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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
The theme of generational religious decline has been a staple of New England Puritan historiography. Yet while scholars have examined these issues at the larger cultural and ecclesial levels, few have looked at the small-scale manifestations of such “declension” within Puritan parent-child relationships. This article looks at Cotton Mather's perceptions of the causes of and potential solutions for male youth waywardness in colonial New England. Attempting to provide pastoral wisdom for distressed parents in his congregation, Mather also had to deal with this issue in his own home. His rebellious son, Increase, served as a very personal example of a vexing public issue, and Mather worked hard to put his pastoral ideals into “fatherly” practice. As he confronted these challenges, Mather located the causes of male youth rebellion in the perilous nature of “youth,” the failures of Puritan parents, and the inscrutable sovereignty of God. In the end, I argue that Mather was ultimately hopeful about God's work and purposes in the midst of youth declension. His belief in God's providence meant that the afflictions attending youthful rebellion could be perceived as God's means of spurring repentance and renewal, addressing parental sin, bolstering godly childrearing, and arousing youth themselves in the pursuit of righteousness.
1. Mather, Cotton, The Young Man Spoken To (Boston: T. Green, 1712), 11 Google Scholar.
2. See, for example, Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939)Google Scholar; Stout, Harry S., The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Wallach, Glenn, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
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4. Mather, Cotton, The Duty of Children Whose Parents Have Prayed for Them (Boston: n.p, 1703)Google Scholar, preface.
5. Miller, The New England Mind; Miller, Perry,. Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956)Google Scholar. While Miller persuasively argued for Puritan declension, some historians have denied this reality. See, for example, Hall, David D., “New England, 1660-1730,” in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. Coffey, John and Lim, Paul C. H. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 148 Google Scholar; Morgan, Edmund, “New England Puritanism: Another Approach,” William and Mary Quarterly 18 (1961): 241-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pope, Robert G., “New England versus the New England Mind: The Myth of Declension,” Journal of Social History 3, (1969): 95–99 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moran, Gerald F. and Vinovskis, Maris A., Religion, Family, and the Life Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 92 Google Scholar; Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Peterson, Mark A., The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan Neiu England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1–20 Google Scholar; Murphey, Murray G., “Perry Miller and American Studies,” American Studies 42 (Summer 2001): 5–18 Google Scholar.
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7. As one example, Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall note that declension should not indicate the failure of the Puritan experiment as much as the natural recognition that parents were unable to control fully the subsequent generations. See “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord's Supper in Early New England,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41-68.
8. For a good description of this, see Silverman, Kenneth, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)Google Scholar.
9. For a good look at the Puritan theology of affliction, see Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Sears McGee, J., The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620-1670 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 15–67 Google Scholar. McGee notes that God used suffering for the purpose of spurring repentance and testing and refining graces, assuming the role of a “loving yet chastising Father” (49).
10. Mather, Cotton, Family-Religion Urged (Boston, n.p., 1709), 8 Google Scholar.
11. Mather, Cotton, A Family Weil-Ordered (Boston: B. Green & I. Allen, 1699), 6 Google Scholar. It appears that the family was even more important in New England than it had been in England because of the lack of nearby schools and churches. See Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 135 Google Scholar; Vinovskis, Maris, “Family and Schooling in Colonial and Nineteenth- Century America,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987): 22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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13. Mather, Cotton, The Wayes and Joyes of Early Piety (Boston: B. Green, 1712), 36–38 Google Scholar. Edmund Morgan suggested that this reliance upon the family to sustain Puritanism amounted to a form of “tribalism” that ultimately crippled the churches. Hope was placed in the children of the godly, resisting an evangelistic impulse in favor of a protective impulse. See Morgan, Edmund, The Puritan Family (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 161-86Google Scholar. For a more positive interpretation of tribalism, see Moran, and Vinovskis, , Religion, Family, and the Life Course, 13–20 Google Scholar.
14. Stout, , The New England Soul, 58 Google Scholar. According to Stout, church membership percentages dropped to about half in settled towns like Dedham, while they were even lower in Mather's Boston Those bringing their children for baptism had to proclaim allegiance to the “historical faith” (even if it was not yet a personal converting faith) and adhere to the behavioral strictures of God's Word and church discipline. See also Pope, Robert G., The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969)Google Scholar.
