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.

3. Mather, Cotton, The Gospel of Manna, To be Gathered in the Morning (Boston: T. Green, 1710), 26 Google Scholar.

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.

6. See, for example, Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

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.

12. Mather, Cotton, Cares about the Nurseries (Boston: T. Green, 1702), 30–31 Google Scholar.

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.

18. Morgan, , The Puritan Family, 148-49Google Scholar. See also Walzer, John F., “A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth-Century American Childhood,” in The History of Childhood, ed. deMause, Lloyd (New York: Jason Aronson, 1995), 352 Google Scholar; Middlekauf, Robert, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 199, 264Google Scholar. This obsession with youth morality continued on in the ministry of Jonathan Edwards. See, for example, Tracy, Patricia J., Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980)Google Scholar.

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.

59. Mather, , The Gospel of Manna, 36 Google Scholar.

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61. Mather, , Ornaments of the Daughters of Zion, 44 Google Scholar. See also Shiels, Richard D., “The Feminization of American Congregationalism,” American Quarterly 33 (1981): 46–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Mather, , Addresses to Old Men, 57 Google Scholar.

63. Ibid., 97.

64. Mather, , Early Religion Urged, 4–5 Google Scholar. Mather also specified that the Hebrew for young man was “Nagnar,” meaning “to cast off” (17).

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.

66. Mather, , Addresses to Old Men, 69–70 Google Scholar.

67. Lombard, , Making Manhood, 47–52 Google Scholar. On the association of passion (including seduction) and the female nature, see also Malmsheimer, “Daughters of Zion,” 487-88. It should be noted, however, that this disdain for immoral passion was coupled somewhat incongruously with Mather's heralding of passionate and emotionally charged religion. On this theme, see Lovelace, Richard F., The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1979)Google Scholar.

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69. Mather, , Early Religion Urged, 28 Google Scholar.

70. Diary, 2:216. Mather favored strengthening the power of the community tithingmen in order to halt unruly youth, especially on the Sabbath. Diary, 1:76, 101.

71. Mather, , Early Religion Urged, 29 Google Scholar.

72. Lombard, , Making Manhood, 55 Google Scholar; Mintz, , Huck's Raft, 28 Google Scholar.

73. Patricia Tracy notes that youth in the eighteenth century had progressively fewer opportunities for informal and natural gatherings because of the decline of common field agriculture, barn raisings, and corn huskings. She sees this as spawning the less desirable youthful gatherings that were disparaged by people like Mather and, later, Jonathan Edwards. See Tracy, , Jonathan Edwards, Pastor, 106 Google Scholar.

74. Mather, , Early Religion Urged, 31 Google Scholar.

75. Mather, , The Wayes and Joyes of Early Piety, 47 Google Scholar.

76. Roger Thompson speaks of the development of a youth peer culture (combined with peer disorder) in Middlesex, Massachusetts. He notes that youth in New England were not as organized or institutionalized as in Europe. See Thompson, “Adolescent Culture in Colonial Massachusetts,” 127-41.

77. Mather, , Addresses to Old Men, 71 Google Scholar. This was certainly a species of the fear of bodily sensuality and pollution mentioned by Philip Greven as common among “evangelicals” of that era. See Greven, , The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 65–73 Google Scholar.

78. Mather, , Addresses to Old Men, 73 Google Scholar. See also Mather, , Early Religion Urged, 8–9 Google Scholar; Mather, Cotton, The Pure Nazarite (Boston: T. Fleet, 1723)Google Scholar.

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80. Mather also labeled self-pollution as “effeminate” in Nicetas (Boston: Timothy Green, 1705), 40. Lombard makes a similar point in noting that “the opprobrious term effeminate referred not to a man with homosexual feelings but to one with ‘a strong heterosexual passion'” (Making Manhood, 63).

