own elaborate formal “Arguments tending to prove the Removing from Old-England to New . . . to be not only lawful, but also necessary for them that are not otherwise tyed, but free,” he left England and on the 17th of August 1635, and landed in Boston after an “extraordinary and miraculous deliverance” from a terrible storm. As a famous preacher “he was desired at Plimouth, Dorchester, and Roxbury.” He went to Dorchester, where the Church had been greatly depleted by migrations to Windsor, Connecticut; and where, after a delay of several months, in August 1636 there was constituted by the consent of magistrates and clergy a church of which he was “teacher” until his death in Dorchester on the 22nd of April 1669.
He was an able preacher, “aiming,” said his biographer, “to shoot his arrows not over his people’s heads, but into their Hearts and Consciences”; and he was a leader of New England Congregationalism, whose policy he defended and described in the tract Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed, in an Answer of the Elders of the Severall Churches of New England to Two and Thirty Questions (written 1639; printed 1643), and in his Reply to Mr Rutherford (1647), a polemic against the Presbyterianism to which the English Congregationalists were then tending. He drafted the Cambridge Platform, an ecclesiastical constitution in seventeen chapters, adopted (with the omission of Mather’s paragraph favouring the “Half-way Covenant,” of which he strongly approved) by the general synod in August 1646. In 1657 he drafted the declaration of the Ministerial Convention on the meaning and force of the Half-way Covenant; this was published in 1659 under the title: A Disputation concerning Church Members and their Children in Answer to XXI. Questions. With Thomas Welde and John Eliot he wrote the “Bay Psalm Book,” or, more accurately, The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640), probably the first book printed in the English colonies.
He married in 1624 Katherine Hoult or Holt (d. 1655), and secondly in 1656 Sarah Hankredge (d. 1676), the widow of John Cotton. Of six sons, all by his first wife, four were ministers: Samuel (1626–1671), the first fellow of Harvard College who was a graduate, chaplain of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1650–1653, and pastor (1656–1671, excepting suspension in 1660–1662) of St Nicholas’s in Dublin; Nathaniel (1630–1697), who graduated at Harvard in 1647, was vicar of Barnstaple, Devon, in 1656–1662, pastor of the English Church in Rotterdam, his brother’s successor in Dublin in 1671–1688, and then until his death pastor of a church in London; Eleazar (1637–1669), who graduated at Harvard in 1656 and after preaching in Northampton, Massachusetts, for three years, became in 1661 pastor of the church there; and Increase Mather (q.v.). Horace E. Mather, in his Lineage of Richard Mather (Hartford, Connecticut, 1890), gives a list of 80 clergymen descended from Richard Mather, of whom 29 bore the name Mather and 51 other names, the more famous being Storrs and Schauffler.
See The Life and Death of That Reverend Man of God, Mr Richard Mather (Cambridge, 1670; reprinted 1850, with his Journal for 1635, by the Dorchester Antiquarian and Historical Society), with an introduction by Increase Mather, who may have been the author; W. B. Sprague’s Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. i. (New York, 1857); Cotton Mather’s Magnalia (London, 1702); an essay on Richard Mather in Williston Walker’s Ten New England Leaders (New York, 1901); and the works referred to in the article on Increase Mather. (R. We.)
MATHERAN, a hill sanatorium in India, in the Kolaba
district of Bombay, 2460 ft. above the sea, and about 30 m.
E. of Bombay city. Pop. (1901), 3060. It consists of several
thickly wooded ridges, on a spur of the Western Ghats, with
a magnificent outlook over the plain below and the distant
sea. First explored in 1850, it has since become the favourite
resort of the middle classes of Bombay (especially the Parsis)
during the spring and autumn months. It has recently been
connected by a 2 ft. gauge mountain line with Neral station on
the Great Indian Peninsula railway, 54 m. from Bombay.
