IN 17 10 Cotton Mather published Bonifacius, usually known as Essays to Do Good. Benjamin Franklin acknowledged it influenced his life profoundly; Perry Miller called it one of the most important books of the early eighteenth century. Mather's essay has had twenty editions, seventeen of them between 1 8oo and 1840.2 That a Puritan tract on charity, written when the initial force of Puritanism had spent itself, found an audience a century later while democratic ideology was gathering momentum, suggests there was more to Mather's book than exhortations to do good. For Perry Miller the work was a signpost on the route from Puritan piety to middle-class morality, pointing downhill to moralizing, conformity, and pettiness. From a different perspective, however, the importance of Essays to Do Good is not as a sign of Puritan declension, but as a statement from a distinctively American society whose ideas about social mobility and class lines were already quite different from those of its English parent. John Winthrop's holy community was not and perhaps never had been a reality in Puritan society. By the opening of the eighteenth century, New England was farther than ever from the model. Social order was undergoing profound changes: men who had for years controlled town meetings were challenged by newcomers eager for a share of power; masters were discovering servants less docile; ministers were lamenting contention in their flocks and pleading for kindness and contentment; the lower classes seemed to be forgetting