" [Footnote: _Mass. Hist. Coll._ fifth series, vi. 2.]
Humility has sometimes been extolled as the crowning grace of Christian
clergymen, but Cotton Mather's Diary shows the intolerable arrogance of
the early Congregational divines.
"A wonderful joy filled the hearts of our good people far and near, that
we had obtained thus much from them. Our strife seemed now at an end;
there was much relenting in some of their spirits, when they saw our
condescension, our charity, our compassion. We overlooked all past
offences. We kept the public fast with them ... and my father preached
with them on following peace with holiness, and I concluded with prayer."
[Footnote: _History of Harvard_, i. 487, App. x.]
Yet, although there had been this ostensible reconciliation, those who
have appreciated the sensitiveness to sin, of him whom Dr. Eliot calls the
patriarch and his son, must already feel certain they were incapable of
letting Colman's impiety pass unrebuked; indeed, the Diary says the
"faithful antidote" was at that moment in the press, and it was not long
before it was published, sanctified by their prayers. The patriarch began
by telling how he was defending the "cause of Christ and of his churches
in New England," and "if we espouse such principles... we then give away
the whole Congregational cause at once.
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