XIII

THE "REFORMING SYNOD" OF 1679 AND 1680,

AND ITS CONFESSION OF FAITH

Editions And Reprints

A. The Result Of 1679

I. [Increase Mather] The Necessity of Reformation With the Expedients thereunto, asserted. Boston; Printed by John Foster In the Year ibjq. 4° pp. vi, 15-1

II. Cotton Mather, Magnolia, London, 1702, ed. Hartford, 1853-5, II: 320331 (without the Preface).

III.

The Results of Three Synods, etc. Boston, 1725, pp. 94-118.

B. The Confession Of 1680

I. A Confession of Faith Owned and consented unto by the Elders and Messengers of the Churches Assembled at Boston in New-England, May 12. 1680. Being the second Session of that Synod, etc. Boston; Printed by John Foster. 16S0. 8° 5i 3 inches, pp. vi, 65, with Cambridge Platform.

II. At Boston in 1699 in English and Indian, with Cambridge Platform." III. In the Magnolia, Eondon, 1702, V: 5-19, ed. Hartford, 1853-5, II: 182-207.

IV. At Boston in 1725.3 3

V. At Boston in 1750.4

VI. At Boston in 1757, with Cambridge Platform.6

VII. In The Original Constitution, Order and Faith of the New England Churches, etc. Boston, 1812, with the Cambridge Platform (ed. 1808), and the Propositions of 1662.

VIII. In The Cambridge and Saybrook Platforms of Church Discipline, with the Confession of Faith adopted in 1680; and the Heads of Agreement

in I6qo. Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1829, pp. 69-113. In T. C. Upham, Ratio Disciplina, Portland, 1829, pp. 253-302. In the Manual of the Old South Church, Boston, Mass., ed. Boston, 1841,. pp. 13-66.6

IX.

X.

1 Full title in reprint at the close of this chapter.

2 Catalogue of Collection of Mr. Brayton Ives, New York, 1891, No. 14s; Prince Library,

No. 24.23.

s Brinley Sale Cat., No. 7492.

6 Given as the "Confession of Faith

4 Prince, No. 14.60.

5 Brinley, No. 7493. of the Old South Church," but Mr. H. A. Hill, in his admirable History of that Church, has pointed out (I: 235, and II: 555) that it probably was never adopted by formal vote of the church. The consent of the minister to this confession at his settlement over the Old South was taken from the installation of Rev. Alexander Cumming in 1761 to that of Dr. J. M. Manning in 1857. At the settlement of Rev. G. A. Gordon, the present pastor, in 1884, it was omitted.

27

(409)

XI. In Report on Congregationalism, including a Manual of Church Discipline, together with the Cambridge Platform and the Confession of Faith,

adopted in 1680. Boston, 1846, pp. 87-128.

1855.

XII. In the Manual of the Old South Church, Boston, Mass., ed. Boston,

XIII. In The Cambridge Platform

and the Confession

1680, to which is pref1xed a Platform of Ecclesiastical Government, by Nath. Emmons. Boston, 1855.

Massachusetts Bay, Boston, 1853-4, V: 215, 216, 244,

Peter Thatcher, MS. Diary (some extracts are printed by Palfrey and Hill in the passages cited under Literature below).

Literature

Hubbard, General History of New England, ed. Boston, 1848, pp. 621-624. Cotton Mather, Magnalia, ed. Hartford, 1853-5, II: 179-181, 316-320, 331-338. Neal, History of New England,3 London, 1720, II: 409-411. Cotton Mather, Parentator. Memoirs of Remarkables in the Life and the Death of the EverMemorable Dr. Inercase Mather, Boston, 1724, pp. 81-87. Hutchinson, History of the Colony of Massachusetts Ray, ed. London, 1765, I: 324. Emerson, Historical Sketeh of the First Church in Boston, Boston, 1812, pp. 127-129. Wisner, History of the Old South Church in Boston, Boston, 1830, pp. 15, 16. Palfrey, History of New England, III: 330-332. Lawrence, Our Declaration of Faith and the Confession, in Cong. Quarterly, VIII: 173-190 passim (Apl., 1866). Dexter, Congregationalism, as seen in its Literature, pp. 476-485. Doyle, English in America; Puritan Colonies, London, 1887, II: 272. H. A. Hill, History of the Old South Church, Boston, 1890, I: 231-235.

