He holds it "a tough
work, a wonderful hard matter to be saved." "Jesus Christ is not
got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many mystics, he yearns to
be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be "drowned, plunged,
and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later we shall find
this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan
Edwards.
John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial
pulpit, owes his fame more to his social and political influence
than to his literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding.
Trained, like Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh
from the rectorship of St. Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston,
John Cotton dominated that new Boston which was named in his
honor. He became the Pope of the theocracy; a clever Pope and not
an unkindly one. He seems to have shared some of the opinions of
Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced the sentence of
admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with much zeal and
detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods,
might have done justice to this scene.
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