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+Project Gutenberg's Sabbath in Puritan New England, by Alice Morse Earle
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sabbath in Puritan New England
+
+Author: Alice Morse Earle
+
+Posting Date: April 8, 2014 [EBook #8659]
+Release Date: August, 2005
+First Posted: July 30, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar and
+spelling from that old time, the word "their" is spelled as "thier" 17 times.
+It has been left there as "thier".
+
+
+
+
+THE SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND
+
+by
+
+Alice Morse Earle
+
+Seventh Edition
+
+
+
+
+To the Memory of my Mother.
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+     I.  The New England Meeting-House
+    II.  The Church Militant
+   III.  By Drum and Horn and Shell
+    IV.  The Old-Fashioned Pews
+     V.  Seating the Meeting
+    VI.  The Tithingman and the Sleepers
+   VII.  The Length of the Service
+  VIII.  The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House
+    IX.  The Noon-House
+     X.  The Deacon's Office
+    XI.  The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims
+   XII.  The Bay Psalm-Book
+  XIII.  Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms
+   XIV.  Other Old Psalm-Books
+    XV.  The Church Music
+   XVI.  The Interruptions of the Services
+  XVII.  The Observance of the Day
+ XVIII.  The Authority of the Church and the Ministers
+   XIX.  The Ordination of the Minister
+    XX.  The Ministers
+   XXI.  The Ministers' Pay
+  XXII.  The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit
+ XXIII.  The Early Congregations
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Sabbath in Puritan New England.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The New England Meeting-House.
+
+
+
+When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord's
+Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong
+and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every
+Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they
+worshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.
+
+As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,
+the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein for
+the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton
+Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply
+such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the
+Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as
+bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the
+Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.
+
+The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these
+houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that
+theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England
+to create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slow
+or indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 that
+a meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if the
+people failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,
+and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of members
+necessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in the
+Platform of Church Discipline: "A church ought not to be of greater number
+than can ordinarilie meet convenientlie in one place, nor ordinarilie
+fewer than may convenientlie carry on church-work." Each church was quite
+independent in its work and government, and had absolute power to admit,
+expel, control, and censure its members.
+
+These first meeting-houses were simple buildings enough,--square log-houses
+with clay-filled chinks, surmounted by steep roofs thatched with long
+straw or grass, and often with only the beaten earth for a floor. It was
+considered a great advance and a matter of proper pride when the settlers
+had the meeting-house "lathed on the inside, and so daubed and whitened
+over workmanlike." The dimensions of many of these first essays at church
+architecture are known to us, and lowly little structures they were. One,
+indeed, is preserved for us under cover at Salem. The first meeting-house
+in Dedham was thirty-six feet long, twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high
+"in the stud;" the one in Medford was smaller still; and the Haverhill
+edifice was only twenty-six feet long and twenty wide, yet "none other than
+the house of God."
+
+As the colonists grew in wealth and numbers, they desired and built better
+sanctuaries, "good roomthy meeting-houses" they were called by Judge
+Sewall, the most valued and most interesting journal-keeper of the times.
+The rude early buildings were then converted into granaries or storehouses,
+or, as was the Pentucket meeting-house, into a "house of shelter or a house
+to sett horses in." As these meeting-houses had not been consecrated, and
+as they were town-halls, forts, or court-houses as well as meeting-houses,
+the humbler uses to which they were finally put were not regarded as
+profanations of holy places.
+
+The second form or type of American church architecture was a square wooden
+building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which
+was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or
+turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which
+was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this
+second style of architecture. These square meeting-houses, so much alike,
+soon abounded in New England; for a new church, in its contract for
+building, would often specify that the structure should be "like in every
+detaile to the Lynn meeting-house," or like the Hadley, Milford, Boston,
+Danvers, or New Haven meeting-house. This form of edifice was the prototype
+of the fine great First Church of Boston, a large square brick building,
+with three rows of windows and two galleries, which stood from the year
+1713 to 1808, and of which many pictures exist.
+
+The third form of the Puritan meeting-house, of which the Old South Church
+of Boston is a typical model, has too many representatives throughout New
+England to need any description, as have also the succeeding forms of New
+England church architecture.
+
+The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow
+lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the
+colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile
+of the meeting-house. Soon, however, the houses became too closely crowded
+for the most convenient uses of a farming community; pasturage for the
+cattle had to be obtained at too great a distance from the farmhouse;
+firewood had to be brought from too distant woods; nearness to water
+also had to be considered. Thus the law became a dead letter, and each
+new-coming settler built on outlying and remote land, since the Indians
+were no longer so deeply to be dreaded. Then the meeting-houses, having
+usually to accommodate a whole township of scattered farms, were placed on
+remote and often highly elevated locations; sometimes at the very top of a
+long, steep hill,--so long and so steep in some cases, especially in one
+Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down on horseback
+from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading
+their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The
+second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly
+pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England
+Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his
+dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he
+leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and
+surrounding): "This is very like the way to heaven; 'tis uphill. The Lord
+by His grace fetch us up."
+
+The location on a hilltop was chosen and favored for various reasons. The
+meeting-house was at first a watch-house, from which to keep vigilant
+lookout for any possible approach of hostile or sneaking Indians; it was
+also a landmark, whose high bell-turret, or steeple, though pointing to
+heaven, was likewise a guide on earth, for, thus stationed on a high
+elevation, it could be seen for miles around by travellers journeying
+through the woods, or in the narrow, tree-obscured bridle-paths which were
+then almost the only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for
+sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan
+ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb
+uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of
+having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of
+envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously
+remote and painfully inaccessible locations chosen for the site of many
+fine, roomy churches must astonish any observing traveller on the byroads
+of New England. Too often, alas! these churches are deserted, falling down,
+unopened from year to year, destitute alike of minister and congregation.
+Sometimes, too, on high hilltops, or on lonesome roads leading through a
+tall second growth of woods, deserted and neglected old graveyards--the
+most lonely and forlorn of all sad places--by their broken and fallen
+headstones, which surround a half-filled-in and uncovered cellar, show
+that once a meeting-house for New England Christians had stood there. Tall
+grass, and a tangle of blackberry brambles cover the forgotten graves,
+and perhaps a spire of orange tiger-lilies, a shrub of southernwood or of
+winter-killed and dying box, may struggle feebly for life under the shadow
+of the "plumed ranks of tall wild cherry," and prove that once these lonely
+graves were cared for and loved for the sake of those who lie buried in
+this now waste spot. No traces remain of the old meeting-house save the
+cellar and the narrow stone steps, sadly leading nowhere, which once were
+pressed by the feet of the children of the Pilgrims, but now are trodden
+only by the curious and infrequent passer-by, or the epitaph-seeking
+antiquary.
+
+It is difficult often to understand the details in the descriptions of
+these early meeting-houses, the colonial spelling is so widely varied,
+and so cleverly ingenious. Uniformity of spelling is a strictly modern
+accomplishment, a hampering innovation. "A square roofe without Dormans,
+with two Lucoms on each side," means, I think, without dormer windows, and
+with luthern windows. Another church paid a bill for the meeting-house roof
+and the "Suppolidge." They had "turritts" and "turetts" and "turits" and
+"turyts" and "feriats" and "tyrryts" and "toryttes" and "turiotts" and
+"chyrits," which were one and the same thing; and one church had orders
+for "juyces and rayles and nayles and bymes and tymber and gaybels and a
+pulpyt, and three payr of stayrs," in its meeting-house,--a liberal supply
+of the now fashionable _y_'s. We read of "pinakles" and "pyks" and
+"shuthers" and "scaffills" and "bimes" and "lynters" and "bathyns" and
+"chymbers" and "bellfers;" and often in one entry the same word will be
+spelt in three or four different ways. Here is a portion of a contract in
+the records of the Roxbury church: "Sayd John is to fence in the Buring
+Plas with a Fesy ston wall, sefighiattly don for Strenk and workmanship
+as also to mark a Doball gatt 6 or 8 fote wid and to hing it."
+_Sefighiattly_ is "sufficiently;" but who can translate "Fesy"? can it
+mean "facy" or faced smoothly?
+
+The church-raising was always a great event in the town. Each citizen was
+forced by law to take part in or contribute to "raring the Meeting hows."
+In early days nails were scarce,--so scarce that unprincipled persons set
+fire to any buildings which chanced to be temporarily empty, for the sake
+of obtaining the nails from the ruins; so each male inhabitant supplied
+to the new church a certain "amount of nayles." Not only were logs, and
+lumber, and the use of horses' and men's labor given, but a contribution
+was also levied for the inevitable barrel of rum and its unintoxicating
+accompaniments. "Rhum and Cacks" are frequent entries in the account books
+of early churches. No wonder that accidents were frequent, and that men
+fell from the scaffolding and were killed, as at the raising of the
+Dunstable meeting-house. When the Medford people built their second
+meeting-house, they provided for the workmen and bystanders, five barrels
+of rum, one barrel of good brown sugar, a box of fine lemons, and two
+loaves of sugar. As a natural consequence, two thirds of the frame fell,
+and many were injured. In Northampton, in 1738, ten gallons of rum were
+bought for £8 "to raise the meeting-house"--and the village doctor got "£3
+for setting his bone Jonathan Strong, and £3 10s. for setting Ebenezer
+Burt's thy" which had somehow through the rum or the raising, both gotten
+broken. Sometimes, as in Pittsfield in 1671, the sum of four shillings was
+raised on every acre of land in the town, and three shillings a day were
+paid to every man who came early to work, while one shilling a day was
+apportioned to each worker for his rum and sugar. At last no liquor was
+allowed to the workmen until after the day's work was over, and thus fatal
+accidents were prevented.