A

S has been pointed out in enumerating the causes which led to the Half-Way Covenant, the passing away of the founders of New England brought forward a generation which, though in the main moral, had not that intensity of religious experience which characterized its predecessor. While it was true, as Cotton Mather affirmed in writing of this period, that'

"New-England was not become so degenerate a Country, but that there was yet Preserved in it, far more of Serious Religion, as well as of Blameless Morality, than was Proportionably to be seen in any Country upon the face of the Earth"; the declaration of Thomas Prince is also well founded, that*— "a little after 1660, there began to appear a Decay: And this increased to 1670, when it grew very visible and threatening, and was generally complained of and be

1 By a committee of which Dr. Leonard Woods was chairman.

7 Hubbard was probably a member of the Synod, but his report is remarkably barren, and is largely made up from the Prefaces of the Results.

wailed bitterly by the Pious among them: And yet much more to 1680, when but few of the first Generation remained."

The number of additions to the full communion of the churches was small; while records of church discipline show that serious misconduct was by no means rare. Under such circumstances it is no wonder that the minds of faithful ministers were filled with concern.

The sense of alarm regarding the state of New England engendered by the decline of visible piety, was greatly intensif1ed by a series of disastrous events which seemed to the men of that age divine judgments. The first fifty years of New England history were of unusual prosperity. With the exception of the short, sharp struggle with the Pequots in 1637, no war disturbed the borders of the land. During the Puritan ascendency in England the home government had been friendly, and even the restoration of the Stuarts had brought no serious political disaster. In spite of the "Navigation Acts," the trade of New England flourished. and brought considerable wealth and increasing luxury to its ports. But this course of prosperity was rudely interrupted at the close of the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The Indians, who had been at peace with the white settlers for nearly forty years, and who had been well treated by the Puritans, broke out in warfare; and from June 20, 1675, to the death of Philip, August 12, 1676, threatened the existence of the colonies. This struggle, known from the chief Indian leader as Philip's war,' resulted in the elimination of the Indian problem from the category of questions vital to New England life; but at a terrible cost. the eighty or ninety towns to be found in Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies in 1675, ten or twelve were utterly destroyed, while forty more were partially burned. Nor was the loss of property the most serious result of the contest.

Of

Between five and six

1 These acts, the first of which was passed under the Commonwealth, Oct. 9, 1651, and which were strengthened in 1660, in their extreme form forbade the importation of goods into the colonies except in English vessels, and the export of their chief products except to English ports. They were long more honored in the breach than the observance.

* This war, which forms the political background of the Reforming Synod, is well described by Palfrey, History of New England, III: 132-230; and John Fiske, Beginnings of New England, pp. 199-241

* These figures are from Palfrey, III: 215.

hundred young and middle-aged men-a tenth of all of military age in the colonies--lost their lives; and to these victims must be added the scores of women and children who perished by the tomahawk or died amid the torments of the stake. An experience so ghastly and so universal might well seem to the ministry of that day a special outpouring of the wrath of God.

And, beyond the great disaster of the Indian war, the opening of the last quarter of the century was a period of losses unexampled in the history of the colonies. On November 27, 1676, the North Church in Boston and more than forty houses adjacent were burned.1 Three years later, August 7-8, 1679, a yet more destructive conflagration swept away nearly all the business portion of the town. Shipwreck also brought more than customary losses to the merchants of the colonies, while pestilences, especially the dreaded ^mall-pox, caused great mortality. And, as if to fill the cup of misfortune, the liberties of the colonies, especially of Massachusetts, were threatened at this crisis of war and impoverishment, by the hostility of the Stuart government, which was making its hand heavy, and was to bring about, a little later, the tyranny of Dudley and Andros, itself the culmination of a series of acts of oppression, of which not the least exasperating to the ministry of New England were the efforts of English agents, begun with vigor in January, 1679, to introduce Episcopacy into the Puritan commonwealths.'

