SOURCE: "Cotton Mather," in Major Writers of Early American Literature, edited by Everett Emerson, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1972, pp. 93-150.

In the excerpt below, Bercovitch discusses Mather's ideas on piety and science as expressed in Bonifacius and The Christian Philosopher.

… Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.

Emerson, Nature

To interpret Mather's shifts of perspective as a slackening of Puritan principles overlooks his meaning; much less should we read them as a covert capitulation to Arminianism or as a conscious transition from piety to moralism. Undoubtedly, they were so adapted later in the eighteenth century, but we ought not to burden the author with the sins of his readers. He held adamantly to Orthodox Calvinism, the system erected by the master's Swiss, Dutch, and English disciples, which, despite basic modifications, built upon the notions of...