The Kingdom, the Power, & the Glory: The Millennial Impulse in Early American Literature

Literature & Fiction

Smolinski, Reiner

History & Criticism

Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co.

Cotton Mather's mythic image rests on his involvement in the Salem witchcraft debacle (1692-93) and on his Wonders of the Invisible World (1693)-an official defense of the court's verdict and a testimony to the power of Satan and his minions. Mather excerpts the six most notorious cases of Salem witchcraft and buttresses his account with the official endorsement of Lt. Governor William Stoughton, with a disquisition on the devil's machinations described by the best authorities that the subject affords, with a previously delivered sermon at Andover, and with his own experimentations. What ties the various parts together is Mather's millenarian theme of Christ's imminence, of which Satan's plot is the best evidence. Though Mather defends the court's verdict and justifies the government's position, he also voices his great discomfort with the court's procedure in the matter. Wonders appeared in print just when the trials were halting, but it remains, in his own words, "that reviled Book," a bane to his name.

The Wonders of the Invisible World

History

Mather, Cotton

Americas

Zea E-Books

The work reprinted here is a representative examples of Rev. Jonathan Edwards' incisive logic employed in the work of salvation: his famous Enfield sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), which awakened many of his hearers to the danger of their unregenerate condition.

Sinners in the Hands of an angry GOD

EDWARDS, JONATHAN

Religion & Spirituality

Zea Books

<p>This volume serves as a companion piece to the ongoing edition of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (1693-1728), the first comprehensive Bible commentary composed in British North America. Written by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, the essays in this collection offer original in-depth studies of Mather and his hitherto unpublished scriptural interpretations in the historical context of the Early Enlightenment, and the rise of Pietism. Transcending the pejorative image of the Puritan witch-doctor, Mather emerges from these essays as an erudite scholar and cosmopolitan theologian who was fully immersed in the rising developments of biblical exegesis around the turn of the eighteenth century. In facing the challenge of historical criticism or in examining the meaning of race and gender in the Bible, Mather wrestled with religious questions that are still relevant today.</p>

Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana - America's First Bible Commentary: Essays in Reappraisal

World

Mohr Siebrek Ek

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