the pages no longer seem dull, but rather glow with spiritual passion.

Take, for example, what at first sight seems a dry, superstitious passage, written on September 18, 1701:

'One day this week, I mett with a particular Experience (as I have often done, tho' thro' my sinful Sloth, I have not recorded it,) that may serve to illustrate the Operation of the Holy Spirit upon the Words of the Faithful in their Prayers, and the great Occasion and Advantage, which there may be of my observing, what Words I am drawn to utter, when I am under the most praying Energies of the Lord.

'Wee received advice that the Husband of a young Gentlewoman a little related unto me, was come to a tragical Death, in a Fight with a Zallee Man of War. In my visit unto her upon this Advice, I went to Prayer with her, as it was my Duty. She had a sister in the Room who was also a young Widow, and had been so for many months. Now, in my Prayer, I found myself strangely diverted from the Condition of the person to whom only I intended my Visit. I was as it were compelled so to Word my Prayer, as to take in all along the Condition of her Sister; even as if my Prayer had been cheefly, if not only, for her. I wondered a little, at my Frame in this Matter.

'But the Spirit of the Lord knew what I did not know. Within two Dayes, there arrived Intelligence, that the young Man, the Husband of the supposed Widow, to whom I gave my Visit, was yett living.'

A mere matter of chance this would seem nowadays. To an earnest Puritan of the seventeenth century-who incidentally had common sense enough to commend him to Benjamin Franklin-it seemed a spiritual experience worth recording for a purpose almost scientific. It pointed towards the fact that a human being, devoutly serving the Lord, had been vouchsafed an unwitting share in divine omniscience. It did not stand alone, either; only the sin of sloth, deadly since the curse of Adam, had prevented a record of other such experiences, which might have gone far to prove their regularity as spiritual phenomena. Hypocritical though this selfabasement may seem, nothing short of it could acknowledge the just curse which had fallen upon the children of men, godly and godless alike. Nothing, again, could more gravely reassure a Puritan that in prayer he

ought to depend on the inspiration of the moment, instead of slothfully relying on the words of a liturgy. Nothing could be more simply reverent than the evangelic spirit in which it discovers a passing presence of God in that bereaved little Boston room, when William III was King. Few will believe Cotton Mather right in his interpretation of what occurred there; none who cannot imaginatively sympathise with his interpretation can understand the New England Puritans, whose faith was the life-spring of a nation.

After a while, it is not the historical passages of Cotton Mather's diary which linger in memory, nor even any particular spiritual passages. It is the strenuous fixity of purpose with which he persevered in effort to commune with divinity. Though the presence of the Lord might reveal itself anywhere, it gleamed most brightly in moments of solitary rapture. So, sometimes on particular occasions, oftener impelled only by spiritual craving, Mather would betake himself to his study, where with prayer and fasting, 'prostrate in the dust,' he would implore the grace of mystic communion. His notes of these devotions are numberless-monotonous, if you fail to sympathise, fervid if you can make the words live with semblance of the passion which drove his pen. In 1685, for instance, he notes that he would study his sermons kneeling, calling upon the Eternal Spirit that he would assist mee in what I am about. If I do it, in a settled Prayer, I would, after the Prayer is over, still remain in my Posture, for some Time, noting down what Hints occur to mee, fitt for my Improvement.' This memorandum of spiritual experience in the New England of King James II accords remarkably with the assertions of Indian devotees that the postures in which they pray perceptibly modify their consequent spiritual insight. In the same year, 1685, Cotton Mather was visited in his study by an angel-a vision which he records in Latin, deficient in classical purity, but surging with a glorious rhythm like that of the Vulgate and of the Fathers.

6

'Res Mirabilis et Memoranda.

'Post fusas, maximis cum Ardoribus Jejuniisque Preces, apparuit Angelus, qui Vultum habuit solis instar Meridiani micantem, caetera humanum, et prorsus imberbem; Caput

magnificâ Tiarâ obvolutum; in Humeris, Alas; Vestes deinceps candidas et splendidas, Togam nempe Talarem, et Zonam circa Lumbos, Orientalium cingulis non absimilem. Dixitque hic Angelus, a Domino Jesu se missum, ut Responsa cujusdam Juvenis precibus articulatim afferat referatque. Quamplurima retulit hic Angelus, quae hic scribere non fas est. Verum inter alia memoratu digna, futurum hujusce Juvenis Fatum optime posse exprimi asseruit in illis Vatis Ezekielis verbis: Ezek. 31: 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9. "Behold hee was a Cedar in Lebanon" [&c.]. Atque particulariter clausulas de Rationis ejus extendendis [sic] exposuit hic Angelus, de Libris ab hoc juvene componendis, et non tantum in Americâ, sed etiam in Europa, publicandis. Additque peculiares quasdam praedictiones, et pro tali ac tanto Peccatore valde mirabiles, de Operibus insignibus, quae pro Ecclesia Christi, in Revolutionibus jam appropinquantibus, hic Juvenis olim facturus est. Domine Jesu! Quid sibi vult haec res tam extraordinaria? A Diabolicis Illusionibus, obsecro te, Servum tuum indignissimum ut liberes et defendas.'

