"Miry places" (Ezekiel 47:11): a sermon by Cotton Mather in the Library of Congress manuscript collections

Abstract

The unpublished sermon on the verse Ezekiel 47:11 (“But the miry places thereof and the marishes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt”) by the leading intellectual of early colonial New England / Massachusetts pastor Cotton Mather (1663-1728) of Boston, stored in the Library of Congress Manuscript Department is studied in respect of the time and circumstances of its composition. This sermon seems to have been overlooked by scholars of colonial New England. The text of the sermon, possibly written and peached in late 1700s, is represented in the incomplete form, as it is found in the manuscript. The text of the sermon is peculiar in respect of Mather's treatment of Ezekiel in his literary corpus. The topic of the sermon bears very speci c New England connotations: the lack of work of the Holy Spirit within an individual soul. This issue, so destructive to personal salvation, is here viewed as a communal problem, since the multitude of the unconverted create “Miry Places” that de le the City of God and the very river of Gospel grace that does not “heal” them. While in his “Biblia Americana” Mather interprets Ezekiel's vision as describing the eschatological future, here he reads the prophet's text as an allegory of actual spiritual experience of the community and deals with a “Mystical, & a Spiritual Meaning” of the verse.