15. Pope, “New England versus the New England Mind.” Pope contends that the halfway covenant was simply a representation of increased scrupulosity in defining proper conversion, making it harder to gain admission to full church membership.
16. Hall, “New England, 1660-1730,” 145.
17. Mather, Cotton, Addresses to Old Men, Young Men, and Little Children (Boston: R. Pierce, 1694), 90 Google Scholar.
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19. According to some historians, many young people did actually renew the covenant, often coordinating in time with marriage or the birth of a first child. However, in a culture where family religion and cultural continuity were inextricably intertwined, this perhaps indicated more of a strategy for a perpetual family legacy than legitimate spiritual conviction. Jonathan Edwards, for one, denigrated this practice of “family preservation” as hypocritical. Likewise, Mather focused more on the individual spiritual malaise evident in youth rather than their formal church membership or covenant renewal statistics. On these themes, see Brown and Hall, “Family Strategies,” 50-61; Peterson, , The Price of Redemption, 48–50 Google Scholar; Hambrick-Stowe, Charles, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 244-56Google Scholar; Wallach, , Obedient Sons, 23 Google Scholar.
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21. At the height of his career, as Mark Noll indicates, this “neurotic dynamo” was responsible for “a quarter to a third of all religious work published annually in the colonies.” See Noll, , America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22. Mather, Cotton, Help for Distressed Parents (Boston: John Allen, 1695), 5 Google Scholar.
23. Ibid., 4.
24. Ibid., 2; Brown and Hall, “Family Strategies,” 54.
25. A son, Joseph, was born in 1693 but died shortly after birth, the victim of an abnormal colon that Mather suspected was the work of witchcraft. Another son, Samuel, was born a year after Increase, in 1700, but died in 1701 of “convulsions.” See Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., The Diary of Cotton Mather (reprint New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1911), 1:164,. 382 (hereafter referred to as Diary) Google Scholar.
26. Ibid., 1:307-8. On naming, see also Cotton Mather, Bonifacius: An Essay.. .To Do Good (Boston: B. Green, 1710), 54. For Puritans, naming provided a means of expressing goals for the child's nurture and, in some cases, a sense of protection for the child's spirit. Breaking with tradition in England, most New Englanders named their children for biblical figures or family members of noble character. See Axtell, James, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974), 8 Google Scholar; Hall, , Worlds of Wonder, 10, 17, 153, 218, 241Google Scholar; Wilson, Lisa, Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 120-22Google Scholar; Illick, Joseph E., “Child-Rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America,” in deMause, The History of Childhood, 324-25Google Scholar.
27. Diary, 1:307-8. Mather had several of these experiences in which he felt that God had given him a “particular faith” to trust him for a great result of some kind. Mather's biographer called this a “divinely sent intimation, perhaps conveyed through the invisible ministry of good angels, that a particular prayer would be answered.” See Silverman, , The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 173 Google Scholar.
28. Diary, 1:336. Anne S. Lombard notes that fathers often described expectations for their sons, though not their daughters. See Lombard, , Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Wallach, , Obedient Sons, 12 Google Scholar.
29. Both Lombard and Wilson suggest, in contrast to the stereotype of distant and uncaring patriarchs, that fathers were often deeply invested in caring for sick children. See Lombard, , Making Manhood, 24–27 Google Scholar; Wilson, , Ye Heart of a Man, 134-35Google Scholar.
30. Diary, 1:337.
31. Ibid., 1:348.
32. These God-given assurances were likely even more poignant for Mather because he sought, but did not receive, similar divine guarantees during his son Samuel's subsequent illness. Samuel did not recover. See ibid., 1:380, 382.
33. Ibid., 1:447, 508.
34. Ibid., 1:583.
35. After the loss of two other sons in infancy, another son, also named Samuel, was born in 1706.
36. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 13 Google Scholar.
37. As Lombard notes, it seems that not much was expected spiritually of young children prior to the age of seven. Mather's grandfather John Cotton noted that it was fine for younger children to “spend much time in pastime and play, for their bodies are too weak to labour and the minds to study are too shallow … even the first seven years are spent in pastime, and God looks not much at it” (quoted in Lombard, , Making Manhood, 21)Google Scholar. Puritan fathers seem to have taken on a more prominent role when sons reached the age of seven, a time when boys moved from infancy to childhood. A change of clothing typically symbolized this shift to boyhood and signified a new identification with the father rather than mother. Spiritual and educational instruction seems to have been heightened after age seven as well, sometimes by the father and sometimes through other tutors. See Lombard, , Making Manhood, 28–33 Google Scholar.