Though this was not his only entertainment of a celestial visitor, it seems to have remained his most memorable; he refers to it specifically so long afterwards as March 14, 1712/3. In view of this, a note in his vast, unpublished 'Biblia Americana' appears like a record of personal observation. It is a comment on John i, 32: And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from Heaven like a dove, and it abode upon Him.' This does not imply, Mather writes, that the Holy Ghost ever assumed the shape of a bird; it means that 'assuming a body of light, or surrounded with a Guard of Angels in Luminous Forms, . . . [He] came down from above, just as a Dove with spread wings uses to do.' On March 14, 1701/2, he had intended to set apart the day for prayer: 'But because I preached yesterday, and was afraid of overdoing, unto a Trespass against the sixth Commandment, I omitted it. However, in the Evening, I perceived I was able to have done more than I thought I was. Wherefore I called now to Mind, that the primitive Christians, in obedience to that Commandment of Watching unto Prayer, sometimes had their Vigils, which were of great use unto them in their Christianity. . . . They found God often rewarding the Devotions of such Vigils with a more than ordinary degree of heavenly Consolation. Accordingly, I resolved, that I would this Night, make some Essay towards a Vigil. I dismissed my

dear Consort unto her own Repose; and in the Dead of the Night, I retired into my Study; and there casting myself into the Dust, prostrate on my Study-floor before the Lord, I was rewarded with Communications from Heaven, that cannot be uttered. . . . If these be Vigils, I must (as far as the sixth Commandment will allow) have some more of them!'

Whenever he could find time and strength, he had them thenceforth. In April 1703 he managed to fast and pray for three days together. 'Astonishing Entertainments from Heaven,' he writes on the second day,' were granted me, in and from this Action. God opened Heaven to me, after a Manner, that I may not, and indeed cannot express in any writing.' The 15th of May in the same

year

'was a Day full of astonishing Enjoyments; a Day filled with Resignations, and Satisfactions, and heavenly Astonishments. Heaven has been opened unto me. .. I was not able to bear the Extasies of the Divine Love, into which I was raptured; they exhausted my Spirits; they made me faint and sick; they were insupportable; I was forced, even to withdraw from them, lest I should have swoon'd away under the raptures.'

Passages like this form the substance of the whole diary. It is a record of God's dealings with a sinner to whom perhaps has been granted the unmerited grace of salvation to whom surely have been granted glimpses of what that salvation might be like, in its infinite, reconciled communion with divinity. To the generation of Puritans who preceded the Civil Wars in England, whose descendants persisted unchanged in New England long after their like had vanished in the mother-country, such glimpses were what made life worth living. They rarely recorded, in set terms, perceptions which must transcend the limitations of human expression. Like Cotton Mather, they recorded only that such perceptions had been the most wondrous incidents of their fervid lives.

In an old volume of the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society lies forgotten a letter which more nearly sets forth what Mather perceived in his mystic raptures than any passage in his own writings. It was written from England on March 21, 1637/8, by Edward

* Series IV, vol. vi pp. 504, 505 (1863).

Howes, an accomplished Puritan who never fulfilled his purpose of crossing the Atlantic, to his intimate friend, the younger John Winthrop, afterwards Governor of Connecticut. After touching on certain religious disputes in New England, Howes proceeds as follows:

'I wonder your people that pretend to know so much do not know that Love is the fulfilling of the Law, and that against Love there is no Law. But no marvel, when many have not the beginning of wisdom in them; and how can they that fear not God keep his commandments or fulfill them? ... The terra incognita cognita est paucis, arcanum Jehovae adest reverentibus ipsum; to tell you my thoughts or knowledge of it, it's neither earth, water, air, nor fire, nor aether, so that it's beyond sense, or my expression; but to give you an intelligible taste, it's lesser than the least, it cannot be divided nor communicated, it's bigger than the biggest, for it's perfect, it's beyond the highest, and below the lowest, for thought cannot reach it; if you know it I need not tell you it, if I speak in an unknown tongue, I do but beat the air.'

This passage, more boldly attempting to express the inexpressible than any of Cotton Mather's own, throws light on some aspects of Mather's character and reputation. Human beings, confined within a circle of knowledge which may be tested by observation or experiment, feel as if they were surrounded with unknown regions accessible, if accessible at all, only to a kind of perception for which the everyday faculties of humanity are singularly unsuited. Whether these regions really exist is not to the point; they certainly seem to. Throughout human record, men have striven to penetrate these mysteries, and to utter and record concerning them truths less mutable than the truths of this passing world. Thus have arisen the various systems of religion. Now a remarkable fact about these systems is that none of enduring vigour has originated in Europe. In practical affairs and matters of human knowledge-in politics and law, in science and mundane philosophy, in literature and other fine art-Europe more than holds its own; in matters spiritual it must still, and probably always, sit at the feet of Asia. The true seers are Asiatic; the rigid formulas of European creeds are based on mystical perceptions inconceivable in Europe. So when Howes in Old England, and Cotton Mather in Boston, strove, like