+
+The earliest meeting-houses had oiled paper in the windows to admit the
+light. A Pilgrim colonist wrote to an English friend about to emigrate,
+"Bring oiled paper for your windows." Higginson, however, writing in 1629,
+asks for "glasse for windowes." When glass was used it was not set in the
+windows as now. We find frequent entries of "glasse and nayles for it," and
+in Newbury, in 1665, the church ordered that the "Glasse in the windows
+be ... look't to if any should happen to be loosed with winde to be nailed
+close again." The glass was in lozenge-shaped panes, set in lead in the
+form of two long narrow sashes opening in the middle from top to bottom,
+and it was many years before oblong or square panes came into common use.
+
+These early churches were destitute of shade, for the trees in the
+immediate vicinity were always cut down on account of dread of the fierce
+fires which swept often through the forests and overwhelmed and destroyed
+the towns. The heat and blazing light in summer were as hard to bear in
+these unscreened meeting-houses as was the cold in winter.
+
+  "Old house of Puritanic wood,
+  Through whose unpainted windows streamed,
+  On seats as primitive and rude
+  As Jacob's pillow when he dreamed,
+  The white and undiluted day."
+
+We have all heard the theory advanced that it is impossible there should be
+any true religious feeling, any sense of sanctity, in a garish and bright
+light,--"the white and undiluted day,"--but I think no one can doubt that
+to the Puritans these seething, glaring, pine-smelling hothouses were truly
+God's dwelling-place, though there was no "dim, religious light" within.
+
+Curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and the sunlight streamed in with
+unobstructed and unbroken rays. Heavy shutters for protection were often
+used, but to close them at time of service would have been to plunge
+the church into utter darkness. Permission was sometimes given, as in
+Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of
+the sun there,"--a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As
+years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches
+became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and
+fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which
+was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked
+live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed
+abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great
+hemlock-tree back of the pulpit window." Another minister, Dr. Storrs,
+having struggled to read his sermon in an ill-lighted, gloomy church, said
+he would never speak in that building again while it was so overshadowed
+with trees. A few years later he was invited to preach to the same
+congregation; but when he approached the church, and saw the great
+umbrageous tree still standing, he rode away, and left the people
+sermonless in their darkness. The chill of these sunless, unheated
+buildings in winter can well be imagined.
+
+Strange and grotesque decorations did the outside of the earliest
+meeting-houses bear,--grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and
+by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped
+from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his
+destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear,
+which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough.
+The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September,
+twenty bears were killed within two miles of Boston. This bear story
+requires unlimited faith in Puritan probity, and confidence in Puritan
+records to credit it, but believe it, ye who can, as I do! In Salem and in
+Ipswich, in 1640, any man who brought a living wolf to the meeting-house
+was paid fifteen shillings by the town; if the wolf were dead, ten
+shillings. In 1664, if the wolf-killer wished to obtain the reward, he was
+ordered to bring the wolf's head and "nayle it to the meeting-house and
+give notis thereof." In Hampton, the inhabitants were ordered to "nayle the
+same to a little red oake tree at northeast end of the meeting-house." One
+man in Newbury, in 1665, killed seven wolves, and was paid the reward
+for so doing. This was a great number, for the wary wolf was not easily
+destroyed either by musket or wolf-hook. In 1723 wolves were so abundant
+in Ipswich that parents would not suffer their children to go to and from
+church and school without the attendance of some grown person. As late as
+1746 wolves made sad havoc in Woodbury, Connecticut; and a reward of five
+dollars for each wolf's head was offered by law in that township in 1853.
+
+In 1718 the last public reward was paid in Salem for a wolf's head, but
+so late as the year 1779 the howls of wolves were heard every night in
+Newbury, though trophies of shrivelled wolves' heads no longer graced the
+walls of the meeting-house.
+
+All kinds of notices and orders and regulations and "bills" were posted on
+the meeting-house, often on the door, where they would greet the eye of
+all who entered: prohibitions from selling guns and powder to the Indians,
+notices of town meetings, intentions of marriage, copies of the laws
+against Sabbath-breaking, messages from the Quakers, warnings of "vandoos"
+and sales, lists of the town officers, and sometimes scandalous and
+insulting libels, and libels in verse, which is worse, for our forefathers
+dearly loved to rhyme on all occasions. On the meeting-house green stood
+those Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, whipping-post,
+pillory, and cage; and on lecture days the stocks and pillory were
+often occupied by wicked or careless colonists, or those everlasting
+pillory-replenishers, the Quakers. It is one of the unintentionally comic
+features of absurd colonial laws and punishments in which the early legal
+records so delightfully abound, that the first man who was sentenced to and
+occupied the stocks in Boston was the carpenter who made them. He was thus
+fitly punished for his extortionate charge to the town for the lumber
+he used in their manufacture. This was rather better than "making the
+punishment fit the crime," since the Boston magistrates managed to force
+the criminal to furnish his own punishment. In Shrewsbury, also, the
+unhappy man who first tested the wearisome capacity and endured the public
+mortication of the town's stocks was the man who made them. He "builded
+better than he knew." Pillories were used as a means of punishment until
+a comparatively recent date,--in Salem until the year 1801, and in Boston
+till 1803.
+
+Great horse-blocks, rows of stepping-stones, or hewn logs further graced
+the meeting-house green; and occasionally one fine horse-block, such as the
+Concord women proudly erected, and paid for by a contribution of a pound of
+butter from each house-wife.
+
+The meeting-house not only was employed for the worship of God and for town
+meetings, but it was a storehouse as well. Until after the Revolutionary
+War it was universally used as a powder magazine; and indeed, as no fire in
+stove or fireplace was ever allowed within, it was a safe enough place for
+the explosive material. In Hanover, the powder room was in the steeple,
+while in Quincy the "powder-closite" was in the beams of the roof. Whenever
+there chanced to be a thunderstorm during the time of public worship, the
+people of Beverly ran out under the trees, and in other towns they left
+the meeting-house if the storm seemed severe or near; still they built no
+powder houses. Grain, too, was stored in the loft of the meeting-house for
+safety; hatches were built, and often the corn paid to the minister was
+placed there. "Leantos," or "linters," were sometimes built by the side of
+the building for use for storage. In Springfield, Mr. Pyncheon was allowed
+to place his corn in the roof chamber of the meeting-house; but as the
+people were afraid that the great weight might burst the floor, he was
+forbidden to store more than four hundred bushels at a time, unless he
+"underpropped the floor."
+
+In one church in the Connecticut valley, in a township where it was
+forbidden that tobacco be smoked upon the public streets, the church
+loft was used to dry and store the freshly cut tobacco-leaves which the
+inhabitants sold to the "ungodly Dutch." Thus did greed for gain lead even
+blue Connecticut Christians to profane the house of God.
+
+The early meeting-houses in country parishes were seldom painted, such
+outward show being thought vain and extravagant. In the middle of the
+eighteenth century paint became cheaper and more plentiful, and a gay
+rivalry in church-decoration sprang up. One meeting-house had to be as fine
+as its neighbor. Votes were taken, "rates were levied," gifts were asked
+in every town to buy "colour" for the meeting-house. For instance, the new
+meeting-house in Pomfret, Connecticut, was painted bright yellow; it proved
+a veritable golden apple of discord throughout the county. Windham town
+quickly voted that its meeting-house be "coloured something like the
+Pomfret meeting-house." Killingly soon ordered that the "cullering of the
+body of our meeting-house should be like the Pomfret meeting-house, and the
+Roff shal be cullered Read." Brooklyn church then, in 1762, ordered that
+the outside of its meeting-house be "culered" in the approved fashion.
+The body of the house was painted a bright orange; the doors and "bottom
+boards" a warm chocolate color; the "window-jets," corner-boards, and
+weather-boards white. What a bright nosegay of color! As a crowning glory
+Brooklyn people put up an "Eleclarick Rod" on the gorgeous edifice, and
+proudly boasted that--Brooklyn meeting-house was the "newest biggest and
+yallowest" in the county. One old writer, however, spoke scornfully of the
+spirit of envious emulation, extravagance, and bad taste that spread and
+prevailed from the example of the foolish and useless "colouring" of the
+Pomfret meeting-house.
