Mr. Sewall declined the appointment. On the eighteenth of November, the Rev. Benjamin Colman, of the Brattle-street Church, was chosen. He also declining, the Rev. Benjamin Wadsworth, of the First Church, was elected, in June, 1725, and inaugurated on the seventh of July.
It thus appears that Dr. Mather was pointedly passed over; and every other Minister of Boston successively chosen to that great office.
Of course he took, as Mr. Peirce informs us, no further part in the management of the College. While he considered, as he expressed it, the "senselessness" of those entrusted with its affairs, as threatening "little short of a dissolution of the College," yet he persuaded himself that he had never desired the office. He had, he says, "unspeakable cause to admire the compassion of Heaven, in saving him from the appointment;" and that he had always had a "dread of what the generality of sober men" thought he desired--"dismal apprehension of the distresses which a call at Cambridge would bring" upon him.--He was sincere in those declarations, no doubt; but they show how completely he could blind himself to the past and even to the actual present. Mr. Peirce explains why the Corporation were so resolute in withholding their suffrages from Mather: "His contemporaries appear to have formed a very correct estimate of his character." "They saw, what posterity sees, that he was a man of wonderful parts, of immense learning, and of eminent piety and virtue." "They saw his weakness and eccentricities." "It is evident that his judgment was not equal to his other faculties; that his passions, which were naturally strong and violent, were not always under proper regulation; that he was weak, credulous, enthusiastic, and superstitious. His conversation is said to have been instructive and entertaining, in a high degree, though often marred by levity, vanity, imprudence and puns." For these reasons, he was deemed an unsuitable person for the Presidency of the College.
While compelled--by the attempt of the writer in the _North American Review_ to reverse the just verdict of history in reference to Cotton Mather's connection with Salem Witchcraft--to show the unhappy part he acted and the terrible responsibility he incurred, in bringing forward, and carrying through its stages, that awful tragedy, and the unworthy means he used to throw that responsibility, afterwards, on others, I am not to be misled into a false position, in reference to this extraordinary man. I endorse the language of Mr. Peirce: "He possessed great vigor and activity of mind, quickness of apprehension, a lively imagination, a prodigious memory, uncommon facility in acquiring and communicating knowledge, with the most indefatigable application and industry; that he amassed an immense store of information on all subjects, human and divine." I follow Mr. Peirce still further, in believing that his natural temperament was pleasant and his sentiments of a benevolent cast: "that he was an habitual promoter and doer of good, is evident, as well from his writings as from the various accounts that have been transmitted respecting him."