What Must I Do to Be Saved? It is impossible to ask a more weighty Question! It is deplorable that we hear it asked with no more Frequency, with nor more Agony.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of seeking answers to profound existential questions about salvation and purpose.
Cotton Mather's quote highlights a critical and often overlooked inquiry in human existence: the question of salvation. He suggests that asking what it takes to be saved is not only fundamental but deserves more contemplation and urgency from individuals. Mather's lament about the lack of frequency and seriousness with which this question is approached implies that many fail to engage deeply with their spiritual or moral dilemmas, thereby missing an essential part of human experience.
In practice
During a spiritual retreat, someone can quote Mather to encourage participants to think about their life choices.
Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow
I have always said that often the religion you were born with becomes more important to you as you see the universality of truth.
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.
I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.
He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.
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