years Increase Mather fought stoutly to maintain himself in the presidency. At last, however, he yielded it up, outgeneralled. His ministry in Boston had always appeared to him his principal duty. To get rid of him the liberal majority in the governing boards of Harvard College passed a vote, still in force, that the President of the College must actually reside in the town of Cambridge, where the college is situated; it was then some eight miles from Boston. Mather therefore resigned, in 1701. Theocracy had lost not only control of the State, but all considerable influence in the oldest and at that time the only important institution of the higher learning in British America.

Increase Mather lived for twenty-two years more, Cotton Mather for twenty-seven; throughout the time left them they were singularly and beautifully sympathetic. Though their political influence was at an end, and their influence on the training of the ministry— at that time the chief end of New England educationmortally enfeebled, they never relaxed their faithful work as ministers of the Gospel. With Cotton Mather, the while, not yet stricken in years, there was rather increase than relaxation of his lifelong effort to do good in every way. This effort impelled him to meddle incessantly with public and with academic affairs, thereby keeping aflame animosities excited when he was politically and academically influential. At the same time, he concerned himself with what would now be called social service, in a manner which won him the lifelong respect of Benjamin Franklin. He wrote and published incessantly on all manner of subjects which he conceived might tend to the greater glory of God. He collected and transmitted to England, under the title of Curiosa Americana,' notes on natural history, and the like, which won him the honour of fellowship in the Royal Society. And, in 1721, against a storm of opposition which actually attempted assassination, he introduced in Boston the practice of inoculation for smallpox-it is said for the first time in the history of European medicine.

His credit for this, to be sure, has been disputed. Prof. Kittredge, however, has lately demonstrated that the then accessible facts concerning inoculation in Turkey and among the negroes of Africa had been in Mather's

possession for fully five years before the outbreak of smallpox in Massachusetts which made him put them to proof; and, moreover, that throughout these years he had purposed to try the efficacy of inoculation whenever occasion should sadly arise. Mather's claim to fellowship in the Royal Society has also been disputed, and indeed was challenged in his own day. Another paper of Prof. Kittredge's finally explains the accident by which his entirely regular election, of which he received formal notice in 1713, was not formally confirmed in an open meeting of the Society until ten years later. There can be no further question that he was fully recognised as a man of scientific eminence by the highest authority in England.

The diary of such a man, if concerned with matters of fact, would have been replete with interest. Instead, the volumes now before us seem, at first glance, so dull that one might well wonder why they were rescued from the oblivion of manuscript. What few vivid passages they contain have mostly been printed before. They form a surprisingly small part of the whole, which was intended to be a record not of fact, but of spiritual experience. What is more, the diary, for the most part, exists not in the original copies but in digests, carefully made by Mather's own hand, preserving only such passages as afterthought assured him might be spiritually useful. As now preserved, the records are made in separate note-books, one for each year, beginning with his birthday. There remain twenty-six, the first for the year 1681, when he was eighteen years old, the last for the year 1724, when he was sixty-one. Down to 1711 they are scrupulously summarised; the seven note-books which survive from subsequent years are just as they came day by day from his pen. In that year he began a practice of asking himself every morning, 'What shall I render to the Lord?' His answer to each of these questions, he writes, will be a GOOD DEVISED, for which a G. D. will be the Distinction in these Memorials.' So for seven years out of fourteen we have his daily record of what he purposed doing for the glory of God and incidentally for the good of mankind. The published volumes supplement the diary, and fill its gaps, with a number of not very memorable letters. In brief, these

6

books are not an objective record of his outward life; they are rather records of his inner and spiritual life, in such aspects as he thought he ought to remember, and give posterity a chance of knowing.

Any such compilation must evidently be perilous to the reputation of a man whose enemies for two centuries have held him credulous, hypocritical and mendacious. Whoever seeks there may doubtless find confirmation of much that has been said against him. The simplest rule of life, however, is to explain things in the simplest way. Taken simply, accepted as honest, these pages of Cotton Mather are, after all, a document of historical importance. Beyond almost anything else in existence, they exhibit what life meant to earnest New England Puritans.

