Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister, social conservative and was influential in early American science.

While Mather's writtings were very important to early America, his writings do not hold up well outside his time. Mather died in 1728.

"The oracles of God foretold the rising of an Antichrist in the Christian Church: and in the Pope of Rome, all the characteristics of that Antichrist are so marvelously answered that if any who read the Scriptures do not see it, there is a marvelous blindness upon them."

And yet there are still people today who find the Biblical description of the antichrist fits the Pope very well. I guess that some things will never change.

And yet there are still people today who find the Biblical description of the antichrist fits the Pope very well. I guess that some things will never change.

Massachusetts, like many American colonies, had roots in a scrupulous fundamentalist Protestantism. Christianity was no barrier to slave-ownership, however. The Puritans regarded themselves as God's Elect, and so they had no difficulty with slavery, which had the sanction of the Law of the God of Israel. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination easily supported the Puritans in a position that blacks were a people cursed and condemned by God to serve whites. Cotton Mather told blacks they were the "miserable children of Adam and Noah," for whom slavery had been ordained as a punishment.