Creative Books

"New England being
a country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably
enwrapped in theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest
themselves in politics." Indeed, for many years they virtually
controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could
vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and
imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by
permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their
orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not
democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit
government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their
first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,--that
is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was
afterwards rebuked in England as "fanatical and absurd." But the
government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered
by theological controversy.


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