38. Diary, 2:53.
39. Ibid., 2:76.
40. Ibid., 2:204.
41. Ibid., 2:278. The famous Massachusetts School Law of 1642 actually mandated that parents and masters train up young people for an “honest lawful calling.” Mather was similarly keen on the importance of parents providing a useful education for children so that that they could be “put unto some agreeable callings” ( Mather, , A Family Well-Ordered, 18 Google Scholar). He also saw it as important that parents consider children's “capacities” and “inclinations” in selecting a vocation as long as the decision was also accompanied by prayer and fasting (Illick, “Child-Rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America,” 330). However, Mather was grieved that Increase chose a “life of Action” after receiving a “learned and polite education” (Diary, 2:299).
42. On this theme, see Mintz, Steven, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 27–28 Google Scholar; Gildrie, Richard P., The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly: The Reformation of Manners in Orthodox New England, 1679-1749 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 133-56Google Scholar; Beales, Ross W., “The Child in Seventeenth-Century America,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Hawes, Joseph M. and Ray Hiner, N. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Schulz, Constance, “Children and Childhood in the Eighteenth Century,” in Hawes and Hiner, American Childhood, 74–75 Google Scholar; Demos, John, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 187-90Google Scholar; Demos, John, Four Generations: Population, Land, and the Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 261-89Google Scholar. On the expansion of trade and commerce in the eighteenth century, see Breen, T. H., The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
43. As Helena Wall has pointed out, only in New England did parents send children away with hopes of moral reform. See Wall, , Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 103 Google Scholar.
44. Apprenticeships in New England often began between the ages of ten and fourteen, including contracts that would afford food, clothing, and perhaps some education and moral training for the youth. See Lombard, , Making Manhood, 33–34 Google Scholar; Axtell, , The School upon a Hill, 114 Google Scholar. Edmund Morgan famously suggested that many Puritan parents “put out” their children because they feared spoiling them, but this did not appear to be the case for Mather. See Morgan, , The Puritan Family, 77 Google Scholar.
45. Diary, 2:484.
46. Ibid., 2:611.
47. Ibid., 2:611, 647.
48. Bosco, Ronald A., Paterna: The Autobiography of Cotton Mather (New York: Scholar's Facsimilies & Reprints, 1976), 158 Google Scholar. While some youth surely underwent spiritual crises in their teen years, youthful rebellion in this era seems to have been somewhat normative. See Thompson, Roger, “Adolescent Culture in Colonial Massachusetts,” Journal of Family History 9 (1984): 127-41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49. Tracy, , Jonathan Edwards, Pastor, 93–106 Google Scholar.
50. Ibid., 97-104.
51. On adolescence as a late nineteenth-century invention, see John, and Demos, Virginia, “Adolescence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 31 (November 1969): 632 Google Scholar. In addition, Joseph Kett claims that colonial Americans failed to distinguish between children and youth, viewing the differences between a seven-year-old and a seventeen-year-old as “unimportant.” See Kett, , Kites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 12 Google Scholar. Those who contend that children in colonial society were simply viewed as “miniature adults” often argue much the same way, denying the presence of a stage between childhood and adulthood. See, for example, Demos, , A Little Commonwealth, 134-40Google Scholar; Fleming, Sandford, Children and Puritanism: The Place of Children in the Life and Thought of the New England Churches, 1620-1847 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), 60, 66-67, 153Google Scholar. Other historians have recognized the concept of adolescence in the colonial era. See, for example, Hanawalt, Barbara A., “Historical Descriptions and Prescriptions for Adolescence,” Journal of Family History 17 (1992): 341-51CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ray Hiner, N., “The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into: Educational Analysis in Seventeenth-Century New England,” History of Education Quarterly 13 (Spring 1973): 15–16 Google Scholar. Most historians seem to designate age fourteen as a key cutoff point in designating the switch from childhood to “youth.” For a good description of this transition, see Beales, Ross W., “In Search of the Historical Child: Miniature Adulthood and Youth in Colonial New England,” American Quarterly 27 (October 1975): 379-98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52. Quoted in Beales, “The Child in Seventeenth-Century America,” 35-36.
