Richard Mather

Mather, Richard, 1596–1669, British Puritan clergyman in North America, b. Lancashire, England. He studied at Oxford, began preaching, and was ordained in 1620. His Puritan beliefs led him into difficulties, and he fled to Massachusetts (1635), where he was pastor of Dorchester until his death. He helped to draw up the Cambridge Platform and, with John Eliot and Thomas Welde, prepared the Bay Psalm Book.

See T. J. Holmes, The Minor Mathers (1940); R. Middlekauff, The Mathers (1971).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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