Pilgrim Fathers
Richard Mather – Minister at Toxteth
Chapel Liverpool.
Born 1596, Lowton, Lancashire, England.
Died
April 22, 1669, Dorchester, Massachusetts Bay
MATHER FAMILY. Members of three successive generations
of the Mather family were Puritan ministers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in
New England: Richard (1596–1669), Increase (1629–1723), and Cotton (1663–1728).
Each achieved fame as a preacher and
writer, and collectively they exerted a formative influence on the religious
life of colonial America.
Richard Mather, who was born in Lowton, near Liverpool, matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1618 but studied there for only a few months.
He was preaching at Toxteth Park in Liverpool
when, late in 1633, he was removed from the pulpit. His offences are not known,
although they were doubtless ecclesiastical; as he did not conform to the
practices of the Church of England in many ways.
He and his family then emigrated from Liverpool to
Massachusetts Bay, arriving in mid-August 1635. The people of Dorchester,
Massachusetts, after failing to organize a church in April 1636, succeeded in
August of that year, and Mather was immediately called to the church as its
teacher.
In the pulpit in Dorchester, the Rev Mather
served quietly and faithfully. Although in most ways he probably resembled most
Puritan ministers of his time in Massachusetts Bay Colony, in several notable
accomplishments he differed.
He published defences of the "New England Way," as the church policy of the Bay Colony was called; he helped to write the Cambridge Platform (1648) defining ecclesiastical polity; he also contributed to the definition of Puritan baptismal practice in the so-called Halfway Covenant (1662); and eventually he served as an overseer of Harvard College.