: Schlechtiger, 1710). Canstein worked closely with Francke.

  39. 39.

    Mather, India Christiana, title page. See Ryan P. Hoselton, “The Bible in Pietist and Evangelical Missions,” in Bible in Pietism and Evangelicalism, ed. Hoselton et al., 109−28.

  40. 40.

    See especially Middlekauff, The Mathers, 320−49; Smolinski, “Introduction,” in Mather, “Triparadisus,” ed. Smolinski, 60−78; and Randall, Camisards and Huguenots in the Atlantic World, 95.

  41. 41.

    Mather, Diary, 2:406−407.

  42. 42.

    Mather, India Christiana, 68−69, 74; Malachi, 4. See also his essay titled, “I. Vates. Or, some Remarks upon the SPIRIT of PROPHECY,” in BA, 10:818−849.

  43. 43.

    Smolinski, “Editor’s Introduction,” in BA, 1:17.

  44. 44.

    Mather, Malachi, 63.

  45. 45.

    See the relevant literature in the “Introduction.” Rick Kennedy posits that Mather promoted a “biblical enlightenment that tugged against the moderate enlightenment.” Kennedy, First American Evangelical, 106.

  46. 46.

    Mather, Christian Philosopher, 20, 84; BA, 1:343.

  47. 47.

    Mather, Manuductio, 35−37. Joachim Lange, Medicina Mentis (Berlin, 1708).

  48. 48.

    Holifield, Theology in America, 5−8; Stievermann, Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity, 7, 60−69.

  49. 49.

    Mather, “IV. Ezra, or, The Things done by Ezra, for the Restoring & Preserving of the SACRED SCRIPTURES,” in BA, 10:881–88. Smolinski, “Editor’s Introduction,” in BA, 1:77−112; Smolinski, “Authority and Interpretation”; Smolinski, “How to Go to Heaven”; Winton U. Solberg, “Cotton Mather, the ‘Biblia Americana,’ and the Enlightenment,” in Mather and Biblia Americana, ed. Smolinski and Stievermann, 183−201; Stievermann, Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity, 33−74, 107−92.

  50. 50.

    Mather, Reasonable Religion, 3−4.

  51. 51.

    Mather, Man of Reason, 7. See also Mather, Diary, 2:144, and Christian Philosopher, 297.

  52. 52.

    See especially Miller, New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Chap. 25; Winship, Seers of God, 79−82, 93–110. Jeffrey Jeske’s essay, as characteristic of the religious–secular binary of the older historiography, errs in portraying the Enlightenment Mather as gradually displacing the medieval and Puritan Mather and claims his Christian Philosopher and other works evinced an “essential secularity” in its “shifting of attention from God to the creatures,” Jeffrey Jeske, “Cotton Mather: Physico-theologian,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47:4 (Oct.-Dec., 1986): 583−94, quote on p. 592, and see p. 586 for his application of this dichotomy to Mather’s work on the “Biblia.” According to Winton Solberg, Mather’s thinking and especially his Christian Philosopher “heralds the Enlightenment in America,” and while “Mather was no deist,” he furnished “a theoretical basis for religious rationalism.” Winton Solberg, “Science and Religion in Early America: Cotton Mather’s Christian Philosopher,” Church History 56 (1987): 73−92, quotes on 90, 92. Silverman claims Mather comes “close to irreligion” and the God of his Christian Philosopher has more in common with the “Deity of liberal eighteenth-century Protestantism” than the God of the Puritans. Silverman, Life and Times, 250. Philipp Reisner’s claim that Mather reconceives the Spirit’s indwelling operations in terms of Enlightenment rationalism betrays an especially incautious misreading. Philipp Reisner, Cotton Mather als Auflklärer: Glaube und Gesellschaft im Neuengland der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 36.

  53. 53.

    Mather, Man of Reason, 7. Middlekauff argues that Mather tempered his estimation of reason after 1700 and increasingly stressed its limitations as he witnessed deists and others elevate reason above Scripture: “Mather’s disenchantment with reason was far advanced in 1715.” He overstates his claim, however; Mather’s 1718 tract Man of Reason shows otherwise. See Middlekauff, The Mathers, 279−304, quote on p. 303.

  54. 54.

    Mather, Man of Reason, 3,5.

  55. 55.

    Pershing Vartanian, “Cotton Mather and the Puritan Transition into the Enlightenment,” Early American Literature 7:3 (Winter, 1973): 213−24, quote from p. 217.

  56. 56.

    Cotton Mather, Christianus per Ignem (Boston: B. Green, 1702), 12−13.