+
+Within the meeting-house all was simple enough: raftered walls, sanded
+floors, rows of benches, a few pews, and the pulpit, or the "scaffold,"
+as John Cotton called it. The bare rafters were often profusely hung with
+dusty spiders' webs, and were the home also of countless swallows, that
+flew in and out of the open bell-turret. Sometimes, too, mischievous
+squirrels, attracted by the corn in the meeting-house loft, made their
+homes in the sanctuary; and they were so prolific and so omnivorous that
+the Bible and the pulpit cushions were not safe from their nibbling
+attacks. On every Sunday afternoon the Word of God and its sustaining
+cushion had to be removed to the safe shelter of a neighboring farmhouse or
+tavern, to prevent total annihilation by these Puritanical, Bible-loving
+squirrels.
+
+The pulpits were often pretentious, even in the plain and undecorated
+meeting-houses, and were usually high desks, to which a narrow flight of
+stairs led. In the churches of the third stage of architecture, these
+stairs were often inclosed in a towering hexagonal mahogany structure,
+which was ornamented with pillars and panels. Into this the minister
+walked, closed the door behind him, and invisibly ascended the stairs;
+while the children counted the seconds from the time he closed the door
+until his head appeared through the trap-door at the top of the pulpit. The
+form known as a tub-pulpit was very popular in the larger churches. The
+pulpit of one old, unpainted church retained until the middle of this
+century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring
+eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the
+great, all-seeing eye of God.
+
+As the ceiling and rafters were so open and reverberating, it was generally
+thought imperative to hang above the pulpit a great sounding-board, which
+threatened the minister like a giant extinguisher, and was really as devoid
+of utility as it was curious in ornamentation, "reflecting most part an
+empty ineffectual sound." This great sound-killer was decorated with carved
+and painted rosettes, as in the Shrewsbury meeting-house; with carved ivy
+leaves, as in Farmington; with a carved bunch of grapes or pomegranates, as
+in the Leicester church; with letters indicating a date, as, "M. R. H." for
+March, in the Hadley church; with appropriate mottoes and texts, such as
+the words, "Holiness is the Lords," in the Windham church; with cords and
+tassels, with hanging fringes, with panels and balls; and thus formed a
+great ornament to the church, and a source of honest pride to the church
+members. The clumsy sounding-board was usually hung by a slight iron rod,
+which looked smaller still as it stretched up to the high, raftered roof,
+and always appeared to be entirely insufficient to sustain the great weight
+of the heavy machine. In Danvers, one of these useless though ornamental
+structures hung within eighteen inches of the preacher's nose, on a slender
+bar thirty feet in length; and every Sunday the children gazed with
+fascinated anticipation at the slight rod and the great hexagonal
+extinguisher, thinking and hoping that on this day the sounding-board would
+surely drop, and "put out" the minister. In fact, it was regarded by many
+a child, though this idea was hardly formulated in the little brain, as
+a visible means of possible punishment for any false doctrine that might
+issue from the mouth of the preacher.
+
+Another pastime and source of interest to the children in many old churches
+was the study of the knots and veins in the unpainted wood of which the
+pews and galleries were made. Age had developed and darkened and rendered
+visible all the natural irregularities in the wood, just as it had brought
+out and strengthened the dry-woody, close, unaired, penetrating scent which
+permeated the meeting-house and gave it the distinctive "church smell." The
+children, and perhaps a few of the grown people, found in these clusters
+of knots queer similitudes of faces, strange figures and constellations,
+which, though conned Sunday after Sunday until known by heart, still seemed
+ever to show in their irregular groupings a puzzling possibility of the
+discovery of new configurations and monstrosities.
+
+The dangling, dusty spiders' webs afforded, too, an interesting sight and
+diversion for the sermon-hearing, but not sermon-listening, young Puritans,
+who watched the cobwebs swaying, trembling, forming strange maps of
+imaginary rivers with their many tributaries, or outlines of intersecting
+roads and lanes. And if little Yet-Once, Hate-Evil, or Shearjashub chanced,
+by good fortune, to be seated near a window where a crafty spider and a
+foolish buzzing fly could be watched through the dreary exposition and
+attempted reconciliation of predestination and free will, that indeed were
+a happy way of passing the weary hours.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The Church Militant.
+
+
+
+For many years after the settlement of New England the Puritans, even in
+outwardly tranquil times, went armed to meeting; and to sanctify the Sunday
+gun-loading they were expressly forbidden to fire off their charges at
+any object on that day save an Indian or a wolf, their two "greatest
+inconveniencies." Trumbull, in his "Mac Fingal," Avrites thus in jest of
+this custom of Sunday arm-bearing:--
+
+  "So once, for fear of Indian beating,
+  Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting,--
+  Each man equipped on Sunday morn
+  With psalm-book, shot, and powder-horn,
+  And looked in form, as all must grant,
+  Like the ancient true church militant."
+
+In 1640 it was ordered in Massachusetts that in every township the
+attendants at church should carry a "competent number of peeces, fixed
+and compleat with powder and shot and swords every Lords-day to the
+meeting-house;" one armed man from each household was then thought
+advisable and necessary for public safety. In 1642 six men with muskets and
+powder and shot were thought sufficient for protection for each church. In
+Connecticut similar mandates were issued, and as the orders were neglected
+"by divers persones," a law was passed in 1643 that each offender should
+forfeit twelve pence for each offence. In 1644 a fourth part of the
+"trayned hand" was obliged to come armed each Sabbath, and the sentinels
+were ordered to keep their matches constantly lighted for use in their
+match-locks. They were also commanded to wear armor, which consisted of
+"coats basted with cotton-wool, and thus made defensive against Indian
+arrows." In 1650 so much dread and fear were felt of Sunday attacks from
+the red men that the Sabbath-Day guard was doubled in number. In 1692, the
+Connecticut Legislature ordered one fifth of the soldiers in each town to
+come armed to each meeting, and that nowhere should be present as a guard
+at time of public worship fewer than eight soldiers and a sergeant. In
+Hadley the guard was allowed annually from the public treasury a pound of
+lead and a pound of powder to each soldier.
+
+No details that could add to safety on the Sabbath were forgotten or
+overlooked by the New Haven church; bullets were made common currency at
+the value of a farthing, in order that they might be plentiful and in every
+one's possession; the colonists were enjoined to determine in advance what
+to do with the women and children in case of attack, "that they do not hang
+about them and hinder them;" the men were ordered to bring at least six
+charges of powder and shot to meeting; the farmers were forbidden to "leave
+more arms at home than men to use them;" the half-pikes were to be headed
+and the whole ones mended, and the swords "and all piercing weapons
+furbished up and dressed;" wood was to be placed in the watch-house; it was
+ordered that the "door of the meeting-house next the soldiers' seat be kept
+clear from women and children sitting there, that if there be occasion
+for the soldiers to go suddenly forth, they may have free passage." The
+soldiers sat on either side of the main door, a sentinel was stationed
+in the meeting-house turret, and armed watchers paced the streets; three
+cannon were mounted by the side of this "church militant," which must
+strongly have resembled a garrison.
+
+Military duty and military discipline and regard for the Sabbath, and for
+the House of God as well, did not always make the well-equipped occupants
+of these soldiers' seats in New Haven behave with the dignity and decorum
+befitting such guardians of the peace and protectors in war. Serious
+disorders and disturbances among the guard were reported at the General
+Court on June 16, 1662. One belligerent son of Mars, as he sat in the
+meeting-house, threw lumps of lime--perhaps from the plastered chinks in
+the log wall--at a fellow-warrior, who in turn, very naturally, kicked his
+tormentor with much agility and force. There must have ensued quite a free
+fight all around in the meeting-house, for "Mrs. Goodyear's boy had his
+head broke that day in meeting, on account of which a woman said she
+doubted not the wrath of God was upon us." And well might she think so, for
+divers other unseemly incidents which occurred in the meeting-house at the
+same time were narrated in Court, examined into, and punished.
+
+In spite of these events in the New Haven church (which were certainly
+exceptional), the seemingly incongruous union of church and army was
+suitable enough in a community that always began and ended the military
+exercises on "training day" with solemn prayer and psalm-singing; and that
+used the army and encouraged a true soldier-like spirit not chiefly as aids
+in war, but to help to conquer and destroy the adversaries of truth, and to
+"achieve greater matters by this little handful of men than the world is
+aware of."
+
+The Salem sentinels wore doubtless some of the good English armor owned by
+the town,--corselets to cover the body; gorgets to guard the throat;
+tasses to protect the thighs; all varnished black, and costing each suit
+"twenty-four shillings a peece." The sentry also wore a bandileer, a large
+"neat's leather" belt thrown over the right shoulder, and hanging down
+under the left arm. This bandileer sustained twelve boxes of cartridges,
+and a well-filled bullet-bag. Each man bore either a "bastard musket with
+a snaphance," a "long fowling-piece with musket bore," a "full musket," a
+"barrell with a match-cock," or perhaps (for they were purchased by the
+town) a leather gun (though these leather guns may have been cannon).
