“Cotton was acute and subtile. The son of a Puritan lawyer, he had been eminent at Cambridge as a student. He was quick in the nice perception of distinctions, and pliant in dialectics; in manner persuasive rather than commanding; skilled in the fathers and the schoolmen, but finding all their wisdom compactly stored in Calvin; deeply devout by nature as well as habit from childhood; hating heresy and still precipitately eager to prevent evil actions by suppressing ill opinions, yet verging in opinion towards progress in civil and religious freedom. He was the avowed foe of democracy, which he feared as the blind despotism of animal instincts in the multitude. Yet he opposed hereditary power in all its forms; desiring a government of moral opinion, according to the laws of moral equity, and ‘claiming the ultimate resolution for the whole body of the people.’”[795] Cotton was, if not the originator, then the main mover of the theocratical idea. “When he came,” says Mather, “there were divers churches in America, but the country was in a perplexed and divided state; points of church order he settled with exactness; and inasmuch as no little of an Athenian democracy was in the mould of the colonial government, by the royal charter which was then acted upon, he effectually recommended that none should be electors or elected except such as were visible subjects of Christ personally confederated in the church. In this way, and in others, he propounded an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel.”[796] Cotton was a man of much personal humility. “He learned the lesson of Gregory, ‘It is better, many times, to fly from an injury by silence, than to overcome it by replying;’ and he used that practice of Grynæus, ‘To revenge wrongs by Christian taciturnity.’ On one occasion he had modestly replied to one that would much talk and croak of his insight into the revelations: ‘Brother, I must confess myself to want _light_ in these mysteries.’ The man went home and sent Cotton a _pound of candles_.”[797] He was iron in his doctrines, but personally he had the _nimia humilitas_ which Luther sometimes lamented in Staupitz; so much so, indeed, that Mather marvels that “the hardest flints should not have been broken on such a soft bag of cotton.”[798] Cotton, on landing, in 1633, at once assumed that leading position to which his intellect entitled him, and his pulpit at Boston speedily became a leading power in Massachusetts.