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In August 1682 a comet appeared in the night sky of New England. Two years earlier, preaching on the appearance of another comet, Increase Mather, Cotton’s father, declared that “Such Sights are Heaven’s Alarm to a sinful World, to give notice that God hath bent his Bow, and made his Arrows ready, and that if Sinners turn not, the Arrows of Pestilence and Death shall fall down upon them speedily” (Mather 1986, 20). In the face of such a warning, Mather gave two pieces of advice. First, expect war and not peace. “O let us beware of crying Peace, Peace, when the Day of Destruction is at hand” (Mather 1986, 25). Instead, the chosen people of the Americas needed to take action and in so doing hope to avert the evil events foreshadowed by the comet. Second, however, despite the danger, the results of the coming war were not yet settled. “This word of comfort, I may safely speak,” Mather continued, “The Lord’s Threatenings are not absolute, but conditional” (Mather 1986, 32). The hope of victory came at the high price of holy war against all who would block the pilgrims’ progress. Years later, Cotton recalled the important appearance of the comets in his volume The Christian Philosopher. From his perspective, the comet was at once a knowable astronomical phenomenon, describable under the given rules of nature, and something whose meaning was ultimately part of a larger scheme. Thus, even as the comet could be understood in terms of the new science of Newton, “from whom ’tis a dif¤cult thing to dissent in any thing that belongs to Philosophy,” it also signi¤ed impending troubles to be faced by Mather’s community in its progress toward the new Jerusalem. While his father had been wary of “natural” disasters, Cotton displayed a special fear of the more insidious challenge of human chaos and its potential for breaking the will of the community. “When I see a vast Comet, blazing and rolling about the unmeasurable 78 c h a p t e r f i v e The Indigenous Attitude Æther,” he says, “I will think: ‘Who can tell, but I now see a wicked World made a ¤ery Oven in this Time of the Anger of GOD! The Lord swallowing them up in his Wrath, and the Fire devouring them! What prodigious Mischief and Ruin might such a Ball of Confusion bring upon our sinful Globe, if the Great GOD order its Approach to us!” (Mather 1994, 53–54). The coming of Halley’s Comet in 1682, like the comet of 1680, marked the potential for destructive chaos in America. In this case, however, the chaos was averted. Among the deaths that followed the appearance of Halley’s Comet early in the following year was that of Roger Williams, a Puritan preacher who, for Mather, embodied “Mischief and Ruin.” Cotton Mather addressed the problem of Roger Williams in the ¤nal book of his Magnalia Christi Americana. The book is the penultimate chapter in Mather’s story of New England, and it recalls the elder Mather’s tidings of war in its title, Ecclesiarum Praelia, “The Battles of the Church” (Mather 1967, 2: 489, 489n). Like much of the Magnalia, the book presents a series of loosely related accounts, in this case, of the challenges faced by the religious leadership of the New England colonies in the seventeenth century. The accounts are roughly divided into three sections . The ¤rst focuses on Roger Williams, the second on a series of “internal” challenges to the Puritan leadership, and the third is an account of the wars between the colonies and the Native American peoples of the region. Given the scope of the movements that challenged the leadership which gave rise to the American Baptist and Quaker movements , and given the damage wrought in the Indian wars, it is curious that Mather opens his discussion with the story of Roger Williams. Williams was neither the leader of a popular movement nor even a preacher of dissent. Unlike Metacom,1 who led a confederacy of Native people in a devastating war against the colonies in 1675 and 1676, Williams led no armed attack on the colonies. Williams merits special attention because, as Mather suggests, he bore the “special mark” of someone “eminent” in sinning and so rightly called “the chief of sinners” (Mather 1967, 2: 495). Mather identi¤es the nature of Williams’s sin with the sins of Korah, described in...

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