+Other weapons there were to choose from, mysterious in name, "sakers,
+minions, ffaulcons, rabinets, murthers (or murderers, as they were
+sometimes appropriately called) chambers, harque-busses, carbins,"--all
+these and many other death-dealing machines did our forefathers bring and
+import from their war-loving fatherland to assist them in establishing
+God's Word, and exterminating the Indians, but not always, alas! to aid
+them in converting those poor heathen.
+
+The armed Salem watcher, besides his firearms and ammunition, had attached
+to his wrist by a cord a gun-rest, or gun-fork, which he placed upon
+the ground when he wished to fire his musket, and upon which that
+constitutional kicker rested when touched off. He also carried a sword and
+sometimes a pike, and thus heavily burdened with multitudinous arms and
+cumbersome armor, could never have run after or from an Indian with much
+agility or celerity; though he could stand at the church-door with his
+leather gun,--an awe-inspiring figure,--and he could shoot with his
+"harquebuss," or "carbin," as we well know.
+
+These armed "sentinells" are always regarded as a most picturesque
+accompaniment of Puritan religious worship, and the Salem and Plymouth
+armed men were imposing, though clumsy. But the New Haven soldiers, with
+their bulky garments wadded and stuffed out with thick layers of cotton
+wool, must have been more safety-assuring and comforting than they were
+romantic or heroic; but perhaps they too wore painted tin armor, "corselets
+and gorgets and tasses."
+
+In Concord, New Hampshire, the men, who all came armed to meeting, stacked
+their muskets around a post in the middle of the church, while the honored
+pastor, who was a good shot and owned the best gun in the settlement,
+preached with his treasured weapon in the pulpit by his side, ready from
+his post of vantage to blaze away at any red man whom he saw sneaking
+without, or to lead, if necessary, his congregation to battle. The church
+in York, Maine, until the year 1746, felt it necessary to retain the custom
+of carrying arms to the meeting-house, so plentiful and so aggressive were
+Maine Indians.
+
+Not only in the time of Indian wars were armed men seen in the
+meeting-house, but on June 17, 1775, the Provincial Congress recommended
+that the men "within twenty miles of the sea-coast carry their arms and
+ammunition with them to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they
+meet for public worship." And on many a Sabbath and Lecture Day, during the
+years of war that followed, were proved the wisdom and foresight of that
+suggestion.
+
+The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant
+dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and
+left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe
+exit of the latter. This custom prevailed from habit until a late date in
+many churches in New England, all the men, after the benediction and the
+exit of the parson, walking out in advance of the women. So also the custom
+of the men always sitting at the "head" or door of the pew arose from the
+early necessity of their always being ready to seize their arms and rush
+unobstructed to fight. In some New England village churches to this day,
+the man who would move down from his end of the pew and let a woman sit
+at the door, even if it were a more desirable seat from which to see the
+clergyman, would be thought a poor sort of a creature.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+By Drum and Horn and Shell.
+
+
+
+At about nine o'clock on the Sabbath morning the Puritan colonists
+assembled for the first public service of the holy day; they were gathered
+together by various warning sounds. The Haverhill settlers listened for the
+ringing toot of Abraham Tyler's horn. The Montague and South Hadley people
+were notified that the hour of assembling had arrived by the loud blowing
+of a conch-shell. John Lane, a resident of the latter town, was engaged
+in 1750 to "blow the Cunk" on the Sabbath as "a sign for meeting." In
+Stockbridge a strong-lunged "praying" Indian blew the enormous shell, which
+was safely preserved until modern times, and which, when relieved from
+Sunday use, was for many years sounded as a week-day signal in the
+hay-field. Even a conch-shell was enough of an expense to the poor colonial
+churches. The Montague people in 1759 paid £1 10s. for their "conk," and
+also on the purchase year gave Joseph Root 20 shillings for blowing the new
+shell. In 1785 the Whately church voted that "we will not improve anybody
+to blow the conch," and so the church-attendants straggled to Whately
+meeting each at his own time and pleasure.
+
+In East Hadley the inhabitant who "blew the kunk" (as phonetic East
+Hadleyites spelt it) and swept out the meeting-house was paid annually the
+munificent sum of three dollars for his services. Conch-blowing was not
+so difficult and consequently not so highly-paid an accomplishment as
+drum-beating. A verse of a simple old-fashioned hymn tells thus of the
+gathering of the Puritan saints:--
+
+  "New England's Sabbath day
+  Is heaven-like still and pure,
+  When Israel walks the way
+  Up to the temple's door.
+  The time we tell
+  When there to come
+  By beat of drum
+  Or sounding shell."
+
+The drum, as highly suitable for such a military people, was often used as
+a signal for gathering for public worship, and was plainly the favorite
+means of notification. In 1678 Robert Stuard, of Norwalk, "ingages yt his
+son James shall beate the Drumb, on the Sabbath and other ocations," and in
+Norwalk the "drumb," the "drumne," the "drumme," and at last the drum was
+beaten until 1704, when the Church got a bell. And the "Drumber" was paid,
+and well paid too for his "Cervices," fourteen shillings a year of the
+town's money, and he was furnished a "new strong drumme;" and the town
+supplied to him also the flax for the drum-cords which he wore out in the
+service of God. Johnson, in his "Wonder Working Providence," tells of the
+Cambridge Church: "Hearing the sound of a drum he was directed toward it by
+a broade beaten way; following this rode he demands of the next man he met
+what the signall of the drum ment; the reply was made they had as yet no
+Bell to call men to meeting and therefore made use of the drum." In 1638
+a platform was made upon the top of the Windsor meeting-house "from the
+Lanthornc to the ridge to walk conveniently to sound a trumpet or a drum to
+give warning to meeting."
+
+Sometimes three guns were fired as a signal for "church-time." The signal
+for religious gathering, and the signal for battle were always markedly
+different, in order to avoid unnecessary fright.
+
+In 1647 Robert Basset was appointed in New Haven to drum "twice upon Lordes
+Dayes and Lecture Dayes upon the meeting house that soe those who live farr
+off may heare the more distinkly." Robert may have been a good drummer, but
+he proved to be a most reprehensible and disreputable citizen; in the local
+Court Records of August 1, 1648, we find a full report of an astounding
+occurrence in which he played an important part. Ten men, who Avere nearly
+all sea-faring men,--gay, rollicking sailors,--went to Bassctt's house and
+asked for strong drink. The magistrates had endeavored zealously, and in
+the main successfully, to prevent all intoxication in the community,
+and had forbidden the sale of liquor save in very small quantities. The
+church-drummer, however, wickedly unmindful of his honored calling,
+furnished to the sailors six quarts of strong liquor, with which they all,
+host and visitors, got prodigiously drunk and correspondingly noisy. The
+Court Record says: "The miscarriage continued till betwixt tenn and eleven
+of the clock, to the great provocation of God, disturbance of the peace,
+and to such a height of disorder that strangers wondered at it." In the
+midst of the carousal the master of the pinnace called the boatswain
+"Brother Loggerheads." This must have been a particularly insulting
+epithet, which no respectable boatswain could have been expected quietly to
+endure, for "at once the two men fell fast to wrestling, then to blowes and
+theirin grew to that feircnes that the master of the pinnace thought the
+boatswain would have puled out his eies; and they toumbled on the ground
+down the hill into the creeke and mire shamefully wallowing theirin."
+In his pain and terror the master called out, "Hoe, the Watch! Hoe, the
+Watch!" "The Watch made hast and for the present stopped the disorder, but
+in his rage and distemper the boatswaine fell a-swearinge Wounds and Hart
+as if he were not only angry with men but would provoke the high
+and blessed God." The master of the pinnace, being freed from his
+fellow-combatant, returned to Basset's house--perhaps to tell his tale
+of woe, perhaps to get more liquor--and was assailed by the drummer with
+amazing words of "anger and distemper used by drunken companions;" in
+short, he was "verey offensive, his noyes and oathes being hearde to
+the other side of the creeke." For aiding and abetting this noisy and
+disgraceful spree, and also for partaking in it, Drummer Basset was fined
+£5, which must have been more than his yearly salary, and in disgrace, and
+possibly in disgust, quitted drumming the New Haven good people to meeting
+and moved his residence to Stamford, doubtless to the relief and delight of
+both magistrates and people of the former town.
+
+Another means of notification of the hour for religious service was by the
+use of a flag, often in addition to the sound of the drum or bell. Thus in
+Plymouth, in 1697, the selectmen were ordered to "procure a flagg to be put
+out at the ringing of the first bell, and taken in when the last bell was
+rung." In Sutherland also a flag was used as a means of announcement of
+"meeting-time," and an old goody was paid ten shillings a year for "tending
+the flagg."
+
+Mr. Gosse, in his "Early Bells of Massachusetts," gives a full and
+interesting account of the church-bells of the first colonial towns in that
+State. Lechford, in his "Plaine Dealing," wrote in 1641 that they came
+together in Boston on the Lord's Day by "the wringing of a bell," and it is
+thought that that bell was a hand-bell. The first bells, for the lack
+of bell-towers, were sometimes hung on trees by the side of the
+meeting-houses, to the great amazement and distress of the Indians, who
+regarded them with superstitious dread, thinking--to paraphrase Herbert's
+beautiful line--"when the bell did chime 't was devils' music;" but more
+frequently the bells were hung in a belfry or bell-turret or "bellcony,"
+and from this belfry depended a long bell-rope quite to the floor; and thus
+in the very centre of the church the sexton stood when he rung the summons
+for lire or for meeting. This rope was of course directly in front of the
+pulpit; and Jonathan Edwards, who was devoid of gestures and looked always
+straight before him when preaching, was jokingly said to have "looked-off"
+the bell-rope, when it fell with a crash in the middle of his church.
