Richard Mather, founder of the Mather dynasty in New England, was an active preacher and writer whose published works help to focus the issues faced by the first generation of Massachusetts Bay Puritans in their effort to establish a biblical commonwealth in the New World. Although Mather's pulpit oratory is generally conceded to lack both artistry and power, he developed a vigorous and often heated argumentative style in his polemical writing--a series of rebuttals, definitions, explanations, and statements of church doctrine and government. In his own day, Mather lived in the shadow of his more brilliant contemporaries, especially John Cotton and Thomas Hooker. Subsequently, the roles of his sixth son, Increase, and grandson Cotton as defenders and chroniclers of the faith have eclipsed Richard Mather's position as definer and codifier of that remarkable system known as New England Congregationalism, the federalist theocracy promulgated at Massachusetts Bay in the...