Reviews of Books

None of us would relish getting the kinds of letters that John Cotton received. In 1627, Charles Chauncy, the newly appointed vicar of Ware, asked his English colleague for help in coping with the "dissolute town" over which he now presided, whose "people have wanted instruction for many years." Reluctant to conform to the Anglican church, the future president of Harvard College turned to Cotton for advice. How could he "with most profit and edification . . . proceed in the Lord's work" (p. 122)? Nine years later, now settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Cotton continued to hear from his English brethren, like it or not. In 1637, Richard Bernard, the venerable author of The Faithfull Shepheard (London, 1607), wrote to express his strong disapproval of the Bay Colony's use of the test of a relation of conversion to determine a candidate's eligibility for full church membership. How could Cotton support this rash innovation, "late devised, and in former ages unheard of, and in all Christian Churches els vnpractised Covenant" (p. 260)! Other correspondents sent the equivalent of questionnaires, such as the detailed set of queries submitted in 1647 by an aspiring minister in Exeter, New Hampshire, named Nathanael Norcross. "If you please to give satisfaction herein I shall humbly rest" (p. 398). But there was no rest for Cotton. In 1651, John Eliot, the Roxbury minister and Indian missionary, called on him to refute a recent publication by an English Seeker. This book, Eliot explained, was "well worth the Labour to answer, & needfull" (p. 447).

1

These four letters are typical of the ones Cotton received during his ministries in St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire (1612–1632), and in the (First) Church in Boston, Massachusetts (1633–1652). Most of his correspondence came from fellow clergymen. But friends, acquaintances, and strangers inside and outside the ministry asked him to provide practical guidance on pastoral and moral problems, to answer ecclesiastical, doctrinal, legal, and exegetical questions, or to evaluate published works or drafts of manuscripts. After his emigration to New England, he also received angry or incredulous letters from persons troubled by Massachusetts Bay's ecclesiastical and political policies or by his actions and theological views during the Antinomian Controversy of the mid-1630s. Seldom did he open a letter that did not contain a request or a rebuke. His habit was to respond promptly and thoughtfully, and often at length. For Cotton, conducting correspondence was a professional duty. As Sargent Bush, Jr., observes in his general introduction to The Correspondence of John Cotton, Cotton likened himself--and was likened by his contemporaries--to the apostles, who relied on letters to provide long-distance instruction.

. . .