A Letter of Richard Mather to a Cleric in Old England

T HE following letter was written in i636 by Richard Mather, the teacher of the church in Dorchester, Massachusetts Bay. He composed it in answer to thirty-six questions on New England religion sent to him by a Lancashire minister identified only with the initials E. B.1 The letter is one of the Bay Colony's first complete statements of ecclesiastical doctrine and polity. Written two years after John Cotton's i634 outline, The True Constitution of a Particular Visible Church,2 and some three years before Mather would pen the major survey of New England religion, Church-Government and Church-Covenant Discussed, the letter is a transitional document.8 It illustrates, in a most graphic way, the doctrinal maturation of Massachusetts Bay's churches during the colony's first decade of settlement. At the time it was written, the expulsion of Roger Williams and the Antinomian crisis were paramount concerns, and while the colony focused its attention on these events, alterations and deviations in the character of church operation did not attract a great deal of attention. The result was that while only five years separated Cotton's outline from Mather's extensive i639 statement of faith, the documents were strikingly different in form and con

Archaeology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Medicine · Gerontology