Initial Studies in American Letters | Page 9

the
assembly, showing that as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he
was in persecuting, etc., so he might manifest himself to him as he was
taking the moderate use of the creature called tobacco." The gallant
captain, being banished the colony, betook himself to the falls of the
Piscataquack (Exeter, N.H.), where the Rev. John Wheelwright,
another adherent of Mrs. Hutchinson, had gathered a congregation.
Being made governor of this plantation, Underhill sent letters to the
Massachusetts magistrates, breathing reproaches and imprecations of
vengeance. But meanwhile it was discovered that he had been living in
adultery at Boston with a young woman whom he had seduced, the
wife of a cooper, and the captain was forced to make public confession,
which he did with great unction and in a manner highly dramatic. "He
came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his
bravery and neatness), without a band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled
close to his eyes, and standing upon a form, he did, with many deep
sighs and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course." There is a
lurking humor in the grave Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's
doings. Winthrop's own personality comes out well in his Journal. He

was a born leader of men, a conditor imperii, just, moderate, patient,
wise; and his narrative gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of
the general prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers
in their dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the
neighboring plantations.
Considering our forefathers' errand and calling into this wilderness, it is
not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and tracts in
controversial theology. Multitudes of these were written and published
by the divines of the first generation, such as John Cotton, Thomas
Shepard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the founder
of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that "when he was doing his
Master's business he would put a king into his pocket." Nor were their
successors in the second or the third generation any less industrious and
prolific. They rest from their labors and their works do follow them.
Their sermons and theological treatises are not literature: they are for
the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but they exhibit great learning,
logical acuteness, and an earnestness which sometimes rises into
eloquence. The pulpit ruled New England, and the sermon was the
great intellectual engine of the time. The serious thinking of the
Puritans was given almost exclusively to religion; the other world was
all their art. The daily secular events of life, the aspects of nature, the
vicissitude of the seasons, were important enough to find record in print
only in so far as they manifested God's dealings with his people. So
much was the sermon depended upon to furnish literary food that it was
the general custom of serious-minded laymen to take down the words
of the discourse in their note-books. Franklin, in his Autobiography,
describes this as the constant habit of his grandfather, Peter Folger; and
Mather, in his life of the elder Winthrop, says that "tho' he wrote not
after the preacher, yet such was his attention and such his retention in
hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had
heard in the congregation." These discourses were commonly of great
length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was silently
inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto "fourteenthly."
The book which best sums up the life and thought of this old New
England of the seventeenth century is Cotton Mather's Magnalia

Christi Americana. Mather was by birth a member of that clerical
aristocracy which developed later into Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin Caste of
New England." His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. His father
was Increase Mather, the most learned divine of his generation in New
England, minister of the North Church of Boston, President of Harvard
College, and author, inter alia, of that characteristically Puritan book,
An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences. Cotton Mather
himself was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence. He was
graduated from Harvard at fifteen. He ordered his daily life and
conversation by a system of minute observances. He was a book-worm,
whose life was spent between his library and his pulpit, and his
published works number upward of three hundred and eighty. Of these
the most important is the Magnalia, 1702, an ecclesiastical history of
New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I.
Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous
Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its
eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI.
Wonderful Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord--that is, an account
of