Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 5 (of 8): The English and French in North America 1689-1763
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 5 (of 8): The English and French in North America 1689-1763
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
the new Baptist minister, Elisha Callender, in 1718; and when Dudley,
two years before his death,[234] joined Sewall in open attacks on
Leverett and the government of Harvard College, there is little doubt
where the sympathy of the Mathers lay.[235] They had hopes, too, that
the new Connecticut college would register their edicts, since they
could no longer enforce them at Cambridge. Sewall found the Lord’s
Supper unsuggestive of charity, when the deacon offered the cup to
Madam Winthrop before it was served to him; and we, to-day, had much
rather see him riding about the country on his circuit, distributing
tracts and sermons to squires and hostlers, and astonishing the
children, as he rode into the shire-towns under the escort of the
sheriff and his men.
But Yale College, of which so much was hoped by the lingering
puritanism, soon surprised them, when Timothy Cutler, its rector, with
one of its tutors, and other Connecticut ministers, embraced Episcopacy
in 1722. Governor Saltonstall was powerless to prevent it, when at
Commencement the story of that defection was told. Cutler went to
England, received Episcopal ordination, and came to Boston in 1724 to
take charge of one of its English churches.[236]
But before this the care of the body as well as of souls had proved
a source of dispute with the ministers. Cotton Mather had read in
the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society, to which he was sometimes
a contributor himself, of the method which was employed in Turkey
of disarming the small-pox of some of its terrors by the process
of inoculation.[237] That disease was now raging. While the town
was moving the governor to send the “Seahorse,” man-of-war, down to
Spectacle Island, because she had the pest among her crew, Mather
urged Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to make trial of the Turkish method. The
selectmen of Boston and the town meeting opposed it. The House forbade
it by bill; but the council hesitated. One of the most active of the
physicians of Boston strenuously objected. This was William Douglass,
who had been a student of medicine at Leyden and Paris, and who had
come to Boston three years before. Other physicians were likewise in
opposition. The passions were excited by the controversy; the press was
divided; and Mather, who about this time was finding the people “bloody
and barbarous,” the town “spiteful,” and the country “poisoned,”[238]
had a grenado thrown through his window.[239]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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