Stelligeri And Other Essays Concerning America

lman, first minister of the Brattle Street church, preached the Boston lecture in memory of Cotton Mather, who had died two days before. Cotton Mather had lived all his life in Boston; there is no record, they say, of his ever having travelled farther from home than Ipswich or Andover or Plymouth. Of sensitive temperament, and both by constitution and by conviction devoted to the traditions in which he was trained, he certainly presented, to a degree nowhere common, a conveniently exaggerated type of the characteristics that marked the society of which he formed a part. But Benjamin Colman, at least in earlier life, was of different mettle. After graduation at Harvard College he had passed some years in England, at a time when clever Dissenters could see good company. In Boston, whither he had returned late in 1699 to takecharge of the new church subsequently known as the Brattle Street, he had been so liberal?at least in matters of discipline?as to impress the Mathers, who were the leaders of the strictly orthodox party, as a dangerous Radical. It is not too much, perhaps, to say that his ministerial career marks the beginning of that movement in the Boston churches which, a century later, became Unitarianism and put Calvinism, at best, hopelessly out of fashion. In view of this, his lecture on Cotton Mather becomes curious. His text is the translation of Enoch: "And Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." From these word...