Samuel Mather

Samuel Mather (born May 13, 1626 in Much Woolton , Lancashire ; died October 29, 1671 in Dublin ) was a Puritan clergyman and theologian .

Life

Mather was the second eldest of six sons of the Puritan clergyman Richard Mather , who emigrated with his family to Massachusetts in 1635 and there, as a long-time pastor of Dorchester, became one of the most important spiritual leaders of this colony. Up to the third generation, the Mathers were one of the most powerful and spiritually most influential families in New England , and Samuel Mather also played a part in this. He studied at Harvard College , founded in 1635 , where he graduated with an MA in 1643 and was named first of the college's five fellows in 1650 . As a preacher he worked at the Second Church in north Boston , but turned down the offer to become their pastor - an extremely important position for the church history of New England, which later his brother Increase Mather (from 1664 to 1723) and his nephew Cotton Mather ( from 1685 to 1728) held.

In 1650 he moved back to England and became a sought-after preacher in the Puritan Interregnum . First, he was appointed chaplain of the London Mayor Thomas Andrewes appointed, then one of the chaplains of the Magdalen College of the University of Oxford . In 1653 he resigned and from then on preached mainly in Scotland and - in the wake of Henry Cromwell - in Ireland. In 1656 he was made a Fellow of Trinity College in Dublin and ordained in October of that year as pastor of the now congregational Church of St. Nicholas , and from then on shared this office with Samuel Winter . After the restoration of the House of Stuart , he was suspended in October 1660 after sharply attacking the new King Charles II in his sermons . According to Cotton Mather , who dedicated a chapter to his uncle in his monumental Magnalia Christi Americana , the most important work in early New England church history, he also opposed the reintroduction of a symbolic liturgy in these sermons. In the tried and tested Puritan manner, Mather included church music , “false” festivals such as Christmas , and the idea of ​​church buildings as sacred places of worship . In particularly sharp words, he turned against the sign of the cross :

"He argued against the sign of the cross in baptism, that whatever was to be said against oyl, cream, salt, spittle, therein is to he said against the cross, which indeed never had been used, in the worship of God, as oyl had been of old. That there is as much cause to worship the spear that pierced our Lord, as the cross which hanged him, or that it were as reasonable, to scratch a child's forehead with a thorn, to shew that it must suffer for him, who wore a crown of thorns: that the cross thus employed is a breach of the second commandment in the very letter of it, being an image in the service of God of man's devising, and fetch'd, as Mr. Parker says, from the brothel- house of God's greatest enemy. "

He initially returned to England and became a curate at Burtonwood in Lancashire , but was relieved of this office with the adoption of the Uniformity Act 1662, and then settled again in Dublin. Here he gathered a congregation that met first in his home and later in a meeting house on New Row. In September 1664 he was temporarily imprisoned for these activities, but was soon released again. He died on October 29, 1671 and was buried in the St. Nicholas cemetery.

plant

Mather's most important work is The Figures Or Types of the Old Testament , a systematic treatise on biblical typology . It was published in London in 1673, posthumously, edited by his younger brother Nathanel Mather , and is based on sermons he gave in Dublin between March 1666 and February 1668. The work evidently met with broad and long-lasting interest in non-conformist circles. A second edition appeared in 1705, a third in 1834, but largely rewritten by a certain Catherine Fry Wilson.

Fonts

• The Figures Or Types of the Old Testament: By Which Christ and the Heavenly Things of the Gospel Were Preached and Shadowed to the People of God of Old. Explain'd and Improv'd in Sundry Sermons . London 1673, second edition: Nath. Hillier, London 1705.

literature

• Francis J. Bremer: Mather, Samuel (1626–1671) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition). Oxford University Press, New York 2004–: < http: //www.oxforddnb.com.460264923 > (restricted access).
• Ursula Brumm : The Religious Typology in American Thought: Its Significance for American Literary and Intellectual History . Leiden, Brill 1963. (= Studies on American Literature and History 2)
• Alexander Gordon:  Mather, Samuel . In: Sidney Lee (Ed.): Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 37:  Masquerier - Millyng. , MacMillan & Co, Smith, Elder & Co., New York City / London 1894, p. 31 (English).
• John Langdon Sibley: Samuel Mather . In: John Langdon Sibley: Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts , Volume I. Charles William Sever, Cambridge Mass. 1873, pp. 78-87.

Web links

• Works by Samuel Mather in the Post-Reformation Digital Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Robert Middlekauff : The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals offers a representation that spans three generations and focuses on Richard, Increase and Cotton Mather . Oxford University Press, New York 1971, ISBN 0-520-21930-9 .
2. ↑ Cotton Mather: Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from its First Planting in the Year 1620. unto the year of Our Lord, 1698 , London 1702, Book IV, Chapter II.
3. ↑ Ursula Brumm: The religious typology in American thought , p. 34.