"Wo to Drunkards"

Wo to Drunkards

Wo to Drunkards, two sermons by Increase Mather. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. See more about Wo to Drunkards from the Society. 

Rule (Breaking)

From a sermon by Increase Mather, an early Harvard president and one of several Puritan ministers from the influential Mather family: 

"Drink is in it self a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan; the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil."

University laws were based on Massachusetts Bay Colony laws, which accepted alcohol, but punished obvious intoxication. Drunkenness, idleness, and various other forms of dissipation led Cotton Mather--Increase Mather's son and a prolific religious writer---to declare that Satan had taken up quarters at Harvard College, and would be dislodged only with his own election to the presidency of the school. Mather did not succeed, in part because he believed theology should be the exclusive subject taught at the school. 

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