West Port Experiment

I’ve recorded several chapters of Cotton Mather’s great Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England: from Its First Planting, in the Year 1620, Unto the Year of Our Lord 1698. Here are the opening words of the first chapter, “Discoveries of America.”

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“It is the opinion of some, though ’tis but an opinion, and but of some learned men, that when the sacred oracles “of Heaven assure us, the things under the earth are some of those, whose knees are to bow in the name of Jesus, by those things are meant the inhabitants of America, who are Antipodes to those of the other hemisphere. I would not quote any words of Lactantius, though there are some to countenance this interpretation, because of their being so ungeographical: nor would I go to strengthen the interpretation by reciting the words of the Indians to the first white invaders of their territories, we hear you are come from under the world to take our world from us. But granting the uncertainty of such an exposition, I shall yet give the Church of God a certain account of those things, which in America have been believing and adoring the glorious name of Jesus; and of that country in America, where those things have been attended with circumstances most remarkable. I can contentedly allow that America (which, as the learned Nicholas Fuller observes, might more justly be called Columbina) was altogether unknown to the penmen of the Holy Scriptures, and in the ages when the Scriptures were penned. I can allow, that those parts of the earth, which do not include America, are, in the inspired writings of Luke and of Paul, stiled all the world. I can allow, that the opinion of Torniellus and of Pagius, about the apostles preaching the gospel in America, has been sufficiently refuted by Basnagius. But I am out of the reach of Pope Zachary’s excommunication. I can assert the existence of the American Antipodes: and I can report unto the European churches great occurrences among these Americans. Yet I will report every one of them with such a Christian and exact veracity, that no man shall have cause to use about any one of them the words which the great Austin (as great as he was) used about the existence of Antipodes; it is a fable, and nulla ratione credendum.