+
+At the first sound of the drum or horn or bell the town inhabitants issued
+from their houses in "desent order," man and wife walking first, and the
+children in quiet procession after them. Often a man-servant and a maid
+walked on either side of the heads of the family. In some communities the
+congregation waited outside the church door until the minister and his wife
+arrived and passed into the house; then the church-attendants followed, the
+loitering boys always contriving to scuffle noisily in from the horse-sheds
+at the last moment, making much scraping and clatter with their heavy boots
+on the sanded floor, and tumbling clumsily up the uucarpeted, creaking
+stairs.
+
+In other churches the members of the congregation seated themselves in
+their pews upon their arrival, but rose reverently when the parson, dressed
+in black skull-cap and Geneva cloak, entered the door; and they stood, in
+token of respect, until after he entered the pulpit and was seated.
+
+It was also the honor-giving and deferential custom in many New England
+churches, in the eighteenth century, for the entire congregation to remain
+respectfully standing within the pews at the end of the serice until the
+minister had descended from his lofty pulpit, opened the door of his wife's
+pew, and led her with stately dignity to the church-porch, where, were he
+and she genial and neighborly minded souls, they in turn stood and greeted
+with carefully adjusted degrees of warmth, interest, respect, or patronage,
+the different members of the congregation as they slowly passed out.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The Old-Fashioned Pews.
+
+
+
+In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow,
+uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks
+placed on legs like milking-stools. They were without any support or rest
+for the back; and perhaps the stiff-backed Pilgrims and Puritans required
+or wished no support. Quickly, as the colonies grew in wealth and the
+colonists in ambition and importance, "Spots for Pues" were sold (or
+"pitts" as they were sometimes called), at first to some few rich or
+influential men who wished to sit in a group together, and finally each
+family of dignity or wealth sat in its own family-pew. Often it was
+stipulated in the permission to build a pew that a separate entrance-door
+should be cut into it through the outside wall of the meeting-house, thus
+detracting grievously from the external symmetry of the edifice, but
+obviating the necessity of a space-occupying entrance aisle within the
+church, where there was little enough sitting-room for the quickly
+increasing and universally church-going population. As these pews were
+either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted,
+and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the
+kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style
+of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted. A man who had
+a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by
+the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were
+individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house
+destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was
+being razed, the old building materials to use in the construction of her
+new home. She was not allowed, however, to remove the wood which formed the
+pews, as they were adjudged to be the property of the members who had built
+them, and those owners only could sell or remove the materials of which
+they were built.
+
+Many of the pews in the old meeting-houses had towering partition walls,
+which extended up so high that only the tops of the tallest heads could be
+seen when the occupants were seated. Permissions to build were often given
+with modifying restrictions to the aspiring pew-builders, as for instance
+is recorded of the Haverhill church, "provided they would not build so high
+as to damnify and hinder the light of them windows," or of the Waterbury
+church, "if the pues will not progodish the hous." Often the floor of the
+pews was several inches and occasionally a foot higher than the floor of
+the "alleys," thus forming at the entrance-door of the pew one or two
+steps, which were great stumbling-blocks to clumsy and to childish feet,
+that tripped again when within the pew over the "crickets" and foot-benches
+which were, if the family were large, the accepted and lowly church-seats
+of the little children. Occasionally one long, low foot-rest stretched
+quite across one side of the pew-floor. I have seen these long benches
+with a tier of three shelves; the lower and broader shelf was used as a
+foot-rest, the second one was to hold the hats of the men, and the third
+and narrower shelf was for the hymn-books and Bibles. Such comfortable and
+luxurious pew-furnishings could never have been found in many churches.
+
+An old New Englander relates a funny story of his youth, in which one of
+these triple-tiered foot-benches played an important part. When he was
+a boy a travelling show visited his native town, and though he was not
+permitted to go within the mystic and alluring tent, he stood longingly at
+the gate, and was prodigiously diverted and astonished by an exhibition of
+tight-rope walking, which was given outside the tent-door as a bait to
+lure pleasure-loving and frivolous townspeople within, and also as a
+tantalization to the children of the saints who were not allowed to enter
+the tent of the wicked. Fired by that bewildering and amazing performance,
+he daily, after the wonderful sight, practised walking on rails, on fences,
+on fallen trees, and on every narrow foothold which he could find, as a
+careful preparation for a final feat and triumph of skill on his mother's
+clothes-line. In an evil hour, as he sat one Sunday in the corner of his
+father's pew, his eyes rested on the narrow ledge which formed the top of
+the long foot-bench. Satan can find mischief for idle boys within church as
+well as without, and the desire grew stronger to try to walk on that
+narrow foothold. He looked at his father and mother, they were peacefully
+sleeping; so also were the grown-up occupants of the neighboring pews;
+the pew walls were high, the minister seldom glanced to right or left; a
+thousand good reasons were whispered in his ear by the mischief-finder,
+and at last he willingly yielded, pulled off his heavy shoes, and softly
+mounted the foot-bench. He walked forward and back with great success
+twice, thrice, but when turning for a fourth tour he suddenly lost his
+balance, and over he went with a resounding crash--hats, psalm-books,
+heavy bench, and all. He crushed into hopeless shapelessness his father's
+gray beaver meeting-hat, a long-treasured and much-loved antique; he nearly
+smashed his mother's kid-slippered foot to jelly, and the fall elicited
+from her, in the surprise of the sudden awakening and intense pain, an
+ear-piercing shriek, which, with the noisy crash, electrified the entire
+meeting. All the grown people stood up to investigate, the children climbed
+on the seats to look at the guilty offender and his deeply mortified
+parents; while the minister paused in his sermon and said with cutting
+severity, "I have always regretted that the office of tithingman has been
+abolished in this community, as his presence and his watchful care
+are sadly needed by both the grown persons and the children in this
+congregation." The wretched boy who had caused all the commotion and
+disgrace was of course uninjured by his fall, but a final settlement at
+home between father and son on account of this sacrilegious piece of church
+disturbance made the unhappy would-be tight-rope walker wish that he had at
+least broken his arm instead of his father's hat and his mother's pride and
+the peace of the congregation.
+
+The seats were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three
+sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the
+minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian
+benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite
+justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in
+one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay,
+"What! must I be shut up in a closet and sit on a shelf?" Often elderly
+people petitioned to build separate small pens of pews with a single wider
+seat as "through the seats being so very narrow" they could not sit in
+comfort.
+
+The seats were, until well into this century, almost universally hung on
+hinges, and could be turned up against the walls of the pew, thus enabling
+the standing congregation to lean for support against the sides of the pews
+during the psalm-singing and the long, long prayers.
+
+  "And when at last the loud Amen
+  Fell from aloft, how quickly then
+  The seats came down with heavy rattle,
+  Like musketry in fiercest battle."
+
+This noise of slamming pew-seats could easily be heard over half a mile
+away from the meeting-house in the summer time, for the perverse boys
+contrived always in their salute of welcome to the Amen to give vent in
+a most tremendous bang to a little of their pent up and ill-repressed
+energies. In old church-orders such entries as this (of the Haverhill
+church) are frequently seen: "The people are to Let their Seats down
+without Such Nois." "The boyes are not to wickedly noise down there
+pew-seats." A gentleman attending the old church in Leicester heard at
+the beginning of the prayer, for the first time in his life, the noise of
+slamming pew-seats, as the seats were thrust up against the pew-walls. He
+jumped into the aisle at the first clatter, thinking instinctively that the
+gallery was cracking and falling. Another stranger, a Southerner, entering
+rather late at a morning service in an old church in New England, was
+greeted with the rattle of falling seats, and exclaimed in amazement, "Do
+you Northern people applaud in church?"
+
+In many meeting-houses the tops of the pews and of the high gallery
+railings were ornamented with little balustrades of turned wood, which were
+often worn quite bare of paint by childish fingers that had tried them all
+"to find which ones would turn," and which, alas! would also squeak. This
+fascinating occupation whiled away many a tedious hour in the dreary
+church, and in spite of weekly forbidding frowns and whispered reproofs for
+the shrill, ear-piercing squeaks elicited by turning the spindle-shaped
+balusters, was entirely too alluring a time-killer to be abandoned, and
+consequently descended, an hereditary church pastime, from generation to
+generation of the children of the Puritans; and indeed it remained so
+strong an instinct that many a grown person, visiting in after life a
+church whose pews bore balustrades like the ones of his childhood, could
+scarce keep his itching fingers from trying them each in succession "to see
+which ones would turn."