53. Mather, , Cares about the Nurseries, 57 Google Scholar.
54. Beales, “The Child in Seventeenth-Century America,” 36. Mather urged young people not to wait until they were “Twice Seven Years Old” before becoming “seriously Religious.” Mather, Cotton, Words of Understanding (Boston: S. Kneel, 1724), 10 Google Scholar.
55. Mather, , Cares about the Nurseries, 52–53 Google Scholar. Statistics seem to reveal that most conversions in this era took place after the age of twenty. See, for example, Pope, Charles Henry, ed., Records of the First Church at Dorchester in New England, 1636-1734 (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1891)Google Scholar. Teen conversions in the Great Awakening obviously changed ideas on the “proper” age of conversion. On this theme, see Kett, , Rites of Passage, 62–85 Google Scholar.
56. Mather, Cotton, Early Religion Urged (Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1694), 115-17Google Scholar. Mather apparently initiated a society of this kind during his own youth at the age of sixteen. Such societies were common in other locales as well. See Mather, Cotton, Religious Societies (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1724)Google Scholar; Ramsbottom, M. M., “Religion, Society, and the Family in Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1630-1740” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1987), 205-38Google Scholar; Middlekauf, , The Mathers, 193 Google Scholar. Patricia Tracy actually saw such societies in Jonathan Edwards's era as weakening family government and the direct spiritual ties between parents and children (substituting pastoral and peer authority for parental authority). See Tracy, , Jonathan Edwards, Pastor, 111 Google Scholar.
57. Mather, Cotton, Parental Wishes and Charges (Boston: T. Green, 1705), 32 Google Scholar; Mather, , Early Religion Urged, 19–20 Google Scholar. Mather expressed some of these optimistic hopes for pious youth in a piece published for a young men's religious society, entitled Youth in Its Brightest Glory (Boston: T. Green, 1709).
58. On the relation of passion and “the profane” in New England, see Gildrie, The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly. This privileging of age over youth seems to have been somewhat reversed in the ministry of Jonathan Edwards. See Minkema, Kenneth, “Old Age and Religion in the Writings and Life of Jonathan Edwards,” Church History 70 (December 2001): 674–704 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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65. As N. Ray Hiner has suggested, many Puritans viewed passion and sensuality as the source of most youthful sins in the teen years. See Hiner, “The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into,” 16.
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113. Ibid., 12.
114. Ibid.
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116. Mather, Cotton, The Best Ornaments of Youth (Boston: Timothy Green, 1707), 3–4 Google Scholar.
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119. Mather, Cotton, Tela Praevisa (Boston: B. Green, 1724), 12 Google Scholar.
120. Diary, 2:466.
121. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 19 Google Scholar. As McGee has indicated, Puritans believed that God—as a God of order—often sent afflictions that reflected the nature of the particular sins. This “boomerang principle” revealed that God wanted to alert his children to the nature of their sin through the particular “cross” that he sent. See McGee, , The Godly Man in Stuart England, 36–37 Google Scholar.
122. Mather, , A Family Well-Ordered, 46–47 Google Scholar. For a historical example of this, see Mather, Help for Distressed Parents, appendix.
123. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 17 Google Scholar.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid., 16.
127. Diary, 2:485.
128. Ibid., 2:465-66. On this theme, see also Middlekauf, The Mathers, 201-2. It is worth noting that Mather drew comfort from his other son, Samuel, who pursued godliness and, ultimately, a ministry profession. He noted, in fact, that he was the son “in whom a gracious God wonderfully makes up to me what I miss of comfort in his miserable brother” (Diary, 2:701).
129. Ibid., 2:486.
130. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 19–21 Google Scholar.
131. Mather, , A Family Well-Ordered, 30–31 Google Scholar.
132. Mather, , Parentalia, 31 Google Scholar.
133. Diary, 2:76, 92, 447.
134. Mather, Cotton, A Token for the Children of New England (Boston: Timothy Green, 1700)Google Scholar.
135. See, for example, Mather, Cotton, Vita Brevis (Boston: John Allen, 1714)Google Scholar; Mather, Cotton, The A, B, C of Religion (Boston: Timothy Green, 1713)Google Scholar.
136. Diary, 2:64.
137. Mather, Cotton, Corderius Americanus (Boston: John Allen, 1708), 18 Google Scholar.
138. Mather, , Cares about the Nurseries, 76–78 Google Scholar.
139. Mather, , Early Religion Urged, 32–34, 57.Google Scholar
140. Mather, , The Wayes and Joyes of Early Piety, 48 Google Scholar.
141. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 55 Google Scholar.
