Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World emphasizes two important themes of Puritan hermeneutics. The first theme is Puritan faculty psychology. The second theme is the pivotal role to be played by New England in Protestant eschatology. In this paper, I propose to explore these two themes and investigate how they cohere or unify the apparent disjointed parts of Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World.Puritan faculty psychology provides a theory for looking at Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World. Puritan faculty psychology was an integral part of the intellectual make up of the Puritans. It worked, operated, and influenced their writings in ways that they could not acknowledge (Miller, Seventeenth Century 242-243). By using Puritan faculty psychology we can discern important and interesting aspects of Mather's Wonders that would otherwise remain hidden from us.For the Puritan, man's faculties had a natural hierarchy of subordination. The passions depended on the will which in turn depended on right reason (Miller, Seventeenth Century 252-253). The passions were aroused by the senses, but they were not to cause action until they were mediated by the will through right reason (Miller, Seventeenth Century 252). A
Witchcraft posed dangers because it was "very much transacted upon the stage of imagination. "The Devil is come down in great Wrath, for be has but a short time. In the first section of Wonders, Mather weaves this sense of degeneracy of the community, the settlement's existence in satan's wilderness, and the resulting attacks which were, for Mather, the beginnings of the final battle, with the previously identified theme of this part (above 4-5), the instruction to the judges on how to avoid executing innocents. At the top of this list was the effect that the devil's tempting had "made our too nigh denying of reason to one another. In this the third section of Wonders , Mather explained the importance of God's grace in determining right reason. Like Mather's writing in Wonders, many of these sermons contained "millenarian overtones. "If we allow the Mad dogs of Hell to poyson us by biting us, we shall imagine that we see nothing but such things about us, and like such things fly upon all that we see. Mather chose his style to be plain and journalistic in an effort to inform the reader of the causes and outcomes of the trials. Sin, for the Puritan, was reason that has operated as a result of a malfunctioning of this hierarchy. The first item Mather directed to those who are criticizing the proceedings. Do you buy that claim? Why or why not? Does he have other motives for writing?According to Mather, in Wonders, what reasons would the Devil have for being so interested in New England, or, for that matter, Martha Carrier? In his work The Wonders of the Invisible World, Cotton Mather attempts to give an objective account of the Salem witchcraft trials. Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639-1723 (1988); Robert Many colonists in late-seventeenth-century New England combined their Puritan faith with a belief in witchcraft, and charges that one or another person was one of Satan's agents, bent on bringing harm to the community, were common.
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Acceptance Essays
