A History of American Literature. Boynton Percy Holmes
anything is in such a way revealed. And of this sort is the foolish Sorcery of those Women that put the white of an Egg into a Glass of Water, so that they may be able to divine of what Occupation their future husbands shall be. It were much better to remain ignorant than thus to consult with the Devil. These kind of practices appear at first blush to be Diabolical; so that I shall not multiply Words in evincing the evil of them. It is noted that the Children of Israel did secretly those things that are not right against the Lord their God 2 King. 17. 9. I am told there are some who do secretly practice such Abominations as these last mentioned, unto whom the Lord in mercy give deep and unfeigned Repentance and pardon for their grievous Sin.
These preachers thus turned superstition into an enemy of the true religion, as it assuredly is; but they regarded it not as the fruit of ignorance, to be remedied by education and intelligence, but as a device of Satan which could be offset by preaching and prayer. The two books are cut from the same cloth, so that an indication of the contents of the one just mentioned will give an idea of them both. The chapter headings run as follows: Of Remarkable Sea Deliverances; Preservations; Lightening; Philosophical Meditations; Things Preternatural [voices of invisible speakers and doings of mysterious mischief-makers]; That there are Daemons and Possessed Persons [three main arguments: (1) Scripture forbade witchcraft, therefore there must be such a thing; (2) experience has made it manifest; (3) convicted maldoers have confessed it]; Apparitions; Conscience; Deaf and Dumb Persons; Tempests; Earthquakes; and Judgments. As a whole the book is a collection of curious anecdotes taken on almost any hearsay, but almost all at second or third hand. They resemble some of the most popular of the atrocity stories which have been told during every war that history chronicles, but which no investigator has been able to run down in any single instance. In point of superstition the Mathers, to repeat, should be considered in two lights: compared with educated men of the twentieth century they were almost incredibly primitive in what they were willing to believe, but considered with reference to their own generation they fought the wiles of the devil as soldiers of the Lord.
The most ambitious work that either produced was Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia,” a history of the Church in New England. This was a bulky two-volume effort, divided into seven parts, or books. As a matter of fact it was really a general history of the region by a man who regarded the existence of New England as identical with the existence of the Church. In this basic assumption as well as in many of his details Cotton Mather revealed himself as a hopeless conservative of his day – hopeless because it was already evident to all but him and his kind that the State was shaking off the control of the Church leaders. One can get a fair idea of the bias of the book from the opening paragraph:
It is the Opinion of some, though ’tis but an Opinion, and but of some Learned Men, That when the Sacred Oracles of Heaven assure us, The Things under the Earth are some of those, whose Knees are to bow in the Name of Jesus, by those Things are meant the Inhabitants of America, who are Antipodes to those of the other Hemispheres. I would not quote any words of Lactantius, though there are some to countenance this Interpretation, because of their being so Ungeographical: nor would I go to strengthen the Interpretation by reciting the Words of the Indians to the first White Invaders of their Territories, We hear you are come from under the World, to take our World from us. But granting the uncertainty of such an Exposition, I shall yet give the Church of God a certain account of these Things, which in America have been Believing and Adoring the glorious Name of Jesus; and of that Country in America, where those Things have been attended with Circumstances most remarkable.
The “Magnalia” is really an attempt at a general history of New England from 1620 to 1698, containing classified material on the governors, magistrates, and preachers, a history of Harvard, a collection of reports of church transactions, an account of the Indian Wars, and “A Faithful Record of many Illustrious Wonderful Providences.” Yet for historical data it is almost as unreliable as the libelous “New English Canaan” of Thomas Morton. For Morton was no more eager to turn the facts to the discredit of the Puritans than Mather was to interpret them to the glory of the Church; and the consequence was that neither could be absolutely trusted. The historians have abandoned Mather as a safe authority. His sin has found him out, even though he committed it in the name of the Lord.
The man in this period in whom complete faith can be put is Samuel Sewall, who did not profess to be an author except in an incidental way. He lived from 1652 to 1730 and kept a very full diary from 1673 to 1729. This was written with no thought of publication, and actually was not printed until a hundred and fifty years later, when it was given to the world by the Massachusetts Historical Society. In American literature Sewall’s Diary occupies a place almost exactly parallel to that of John Evelyn’s in English letters. Their lives and their long diaries covered about the same years, and they held corresponding positions in the communities. Both were educated men – Sewall was a graduate of Harvard – and both were highly respected and trusted. Sewall held a minor position at Harvard connected with the library, was prominent in church affairs, and was a judge, officiating at the time of the Salem witchcraft trials. An informal journal written without prejudice, by such a man as he, gives material of the greatest value for a picture of the times. It is material of course and not the picture itself, for it lacks anything in the way of composition, just as do the facts of ordinary daily life in the order of their occurrence. But out of it two main threads of interest may be unwoven. One is the sober but not unrelieved background of the times, itself a composite of various strands. Religion was its strongest fiber. Few weeks pass in which there is no record of sermon, fast, christening, wedding, funeral, or special celebration. These were among the chief social happenings of the calendar. Funerals as well as more festive occasions were accompanied with gifts of gloves and rings; refreshments were ample if not lavish; and the bill for strong drinks was always a heavy item, for it must be remembered that prohibition is of recent origin, and that among the Puritans self-control made drunkenness as infrequent as drinking was common. Against frivolity too they set their minds; and Sewall’s Diary gives a protest at “tricks” and dancing and May festivals, and even Christmas and Easter, which were triply hated because they had their origins in pagan tradition and had come to the present through the Church of Rome and the Church of England. Yet the objections to these practices and festivals show that they were real disturbances in Sewall’s Boston, as were the roistering of sailors and other strangers in town.
The other and more important thread is the revelation of the inner mind of a flesh-and-blood colonial American. It takes patient reading to recreate the real man; but he is here in these pages, with all the inconsistencies that make up life out of story-books. He was all in all a fine, devout, broad-gauge man – and this is what any biographer would tell of him – with a moderate supply of littleness and petty vanity, which the biographer would be almost certain to suppress. And he was in himself a record of the public opinion of his generation. He wrote two other things besides his Diary. One is a theological treatise which was as uninspired as the quoted paragraph from Mather’s “Magnalia,” and on much the same theme. It shows him to be an apparently hopeless old fogy. The other is a pamphlet called “The Selling of Joseph,” which was probably the first antislavery utterance printed in America, and implies that Samuel Sewall was centuries ahead of the times. There is at second glance nothing perplexing in this contradiction. Sewall was a normal man who stood between the oldest-fashioned and the newest-fashioned thinkers. Sometimes he leaned backward, and sometimes forward; but on the whole he was inclined to advance. Of this he gave one famous proof. Five years after the Salem trials he had the honesty to admit to himself that he had been all wrong in his judgment, and the courage to make a public confession of his repentance. He chose one of the hardest ways of doing it. Among the “curious punishments of bygone days,” one was the humiliation of disreputable persons by forcing them to sit at the foot of the church pulpit while the minister read a public reproof. On Fast Day, 1697, Samuel Sewall of his own choice posted a bill which could be read by any who would, and, giving a copy of it to the Reverend Mr. Willard, stood up at the reading before the congregation. The method of atoning for his mistake proves that he was still a devout and faithful Puritan worshiper, but the fact that he did so at all shows that he could confess errors, even when they had been committed in behalf of the Church. The Mathers could neither have seen nor acknowledged such mistakes. They were too cocksure