+
+These open balustrades also afforded fine peep-holes through which, by
+standing or kneeling upon "the shelf," a child might gaze at his neighbor;
+and also through which sly missiles--little balls of twisted paper--could
+be snapped, to the annoyance of some meek girl or retaliating boy, until
+the young marksman was ignominiously pulled down by his mother from his
+post of attack. And through these balustrades the same boy a few years
+later could thrust sly missives, also of twisted paper, to the girl whom he
+had once assailed and bombarded with his annoying paper bullets.
+
+Through the pillared top-rail a restless child in olden days often
+received, on a hot summer Sabbath from a farmer's wife or daughter in an
+adjoining pew, friendly and quieting gifts of sprigs of dill, or fennel,
+or caraway, famous anti-soporifics; and on this herbivorous food he would
+contentedly browse as long as it lasted. An uneasy, sermon-tired little
+girl was once given through the pew-rail several stalks of caraway, and
+with them a large bunch of aromatic southernwood, or "lad's-love" which had
+been brought to meeting by the matron in the next pew, with a crudely and
+unconsciously aesthetic sense that where eye and ear found so little to
+delight them, there the pungent and spicy fragrance of the southernwood
+would be doubly grateful to the nostrils. Little Missy sat down delightedly
+to nibble the caraway-seed, and her mother seeing her so quietly and
+absorbingly occupied, at once fell contentedly and placidly asleep in her
+corner of the pew. But five heads of caraway, though each contain many
+score of seeds, and the whole number be slowly nibbled and eaten one seed
+at a time, will not last through the child's eternity of a long doctrinal
+sermon; and when the umbels were all devoured, the young experimentalist
+began upon the stalks and stems, and they, too, slowly disappeared. She
+then attacked the sprays of southernwood, and in spite of its bitter,
+wormwoody flavor, having nothing else to do, she finished it, all but the
+tough stems, just as the long sermon was brought to a close. Her waking
+mother, discovering no signs of green verdure in the pew, quickly drew
+forth a whispered confession of the time-killing Nebuchadnezzar-like feast,
+and frightened and horrified, at once bore the leaf-gorged child from
+the church, signalling in her retreat to the village doctor, who quickly
+followed and administered to the omnivorous young New Englander a bolus
+which made her loathe to her dying day, through a sympathetic association
+and memory, the taste of caraway, and the scent of southernwood.
+
+An old gentleman, lamenting the razing of the church of his childhood,
+told the story of his youthful Sabbaths in rhyme, and thus refers with
+affectionate enthusiasm to the old custom of bringing bunches of esculent
+"sallet" herbs to meeting:--
+
+  "And when I tired and restless grew,
+  Our next pew neighbor, Mrs. True,
+  Reached her kind hand the top rail through
+  To hand me dill, and fennel too,
+  And sprigs of caraway.
+
+  "And as I munched the spicy seeds,
+  I dimly felt that kindly deeds
+  That thus supply our present needs,
+  Though only gifts of pungent weeds,
+  Show true religion.
+
+  "And often now through sermon trite
+  And operatic singer's flight,
+  I long for that old friendly sight,
+  The hand with herbs of value light,
+  To help to pass the time."
+
+Were the dill and "sweetest fennel" chosen Sabbath favorites for their
+old-time virtues and powers?
+
+  "Vervain and dill
+  Hinder witches of their ill."
+
+And of the charmed fennel Longfellow wrote:--
+
+  "The fennel with its yellow flowers
+  That, in an earlier age than ours,
+  Was gifted with the wondrous powers,
+      Lost vision to restore."
+
+And traditions of mysterious powers, dream-influencing, spirit-exorcising,
+virtue-awakening, health-giving properties, hung vaguely around the
+southernwood and made it specially fit to be a Sabbath-day posy. These
+traditions are softened by the influence of years into simply idealizing,
+in the mind of every country-bred New Englander, the peculiar refreshing
+scent of the southernwood as a typical Sabbath-day fragrance. Half a
+century ago, the pretty feathery pale-green shrub grew in every country
+door-yard, humble or great, throughout New England; and every church-going
+woman picked a branch or spray of it when she left her home on Sabbath
+morn. To this day, on hot summer Sundays, many a staid old daughter of
+the Puritans may be seen entering the village meeting-house, clad in
+a lilac-sprigged lawn or a green-striped barège,--a scanty-skirted,
+surplice-waisted relic of past summers,--with a lace-bordered silk cape
+or a delicate, time-yellowed, purple and white cashmere scarf on her bent
+shoulders, wearing on her gray head a shirred-silk or leghorn bonnet, and
+carrying in her lace-mitted hand a fresh handkerchief, her spectacle-case
+and well-worn Bible, and a great sprig of the sweet, old-fashioned
+"lad's-love." A rose, a bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy
+for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was
+ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing
+things,--southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is
+half so fresh, so countrified, so memory-sweet.
+
+The benches and the pew-seats in the old churches were never cushioned.
+Occasionally very old or feeble women brought cushions to meeting to sit
+upon. It is a matter of recent tradition that Colonel Greenleaf caused a
+nine days' talk in Newbury town at the beginning of this century when
+he cushioned his pew. The widow of Sir William Pepperell, who lived in
+imposing style, had her pew cushioned and lined and curtained with
+worsted stuff, and carpeted with a heavy bear-skin. This worn, faded, and
+moth-eaten furniture remained in the Kittery church until the year 1840,
+just as when Lady Pepperell furnished and occupied the pew. Nor were even
+the seats of the pulpit cushioned. The "cooshoons" of velvet or leather,
+which were given by will to the church, and which were kept in the pulpit,
+and were nibbled by the squirrels, were for the Bible, not the minister, to
+rest upon.
+
+In many churches--in Durham, Concord and Sandwich--the pews had
+swing-shelves, "leaning shelves," upon which a church attendant could rest
+his paper and his arm when taking notes from the sermon, as was at one time
+the universal custom, and in which even school-boys of a century ago had
+to take part. Funny stories are told of the ostentatious notes taken by
+pompous parishioners who could neither write nor read, but who could
+scribble, and thus cut a learned figure.
+
+The doors of the pews were usually cut down somewhat lower than the
+pew-walls, and frequently had no top-rails. They sometimes bore the name of
+the pew-owner painted in large white letters. They were secured when
+closed by clumsy wooden buttons. In many country congregations the elderly
+men--stiff old farmers--had a fashion of standing up in the middle of the
+sermon to stretch their cramped limbs, and they would lean against and hang
+over the pew door and stare up and down the aisle. In Andover, Vermont,
+old Deacon Puffer never let a summer Sunday pass without thus resting and
+diverting himself. One day, having ill-secured the wooden button at the
+door of his pew, the leaning-place gave way under his weight, and out he
+sprawled on all-fours, with a loud clatter, into the middle of the aisle,
+to the amusement of the children, and the mortification of his wife.
+
+Thus it may be seen, as an old autobiography phrases it, "diversions was
+frequent in meeting, and the more duller the sermon, the more likely it was
+that some accident or mischief would be done to help to pass the time."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Seating the Meeting.
+
+
+
+Perhaps no duty was more important and more difficult of satisfactory
+performance in the church work in early New England than "seating the
+meeting-house." Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all
+forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was
+the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the
+seat in which each person should sit during public worship. A committee of
+dignified and influential men was appointed to assign irrevocably to each
+person his or her place, according to rank and importance. Whittier wrote
+of this custom:--
+
+  "In the goodly house of worship, where in order due and fit,
+  As by public vote directed, classed and ranked the people sit;
+  Mistress first and goodwife after, clerkly squire before the clown,
+  From the brave coat, lace embroidered: to the gray frock shading down."
+
+In many cases the members of the committee were changed each year or at
+each fresh seating, in order to obviate any of the effects of partiality
+through kinship, friendship, personal esteem, or debt. A second committee
+was also appointed to seat the members of committee number one, in order
+that, as Haverhill people phrased it, "there may be no Grumbling at them
+for picking and placing themselves."
+
+This seating committee sent to the church the list of all the attendants
+and the seats assigned to them, and when the list had been twice or thrice
+read to the congregation, and nailed on the meeting-house door, it became a
+law. Then some such order as this of the church at Watertown, Connecticut,
+was passed: "It is ordered that the next Sabbath Day every person shall
+take his or her seat appointed to them, and not go to any other seat where
+others are placed: And if any one of the inhabitants shall act contrary, he
+shall for the first offence be reproved by the deacons, and for a second
+pay a fine of two shillings, and a like fine for each offence ever
+after." Or this of the Stratham church: "When the comety have Seatid the
+meeting-house every person that is Seatid shall set in those Seats or pay
+Five Shillings Pir Day for every day they set out of There seats in a
+Disorderly Manner to advance themselves Higher in the meeting-house." These
+two church-laws were very lenient. In many towns the punishments and fines
+were much more severe. Two men of Newbury were in 1669 fined £27 4s.
