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Richard Mather

Richard Mather (1596 – 22 April 1669) was a New England Puritan minister in colonial Boston. He was father to Increase Mather and grandfather to Cotton Mather, both celebrated Boston theologians.

For other people named Richard Mather, see Richard Mather (disambiguation).

The Reverend
Richard Mather

1596

Lowton, Winwick, Lancashire, England

22 April 1669 (aged 72–73)

Dorchester, Massachusetts Bay Colony

Brasenose College, Oxford

Minister

  • Katherine Hoult
  • Sarah Hankredge

Works[edit]

He was a leader of New England Congregationalism, whose policy he defended and described in the tract Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed, in an Answer of the Elders of the Severall Churches of New England to Two and Thirty Questions (written 1639; printed 1643),[5] an answer for the ministers of the colony to 32 questions relating to church government that were propounded by the general court in 1639.[8] He drew up the Cambridge Platform of Discipline,[8] an ecclesiastical constitution in seventeen chapters, adopted (with the omission of Mather's paragraph favouring the "Half-Way Covenant", of which he strongly approved) by the general synod in August 1646.[5] His Reply to Mr Rutherford (1647) is a polemic against the Presbyterianism to which the English Congregationalists were then tending.[5]


With Thomas Welde, Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot he wrote the "Bay Psalm Book", or, more accurately, The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640), probably the first book printed in the English colonies.[5] He was the author of Treatise on Justification (1652). Many of Mather's works were printed by Boston printer John Foster, Boston's first printer.[9]

(1626–1671), the first fellow of Harvard College who was a graduate, chaplain of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1650–1653, and pastor (1656–1671, excepting suspension in 1660–1662) of Church of St. Nicholas Within Dublin;[5][10]

Samuel

Timothy Mather 1628–1684. Also known as "The Farmer Mather" as he was the only son who was not a minister. He was made Selectmen of Dorchester, Massachusetts during the years 1667–1669 and 1675 and 1676. He died in 1684 after a fall in his barn.

(1630–1697), who graduated at Harvard in 1647, was vicar of Barnstaple, Devon, in 1656–1662, pastor of the English Church in Rotterdam, his brother's successor in Dublin in 1671–1688, and then until his death pastor of a church in London;

Nathaniel

Eleazar (1637–1669), who graduated at Harvard in 1656 and after preaching in , for three years, became in 1661 pastor of the church there; father-in-law to the Rev. John Williams (New England minister) 1664–1729 (Harvard Class of 1683) of Deerfield, Massachusetts; Rev Williams was the father of Eunice Kanenstenhawi Williams (1696–1785)

Northampton, Massachusetts

who graduated at Harvard Class of 1656 (1639–1723) was a Puritan minister and a major figure in the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts). Son-in-law to the Rev. John Cotton; Father of the Rev. Cotton Mather (1663–1728) Harvard Class of 1678.

Increase

In 1624, Mather married Katherine Hoult (or Holt) who died in 1655, then re-married the following year to Sarah Hankredge (died 1676), the widow of the Rev. John Cotton. Of six sons, all by his first wife, four were ministers:[5]


Horace E. Mather, in his "Lineage of Richard Mather" (Hartford, Connecticut, 1890), gives a list of 80 clergymen descended from Richard Mather, of whom 29 bore the name Mather and 51 other names, the most common being Storrs and Schauffler.[5]

Toxteth Unitarian Chapel

Greaves, Richard L (1998), Dublin's Merchant-Quaker: Anthony Sharp and the Community of Friends, 1643 – 1707, Stanford University Press, p. , ISBN 9780804734523

4

Attribution

Clapp, Ebenezer (1859), , Boston{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

History of the Town of Dorchester, Massachusetts

Gordon, Alexander (1894). . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 37. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 29–30.

"Mather, Richard" 

Mather, Richard (1850),

Journal of Richard Mather 1635 His Life and Death 1670.

Middlekauff, Robert (1973), The Mathers - Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals 1596-1728