These emigrant Englishmen devoutly accepted the dogmas of Calvin. Human beings, the offspring of Adam, they held to be justly perverted in will. No voluntary human effort could ever make any man's will coincide with the will of God; yet any slightest act of will in the smallest degree opposed to the infinitely right will of God was infinite and mortal sin. Salvation, which could come only through the atonement of Christ, was vouchsafed only, as an unmerited mercy, to the elect. The token of election was miraculous ability not only to yield to the will of God, but to accept it so unreservedly that no consciousness of conflict should remain. Complete union with Divinity, however, was impossible this side the grave; until freed from every fetter of the flesh, children of Adam could never be securely rid of the penalty his fall had imposed. The Devil, too, loved no wile more than that by which, now and again, he deluded sinners into fleeting assurance of harmony with the divine will. No man could ever be finally certain that he was either beyond hope or beyond fear. So far as he rebelled, he manifested his ancestral curse; so far as he unfalteringly submitted to the dispensations of God, he showed signs of how, if he should chance to be of the elect, God's grace might work. To record such signs, and the struggles which environed them, was therefore a precious service to God-at once an encouragement and a warning both to the maker of the record and to any who should ever read it aright. Such service to God is the purpose of Cotton Mather's diary. Thus understood,

the pages no longer seem dull, but rather glow with spiritual passion.

Take, for example, what at first sight seems a dry, superstitious passage, written on September 18, 1701:

'One day this week, I mett with a particular Experience (as I have often done, tho' thro' my sinful Sloth, I have not recorded it,) that may serve to illustrate the Operation of the Holy Spirit upon the Words of the Faithful in their Prayers, and the great Occasion and Advantage, which there may be of my observing, what Words I am drawn to utter, when I am under the most praying Energies of the Lord.

'Wee received advice that the Husband of a young Gentlewoman a little related unto me, was come to a tragical Death, in a Fight with a Zallee Man of War. In my visit unto her upon this Advice, I went to Prayer with her, as it was my Duty. She had a sister in the Room who was also a young Widow, and had been so for many months. Now, in my Prayer, I found myself strangely diverted from the Condition of the person to whom only I intended my Visit. I was as it were compelled so to Word my Prayer, as to take in all along the Condition of her Sister; even as if my Prayer had been cheefly, if not only, for her. I wondered a little, at my Frame in this Matter.

'But the Spirit of the Lord knew what I did not know. Within two Dayes, there arrived Intelligence, that the young Man, the Husband of the supposed Widow, to whom I gave my Visit, was yett living.'

A mere matter of chance this would seem nowadays. To an earnest Puritan of the seventeenth century-who incidentally had common sense enough to commend him to Benjamin Franklin-it seemed a spiritual experience worth recording for a purpose almost scientific. It pointed towards the fact that a human being, devoutly serving the Lord, had been vouchsafed an unwitting share in divine omniscience. It did not stand alone, either; only the sin of sloth, deadly since the curse of Adam, had prevented a record of other such experiences, which might have gone far to prove their regularity as spiritual phenomena. Hypocritical though this selfabasement may seem, nothing short of it could acknowledge the just curse which had fallen upon the children of men, godly and godless alike. Nothing, again, could more gravely reassure a Puritan that in prayer he

ought to depend on the inspiration of the moment, instead of slothfully relying on the words of a liturgy. Nothing could be more simply reverent than the evangelic spirit in which it discovers a passing presence of God in that bereaved little Boston room, when William III was King. Few will believe Cotton Mather right in his interpretation of what occurred there; none who cannot imaginatively sympathise with his interpretation can understand the New England Puritans, whose faith was the life-spring of a nation.

After a while, it is not the historical passages of Cotton Mather's diary which linger in memory, nor even any particular spiritual passages. It is the strenuous fixity of purpose with which he persevered in effort to commune with divinity. Though the presence of the Lord might reveal itself anywhere, it gleamed most brightly in moments of solitary rapture. So, sometimes on particular occasions, oftener impelled only by spiritual craving, Mather would betake himself to his study, where with prayer and fasting, 'prostrate in the dust,' he would implore the grace of mystic communion. His notes of these devotions are numberless-monotonous, if you fail to sympathise, fervid if you can make the words live with semblance of the passion which drove his pen. In 1685, for instance, he notes that he would study his sermons kneeling, calling upon the Eternal Spirit that he would assist mee in what I am about. If I do it, in a settled Prayer, I would, after the Prayer is over, still remain in my Posture, for some Time, noting down what Hints occur to mee, fitt for my Improvement.' This memorandum of spiritual experience in the New England of King James II accords remarkably with the assertions of Indian devotees that the postures in which they pray perceptibly modify their consequent spiritual insight. In the same year, 1685, Cotton Mather was visited in his study by an angel-a vision which he records in Latin, deficient in classical purity, but surging with a glorious rhythm like that of the Vulgate and of the Fathers.

'Res Mirabilis et Memoranda.

'Post fusas, maximis cum Ardoribus Jejuniisque Preces, apparuit Angelus, qui Vultum habuit solis instar Meridiani micantem, caetera humanum, et prorsus imberbem; Caput