Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-cfpbc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T03:44:47.165Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Moses Mather (Old Calvinist) and the Evolution of Edwardseanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Mark A. Noll
Affiliation:
Associate professor of history in Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Extract

In the fall of 1811, President Timothy Dwight of Yale College, traveling once again into the countryside in pursuit of New England's natural history, stopped briefly at Middlesex, Connecticut. Only five years before Dwight's visit, this village, known today as Darien, had suffered the loss of its longtime Congregational minister, Moses Mather. After commenting on the village, Dwight went on to say something about its late pastor:

Dr. Mather was a man distinguished for learning and piety, a strong understanding, and a most exemplary life. His natural temper was grave and unbending. His candor was that of the Gospel.… Dr. Mather died September 21, 1806, venerated by all who knew him, in the eighty-eighth year of his age.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Dwight, Timothy, Travels; in New-England and New-York, ed. Solomon, Barbara Miller, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 3:352353.Google Scholar

2. The general story of the Edwardsean theological tradition is told by Foster, Frank H., A Genetic History of the New England Theology (Chicago, 1907)Google Scholar; Haroutunian, Joseph, Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology, (New York, 1932)Google Scholar; and Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn., 1972), pp. 295313, 403428.Google Scholar

3. Biographical information on Mather is supplied by Dexter, Franklin Bowditch, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, 6 vols. (New York, 18851912), 1:626628Google Scholar; Sprague, William B., Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols. (New York, 18571869), 1:425427Google Scholar; Gluss, Vivian K., “Moses Mather: Old Light” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, n.d.)Google Scholar; and McLean, Louise H., “A Brief History of Darien,”Google Scholar and McPherson, Bertha Mather, “The Rev. Moses Mather—His Personal Story,” Darien 1641–1820–1970: Historical Sketches (Darien, Conn., 1970).Google Scholar

4. Mather was a fellow of Yale College from 1777 to 1790 and he received the D.D. degree from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1790.

5. Chauncy, Charles, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England … (Boston, 1743), p. 13Google Scholar of preliminary matter.

6. Tucker, Louis Leonard, Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale College (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962)Google Scholar; Akers, Charles W., Called unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Morgan, Edmund S., The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New Haven, Conn., 1952), pp. 168176.Google Scholar

8. Mather, Moses, Divine Sovereignty displayed by Predestination: Or, the Doctrine of the Decree Considered in its Proper Light, and Real Tendency (New Haven, Conn., 1763).Google Scholar

9. Mather, Moses, The Visible Church in Covenant with God … (New York, [1769]), p. 49.Google Scholar

10. The titles of Bellamy's six works in this controversy are found in Walker, Williston, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York, 1893), pp. 241242.Google Scholar

11. Mather, , Visible Church,. 4.Google Scholar

12. “Darien, Connecticut: First Congregational Church, Records 1739–1938,” MS, I, 9, 52; Connecticut State Library, Hartford.

13. Mather, Moses, “On the Change of the Sabbath,” and “The Subject continued,” The American Preacher, vol. 4, ed. Austin, David (New Haven, Conn., 1793), Sermons 73 and 74.Google Scholar

14. Mather, Moses, America's Appeal to the Impartial World, Wherein the Rights of the Americans, as Men, British Subjects, and as Colonists: The Equity of the Demand, and the Manner in which it was made upon them by Great-Britain, are stated and considered. And, the Opposition made by the Colonies to Acts of Parliament, their resorting to Arms in their necessary Defence, against the Military Armaments, employed to enforce them, vindicated (Hartford, Conn., 1775).Google Scholar

15. Connecticut Journal, 8 September 1779, p. 3Google Scholar; 18 October 1781, p. 3.

16. Mather, Moses, Sermon, Preached in the Audience of the General Assembly … on the Day of their Anniversary Election, May 10, 1781 (New London, Conn., 1781).Google Scholar

17. Mather, , Divine Sovereignty, p. 25Google Scholar; Mather, , Sermon of Election, p. 20.Google Scholar

18. Mather, , Divine Sovereignty, pp. 5, 12.Google Scholar

19. Mather, Moses, The Visible Church in Covenant with God; Further Illustrated … (New Haven, Conn., 1770), p. 17.Google Scholar

20. Mather, Moses, A Systematic View of Divinity; or, The Ruin and Recovery of Man (Stamford, Conn., 1813), pp. 49, 60.Google Scholar This treatise was written in the mid-1770s.

21. Ibid., p. 246.

22. Mather, , America's Appeal, pp. 8, 65.Google Scholar See pp. 5, 6, 10, 35, 59, 63, 65 and 69–70 for the further use of reason and nature as warrants to justify political positions.

