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Updated: June 28, 2025
Except in Jonathan Edwards's "Narratives of Surprising Conversions," no more painful examples of the Puritanical religious teaching of the young can be found than the account given in the Magnalia of various young souls in whom the love of God was remarkably budding, especially this same unwholesome Nathaniel Mather.
And we find that this very term was applied to the representative centre of a consecrated family, in the "Attestation" to the Magnalia, written by John Higginson, venerable in years, as in all things else, in some Latin lines of his composure: "Venerande Mathere."
But Cotton Mather's Magnalia, a vast book dealing with the past history of New England, was printed in 1702, only a year later than Defoe's True-Born Englishman. For more than two centuries the development of English speech and English writing on this side of the Atlantic has kept measurable pace now slower, now swifter with the speech of the mother country.
Magnalia Christi Americana. Edit. London, 1702. All communications, in answer to this missive were to be addressed to the "President and Fellows" of Harvard College.
His "Magnalia" was printed in England, and the exigences and vicissitudes of publication at that time are fully told in his diary; also the exalted and idealized view which he took of authorship.
Compare Mather, Magnalia, II. 595; Belknap, Hist. New Hampshire, I. 207; Journal of Rev. Hist. Charlevoix adds various embellishments, not to be found in the original sources. Later writers copy and improve upon him, until Hertel is pictured as charging the pursuers sword in hand, while the English fly in disorder before him. Their remains were buried by Captain Church, three years later.
Born in Boston in 1663, died in 1728; son of Increase Mather; colleague of his father in the North Church of Boston in 1684, remaining in that pulpit until his death; active in the suppression of witchcraft; published his "Magnalia" in 1702, his "Wonders of the Invisible World" in 1692. He that will write of Eliot must write of charity, or say nothing.
A copy of Spigelius's famous Anatomy, in the Boston Athenaeum, has the names of Increase and Samuel Mather written in it, and was doubtless early overhauled by the youthful Cotton, who refers to the great anatomist's singular death, among his curious stories in the "Magnalia," and quotes him among nearly a hundred authors whom he cites in his manuscript "The Angel of Bethesda." Dr.
Hale's book had not the benefit of his revision, as it did not pass through the press until two years after his death; and we thus account for the error as to the date of the Goodwin affair. In making up his Magnalia, Mather had the use of Hale's manuscript and transferred from it nearly all that he says, in that work, about Salem Witchcraft. He copies the passage above quoted.
One to "Dr. John Swinnerton, Physician," in 1688; another to his wife. There, too, is the grave of Nathaniel Mather, the younger brother of Cotton, and mentioned in the Magnalia as a hard student, and of great promise. "An aged man at nineteen years," saith the gravestone. It affected me deeply, when I had cleared away the grass from the half-buried stone, and read the name.
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