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CHAPTER 9. The Last Puritan [1703–1723]
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CHAPTER 9 The Last Puritan {1703-1723} HARVARD LOST Lilacs were blooming in Boston in the spring of 1699, when the city learned that England had rejected another batch of Massachusetts laws, including the 1697 version of the Harvard charter. Once again the now tiresome business of seeking a new charter for the college had to be addressed . The problem was that the crown insisted the king have oversight over the college. A new draft was prepared which gave the crown exclusive right ofvisitation. At the same time, and also for the first time in the history of the college, the draft included a religious test: "no person shall be chosen, and continued President, Vice-President, or Fellow, of said Corporation, but such as shall declare and continue their adherence unto the principles of Reformation, which were espoused and intended by those who first settled this country, and founded the College , and have hitherto been the professionand practice of the generality of the churches ofChrist in New England." ' Both the Council and the House approved the innovation. Governor Bellomont did not. He wrote to the Lords of Trade in London that the paragraph would exclude forever "all members of the Church of England " from being on the college's governing board and vetoed the proposed charter, and they were back at the beginning, as far as the college charter was concerned.2 It was another summer before a new draft charter was again thrust into the legislative mill. This time the Council persuaded Governor Bel- The Last Puritan 303} lomont to give his approval to powers of visitation held by the king through his governor and the Council jointly. There would be no religious test. Mather, deep in his efforts to counteract the influence of the Brattle Street Church—he sent the manuscript of Order of the Gospel to the printer that March—went so far as to speculate if it might not be better not to have a charter at all: "Is it not much more eligible to have the Colledge turned into a school for Academical Learningwithout priviledge of Conferring degrees, as in Geneva it has bin where many Eminent divines have had their education, than to consent to such fatal alterations in the government of the Colledge, as some would have?"3 Nothing came of that idea, nor is there any evidence that Mather even raised it publicly. On another point, however, the new draft charter was explicit: "The President of the said Corporation, as also all The Fellows and Tutors, thereof receiving salary shall reside at the Colledge. . . ."4 Mather's political enemies had triumphed. The General Assembly asked him to call a church meeting that very evening, and a delegation from the assembly went to explain and cajole the membership. The next day the following vote passed the brethren: "Being under the sense of the great benefit we have long enjoyed by the labor ofour pastor, the Rev. Increase Mather, among us, it must needs be unreasonable and impossible for us to consent that his relations to us, and our enjoyment of him and them, should cease. "Nevertheless, the respect we have to desire and welfare ofthe publick does compel us to consent that our good pastor may so remove his personal residence to the Colledge at Cambridge as may be consistent with the continuance of his relation to us, and his visits to us, with his publick administrations, as often as his health and strength may allow it."5 The language wasclouded, but the meaning wasplain. Mather must try to live in Cambridge despite everything. He moved there in the summer , leaving Maria at home in Boston. Every day Mather walked the short distance along hot, dusty lanes to the college buildings situated at the edge of the town common. An imposing new dormitory, Stoughton College, had been completed the year before. It was a good match in height and length to Old Harvard Hall and offered students amenities unheard of half a century before. Students in Stoughton College could, for example, rent space in the cellar to keep wine during term. The bricks to build the new hall had come from the long unused Indian College , where the early presses had printed Mather's first books. Mather went each day to Old Harvard Hall. In the cool shade of the large central room he lectured to the students. His subjects on alternate [3.129.13.201] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 23:09...