+each for "disorderly going and setting in seats belonging to others." They
+were dissatisfied with the seats assigned to them by the seating committee,
+and openly and defiantly rebelled. Other and more peaceable citizens
+"entred their Decents" to the first decision of the committee and asked for
+reconsideration of their special cases and for promotion to a higher pew
+before the final orders were "Jsued."
+
+In all the Puritan meetings, as then and now in Quaker meetings, the men
+sat on one side of the meeting-house and the women on the other; and they
+entered by separate doors. It was a great and much-contested change when
+men and women were ordered to sit together "promiscuoslie." In front,
+on either side of the pulpit (or very rarely in the foremost row in the
+gallery), was a seat of highest dignity, known as the "foreseat," in which
+only the persons of greatest importance in the community sat.
+
+Sometimes a row of square pews was built on three sides of the ground
+floor, and each pew occupied by separate families, while the pulpit was
+on the fourth side. If any man wished such a private pew for himself and
+family, he obtained permission from the church and town, and built it at
+his own expense. Immediately in front of the pulpit was either a long seat
+or a square inclosed pew for the deacons, who sat facing the congregation.
+This was usually a foot or two above the level of the other pews, and was
+reached by two or three steep, narrow steps. On a still higher plane was a
+pew for the ruling elders, when ruling elders there were. The magistrates
+also had a pew for their special use. What we now deem the best seats,
+those in the middle of the church, were in olden times the free seats.
+
+Usually, on one side of the pulpit was a square pew for the minister's
+family. When there were twenty-six children in the family, as at least one
+New England parson could boast, and when ministers' families of twelve
+or fourteen children were far from unusual, it is no wonder that we find
+frequent votes to "inlarge the ministers wives pew the breadth of the
+alley," or to "take in the next pue to the ministers wives pue into her
+pue." The seats in the gallery were universally regarded in the early
+churches as the most exalted, in every sense, in the house, with the
+exception, of course, of the dignity-bearing foreseat and the few private
+pews.
+
+It is easy to comprehend what a source of disappointed anticipation,
+heart-burning jealousy, offended dignity, unseemly pride, and bitter
+quarrelling this method of assigning scats, and ranking thereby, must have
+been in those little communities. How the goodwivcs must have hated the
+seating committee! Though it was expressly ordered, when the committee
+rendered their decision, that "the inhabitants are to rest silent and
+sett down satysfyed," who can still the tongue of an envious woman or an
+insulted man? Though they were Puritans, they were first of all men and
+women, and complaints and revolts were frequent. Judge Sewall records that
+one indignant dame "treated Captain Osgood very roughly on account of
+seating the meeting-house." To her the difference between a seat in the
+first and one in the second row was immeasurably great. It was not alone
+the Scribes and Pharisees who desired the highest seats in the synagogue.
+
+It was found necessary at a very early date to "dignify the meeting,"
+which was to make certain seats, though in different localities, equal in
+dignity; thus could peace and contented pride be partially restored. For
+instance, the seating committee in the Sutton church used their "best
+discresing," and voted that "the third seat below be equal in dignity with
+the foreseat in the front gallery, and the fourth seat below be equal in
+dignity with the foreseat in the side gallery," etc., thus making many
+seats of equal honor. Of course wives had to have seats of equal importance
+with those of their husbands, and each widow retained the dignity
+apportioned to her in her husband's lifetime. We can well believe that much
+"discresing" was necessary in dignifying as well as in seating. Often,
+after building a new meeting-house with all the painstaking and thoughtful
+judgment that could be shown, the dissensions over the seating lasted for
+years. The conciliatory fashion of "dignifying the seats" clung long in the
+Congregational churches of New England. In East Hartford and Windsor it was
+not abandoned until 1824.
+
+Many men were unwilling to serve on these seating committees, and refused
+to "medle with the seating," protesting against it on account of the odium
+that was incurred, but they were seldom "let off." Even so influential and
+upright a man as Judge Sewall felt a dread of the responsibility and of
+the personal spleen he might arouse. He also feared in one case lest his
+seat-decisions might, if disliked, work against the ministerial peace of
+his son, who had been recently ordained as pastor of the church. Sometimes
+the difficulty was settled in this way: the entire church (or rather the
+male members) voted who should occupy the foreseat, or the highest pew, and
+the voted-in occupants of this seat of honor formed a committee, who in
+turn seated the others of the congregation.
+
+In the town of Rowley, "age, office, and the amount paid toward building
+the meeting-house were considered when assigning seats." Other towns had
+very amusing and minute rules for seating. Each year of the age counted one
+degree. Military service counted eight degrees. The magistrate's office
+counted ten degrees. Every forty shillings paid in on the church rate
+counted one degree. We can imagine the ambitious Puritan adding up his
+degrees, and paying in forty shillings more in order to sit one seat above
+his neighbor who was a year or two older.
+
+In Pittsfield, as early as the year 1765, the pews were sold by "vandoo"
+to the highest bidder, in order to stop the unceasing quarrels over
+the seating. In Windham, Connecticut, in 1762, the adoption of this
+pacificatory measure only increased the dissension when it was discovered
+that some miserable "bachelors who never paid for more than one head and
+a horse" had bid in several of the best pews in the meeting-house. In New
+London, two women, sisters-in-law, were seated side by side. Each claimed
+the upper or more dignified seat, and they quarrelled so fiercely over the
+occupation of it that they had to be brought before the town meeting.
+
+In no way could honor and respect be shown more satisfactorily in the
+community than by the seat assigned in meeting. When Judge Sewall married
+his second wife, he writes with much pride: "Mr. Oliver in the names of the
+Overseers invites my Wife to sit in the foreseat. I thought to have brought
+her into my pue. I thankt him and the Overseers." His wife died in a few
+months, and he reproached himself for his pride in this honor, and left the
+seat which he had in the men's foreseat. "God in his holy Sovereignty put
+my wife out of the Fore Seat. I apprehended I had Cause to be ashamed of my
+Sin and loath myself for it, and retired into my Pue," which was of course
+less dignified than the foreseat.
+
+Often, in thriving communities, the "pues" and benches did not afford
+seating room enough for the large number who wished to attend public
+worship, and complaints were frequent that many were "obliged to sit
+squeased on the stairs." Persons were allowed to bring chairs and stools
+into the meeting-house, and place them in the "alleys." These extra seats
+became often such encumbering nuisances that in many towns laws were passed
+abolishing and excluding them, or, as in Hadley, ordering them "back of the
+women's seats." In 1759 it was ordered in that town to "clear the Alleys of
+the meeting-house of chairs and other Incumbrances." Where the chairless
+people went is not told; perhaps they sat in the doorway, or, in the summer
+time, listened outside the windows. One forward citizen of Hardwicke had
+gradually moved his chair down the church alley, step by step, Sunday after
+Sunday, from one position of dignity to another still higher, until at last
+he boldly invaded the deacons' seat. When, in the year 1700, this honored
+position was forbidden him, in his chagrin and mortification he committed
+suicide by hanging.
+
+The young men sat together in rows, and the young women in corresponding
+seats on the other side of the house. In 1677 the selectmen of Newbury
+gave permission to a few young women to build a pew in the gallery. It is
+impossible to understand why this should have roused the indignation of the
+bachelors of the town, but they were excited and angered to such a pitch
+that they broke a window, invaded the meeting-house, and "broke the pue in
+pessis." For this sacrilegious act they were fined £10 each, and sentenced
+to be whipped or pilloried. In consideration, however, of the fact that
+many of them had been brave soldiers, the punishment was omitted when they
+confessed and asked forgiveness. This episode is very comical; it exhibits
+the Puritan youth in such an ungallant and absurd light. When, ten years
+later, liberty was given to ten young men, who had sat in the "foure backer
+seats in the gallery," to build a pew in "the hindermost seat in the
+gallery behind the pulpit," it is not recorded that the Salem young women
+made any objection. In the Woburn church, the four daughters of one of the
+most respected families in the place received permission to build a pew in
+which to sit. Here also such indignant and violent protests were made by
+the young men that the selectmen were obliged to revoke the permission.
+It would be interesting to know the bachelors' discourteous objections to
+young women being allowed to own a pew, but no record of their reasons
+is given. Bachelors were so restricted and governed in the colonies that
+perhaps they resented the thought of any independence being allowed to
+single women. Single men could not live alone, but were forced to reside
+with some family to whom the court assigned them, and to do in all respects
+just what the court ordered. Thus, in olden times, a man had to marry to
+obtain his freedom. The only clue to a knowledge of the cause of the fierce
+and resentful objection of New England young men to permitting the young
+women of the various congregations to build and own a "maids pue" is
+contained in the record of the church of the town of Scotland, Connecticut.