81. Mather, , Youth in its Brightest Glory, 19 Google Scholar. See also Mather, , Nicetas, 37–38 Google Scholar. Mather was in some ways fighting a new battle here as well. Increasingly, the sexual double standard was beginning to take hold as allowances were made for male sexual indiscretions. See Chamberlain, Ava, “Bad Books and Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75 (June 2002): 179–203 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82. Mather, , Addresses to Old Men, 78 Google Scholar. It should be noted that false security was a pervasive theme in Puritan religious discourse, by no means restricted to youth or families. See, for example, Morgan, Edmund, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: Cornell University Press, 1965), 64–70 Google Scholar.

83. Mather, , Early Religion Urged, 10 Google Scholar.

84. Mather, , Cares about the Nurseries, 75 Google Scholar.

85. Mather, , Words of Understanding, 9 Google Scholar. In The Young Man Spoken To, Mather noted that “Ten times more Dy before Twenty than after Sixty” (8).

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91. Mather, , Cares about the Nurseries, 55–56 Google Scholar.

92. Mather, , Addresses to Old Men, 111 Google Scholar.

93. Bosco, , Paterna, 137 Google Scholar.

94. Ibid., 114.

95. Mather, , Cares about the Nurseries, 56 Google Scholar. It is worth noting that this was a significant reality in Mather's personal experience. Only six of his children lived beyond childhood and only two outlived him. He therefore buried thirteen of his fifteen children.

96. Other prominent New England clergy, such as Charles Chauncy and Eleazer Mather, also resisted giving a precise age in which the child came to “years of discretion,” preferring to leave such decisions in the hands of local church officers. See Beales, “In Search of the Historical Child,” 388-91.

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98. Ibid., 55, 57.

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101. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 30 Google Scholar.

102. Ibid., 24.

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105. Diary, 2:265.

106. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 21 Google Scholar.

107. Mather, , A Family Well-Ordered, 10–11 Google Scholar. On this theme, see also Slater, Peter Gregg, Children in the New England Mind: In Death and in Life (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977), 41 Google Scholar.

108. Jacobs, Alan, Original Sin: A Cultural History (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), 128-29Google Scholar. Jacobs notes that the doctrine of original sin diminished in popularity in the fifty years following John Bunyan's death, reemerging as a popular theme during the ministry of George Whitefield. See also Brekus, Catherine, Sarah Osborn's World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 145 Google Scholar.

109. Mather, , Repeated Warnings, 11 Google Scholar. As Brekus has noted, rhetoric on the torments of hell seems to have increased in the eighteenth century, perhaps as a response to “humanitarian challenges” to the doctrine in this era. See Brekus, , Sarah Osborn's World, 145 Google Scholar.

110. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 28 Google Scholar. See also Greven, , The Protestant Temperament, 32–43 Google Scholar.

111. Bosco, , Paterna, 194-95Google Scholar. See also Morgan, , The Puritan Family, 104-5Google Scholar; Moran, and Vinovskis, , Religion, Family, and the Life Course, 116 Google Scholar.

112. Mather, , Help for Distressed Parents, 20–21 Google Scholar.

113. Ibid., 12.

114. Ibid.

115. As Robert Middlekauf has suggested, Mather was particular eager to remind his flock that their spiritual ability was worth nothing in the divine economy. His suggestion that parents could not save their children was directly in line with this larger pastoral theme. See Middlekauf, , The Mathers, 235-53Google Scholar.

116. Mather, Cotton, The Best Ornaments of Youth (Boston: Timothy Green, 1707), 3–4 Google Scholar.

117. Bercovitch, , The American Jeremiad, 8 Google Scholar.

118. Alexandra Walsham notes that this was the most common interpretation among early modern Protestants. God was chastising his children in order to protect them from complacency and spark reformation, protecting them from the ultimate punishment of hell. See Walsham, , Providence in Early Modern England, 8–20 Google Scholar. This was part of the larger ideology termed “experimental predestinarianism” by Kendall, R. T. in Calvin and English Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.