  57. 57.

    Cotton Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium (Boston: Hancock, 1726), 50.

  58. 58.

    Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xxviii.

  59. 59.

    Robert Boyle, The Christian Virtuoso [1690−91], in The Works of Robert Boyle: Vol. II, 1687−91, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 291.

  60. 60.

    Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium, 47−52. Mather writes a fuller polemic arguing for God’s existence against atheism in his Christian Philosopher, 308−310. Miller is driven by his secularization paradigm when he says Mather’s Manuductio ad Ministerium “shows signs of disintegration” away from Puritanism toward humanistic “Arminianism, morality, and Unitarianism.” Perry Miller, “The Manuductio ad Ministerium,” in Holmes, Bibliography, II:634−35. The key lies in understanding how Mather, unlike, for instance, Benjamin Franklin, attempted to reconcile reason and Christian experience, the new learning, and orthodox theology. For more on Mather and natural philosophy, see Solberg, “Science and Religion in Early America”; Winship, Seers of God, Chap. 5.

  61. 61.

    BA, 1:303−306, 325−26, 337−402, 417−19, 625−35, 638−40; 3:112−13.

  62. 62.

    For more on the entanglements of esotericism and Enlightenment, see Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathon: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); David Levine, “Giants in the Earth: Science and the Occult in Cotton Mather’s Letters to the Royal Society,” William & Mary Quarterly 45 (1988): 751–70; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially Chaps. 4, 5, and 8; Allis P. Coudert, Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011); Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1616−1676 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Renko Geffarth, and Markus Meumann, eds., Aufklärung und Esoterik: Wege in die Moderne (Berlin: Ge Gruyter, 2013); Rivett, Science of the Soul, Chap. 5.

  63. 63.

    Stievermann, Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity, 183.

  64. 64.

    Brett Malcolm Grainger, “Vital Nature and Vital Piety: Johann Arndt and the Evangelical Vitalism of Cotton Mather,” Church History 81:4 (December 2012): 852−72; Ward, Early Evangelicalism, 7−23.

  65. 65.

    Stievermann, Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity, 169−81; Paul Wise, “Cotton Mather and the Invisible World,” in Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana, ed. Smolinski and Stievermann, 227−57.

  66. 66.

    Mather, Diary, 1:23.

  67. 67.

    Mather, Diary, 1:86−87. David Levine, “When did Cotton Mather See the Angel?” Early American Literature 15 (1980): 271−75.

  68. 68.

    Mather, Christian Philosopher, 306.

  69. 69.

    Cotton Mather, “Appendix,” BA, 10:821.

  70. 70.

    Cotton Mather, Late Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions… (London: Parkhurst, 1691), 18. See Winship, Seers of God, Chap. 6; Silverman, Life and Times, Chap. 4.

  71. 71.

    Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World… (Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1693), 44. Kindred works blending Puritan thought and empirical philosophy that Mather knew well included Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (Boston: Samuel Green, 1684), and Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits Fully Evinced … Proving the Immortality of Souls… (London: T. Parkhurst, 1691). Winship shows how Increase’s work closely imitated the experimental style of Robert Boyle; Winship, Seers of God, 64−68.

  72. 72.

    Cotton Mather, “Mather-Calef Paper on Witchcraft,” transcribed and ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 47 (Oct., 1913− Jun., 1914): 240−68, quotes from 149−50.

  73. 73.

    Mather, Wonders, 76; Rivett, Science of the Soul, 260−63.

  74. 74.

    Mather, Diary, 1:157. In 1690, taking advantage of the scare with the Goodwin children to promote evangelical conversion and piety, Mather authored a tract with advice for young men on how to overcome the devil’s workings; Addresses to Old Men, and Young Men, and Little Children (Boston: R. Pierce, 1690), 46−88.

  75. 75.

    Mather only succeeded to publish one chapter of his Angel of Bethesda, which detailed his notion of the Nishmath-Chajim, Cotton Mather, The Angel of Bethesda… (New London: Timothy Green, 1722), 1. The full edition would not be published until the twentieth century, Cotton Mather, Angel of Bethesda, ed. Gordon W. Jones (Barre, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1972). Mather included much of his thinking on the Nishmath-Chajim in his treatise on eschatology, the “Triparadisus” (1726/27), which he also was unable to publish in his lifetime, Mather, The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather: An Edition of “Triparadisus,” ed. Reiner Smolinski (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 122−26. See Otho T. Beall Jr. and Richard H. Shyrock, Cotton Mather: The First Significant Figure in American Medicine (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1954); Margaret Humphreys Warner, “Vindicating the Minister’s Role: Cotton Mather’s Concept of the Nishmath-Chajim and the Spiritualization of Medicine,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 36 (July 1981): 278−95; Silverman, Life and Times, 405−10; and Grainger, “Vital Nature and Vital Piety.” In contrast to many earlier studies on Mather and science, Philippa Koch’s treatment avoids the secular–religious binary and demonstrated the close interrelationship between Mather’s spiritual and scientific thinking, Philippa Koch, “Experience and the Soul in Eighteenth-Century Medicine,” Church History 85:3 (Sept. 2016): 552−86.

