page_title: Deodat Lawson
section_title: The sermon: Christ's Fidelity Against Satan's Malignity
hierarchical_section_title: Deodat Lawson / Salem Witch-phobia / The sermon: Christ's Fidelity Against Satan's Malignity
caption_attribution_description: English: Cotton Mather chose to publish this posthumous biography of Phips anonymously in London. His uncle Nath. Mather shepherded the work into print but died in 1697, perhaps complicating CM's attempt to remain anonymous. Calef's book reveals CM as author and CM soon claimed the work.
context_page_description: Deodat Lawson was a minister in Salem Village from 1684 to 1688 and is famous for a 10-page pamphlet describing the witchcraft accusations in the early spring of 1692. The pamphlet was billed as "collected by Deodat Lawson" and printed within the year in Boston, Massachusetts.
context_section_description: In his pamphlet Lawson briefly mentions that March 24 is "Lecture Day at the Village" but nothing more is said about the sermon delivered that day, or how it was received by the same audience that had been unruly and disruptive during the sermons on March 20. What makes this surprising is that the sermon said to have been delivered on that day, and published within a year under Lawson's name, was a persuasive, lengthy, and elaborate tour de force. GL Burr describes the sermon as "no extempore production, but a studied disquisition on the power and malice of the Devil, who 'Contracts and Indents with Witches and Wizzards, that they shall be the Instruments by whom he may more secretly Affect and Afflict the Bodies and Minds of others.'"  CW Upham calls it "a thoroughly elaborated and carefully constructed performance, requiring long and patient application to compose it, and exhausting all the resources of theological research and reference, and of artistic skill and finish."
  Cotton Mather records that he took multiple "journeys" to Salem in his memoirs, and in a September 2, 1692 letter to Chief Justice Stoughton he writes that "one half of my endeavors to serve you have not been told or seen." In fact there is no record of Mather having delivered a sermon in Salem Village in 1692. Yet there is a noticeable affinity between the March 24, 1692 sermon and Cotton Mather's sermons on the subject published in Wonders of the Invisible World. If this sermon can be fully attributed to Deodat Lawson, and him alone, Lawson may have been a strong influence, if not something of a mentor and spiritual guide for the young Cotton Mather.
  
  The March 24, 1692 sermon has a printing date of 1693. It is dedicated to several of the judges who had previously been on the deadly Court of Oyer and Terminer but who were excluded from the new Superior Court meant to take its place (with orders to disregard "spectral evidence") after it was dissolved by Governor William Phips. 
  The printed sermon also claims an endorsement by a circle of ministers who were all part of the Cambridge Association. It is unknown how widely the sermon was distributed in the decade or so after its first printing. At least one copy made it from Boston to Salem Village ("William Griggs his Book 1692") but there doesn't seem to be any contemporary mention of it during this period. John Hale's timeline makes no direct mention of the sermon. Most notably, the vociferous Robert Calef seems to take no notice of it despite Calef having published a manuscript that Cotton Mather was passing around to his friends in 1693, the title of which --"Another Brand Pluckt Out of the Burning"-- shares a refrain with the March 24, 1692 sermon. The "another" in the title denotes it having been a sequel to the first "Brand Pluckt" Mather wrote in the winter of 1692-3 (March 16 is the last internal date) in which Mather referred to himself anonymously in the third person. It is not fully understood why Mather wrote anonymously at this time or why he was unable or unwilling to get his two "Brand Pluckt" manuscripts into print. A handful of years later, Mather attempted to remain anonymous by printing in London a posthumous biography of William Phips (see photo) until he was identified as the author by Robert Calef.
caption: Cotton Mather's anonymous Life of Phips
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