The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Read Online Free PDF

he moved, though still a boy, to the independence and responsibility of a master. He now had to exercise others in grammatical studies; he had to maintain discipline; and he had to give an accounting to the community. As far as we know, he did these things ably; yet there must have been considerable strain and exertion. He did not break down, but in 1614, three years after beginning, he experienced the agonizing and exhilarating crisis of conversion. 14
It began simply enough. Mather was living with Edward Aspinwall and his family. He took his meals at the Aspinwall table and saw much of the household. Edward Aspinwall did not rule the household rigidly nor did he make unusual demands upon his boarder. Still, he and his family, in their quiet piety, exerted a subtle influence upon Richard. What impressed the boy most, he later recalled, was the difference between the spiritual condition of the Aspinwalls and his own. They evidently felt God's grace working in themselves; he did not, though he hoped to feel it. The Aspinwalls were not the only ones affecting his spiritual condition. In these years Richard was listening to the min-

 

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ister of nearby Hyton, a Mr. Harrison, who was preaching the Pauline doctrine of the new birth. Richard was especially moved by Harrison's explication of the statement of Jesus that "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God." 15 What he meant was simply that men had to experience regeneration. They could not be satisfied with knowing that their lives were moral or that intellectually they believed in Christ. They must feel the spirit in themselves; they must believe on Christas it was customarily phrased. They must accept Christ's sacrifice as payment for their sins and feel themselves joined to Him.
Feeling of this sort bewilder and perhaps frighten most men who experience them. For Richard they were most intense in his eighteenth year. He later described them in the language of birthhe felt, he said, "terrible pangs." 16 His misery arose in part from his feeling that he would not be saved; in his worst moments he avoided everyone, staying away from meals and nursing his sorrow and grief. Encouraging this process and perhaps ultimately helping him escape his despair was a book by William Perkins.
Born in 1558 Perkins had lived only until 1602, but in his brief life he became one of the two or three most important divines in the English Church. Perkins, like many preachers of his day, attempted to comprehend the mysterious working of grace in men. As he saw it, ordinary men were baffled by the problem of separating natural feeling from divine. Only God could save men, of course, and He drew only those He elected. But common sense told a man that he had some power over his own feelings and that these feelings Were affected by impressions supplied by his senses. How could a man determine the origins of what exactly he was feelingespecially when God worked through his senses too, sending His grace as a passenger on the vehicle of a minister's words or shooting into a man's heart with the message of the Gospel. And a man might bring himself to believein a certain mannerthat Christ died to save men, that Christ was the son of God, and that men required Christ's intercession for their salvation. Even reprobates might go this farand farther: they might succeed in leading moral lives in the eyes of the world, though not in the eyes of God. 17
Perkins schooled ordinary Englishmen in these facts and explained to them how God's workings might be identified. He

 

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made comprehensible what Richard Mather was experiencing and thereby aided in the completion of the process of conversion. Richard Mather later remembered that he had been extraordinarily affected by Perkins' caution about "how farre a Reprobate may go." The danger facing the sinner was that he would confuse his own efforts with God's and become complacent. If he fell into this trap, his chances for grace were