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Two Mathers of Yale Fact
When Yale’s founding ministers wrote letters to New England elders asking advice on how to start a college, they naturally wrote to godly Massachusetts divines Increase and Cotton Mather. If anyone knew how to proceed, the Mathers did, having nurtured and watched over Harvard for years. Increase had been the college’s President since 1685.
However, in June 1701, Harvard’s overseers took advantage of a technicality to sack Mather from the Presidency. Unitarianism and rationalism had laid hold of many of those in control of the school, and they were looking for a way to get rid of their Gospel-minded President. Mather left office September 6, 1701; nine days later he was writing a letter of advice to some Connecticut ministers very determined to start a college which would hold to Biblical truth.
Years after, Cotton Mather aided Yale when trustee strife over its location and a desperate lack of funds had almost sunk it. In 1718 he wrote to Elihu Yale, the wealthy ex-governor of Fort St. George in Madras, encouraging him to give a sizeable gift to the college that he might have a memorial to his name “better than a name of sons and daughters” and also better than “an Egyptian pyramid.” Elihu Yale gave much less than his wealth permitted, but his timely donation probably saved the school from collapse. It certainly put his name on it in perpetuity.
It is interesting to note that Elihu Yale was a descendant (by her first marriage) of Anne Eaton, Theophilus Eaton’s wife. His father, David Yale, had been raised in Theophilus Eaton’s household, but spent much of the rest of his life vindictively trying to destroy the civil and ecclesiastical structures of New England. As an Anglican, Elihu Yale was not all that favorably inclined to an “academy of dissenters.” But one wonders if God wasn’t moving in Mather’s faithful initiative.
Mather later wrote Gurdon Saltonstall, Governor of Connecticut and one of the original movers for the college, that it was to him “an unspeakable pleasure … that I have been in any measure capable of serving so precious a thing as your College at New Haven.”
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