When Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana was finally published in London in 1702, the anxious historian set a day of thanksgiving to God, “ for His watchful and gracious Providence over that Work, and for the Harvest of so many Prayers, and Cares, and Tears, and Resignations.” From 1693 to 1697, Mather had labored over the seven books of his immense ecclesiastical history of New England. Readers of the Magnalia have often dismissed the work as unwieldy, pedantic, incomprehensible. As one anonymous critic complained in 1818, it is “ a chaotick mass of history, biography, obsolete creeds, witchcraft, and Indian wars, interspersed with bad puns, and numerous quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which rise up like so many decayed, hideous stumps to arrest the eye and deform the surface.”
Despite the difficulties presented by the Magnalia, however, American colonial historians have recognized Mather's history as the “ greatest effort in the century to organize the experience of this people.” Cotton Mather was one of the many second- and third-generation ministers who feared that the New England people were declining in piety and descending into moral corruption.