  76. 76.

    Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 2−10. See Stievermann, Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity, 183−84, where he discusses Mather’s gloss on Eccl. 11:5 discussing the spirit that forms the baby in the womb, BA, 5:445.

  77. 77.

    Mather, Diary, 1:61−62, 83; Silverman, Cotton Mather, 32−33.

  78. 78.

    Mather, Diary, 1:169; Winter Meditations: Directions how to Employ the Liesure [sic] of the Winter for the Glory of God (Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1693).

  79. 79.

    See especially Mather, Christianus per Ignem; Agricola. Or The Religious Husbandman… (Boston: T. Fleet, 1727).

  80. 80.

    Mather, Christianus per Ignem, 47; Silverman, Life and Times, 173−90. See also Mather’s gloss on Matthew 17:20 in the “Biblia,” forthcoming in BA vol. 7.

  81. 81.

    Mather, Christian Philosopher, 317−18; he bases this thought on George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Religion: Natural and Revealed… (London: George Strahan, 1715), 79−85. For Mather’s thought on the Trinity, see, among other works, A Christian Conversing with the Great Mystery of Christianity: The Mystery of the Trinity… (Boston: T. Green, 1709); Things to be more Thought Upon, 29−30; and Blessed Unions.

  82. 82.

    Mather, Triparadisus, 113−17, 120−21. For more on the intersection between experimental philosophy and ghost narratives in the early modern period, see Michael Dopffel, “Empirical Form and Religious Function: Apparition Narratives of the Early English Enlightenment” (PhD diss., Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 2018), especially 94−103.

  83. 83.

    Winship, Seers of God, passim.

  84. 84.

    Mather, Christian Philosopher, 305−306.

  85. 85.

    Mather, Salvation of the Soul Considered, 3−4, 7.

  86. 86.

    Cotton Mather, Signatus (Boston: Daniel Henchman, 1727), 8.

  87. 87.

    Cotton Mather, Pia Desideria. Or, The Smoking Flax… (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1722), 8−10.

  88. 88.

    Mather, Christianity Demonstrated, 24−26.

  89. 89.

    Mather, Signatus, 14−16.

  90. 90.

    Cotton Mather, Deus Nobiscum (Boston: S. Gerrish, 1725), 8.

  91. 91.

    Mather, “General Introduction,” in Magnalia, unpaginated, paragraph 5; Magnalia Christi Americana (Books I and II), ed. Kenneth B. Murdock (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 104.

  92. 92.

    Mather, Diary, 1:563−64. For the history of the production and failed publication of Mather’s “Biblia Americana,” see Jan Stievermann, “Cotton Mather and ‘Biblia Americana,’—America’s First Bible Commentary: General Introduction,” in Mather and Biblia Americana, ed. Smolinski and Stievermann, 1−61. For more on the dates of composition, see Smolinski, “Editor’s Introduction,” BA, 1:50−66.

  93. 93.

    Cotton Mather, A New Offer to the Lovers of Religion and Learning (Boston, 1713/14), 2, 1. Cotton’s son, Samuel, included yet another advertisement for the “Biblia” in his biography, Life of Cotton Mather (1729).

  94. 94.

    Mather, New Offer, 10−14. For Mather’s techniques as a Bible commentator and compiler, see Rick Kennedy, “Historians as Flower Pickers and Honey Bees: Cotton Mather and the Commonplace-Book Tradition of History,” in Mather and Biblia Americana, ed. Smolinski and Stievermann, 261−76.

  95. 95.

    Mather, New Offer, 14. For more on Mather’s experimental hermeneutics, see Smolinski, “Editor’s Introduction,” BA, 1:172−74; Stievermann, Prophecy, Piety, and The Problem of Historicity, 381−411.

  96. 96.

    BA, 10:797−810. Mather makes similar statements in his Manuductio ad Ministerium, 82.

  97. 97.

    Mather, New Offer, 12, 14.

