The Mathers were praised highly and blamed sharply in their lifetime, and have been since. There can be little dispute about what they did and what they said; they were outspoken enough to make their motives and feelings palpable. It is as one makes or refuses allowances for their times that the estimate of their value to their generation is scaled. None ever needed allowances more. They had no conception of those influences which place men in relation to other times than their own. There was in their minds no plane higher than the existence around them,—no plane to which the man of all times leads his contemporaries. Matherism, which was to them their life, was to others a domination, the long-suffering of which, by their coevals, to us of to-day is a study. It would be unjust to say that this mighty influence had not been often of great good; but the gentle observer of an historic character does not contentedly witness outbursts of selfish arrogance, canting humiliation, boastful complacency, to say nothing of social impertinences and public indelicacies, and the bandying of opprobrious epithets in controversy. With this there was indeed mingled much for which New England had reason to be grateful. Increase Mather had a convenient astuteness, which was exerted not infrequently to her no small gain. He had learning, which usually left his natural ability and his education free from entanglements. It was too often quite otherwise with his son Cotton, whose reading smothered his faculties, though he had a native power that occasionally got the upper hand. Between them they gathered a library, which, as John Dunton said, was the glory of New England. The awe which Increase inspired knew little of that lurking rebellion which the too pitiful arrogance of Cotton incited; for the father was essentially a strong and politic man, and though his domination was waning outwardly in 1700, he had the ability to compel the Boston press into a refusal to print the _Gospel Order Revised_, which his opponents had written in answer to his _Order of the Gospel_, and to force his adversaries to flee to New York to find a printer.[185]