Cotton, John

E., 1585-1652. The foremost clergyman of his century in New England. He came to the Ma achusetts colony in 1633, having been for 20 years vicar of St. Botolph’s church in Boston, Lincoln shire. He was at once made teacher of the church in the new settlement of Boston, and until his death exercised an influence in church and state unequalled by any one since in New England. He was a prolific writer, but his writings have no charm of style, and the power which he wielded was a force that lay in the man himself, not in his books. His principal works comprise The Bloody Tenet Washed and made White in the Blood of the Lamb, a reply to Roger Williams’s famous “Bloody Tenet of Persecution”; A Brief Exposition upon Ecclesiastes; The Covenant of Grace; The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared; The Way of Life; Treatise concerning Predestination; The New Covenant; Meat for Strong Men, Spiritual Milk for Babes. See Cotton Mather’s Magnalia; Lives by Norton, 1653; McClure, 1843; Tyler’s American Literature.