The year 1692, when his father returned triumphant from England, proved critical in the public lives of both. Theocracy-the government of the State in accordance with the will of God, in this case as interpreted by the orthodox New England Churches-was the ideal to which they were devoted. A charter openly theocratic in terms had proved beyond the diplomatic skill of Increase Mather. He had succeeded, however, in securing considerable power to the royal Governor of Massachusetts, and in persuading the Crown to name as Governor a particularly loyal member of his own congregation. This state of things was obviously unwelcome to the more liberal feeling of his political opponents. What ensued has in it a touch of tragedy.

Almost at the moment when Cotton Mather, fasting and praying in Boston for the prosperity of his father's mission abroad, first had news that the new charter was signed, and thereupon vowed in thanksgiving to do some special service to God, there occurred in Massachusetts an outbreak of what might now be called psychic influence, but was then, throughout Christendom, called witchcraft. Amid the confusion and jargon of the evidence, for example, appears an undisputed statement that a shrewish woman, by making certain signs before her husband's face, would sometimes prevent him from praying, until she chose to step towards him with a loud cry, whereupon his lips would be unlocked. No one who dabbled in such elementary hypnotism under William and Mary had a shadow of doubt that it was actually what the law of all Europe had immemorially declared it-the direct work of the Devil. Some such view is said still to be held by eminent ecclesiastical authority. To Cotton Mather's mind, the call of God to fight this diabolical attack was immediate. The sad history of the Salem Witches ensued a story magnified and distorted by tradition, but deeply memorable in New England history. For, whatever else it did, it fatally hurt theocracy.

Among those accused of witchcraft were some who believed themselves guilty, some concerning whom the evidence leaves doubt, and some who appear to have felt innocent. Neither court, clergy nor people, in New England or anywhere else at that time, questioned the real existence of the diabolical crime. To have done so

would have been to deny scriptural authority-an impiety of which New England had not yet begun to dream. How the crime of witchcraft should be proved was another question, not yet legally determined. The more prudent advisers of the court on this point, among whom was Cotton Mather, recommended that no evidence should be admitted which would not be admissible in other criminal proceedings. Less thoughtful enthusiasts counselled the admission of spectral evidence-that is, of statements by the bewitched of what they had perceived while suffering from diabolical possession; in brief, this was much as if a court of law should admit as evidence in a capital case the statement of one who had been hypnotised, as to what he had seen while in hypnotic trance. The court decided to accept spectral evidence. Cotton Mather, never faltering in his belief that witchcraft was the Devil's own work, did not openly protest; though, in the end, he seems to have believed that the fatal decision of the court on this point was itself of diabolical origin. This, indeed, This, indeed, was probably the opinion of Judge Sewall, when, some years later, he requested public prayers for the guilt he had contracted on that occasion. What ensued was inevitable; guilty and innocent were hopelessly confused in mists of spectral accusation and testimony. Some twenty witches were hanged, among whom several were surely guiltless. Reaction followed on the panic. Spectral evidence was excluded; and no more convictions occurred. The adversaries of the Mathers took the occasion to throw the burden of the tragic blunder on them, the chief pillars of theocracy. Far more than they deserved, they have traditionally suffered under it ever since.

This was not their only blow. Sir William Phipps, the Governor, who sat at their feet in church, proved at best tactless. For one thing, having come to some misunderstanding with the captain of a royal frigate, he took occasion to cane that officer in the public streets. Before long he was summoned to England to give account of his conduct. There he died, early in 1695. His successor, Joseph Dudley, soon quarrelled with the Mathers. From that time onward their public influence was broken. Victorious politically, the liberals presently turned their attention to Harvard College. For some

years Increase Mather fought stoutly to maintain himself in the presidency. At last, however, he yielded it up, outgeneralled. His ministry in Boston had always appeared to him his principal duty. To get rid of him the liberal majority in the governing boards of Harvard College passed a vote, still in force, that the President of the College must actually reside in the town of Cambridge, where the college is situated; it was then some eight miles from Boston. Mather therefore resigned, in 1701. Theocracy had lost not only control of the State, but all considerable influence in the oldest and at that time the only important institution of the higher learning in British America.

