Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ... with any of his successors. But, from the great interest of the subject, I imagine that no apology is needed for what may seem a wide digression, and a certain want of proportion in the narrative. II. RICHARD MATHER, THE FIRST MINISTER The first minister of the Ancient Chapel was Richard Mather, a man well known in his own day among the Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic. He was an early follower of the Oar chief authority for the following narrative of Mather's life is a little hook published in 1670, at Cambridge, Mass., entitled "The Life and Death of that Reverend Man of God, Mr. Richard Mather, Teacher of the Church in Dorchester, in New-England." The writer was a personal friend, who desired that his name should be withheld; but he had access to all Mather's papers and every means of accurate knowledge. There is a dedication by Increase Mather to the Church and Inhabitants of Dorohester, giving these facts as to the author. This Life was reprinted in 1850, at Boston, for the Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society, together with the Journal of Richard Mather, 1635, and forms No. 3 of the Society's Collections. All subsequent accounts are really based on this, the chief being that in Dr. Samuel Clark's Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age, London, 1683, published after the author's death, with an Address to the Reader by Richard Baxter, and that in Dr. Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana: Ecclesiastical History of New England, 1620-1698, published in London in 1702. This last contains a few fresh particulars as to Mather's life, added by the grandson; and the interesting paper given below (p. ), but for the rest is merely an abridgement of the first biography, from which it differs chiefly in its more...
