Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/759

 -ivoo] Idealism in New England. Cotton Mather. 727 dead ; and the religion of New England, as well as its political and moral convictions, had already acquired, in its isolated home, the strength of immemorial tradition. In other words, the general principle that life should be governed by ideal aspirations a principle which in the older world must have proved at odds with established custom, and therefore a breach of historical continuity became, in New England, itself customary. On the whole, the social system of New England was hierarchical. The chief power, social and political, was in the hands of the clergy. The Church government was congregational ; each Church was independent ; but there was little dissent from established principle. And from this state of affairs, quite as much as from any political circumstance, arose that kind of republican democracy which has remained so charac- teristic of all the regions affected by New England tradition. The minister was called to his office by the vote of the congregation over which he was to preside; but, once elected, he enjoyed an authority, spiritual and intellectual, of extraordinary range and strength. With his fellow-ministers he was one of a chosen company, generally acting in harmony, whose position on Yankee earth faintly figured that of the elect in a Yankee heaven. And, though the orthodox clergy of New England fell from their earthly estate a full century ago, the tradition they implanted still gives to ministers, in most parts of the United States, a kind of factitious dignity greater than that enjoyed by most clergymen of a fully established Church. As New England grew, there appeared, in various directions, a tendency to diverge from the rigid principles of the early days. To this we owe the single work of the seventeenth century in America which has any claim to literary permanence. This is the Magnolia Christi Americana, or Church History of New England, written between 1690 and 1700 by Cotton Mather, at that time the most conspicuous Conservative minister of Boston. Hastily written and far from trust- worthy in detail, this book is in spirit a document of historical importance. Cotton Mather honestly believed that the founders of New England wrought the will of God; if so, he reasoned, God would indicate His pleasure by choosing from New England a remarkable proportion of His elect. Accordingly, if a truthful record of what had transpired in New England during its seventy years of national life should reveal an unusual amount of godliness, the record would virtually demonstrate that the Fathers were immortally right. Nothing else could so certainly stem the tide of liberalism, of progress, of whatever we choose to call the de- parture from the principles and the practices of the elder days ; nothing else could so certainly maintain the work which the Fathers had accom- plished. So this big, confused folio was flung together; historical records, biographies of saintly ministers and magistrates, the story of Harvard College, the creeds and disciplines of the Churches, and awful warnings for those who fall away. The book is written in the manner of CH. XXIII.