MATHESON, GEORGE (1842–1906), Scottish theologian
and preacher, was born in Glasgow in 1842, the son of George
Matheson, a merchant. He was educated at the university
of Glasgow, where he graduated first in classics, logic and
philosophy. In his twentieth year he became totally blind,
but he held to his resolve to enter the ministry, and gave himself
to theological and historical study. His first ministry began
in 1868 at Innellan, on the Argyllshire coast between Dunoon
and Toward. His books on Aids to the Study of German Theology,
Can the Old Faith live with the New? The Growth of the Spirit of
Christianity from the First Century to the Dawn of the Lutheran
Era, established his reputation as a liberal and spiritually
minded theologian; and Queen Victoria invited him to preach
at Balmoral. In 1886 he removed to Edinburgh, where he
became minister of St Bernard’s Parish Church. Here his
chief work as a preacher was done. In 1879 the university
of Edinburgh conferred upon him the honorary degree of D.D.,
and the same year he declined an invitation to the pastorate
of Crown Court, London, in succession to Dr John Cumming
(1807–1881). In 1881 he was chosen as Baird lecturer, and
took for his subject “Natural Elements of Revealed Theology,”
and in 1882 he was the St Giles lecturer, his subject being
“Confucianism.” In 1890 he was elected a fellow of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh, Aberdeen gave him its honorary LL.D.,
and in 1899 he was appointed Gifford lecturer by that university,
but declined on grounds of health. In the same year he severed
his active connexion with St Bernard’s. One of his hymns,
“O love that will not let me go,” has passed into the popular
hymnology of the Christian Church. He died suddenly of
apoplexy on the 28th of August 1906. His exegesis owes its
interest to his subjective resources rather than to breadth of
learning; his power lay in spiritual vision rather than balanced
judgment, and in the vivid apprehension of the factors which
make the Christian personality, rather than in constructive
doctrinal statement.
MATHEW, THEOBALD (1790–1856), Irish temperance
reformer, popularly known as Father Mathew, was descended
from a branch of the Llandaff family, and was born at Thomastown,
Tipperary, on the 10th of October 1790. He received
his school education at Kilkenny, whence he passed for a short
time to Maynooth; from 1808 to 1814 he studied at Dublin, where
in the latter year he was ordained to the priesthood. Having
entered the Capuchin order, he, after a brief time of service
at Kilkenny, joined the mission in Cork, which was the scene of his
religious and benevolent labours for many years. The movement
with which his name is most intimately associated began in
1838 with the establishment of a total abstinence association,
which in less than nine months, thanks to his moral influence
and eloquence, enrolled no fewer than 150,000 names. It
rapidly spread to Limerick and elsewhere, and some idea of
its popularity may be formed from the fact that at Nenagh
20,000 persons are said to have taken the pledge in one day,
100,000 at Galway in two days, and 70,000 in Dublin in five days.
In 1844 he visited Liverpool, Manchester and London with
almost equal success. Meanwhile the expenses of his enterprise
had involved him in heavy liabilities, and led on one occasion
to his arrest for debt; from this embarrassment he was only
partially relieved by a pension of £300 granted by Queen Victoria
in 1847. In 1849 he paid a visit to the United States, returning
in 1851. He died at Queenstown on the 8th of December,
1856.
See Father Mathew, a Biography, by J. F. Maguire, M.P. (1863).
MATHEWS, CHARLES (1776–1835), English actor, was
born in London on the 28th of June 1776. His father was
“a serious bookseller,” who also officiated as minister in one
of Lady Huntingdon’s chapels. Mathews was educated at
Merchant Taylors’ School. His love for the stage was formed
in his boyhood, when he was apprentice to his father, and the
latter in 1794 unwillingly permitted him to enter on a theatrical
engagement in Dublin. For several years Mathews had not
only to content himself with thankless parts at a low salary,
but in May 1803 he made his first London appearance at the
Haymarket as Jabel in Cumberland’s The Jew and as Lingo
in The Agreeable Surprise. From this time his professional
career was an uninterrupted triumph. He had a wonderful
gift of mimicry, and could completely disguise his personality
without the smallest change of dress. The versatility and
originality of his powers were admirably displayed in his “At
