Although Cotton Mather became the most famous clergyman of colonial New
England, he was disappointed in two of his life's ambitions. He failed to
become president of Harvard and to bring New England back in religious
matters to the first halcyon days of the colony. On the contrary, he lived
to see Puritan theocracy suffer a great decline. His fantastic and strained
application of religious truth, his overemphasis of many things, and
especially his conduct in zealously aiding and abetting the Salem
witchcraft murders, were no mean factors in causing that decline.

His intentions were certainly good. He was an apostle of altruism, and he
tried to improve each opportunity for doing good in everyday life. He
trained his children to do acts of kindness for other children. His _Essays
to Do Good_ were a powerful influence on the life of Benjamin Franklin.
Cotton Mather would not have lived in vain if he had done nothing else
except to help mold Franklin for the service of his country; but this is
only one of Mather's achievements. We must next pass to his great work in
literature.

THE MAGNALIA.--This "prose epic of New England Puritanism," the most famous
of Mather's many works, is a large folio volume entitled _Magnalia Christi
Americana: or the Ecclesiastical History of New England_. It was published
in London in 1702, two years after Dryden's death.

The book is a remarkable compound of whatever seemed to the author most
striking in early New England history. His point of view was of course
religious. The work contains a rich store of biography of the early clergy,
magistrates, and governors, of the lives of eleven of the clerical
graduates of Harvard, of the faith, discipline, and government of the New
England churches, of remarkable manifestations of the divine providence,
and of the "Way of the Lord" among the churches and the Indians.