Increase Mather lived for twenty-two years more, Cotton Mather for twenty-seven; throughout the time left them they were singularly and beautifully sympathetic. Though their political influence was at an end, and their influence on the training of the ministryat that time the chief end of New England educationmortally enfeebled, they never relaxed their faithful work as ministers of the Gospel. With Cotton Mather, the while, not yet stricken in years, there was rather increase than relaxation of his lifelong effort to do good in every way. This effort impelled him to meddle incessantly with public and with academic affairs, thereby keeping aflame animosities excited when he was politically and academically influential. At the same time, he concerned himself with what would now be called social service, in a manner which won him the lifelong respect of Benjamin Franklin. He wrote and published incessantly on all manner of subjects which he conceived might tend to the greater glory of God. He collected and transmitted to England, under the title of Curiosa Americana,' notes on natural history, and the like, which won him the honour of fellowship in the Royal Society. And, in 1721, against a storm of opposition which actually attempted assassination, he introduced in Boston the practice of inoculation for smallpox-it is said for the first time in the history of European medicine.

His credit for this, to be sure, has been disputed. Prof. Kittredge, however, has lately demonstrated that the then accessible facts concerning inoculation in Turkey and among the negroes of Africa had been in Mather's

possession for fully five years before the outbreak of smallpox in Massachusetts which made him put them to proof; and, moreover, that throughout these years he had purposed to try the efficacy of inoculation whenever occasion should sadly arise. Mather's claim to fellowship in the Royal Society has also been disputed, and indeed was challenged in his own day. Another paper of Prof. Kittredge's finally explains the accident by which his entirely regular election, of which he received formal notice in 1713, was not formally confirmed in an open meeting of the Society until ten years later. There can be no further question that he was fully recognised as a man of scientific eminence by the highest authority in England.

The diary of such a man, if concerned with matters of fact, would have been replete with interest. Instead, the volumes now before us seem, at first glance, so dull that one might well wonder why they were rescued from the oblivion of manuscript. What few vivid passages they contain have mostly been printed before. They form a surprisingly small part of the whole, which was intended to be a record not of fact, but of spiritual experience. What is more, the diary, for the most part, exists not in the original copies but in digests, carefully made by Mather's own hand, preserving only such passages as afterthought assured him might be spiritually useful. As now preserved, the records are made in separate note-books, one for each year, beginning with his birthday. There remain twenty-six, the first for the year 1681, when he was eighteen years old, the last for the year 1724, when he was sixty-one. Down to 1711 they are scrupulously summarised; the seven note-books which survive from subsequent years are just as they came day by day from his pen. In that year he began a practice of asking himself every morning, 'What shall I render to the Lord?' His answer to each of these questions, he writes, 'will be a GOOD DEVISED, for which a G. D. will be the Distinction in these Memorials.' So for seven years out of fourteen we have his daily record of what he purposed doing for the glory of God and incidentally for the good of mankind. The published volumes supplement the diary, and fill its gaps, with a number of not very memorable letters. In brief, these

books are not an objective record of his outward life; they are rather records of his inner and spiritual life, in such aspects as he thought he ought to remember, and give posterity a chance of knowing.

Any such compilation must evidently be perilous to the reputation of a man whose enemies for two centuries have held him credulous, hypocritical and mendacious. Whoever seeks there may doubtless find confirmation of much that has been said against him. The simplest rule of life, however, is to explain things in the simplest way. Taken simply, accepted as honest, these pages of Cotton Mather are, after all, a document of historical importance. Beyond almost anything else in existence, they exhibit what life meant to earnest New England Puritans.

These emigrant Englishmen devoutly accepted the dogmas of Calvin. Human beings, the offspring of Adam, they held to be justly perverted in will. No voluntary human effort could ever make any man's will coincide with the will of God; yet any slightest act of will in the smallest degree opposed to the infinitely right will of God was infinite and mortal sin. Salvation, which could come only through the atonement of Christ, was vouchsafed only, as an unmerited mercy, to the elect. The token of election was miraculous ability not only to yield to the will of God, but to accept it so unreservedly that no consciousness of conflict should remain. Complete union with Divinity, however, was impossible this side the grave; until freed from every fetter of the flesh, children of Adam could never be securely rid of the penalty his fall had imposed. The Devil, too, loved no wile more than that by which, now and again, he deluded sinners into fleeting assurance of harmony with the divine will. No man could ever be finally certain that he was either beyond hope or beyond fear. So far as he rebelled, he manifested his ancestral curse; so far as he unfalteringly submitted to the dispensations of God, he showed signs of how, if he should chance to be of the elect, God's grace might work. To record such signs, and the struggles which environed them, was therefore a precious service to God-at once an encouragement and a warning both to the maker of the record and to any who should ever read it aright. Such service to God is the purpose of Cotton Mather's diary. Thus understood,