Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Vernon Louis Parrington

Critical Essay by Vernon Louis Parrington

SOURCE: "The Mather Dynasty," in Main Currents in American Thought, An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginning to 1920: The Colonial Mind, 1620-1800, Vol. 1, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1927, pp. 99-118.

In the following excerpt, Parrington attempts an examination of Mather's psychology and argues that the Puritan theocracy, whose virtues and glories Mather celebrated, was already crumbling when Mather was in his prime.

… Of the unpopularity that gathered about the name of Mather after the fall of the theocracy, the larger portion fell to the lot of the son, the eccentricities of whose character made him peculiarly vulnerable to attack. In his youth the spoiled child of Boston, in middle life he was petulant and irritable, inclined to sulk when his will was crossed. In the career of no other New England Puritan is the inquisitorial pettiness of the Genevan system of theology and discipline revealed so...
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