23. Mather, , Visible Church Further Illustrated, p. 7.Google Scholar

24. Berk, Stephen N., Calvinism versus Democracy: Timothy Dwight and the Origins of American Evangelical Orthodoxy (Hamden, Conn., 1974), pp. 8081.Google Scholar

25. Taylor, Nathaniel W., Concio ad Clerum (New Haven, Conn., 1828)Google Scholar, quoted in Theology in America, ed. Ahlstrom, Sydney E. (Indianapolis, 1967), p. 220.Google Scholar

26. Edwards, Jonathan, Freedom of the Will, ed. Ramsey, Paul (New Haven, Conn., 1957Google Scholar; orig. pub. 1754).

27. Mather, , America's Appeal, p. 59.Google Scholar

28. Wood, Gordon S., “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 23 (1966): 17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Lovejoy, David S., “Samuel Hopkins: Religion, Slavery, and the Revolution,” New England Quarterly 40 (1967): 227243CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Noll, Mark A., “Church Membership and the American Revolution: An Aspect of Religion and Society in New England from the Revival to the War for Independence” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1975), pp. 192227.Google Scholar

30. Dwight, Timothy, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis … a discourse, preached on the Fourth of July, 1798 (New Haven, Conn., 1798)Google Scholar; Beecher, Lyman, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835).Google Scholar

31. Mather, , America's Appeal, pp. 52, 69, 58–59.Google Scholar Mather is using Psalm 137 in the last quotation.

32. Mather, , Sermon of Election, pp. 16, 19.Google Scholar

33. Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).Google Scholar Advocates of Real Whig thought placed great value in personal liberty, favored a republicanism of checks and balances over any system of unrestrained power, viewed humankind as especially susceptible to the corruptions of wealth and influence, perceived a close interdependence among virtue, freedom and social well-being, and regarded history as a never-ending struggle between tyranny and freedom.

34. Mather, , America's Appeal, pp. 9, 59; 59, 58; 60.Google Scholar

35. Mather, , Sermon of Election, pp. 17, 19, 21, 22.Google Scholar

36. Mather, , Systematic View, p. 185.Google Scholar

37. Mather, , Sermon of Election, p. 31.Google Scholar

38. Mather, , “The Subject continued,” American Preacher 4:317, 320.Google Scholar

39. Humphrey, Heman, The Way to Bless and Save our Country (1831)Google Scholar quoted in Handy, Robert T., A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York, 1977), pp. 174175.Google Scholar

40. Beecher, Lyman, Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasion, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance, 10th ed. (New York, 1843), pp. 8, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 56.Google Scholar

41. Edwards, Jonathan, “An Humble Inquiry …” (1749), The Works of President Edwards, 10 vols. (London, 1817Google Scholar; reprint ed., New York, 1968), 7:101–102.

42. Hopkins, Samuel, A Dialogue, concerning the Slavery of the Africans … (Norwich, Conn., 1776), pp. 2021.Google Scholar

43. Bellamy, Joseph, Election Sermon (New London, Conn., 1762), pp. 24, 31.Google Scholar

44. Bellamy, Joseph, Sermons Upon the following Subjects … The Millennium … (Boston, 1758), p. vi.Google Scholar The transnational, “spiritual” character of this sermon has been recognized by Hatch, Nathan O., “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31 (July 1974): 416417CrossRefGoogle Scholar; implicitly by Davidson, James West, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, Conn., 1977), pp. 189194Google Scholar; and even by Alan Heimert who elsewhere argues that Bellamy anticipated later religious patriotism, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 345.Google Scholar

45. Foster, , Genetic History pp. 107119, 139–140Google Scholar; Haroutunian, , Piety Versus MoralismGoogle Scholar; Ahlstrom, , Religious History, pp. 311312, 404414Google Scholar; Henry, Stuart C., Unvanquished Puritan: A Portrait of Lyman Beecher (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1973), p. 218.Google Scholar

46. Hudson, Winthrop S., Religion in America, 2nd ed. (New York, 1973), pp. 135136Google Scholar; Morse, James King, Jedidiah Morse: A Champion of New England Orthodoxy (1939Google Scholar; reprinted. New York, 1967).

47. Mead, Sidney Earl, Nathaniel William Taylor, 1786–1858: A Connecticut Liberal (Chicago, 1942).Google Scholar

48. Walsh, James Patrick, “The Pure Church in Eighteenth Century Connecticut” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1967), pp. 216238.Google Scholar

49. The acknowledged brilliance of Edwards combined with the absence of comparably brilliant successors must certainly be one of the reasons for the many creative efforts to trace an Edwardsean tradition, not in the substance of Reformed theology, but elsewhere—as, for example, in a mystical attitude toward religious matters, a revolutionary political Calvinism, a radical unwillingness to divorce profession from performance or a democratic transformation of rhetoric. See, respectively, Miller, Perry, “From Edwards to Emerson,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956)Google Scholar; Heimert, , Religion and the American MindGoogle Scholar; Carse, James, Jonathan Edwards and the Visibility of God (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; and Stout, Harry S., “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 34 (October 1977):541.CrossRefGoogle Scholar