It was under these circumstances of disaster and, as was believed, of judgment, that Increase Mather," the most prominent

1 See Increase Mather, Returning unto God

a Sermon, etc. Boston, 1680, Preface. 2 Peter Thacher's diary in Hill, History of the Old South Church, I: 230, 231; Hubbard says, General History, p. 649, "the burning of Boston hath half ruined the whole Colony, as well as the town."

3 Increase Mather, Returning unto God, Preface.

4 See Palfrey, III: 273 et seqq.

5 Palfrey, III: 324.

.

• Increase Mather is too familiar to need extended notice.

Born June 21, 1639, youngest son

of Richard Mather of Dorchester, he graduated at Harvard in 1656, and went the next year to England, where he was well received and given opportunities for preaching. Soon after the Restoration he returned to New England, and after preaching for the Second Church, Boston, from September, 1661, he was ordained its minister, May 27, 1664. From that time to his death he was a part of all that was done in New England. He became President of Harvard in June, 1685, and held the office till 1701; he took prominent part in defense of the colonial liberties, and served as agent for Massachusetts in England from 1688 to 1632, obtaining the new Massachusetts charter

minister of the second generation in New England, and pastor of the Second Church in Boston, aroused his brethren in the ministry to appeal to the Massachusetts General Court for the calling of a Synod.1 The conception of such an assembly was one which might naturally have arisen in his mind, but the immediate suggestion may have come to Mather from letter of Rev. Thomas Jollie, of Pendlton-nigh-Clitherow, in Lancashire, Eng., in which that Puritan divine recommended, under date of January 18, 1678, the summons of a Synod as the best means for securing the spiritual improvement of New England. Whatever the influence of Jollie may have been, Mather succeeded in obtaining the signatures of eighteen of the more prominent of his ministerial brethren to his petition to the Court. First of the signers in the order in which the names were appended to the paper, was the venerable John Eliot of Roxbury, then came the name of Increase Mather, and next that of Samuel Torrey of Weymouth, Moses Fiske of Braintree followed, and then Josiah Flynt of Dorchester. The other signers, in their order, were Thomas Clark of Chelmsford, James Sherman of Sudbury, Joseph Whiting of Lynn, Samuel Cheever of Marblehead, Samuel Phillips of Rowley, Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, Samuel Whiting, Sen., of Lynn, Thomas Cobbett of Ipswich, Edward Bulkeley of Concord, John Sherman of Watertown, John Higginson of Salem, John Hale of Beverly, Samuel Whiting, Jr., of Billerica, and John Wilson of Medfield.

The document to which these autographs are appended is

from William and Mary. His later life was specially fruitful in writings for the press. He died Aug. 23, 1723. Increase Mather was essentially a conservative. As such his influence was directed toward the maintenance of that supremacy of the religious element in civil affairs which marked the founders of New England. As such he opposed changes in the practices of the churches, his ideal being, apparently, the state in which they were about the time of the Synod of 1662. His conservative attitude brought him much opposition, but no man in New England equaled him in influence in his lifetime. As a writer, his voluminousness is only exceeded, among the New England ministry, by his son, Cotton Mather. The sources of information regarding him are many, but they are best epitomized in Sibley, Graduates of Harvard, I: 410-470, where a list of biographical authorities will be found, together with as complete a catalogue of his writings as it is probably possible to make.

1 "Upon a motion of Mr. Mather in Conjunction with others excited by him for it, the General Court called upon the Churches to send their Delegates for a Synod." Cotton Mather, Parentator, p. 84. Doubtless this petition was prepared at the annual Ministerial Convention, of which some account may be found in chapter XV of this volume.

2 The letter is dated 18th of 11th m: 1673, and reads: "The advice I humbly offer for your awakning to duty in the reforming of your manifest evills and for preventing of threatning ruin is, that a Synod bee gathered to that purpose." 4 Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., VIII: 320.