erature, they are for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but
they exhibit great learning, {347} 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 _n_'thly.

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 {348} 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