  98. 98.

    Mather, New Offer, 14.

  99. 99.

    Rivett, Science of the Soul, 5, 172, passim.

  100. 100.

    Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium, 83.

  101. 101.

    Cotton Mather, Psalterium Americanum (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1718), xxiv.

  102. 102.

    Mather, “Essay,” BA, 10:799, 803. Mather refers to these readings in his funeral sermon for Thomas Bridge, Benedictus. Good Men described, and the glories of their goodness, declared. … Whereto there is added, an instrument, which he wrote, when he drew near his End, and left as a Legacy to Survivors, relating some of his experiences (Boston: B. Green, 1715), 44.

  103. 103.

    Mather, Diary, 2:332−33, 376, 411−13, 563. See August Hermann Francke, Pietas Hallensis, trans. Anton Wilhelm Böhme (London: J. Downing, 1705); Johann Arndt, De vero Christianismo libri quatuor: Ob praestantiam suam olim latine redditi; nunc autem revisi ac emendati, cura & studio Antonii Wilhelmi Boemi, transl. Anton Wilhelm Böhme, 2 vols. (London: J. Downing 1708); Anton Wilhelm Böhme, Enchiridion Precum, Ad Promovendum Solidioris Pietatis Studium Collectum (Londini: J. Downing, 1707); August Hermann Francke, “Praefatio Nova De vera ratione tractandi Scripturam S.” in ΤΗΣ ΚΑΙΝΗΣ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗΣ ΑΠΑΝΤΑ (Leipzig, 1702); Francke, Manuductio ad lectionem scripturae sacrae Augusti Hermanni Franckii, S. Th. Prof. Hallens: cum nova prefatione, de impedimentis studii theologici (London: J. Downing, 1706); and Francke, Programmata diversis temporibus in Academia Hallensi publice proposita (Halle, 1714).

  104. 104.

    Mather, Diary, 2:479−80.

  105. 105.

    See Maddux, “Editor’s Introduction,” in BA, 4:41, 52−53, 56−63. See also Cheryl Rivers, “Cotton Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana’: Psalms and the Nature of Puritan Scholarship” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1977).

  106. 106.

    Aside from the “Biblia,” the other work that discusses exegesis most extensively that he never saw published was his “Triparadisus” (1726/27), which was also taken largely from his “Biblia.” See Mather, Triparadisus, ed. Smolinski, especially 162−93.

  107. 107.

    Mather, Psalterium, xvii.

  108. 108.

    Mather, Psalterium, xxi.

  109. 109.

    Mather, “Essay,” BA, 10:805; see Francke, Manuductio, 105−134, especially 105, 126.

  110. 110.

    Tillmann, Bibelexegese beim jungen Goethe, 32−34.

  111. 111.

    Mather, “Essay,” BA, 10:813. From Robert Jenkin, The Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion [1698], 2 vols., 4th ed. (London: W.B., 1715), 2:32.

  112. 112.

    Mather, Psalterium, xxi−xxii.

  113. 113.

    Mather, “Essay,” BA, 10:805. Mather, Psalterium, xxvi.

  114. 114.

    Mather, Psalterium, xxii−xxiv.

  115. 115.

    Mather, Psalterium, xxvi, xxv.

  116. 116.

    Mather, Psalterium, xxiv−xxv.

  117. 117.

    The Spener quote comes from Francke, Manuductio, 110−11. Mather quotes it on p. xxvii of his Psalterium and p. 81 of his Manuductio ad Ministerium, and more fully in his “Essay,” BA, 10:805: Præmissis pijs precibus privatis, in ipsis fontibus sacris, longum contextum et Affectum Scriptorum sacrorum, vel de quibus sermo est, in textu longâ serie, devotâque attentione observent, eumque affectum assumere studeant. Quo pacto, cogitationibus omnibus collectis, atque in rem præsentem ductis, fidei et Imaginis Divinæ varias notas, momenta, circumstantias, cum voluptate maximâ, nec non fructu uberrimo notabunt.”

  118. 118.

    Mather, Manuductio ad Ministerium, 80; Psalterium, xxiv, xxvi. See Francke, Manuductio, 115.

  119. 119.

    See, among others, Nathan O. Hatch, “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 59–78; George M. Marsden, “Everyone One’s Own Interpreter?: The Bible, Science, and Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in ibid., 79–100; Perry, Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States; and Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization.

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Hoselton, R.P. (2023). “Experimental Christians”: Mather’s Philosophical and Biblical Vitalism. In: Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the Quest for Evangelical Enlightenment. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44935-2_3

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