Roger Williams championed liberty of conscience. Cotton Mather promoted acts of kindness and doing good. Roger Williams was born in London but migrated to Boston and then to Salem, Plymouth, and finally to the town he founded, Providence, Rhode Island. Cotton Mather was born in Boston and never strayed from it. Both were trained Puritan ministers, but the young man Roger resigned from the ministry, saying it was “the best callings but (generally) they are the worst trades in the world.”
Instead, he made his living “trucking with the Indians.” Cotton preached at his pulpit at Boston’s Old North Church until seven weeks before he passed away. They both wrote books, especially Cotton, who wrote over four hundred. Alike and yet so different, the two men were thinkers and writers in America’s early religious history. Author William H. Benson compares and contrasts Roger Williams and Cotton Mather in this, the first of six volumes of The Parallel Lives of the Noble American Religious Thinkers vs. Believers. Additional volumes will include: Thomas Paine and George Whitefield, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith, William James and Mary Baker Eddy, Mark Twain and Billy Graham, and H. L. Mencken and Jim Bakker.
About the author
William H. Benson earned his degree in history in 1976. He taught history at a junior high school and also at a community college. Since 1992, he has written a biweekly newspaper column that examines historical events and ideas.
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