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Their mode of accomplishing it. Terrible slaughter. Storming of Providence. Roger Williams. Nanuntenoo's reply. Cowardly sentinels. Alarm of the chief. Flight of Nanuntenoo. His capture. Young America rebuked. Execution of the sachem. Statement of Cotton Mather. Character of Nanuntenoo. Peril of the settlers. Mutual disasters. Philip's affection for Taunton. A family save a town.
It is to be presumed that his warmest admirers would not think of comparing Cotton Mather with his transatlantic correspondent and coadjutor, as to force of character, power of mind, or the moral and religious value of their writings. Yet there were some striking similarities between them. They were men of undoubted genius and great learning.
Ministers in that day still had great influence in New England, and had grasped at temporal as well as spiritual sway, maintaining that the former should rightly involve the latter. What a minister said, had weight; what so well-known a minister as Cotton Mather said, would carry conviction to many.
Patience Mather was saying the seven-multiplication table, when she heard a heavy step in the entry. "That is Squire Bean," whispered her friend, Martha Joy, who stood at her elbow. Patience stopped short in horror. Her especial bugbear in mathematics was eight-times-seven; she was coming toward it fast could she remember it, with old Squire Bean looking at her?
To many the new flag was the symbol of anti-Christ, and Cotton Mather judged it a sin to have the cross restored; but others felt with Sewall, the diarist, who said of the fall of the old government: "The foundations being destroyed, what can the righteous do?"
He was the first minister at Watertown; a position in those days as important as the presidency of a trunk line is in our own. Cotton Mather and the early writers speak of him almost as the founder of the Congregational Church in New England; and he and his descendants were all cultivated gentlemen.
This threw them out of all communication with the Home Government, on the subject, and gave to Mr. Mather controlling influence. He was requested by the Ministers of the Crown to name the officers of the new Government; and, in fact, had the free and sole selection of them all.
Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher," while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Of two of the New England saints it was written:
"I don't care who hears me," the woman replied in a still louder voice, "and as soon as you can won't do for I. I have got to have it on Saturday, so that's flat. I will come up to the field, and you'll best have it ready for me." Ned did not hear the last few words, but he had heard enough to know that Mather owed ten shillings which he had borrowed, besides a bill for cakes.
Irvin J. Morgan at his gilded height struck the inspiring chords, and a moment later the wedding procession entered, led by two white-clad pages, and moved slowly across the white gallery, Mrs. Victor C. Mather, Mrs. A. J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., Mrs. Gurnee Munn, Mrs. Oliver E. Cromwell, Miss Eleanor B. Hopkins and Mrs.
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