Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/289

WENDELL'S "COTTON MATHER" authority and his power to maintain the stern Hebraic law and ritual in the Old Colony grew less and less. To the end of his life he found himself more or less a suspect, criticised, hampered, gainsayed, by the laity and his sacerdotal peers; slowly but surely, to his grief and bewilderment, getting farther away from his inherited rights as the chief exponent of the ancestral creed and New England's spiritual potentate.

He found himself, while keenly alive to his prerogatives as the flower of theocratic generations, lacking real advancement; forced, after all, to take refuge in his learning, subtlety, mysticism, and in what Professor Wendell analyzes as the "histrionic insincerity of priesthood that brings to unhappy men the Divine sympathy of priests." One soon discovers that Mr. Wendell is a master of paradoxy: it is his natural method of getting at a radical truth. In using it for honest needs, rather than for effect, he is original and gives his style a decidedly specific flavor.

Dr. Mather, then, even in that colonial period, was an anachronism. He incurred the obloquy of many who advanced beyond his creed, and in whom his vanity and egregious manner bred a hearty antagonism. And he died after experience of foiled ambitions, grievously baffled, it is clear, in never securing the Presidency of Harvard—which his father held for sixteen years. He saw that college dangerously liberalized, and was driven to strengthen Yale as the citadel of the true faith, where a glorious defence could still be made—the outposts having been sapped if not taken. Yale College—how would the Doctor [275]