and even the passing of Harvard College, that citadel
and fortress of the old theocracy, into the hands of Boston and
Cambridge liberals, was far less a tragedy to Massachusetts than it was
to the Mathers.

The life of Cotton Mather was, indeed, a kind of tragedy, for he was the
most distinguished of those who grew to manhood under the old order only
to witness its fall and live in degenerate days. Not less able than his
father, but how much less influential! In early years his voice was a
commanding one, but he was destined to see his popularity wane and to
live most of his long life in comparative isolation and neglect in the
very community where Increase Mather had been a high priest indeed. In
such men as Cotton Mather the old spirit lived on, sharply accentuated
by defeat; and transformed, in such men as Jonathan Edwards, by dint of
morbid introspection and brooding on the sins of a perverse generation,
into a kind of disease, or spiritual neurasthenia. Such men could but
look back with poignant regret to the golden age that was past. Of that
golden age, Cotton Mather himself, "smitten with a just fear of
encroaching and ill-bodied degeneracies," sat down to write the history,
recording in the _Magnalia_ "the great things done for us by our God,"
in the hope that he might thereby do something "to prevent the loss of
the primitive principles and the primitive practices."

But he had imagined a vain thing. For even as the century drew to its
close, the old Bay colony was already drifting from its back-water
moorings, out into the main current of the world's thought. None could
know to what uncharted seas of political and religious radicalism they
were bearing on. None could foresee the time when Calvin's Institutes
would give way to the Suffolk Resolutions, when Adams would speak in
place of Endicott, or the later day when Emerson would preach a new
antinomianism more desolating than any known to Winthrop or Bradford.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This period is fully treated in Channing's _History of the United
States_, I, chaps, VIII-XIV; and in Tyler's _England in America_, chaps.
V-VII, IX-XIX. See also Fiske's _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours_, I,
chaps. VII-XI, XIV; and Eggleston's _Beginners of a Nation_ and _The
Transit of Civilization from England to America_. The constitutional
aspects of the colonial settlements are exhaustively treated in Osgood's
_The American Colonies in the 17th Century_. For the economi