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Updated: May 29, 2025
The shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather must have groaned aloud at the suggestions, instructions, and actions of this unregenerate, daring, and "amusing" leader of church-singing.
The four other members of the committee represented the Republic Iron and Steel Company, the Lackawanna Steel Company, the American Iron and Steel Institute and the Picklands, Mather Co., of Cleveland. Perhaps the most astounding of all the committees was that on "Oil."
Several other Sachems gave a sort of attention: and it appeared that the way had been in some degree prepared by a French priest, who had been wrecked on Cape Cod, had been passed from one tribe to another, and had died among them, but not without having left a tradition of teaching which was by some identified with Eliot's. Of one Sachem, Mather tells a story: "While Mr.
Mather remarks, in connection with his synopsis of these Rules: "They are considerable things, which I have thus related."
Coming directly to the issue of the day, Mather deplored the fact that the several plantations which lived upon the labor of their Negroes were guilty of the "prodigious Wickedness of deriding, neglecting, and opposing all due Means of bringing the poor Negroes unto God."
Being satisfied that a restoration of the old Charter could not be obtained, Increase Mather acquiesced in what he deemed a necessity, and bent his efforts to have as favorable terms as possible secured in the new. His colleagues in the agency, Elisha Cooke and Thomas Oaks, opposed his course the former, with great determination, taking the ground of the "old Charter or none."
Many prominent clergymen wrote essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of Regular Singing," also a "Joco-serious Dialogue on Singing," by Reverend Mr. Symmes; "Cases of Conscience," compiled by several ministers; "The Accomplished Singer," by Cotton Mather, were the most important.
There were those who were fit to associate with the boldest asserters of civil liberty; and Mather himself, then in England, was not unworthy to be ranked with those sons of the Church, whose firmness and spirit in resisting kingly encroachments in matters of religion, entitled them to the gratitude of their own and succeeding ages.
Yet Cotton Mather scrupled not to put in operation these and other devices; to hound on the magistrates, to browbeat and sophisticate the juries, and to scream threats, warnings and self-glorifications from the pulpit. Needs must, when the devil drives.
Even in 1692, it was the foolish breath of Cotton Mather and others of the clergy that blew the dying embers of this ghastly superstition into a flame; and they were actuated partly by a desire to bring about a religious revival, which might stay for a while the hastening lapse of their own authority, and still more by that credulous scepticism of feeble-minded piety which, dreads the cutting away of an orthodox tumor of misbelief, as if the life-blood of faith would follow, and would keep even a stumbling-block in the way of salvation, if only enough generations had tripped over it to make it venerable.
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