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Mather. For many, the name conjures up Bible-thumping pastors, Puritan busybodies meddling in community life, and falsely accused “witches” made to pay for their alleged misdeeds at Salem in 1692.

But these images have little to do with reality.

For almost a century, the Mathers were leading lights in the Congregational firmament of colonial Massachusetts. Indeed, from Richard Mather’s arrival in 1635, through the long, fruitful pastorate of his son Increase, to the death in 1728 of his grandson Cotton, they were a spiritual dynasty.

“His way of preaching was very plain … aiming to shoot his arrows, not over the heads, but into the hearts of his hearers. Yet so scripturally and powerfully did he preach his plain sermons, that … he saw a great success of his labours, in both Englands [Old and New], converting many souls to God.”

These are Cotton Mather’s words, penned in praise of his grandfather Richard.

Born in 1596 near Liverpool, this patriarch of Puritanism came to faith while a teenager. His conversion experience was in the classic Puritan mold: self-righteous attempts to obey God’s law, despair as he compared his feeble efforts to those of seasoned saints, and finally a breakthrough. At age 18, in the words of his grandson, “the good Spirit of God healed his broken heart, by pouring thereinto the evangelical consolations of <wa>His great and good promises.” ’

After brief study at Oxford University, in 1619 Mather was ordained an Anglican minister. In more than a decade of pastoral ministry, he upheld Calvinist orthodoxy while keeping clear of the Anglican ceremonies he and other Puritans found objectionable.

After 1630, with William Laud’s installation as Archbishop of Canterbury, theological Arminianism was ascendant, and liturgical uniformity was increasingly enforced. In 1633 Mather was briefly suspended from his position; the following year he lost it. In 1635, Richard and his family took ship for Massachusetts.

Mather was soon installed as pastor of the fledgling parish in Dorchester, just south of Boston. Of his accomplishments, three stand out:

1. He persuaded his flock to require that applicants for membership provide a convincing account of their own conversion, the goal being a church composed of “visible saints.”

2. He composed the bulk of the Cambridge Platform (1649), a sort of Robert’s Rules of Order for the government of New England’s churches.

3. He ultimately argued for modifying the Platform to allow baptized non-members (who had not told of a conversion “experience”) to bring their infants for baptism. This so-called “Half-Way Covenant,” which eventually became nearly universal practice in the region, kept a foothold for the gospel in a rapidly secularizing community.

Richard died in 1669, one of the last of that generation of titans.

Richard’s son Increase has been hailed as “the greatest American Puritan” and even “the last American Puritan,” though the first is hyperbole and the second is simply not true. Still, Increase Mather was a dominant figure and the leading voice for orthodox Calvinism in an era when rationalism was beginning to undermine the Bay Colony’s religious foundations.

Increase attended Harvard College, receiving his B.A. in 1656. But instead of staying at Harvard to take his M.A., he enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he received the master’s degree in 1658.

He declined Trinity’s offer of a postgraduate fellowship in favor of service as a parish minister and military chaplain in Cromwell’s England. The restoration of the monarchy (and the re-establishment of Anglicanism) under Charles II, though, dashed his plans, and in 1661 he returned to Boston.

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