SOURCE: "Increase Mather," in Ten New England Leaders, Silver, Burnett and Company, 1901, pp. 175-213.

In the following excerpt, Walker offers an overview of Mather's life, paying particular attention to the influences on Mather as a young man, and to his conflicts with Harvard College in his later years.

… Increase Mather was born on June 21, 1639, in that home in Dorchester into which we have already glanced in considering the career of his father, Richard. Popular tradition represents Puritan names as Biblical or fantastically religious to a degree not true of them in general. If one looks over a list of Puritan emigrants or a catalogue of early church members, one finds it made up chiefly, in reality, of the Williams, the Johns, the Edwards, the Henrys, the Richards, the Thomases, in which Anglo-Saxon parents have delighted certainly since the Norman conquest. But occasionally you will meet an odd exception...