142. Mather, , The Duty of Children, 36 Google Scholar. See also Mather, , The Words of Understanding, 31 Google Scholar.
143. J. Sears McGee likewise suggests that the Puritans believed God was “more angered by their sins than He was by those of the ungodly.” See McGee, , The Godly Man in Stuart England, 27 Google Scholar.
144. Mather, , The Duty of Children, 33 Google Scholar.
145. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 53 Google Scholar.
146. Diary, 2:323.
147. Mather, , A Family Well-Ordered, 78 Google Scholar.
148. Walzer, Michael, Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.
149. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 28 Google Scholar.
150. Bosco, , Paterna, 194 Google Scholar. Brekus, , Sarah Osborn's World, 50 Google Scholar; Greven, , The Protestant Temperament, 55–61, 74-86Google Scholar. As Mark Noll so well explained, Puritan theologies were “instinctively traditional, habitually deferential to inherited authority, and deliberately suspicious of individual self-assertion” (Noll, America's God, 19).
151. Mather, , A Family Well-Ordered, 25.Google Scholar
152. In this sense, Mather possessed some of the characteristics defined by Greven as more “moderate” in nature, relying on persuasion over corporal punishment and voluntary over compulsory obedience. See Greven, , The Protestant Temperament, 159-70Google Scholar.
153. Mather, , A Family Well-Ordered, 22 Google Scholar.
154. Ibid., 25.
155. Ibid., 24.
156. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 27–28 Google Scholar.
157. See, for example, Diary, 2: 92, 106-7, 150, 195, 199, 203, 231, 250.
158. Ibid., 2:49.
159. Ibid., 2:151. N. Ray Hiner suggests that Mather's intensive form of childrearing might have been a cause, rather than a remedy, of Increase's rebellion. See Hiner, , “Cotton Mather and his Children: The Evolution of a Parent Educator, 1686-1728,” in Regulated Children/ Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective, ed. Finkelstein, Barbara (New York: Psychohistory Press Publishers, 1979), 36 Google Scholar.
160. Ibid., 199.
161. Ibid., 665. His efforts with Increase clearly demonstrate what Richard Lovelace has described as Mather's passion for the “machinery of piety,” concrete spiritual techniques to foster the spiritual life. He urged all of his children to develop a technique-oriented faith that was driven along by various spiritual disciplines rather than a passive orthodoxy. This was one means of generating a subjective sense of spiritual assurance among children and parents. Lovelace, , The American Pietism of Cotton Mather, 110-45Google Scholar.
162. Ibid., 32.
163. Ibid., 30-31.
164. Diary, 2:76, 111, 203, 212.
165. Ibid., 2:480.
166. Ibid., 2:195, 466.
167. Ibid., 2:323.
168. Mather, , A Family Weil-Ordered, 34 Google Scholar.
169. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 34 Google Scholar.
170. Diary, 2:489. 171. Ibid.
172. Mather, , Parentalia, 19–20 Google Scholar.
173. Ibid.
174. Increase Mather, , The Duty of Parents to Pray for Their Children (Boston: n.p., 1703), 39 Google Scholar.
175. See, for example, Mather, Cotton, Things That Young People Should Think Upon (Boston: B. Green & J. Allen, 1700)Google Scholar; Mather, , A Family Well-Ordered, 46–51 Google Scholar.
176. Mather, , Things that Young People Should Think Upon, 9 Google Scholar.
177. Diary, 2:765. Sarah Osborn thought similarly upon the death of her son Samuel. See Brekus, , Sarah Osborn's World, 152 Google Scholar.
178. See, for example, Mather, The Words of Understanding; Mather, Cotton, Juga jucunda (Boston: D. Henchman, 1727)Google Scholar.
179. Diary, 2:765.
180. It is interesting to note, in this regard, that youth represented the largest “harvest” of the Great Awakenings of the 1730s and 1740s. Jonathan Edwards concentrated many of his efforts toward this group, and they did (at least temporarily) engage the revivals in significant ways. See Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor; Marsden, George M., Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 150-63Google Scholar.
181. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 34–35 Google Scholar.
182. Diary, 2:591-92.
183. On this theme, see McGee, , The Godly Man in Stuart England, 43 Google Scholar.
184. Ibid., 46-47.