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