“And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out
one by one” (John 8:9a).
When Richard and Katharine Mather rejoiced over the birth of another boy on June 21, 1639, their minds turned to “the never-to-be-forgotten Increase, of every sort, wherewith GOD favoured the Country.” They thought of Boston and its five thousand inhabitants and their little Congregational church of at least 35 families over which Richard presided as pastor. They remembered crossing the Atlantic from England because of religious persecution and being welcomed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Seeing the blessings of God on their lives, they named their newborn Increase.
The Mather home had no shortage of books, so the lack of established schools in Boston posed no problem for educating children. In this household, learning — whether math, science, history, or whatever — meant learning about God, the Author of all truth. Of course, each Sunday the Mather family was privileged to hear sermons by Richard, with his “excellent faculty in making abstruse things plain.”
Richard and others taught Increase, and soon he could read the Latin of Cicero extempore and conjugate verbs in Greek. His handwriting was horrendous, and, though he excelled academically, he didn’t enjoy studying. But, like it or not, at age 12, he entered Harvard, located about ten miles away. Named after a minister, America’s oldest college was established by New England Christians fearful of leaving “an illiterate Ministery to the Churches.” This Puritan-minded school pressed on young Mather the claims of Christ, but he seemed unfazed.
At 14, sickness did what the classroom and pulpit could not. In Increase’s own words, this “sore disease,” perhaps a kidney stone, “set me upon prayer to God, and caused me to reform many vain, wild courses and extravagances of my life. And, from this time I became very studious.”
Not long after this, his mother died, and “about that time the Lord broke in upon my conscience with very terrible convictions and awakenings.” During the spring of 1655, he wrote: “I was in extremity of anguish and horror in my soul.”
One day at home, when his father was away, the 15-year-old wrestled with his sin: “I shut myself up in his study, and wrote down all the sins which I could remember I had been guilty of that lay as a heavy burden on my spirits. I brought them before God, and cried to him for pardoning mercy.”
One wonders what sins he listed. So much of what Increase would later write has survived, for he became a famous preacher and educator, but this list didn’t make it to sunup, for that night he “burnt the paper which in way of confession I had sorrowfully spread before the Lord.”
Where he had been only “outwardly Moral,” now he became “strangely changed,” and some of his friends made fun of his “tender conscience.” Turning his sin-list to ashes didn’t end his struggles.
Comfort came when he again shut himself off from others. “I poured out my soul in complaints before God….I gave myself up to Jesus Christ, declaring that I was now resolved to be his servant, I his only, and his forever; and humbly professed to him that if I did perish, I would perish at his feet.” This prayer carried him to God where he found “ease and inward peace.”
About the Columnist: Paul V. Harrison has pastored Madison FWB Church in Madison, Alabama since 2015. Previously, he pastored Cross Timbers FWB church in Nashville, Tennessee, for 22 years. He was an adjunct professor at Welch College for 17 years, teaching church history and Greek. Paul is the creator of Classic Sermon Index, a subscription-based online index of over 66,000 sermons, with clients including Harvard, Baylor, and Vanderbilt, among others: classicsermonindex.com.
