Mather Sentence Examples

Its style, though in the main rather unnatural and declamatory, is at its best spontaneous, dignified and rhythmical; the book is valuable for occasional facts and for its picture of the times, and it did much to make Mather the most eminent American writer of his day.

He was an assiduous student, commonly spending sixteen hours a day among his books; but his learning (to quote Justin Winsor's contrast between Increase and Cotton Mather) "usually left his natural ability and his education free from entanglements."

Mather conducted an open-air missionary tour in the Midlands and the North with some success.

Of these it is enough to name John Cotton, able both as a divine and as a statesman, potent in England by his expositions and apologies of the " New England way," potent in America for his organizing and administrative power; Thomas Hooker, famed as an exponent and apologist of the " New England way "; John Eliot, famous as the " apostle of the Indians," first of Protestant missionaries to the heathen; Richard Mather, whose influence and work were carried on by his distinguished son, and his still more distinguished grandson, Cotton Mather.

He was the grandson of Richard Mather, and the eldest child of Increase Mather, and Maria, daughter of John Cotton.

Mather took some part as adviser in the Revolution of 1689 in Massachusetts.

His later years were clouded with many sorrows and disappointments; his relations with Governor Joseph Dudley were unfriendly; he lost much of his former prestige in the Church - his own congregation dwindled - and in the college; his uncle John Cotton was expelled from his 8 8 4 _ Mather, Increase charge in the Plymouth Church; his son Increase turned out a ne'er-do-well; four of his children and his second wife died in November 1713; his wife's brothers and the husbands of his sisters were ungodly and violent men; his favourite daughter Katherine, who "understood Latin and read Hebrew fluently," died in 1716; his third wife went mad in 1719; his personal enemies circulated incredible scandals about him; and in 1724-1725 he saw a Liberal once more preferred to him as a new president of Harvard.

Though self-conscious and vain, Cotton Mather had on the whole a noble character.

Cotton Mather's son, Samuel Mather (1706-1785), also a clergyman, graduated at Harvard in 1723, was pastor of the North Church, Boston, from 1732 to 1742, when, owing to a dispute among his congregation over revivals, he resigned to take charge of a church established for him in North Bennett Street.

Among his works are The Life of Cotton Mather (3729); An Apology for the Liberties of the Churches in New England (1738), and America Known to the Ancients (1773).

As a delegate from Dorchester, his father's church, to the Synod of 1662, he opposed the Half-Way Covenant adopted by the Synod and defended by Richard Mather and by Jonathan Mitchell (1624-1668) of Cambridge; but soon afterwards he "surrendered a glad captive" to "the truth so victoriously cleared by Mr Mitchell," and like his father and his son became one of the chief exponents of the Half-Way Covenant.

With the Cambridge Platform of 1646, drafted by his father, the Confession of 1680, for which Increase Mather was largely responsible, was printed as a book of doctrine and government for the churches of Massachusetts.

After the threat of a Quo Warranto writ in 1683 for the surrender of the Massachusetts charter, Mather used all his tremendous influence to persuade the colonists not to give up the charter; and the Boston freemen unanimously voted against submission.

The royal agents immediately afterwards sent to London a treasonable letter, falsely attributed to Mather; but its spuriousness seems to have been suspected in England and Mather was not "fetch'd over and made a Sacrifice."

Mather had expressed strong dissatisfaction with the clause giving the governor the right of veto, and regretted the less theocratic tone of the charter which made all freemen (and not merely church members) electors.

With Sir William Phips, the new governor, a member of Mather's church, he arrived in Boston on the 14th of May 1692.

Mather had been acting president of Harvard College in 1681-1682, and in June 1685 he again became acting president (or rector), but still preached every Sunday in Boston and would not comply with an order of the General Court that he should reside in Cambridge.

That Mather's administration of the college was excellent is admitted even by his harsh critic, Josiah Quincy, in his History of Harvard University.'

The Liberal party, which now came into control in the college repeatedly disappointed the hopes of Cotton Mather that he might be chosen president, and by its ecclesiastical laxness and its broader views of Church polity forced the Mathers to turn from Harvard to Yale as a truer school of the prophets.

The Liberal leaders, John Leverett (1662-1724), William Brattle (1662-1713) - who graduated with Leverett in 1680, and with him as tutor controlled the college during Increase Mather's absence in England - William Brattle's eldest brother, Thomas Brattle (1658-1713), and Ebenezer Pemberton (1671-1717), pastor of the Old South Church, desired an "enrichment of the service," and greater liberality in the matter of baptism.

In 1697 the Second Boston Church, in which Cotton Mather had been his father's colleague since 1685, upbraided the Charlestown Church "for betraying the liberties of the churches in their late putting into the hands of the whole inhabitants the choice of a minister."

The later years of Mather's life were spent almost entirely in the work of the ministry, now beginning to be a less varied career than when he entered on it.

With Jonathan Edwards, than whom he was much more of a man of affairs, and with Benjamin Franklin, whose mission in England somewhat resembled Mather's, he may be ranked among the greatest Americans of the period before the War of Independence.

Sibley's Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University (Cambridge, 1873), with an exhaustive list of Mather's works (about 150 titles); there is much valuable matter in Williston Walker's Ten New England Leaders (New York, 1901) and in his Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York, 1893); for literary criticism of the Mathers see ch.

Mather's worth has been under-estimated by Josiah Quincy, Justin Winsor and other historians out of sympathy with his ecclesiastical spirit, who represent him as only an ambitious narrow-minded schemer.

He worked in a middle management job at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather in London's docklands.

He then went commercial, working for agencies Ogilvy & Mather and TBWA.

Mather joined the itinerancy in 1757 the first married preacher to be accepted.

Both Increase and Cotton Mather follow suit in naming the pope as antichrist.

Morgan Library; Williston Hall, containing the Mather Art Museum, the rooms of the Young Men's Christian Association, and several lecture-rooms; Walker Hall, with college offices and lecture-rooms; Hitchcock Hall; Barrett Hall (1859), the first college gymnasium built in the United States, now used as a lecture hall; the Pratt Gymnasium and Natatorium and the Pratt Health Cottage, whose donors also gave to the college the Pratt Field; an astronomical observatory; and the two dormitories, North College and South College, supplemented by several fraternity houses.

Meanwhile, in America the Puritan tradition, adapted to the new conditions, is represented by Cotton Mather, and later by Jonathan Edwards, the greatest preacher of his time and country.

His style in its simplicity, facility and clearness owed something to De Foe, something to Cotton Mather, something to Plutarch, more to Bunyan and to his early attempts to reproduce the manner of the third volume of the Spectator; and not the least to his own careful study of word usage.

Then came a struggle, carried on in England by Increase Mather as agent (1688-1692) of the colony, to secure such a form of government under a new charter as would preserve as many as possible of their old liberties.

By his sermons and his writings he exerted a great influence in colonial Massachusetts, and according to Mather was "a most incomparable scholar."

Increase Mather was a great preacher with a simple style and a splendid voice, which had a "Tonitruous Cogency," to quote his son's phrase.