United States or Dominican Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If they should chance, for instance, to speak of Cotton Mather as a pedant, they will have the reviewers after them, belaboring them with the charge of "a great lack of research," in not having "pored over" the "prodigious" manuscript of his unpublished work, in the Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the whole of his three hundred and eighty-two printed works, and the huge mass of Mather Papers, in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society; and with never having "read" the Memorable Providences, or "seen" the Wonders of the Invisible World, or "heard" of the Magnalia Christi Americana.
Massachusetts Historical Society: tribute to C.C. Emerson, 21; quality of its literature, 84; on Carlyle, 294. Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 193, 302, 307, 411. Materialism, 146, 391. Mather, Cotton: his Magnalia, 5-7; on Concord discord, 57; on New England Melancholy, 216; a borrower, 381. Mathew, Father, disciples, 368. Mayhew, Jonathan, Boston minister, 51.
John Baily, or of Nathaniel Mather, as given by Cotton Mather in his "Magnalia." Mather says that poor, sad, heart-sick Baily was filled with "desponding jealousies," "disconsolate uneasinesses," gloomy fears, and thinks the words from his diary "may be profitable to some discouraged minds." Profitable! Ah, no; far from it!
Mather's Magnalia might do, but the binding does not please me; Cureton's Corpus Ignatianum might also do if it were not too thin. I do not like taking Norton's Genuineness of the Gospels, as it is just possible someone may be wanting to know whether the Gospels are genuine or not, and be unable to find out because I have got Mr. Norton's book.
Of that golden age, Cotton Mather himself, "smitten with a just fear of encroaching and ill-bodied degeneracies," sat down to write the history, recording in the Magnalia "the great things done for us by our God," in the hope that he might thereby do something "to prevent the loss of the primitive principles and the primitive practices." But he had imagined a vain thing.
Grandfather proceeded to say, that, when Master Cheever died, he bequeathed the chair to the most learned man that was educated at his school, or that had ever been born in America. This was the renowned Cotton Mather, minister of the Old North Church in Boston. "And author of the Magnalia, Grandfather, which we sometimes see you reading," said Laurence. "Yes, Laurence," replied Grandfather.
Of "Magnalia," his chief and representative work, it has been said that "it is a heterogeneous and polyglot compilation of information useful and useless, of unbridled pedantry, of religious adjuration, biographical anecdotes, political maxims, and theories of education.... Indeed, it contains everything except order, accuracy, sobriety, proportion, development, and upshot."
A letter is in existence of Governor Trumbull's ordering that some copies of the funeral sermon preached at his wife's death be printed on heavy writing paper. Copies of the first edition of the "Magnalia" also were issued on large paper and owned in New England, but of course that work was done in London.
Considering the unfair view of the import of the Advice, in the Life of Phips, and embodied in the Magnalia a work, which, with all its defects, inaccuracies, and absurdities, is sure of occupying a conspicuous place in our Colonial literature I said: "unfortunately for the reputation of Cotton Mather, Hutchinson has preserved the Address of the Ministers, entire."
Such amazing verses as these may be found: Cotton Mather, in his "Magnalia," gives thus the full story of the production of "The Bay Psalm-book": "About the year 1639, the New-English reformers, considering that their churches enjoyed the other ordinances of Heaven in their scriptural purity were willing that the 'The singing of Psalms' should be restored among them unto a share of that purity.
Word Of The Day