SOURCE: "Essays to Do Good for the Glory of God: Cotton Mather's Bonifacius" in The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, Cambridge University Press, 1974, pp. 139-55.

In the essay below, Levin examines the themes of Mather's Bonifacius, also known as Essays to Do Good, and argues that the book is historically relevant to an understanding of American philosophers and reformers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Levin's essay was first published in 1966.

Bonifacius—usually known by its running title, Essays to Do Good—has always had a better reputation than the author who published it anonymously in 1710. It is Cotton Mather's historical fate to be considered largely as a transitional figure whose prodigious but narrow mind stretched inadequately between the zealous founding of the Bible Commonwealth and the enlightened struggle for the Republic. His efforts to retain the old Puritan values along with...