+"An Hurlburt, Pashants and Mary Lazelle, Younes Bingham, prudenc Hurlburt
+and Jerusha meachem" were empowered to build a pew "provided they build
+within a year and raise ye pue no higher than the seat is on the Mens
+side." "Never ye Less," saith the chronicle, "ye above said have built said
+pue much higher than ye order, and if they do not lower the same within one
+month from this time the society comitte shall take said pue away." Do you
+wonder that the bachelors resented this towering "maids pue?" that they
+would not be scornfully looked down upon every Sabbath by women-folk,
+especially by a girl named "meachem"? Pashants and Younes and prudenc had
+to quickly come down from their unlawfully high church-perch and take a
+more humble seat, as befitted them; thus did their "vaulting ambition
+o'erleap itself and fall on the other side." Perhaps the Salem maids also
+built too high and imposing a pew. In Haverhill, in 1708, young women were
+permitted to build pews, provided they did not "damnify the Stairway." This
+somewhat profane-sounding restriction they heeded, and the Haverhill maids
+occupied their undamnifying "pue" unmolested. Medford young women, however,
+in 1701, when allowed only one side gallery for seats, while the young men
+were assigned one side and all the front gallery, made such an uproar that
+the town had to call a meeting, and restore to them their "woman's rights"
+in half the front gallery.
+
+Infants were brought to church in their mothers' arms, and on summer days
+the young mothers often sat at the meeting-house door or in the porch,--if
+porch there were,--where, listening to the word of God, they could attend
+also to the wants of their babes. I have heard, too, of a little cage, or
+frame, which was to be seen in the early meeting-houses, for the purpose
+of holding children who were too young to sit alone,--poor Puritan babies!
+Little girls sat with their mothers or elder sisters on "crickets" within
+the pews; or if the family were over-numerous, the children and crickets
+exundated into "the alley without the pues." Often a row of little
+daughters of Zion sat on three-legged stools and low seats the entire
+length of the aisle,--weary, sleepy, young sentinels "without the gates."
+
+The boys, the Puritan boys, those wild animals who were regarded with such
+suspicion, such intense disfavor, by all elderly Puritan eyes, and who were
+publicly stigmatized by the Duxbury elders as "ye wretched boys on ye Lords
+Day," were herded by themselves. They usually sat on the pulpit and gallery
+stairs, and constables or tithingmen were appointed to watch over them and
+control them. In Salem, in 1676, it was ordered that "all ye boyes of ye
+towne are and shall be appointed to sitt upon ye three pair of stairs in ye
+meeting-house on ye Lords Day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look after ye
+boyes yt sitte upon ye pulpit stairs. Reuben Guppy is to look and order soe
+many of ye boyes as may be convenient, and if any are unruly, to present
+their names, as the law directs." Nowadays we should hardly seat boys in a
+group if we wished them to be orderly and decorous, and I fear the man "by
+the name of Guppy" found it no easy task to preserve order and due gravity
+among the Puritan boys in Salem meeting. In fact, the rampant boys behaved
+thus badly for the very reason that they were seated together instead of
+with their respective families; and not until the fashion was universal of
+each family sitting in a pew or group by itself did the boys in meeting
+behave like human beings rather than like mischievous and unruly monkeys.
+
+In Stratford, in 1668, a tithingman was "appointed to watch over the youths
+of disorderly carriage, and see that they behave themselves comelie, and
+use such raps and blows as in his discretion meet."
+
+I like to think of those rows of sober-faced Puritan boys seated on the
+narrow, steep pulpit stairs, clad in knee-breeches and homespun flapped
+coats, and with round, cropped heads, miniature likenesses in dress and
+countenance (if not in deportment) of their grave, stern, God-fearing
+fathers. Though they were of the sedate Puritan blood, they were boys, and
+they wriggled and twisted, and scraped their feet noisily on the sanded
+floor; and I know full well that the square-toed shoes of one in whom
+"original sin" waxed powerful, thrust many a sly dig in the ribs and back
+of the luckless wight who chanced to sit in front of and below him on the
+pulpit stairs. Many a dried kernel of Indian corn was surreptitiously
+snapped at the head of an unwary neighbor, and many a sly word was
+whispered and many a furtive but audible "snicker" elicited when the dread
+tithingman was "having an eye-out" and administering "discreet raps and
+blows" elsewhere.
+
+One of these wicked youths in Andover was brought before the magistrate,
+and it was charged that he "Sported and played and by Indecent Gestures and
+Wry Faces caused laughter and misbehavior in the Beholders." The girls were
+not one whit better behaved. One of "ye tything men chosen of ye town of
+Norwich" reported that "Tabatha Morgus of s'd Norwich Did on ye 24th day
+February it being Sabbath on ye Lordes Day, prophane ye Lordes Day in ye
+meeting house of ye west society in ye time of ye forenoone service on s'd
+Day by her rude and Indecent Behaviour in Laughing and Playing in ye time
+of ye s'd Service which Doinges of ye s'd Tabatha is against ye peace of
+our Sovereign Lord ye King, his Crown and Dignity." Wanton Tabatha had to
+pay three shilings sixpence for her ill-timed mid-winter frolic. Perhaps
+she laughed to try to keep warm. Those who laughed at the misdemeanors of
+others were fined as well. Deborah Bangs, a young girl, in 1755 paid a fine
+of five shillings for "Larfing in the Wareham Meeting House in time of
+Public Worship," and a boy at the same time, for the same offence, paid a
+fine of ten shillings. He may have laughed louder and longer. In a law-book
+in which Jonathan Trumbull recorded the minor cases which he tried as
+justice of the peace, was found this entry: "His Majesties Tithing man
+entered complaint against Jona. and Susan Smith, that on the Lords Day
+during Divine Service, they did _smile_." They were found guilty, and
+each was fined five shillings and costs,--poor smiling Susan and Jonathan.
+
+Those wretched Puritan boys, those "sons of Belial," whittled, too, and cut
+the woodwork and benches of the meeting-house in those early days, just as
+their descendants have ever since hacked and cut the benches and desks in
+country schoolhouses,--though how they ever eluded the vigilant eye and ear
+of the ubiquitous tithingman long enough to whittle will ever remain an
+unsolved mystery of the past. This early forerunning evidence of what
+has become a characteristic Yankee trait and habit was so annoyingly and
+extensively exhibited in Medford, in 1729, that an order was passed to
+prosecute and punish "all who cut the seats in the meeting-house."
+
+Few towns were content to have one tithingman and one staff, but ordered
+that there should be a guardian set over the boys in every corner of the
+meeting-house. In Hanover it was ordered "That there be some sticks set up
+in various places in the meeting-house, and fit persons by them and _to
+use them_." I doubt not that the sticks were well used, and Hanover boys
+were well rapped in meeting.
+
+The Norwalk people come down through history shining with a halo of gentle
+lenity, for their tithingman was ordered to bear a short, small stick only,
+and he was "Desired to use it with clemency." However, if any boy proved
+"incoridgable," he could be "presented" before the elders; and perhaps he
+would rather have been treated as were Hartford boys by cruel Hartford
+church folk, who ordered that if "any boye shall be taken playing or
+misbehaving himself in the time of publick worship whether in the
+meeting-house or about the walls he shall be examined and punished at the
+present publickly before the assembly depart." Parson Chauncey, of Durham,
+when a boy misbehaved in meeting, and was "punched up" by the tithingman,
+often stopped in his sermon, called the godless young offender by name,
+and asked him to come to the parsonage the next day. Some very tender and
+beautiful lessons were taught to these Durham boys at these Monday morning
+interviews, and have descended to us in tradition; and the good Mr.
+Chauncey stands out a shining light of Christian patience and forbearance
+at a time when every other New England minister, from John Cotton down,
+preached and practised the stern repression and sharp correction of all
+children, and chanted together in solemn chorus, "Foolishness is bound up
+in the heart of a child."
+
+One vicious tithingman invented, and was allowed to exercise on the boys,
+a punishment which was the refinement of cruelty. He walked up to the
+laughing, sporting, or whittling boy, took him by the collar or the arm,
+led him ostentatiously across the meeting-house, and seated him by his
+shamefaced mother on the women's side. It was as if one grandly proud in
+kneebreeches should be forced to walk abroad in petticoats. Far rather
+would the disgraced boy have been whacked soundly with the heavy knob of
+the tithingman's staff; for bodily pain is soon forgotten, while mortifying
+abasement lingers long.
+
+The tithingman could also take any older youth who misbehaved or "acted
+unsivill" in meeting from his manly seat with the grown men, and force him
+to sit again with the boys; "if any over sixteen are disorderly, they shall
+be ordered to said seats." Not only could these men of authority keep the
+boys in order during meeting, but they also had full control during the
+nooning, and repressed and restrained and vigorously corrected the luckless
+boys during the midday hours. When seats in the galleries grew to be
+regarded as inferior to seats and pews on the ground floor, the boys, who
+of course must have the worst place in the house, were relegated from the
+pulpit stairs to pews in the gallery, and these square, shut-off pews grew
+to be what Dr. Porter called "the Devil's play-houses," and turbulent
+outbursts were frequent enough.
+
+The little boys still sat downstairs under their parents' watchful eyes.
+"No child under 10 alowed to go up Gailary." In the Sutherland church, if
+the big boys (who ought to have known better) "behaved unseemly," one of
+the tithing-men who "took turns to set in the Galary" was ordered "to bring
+Such Bois out of the Galary & set them before the Deacon's Seat" with the
+small boys. In Plainfield, Connecticut, the "pestigeous" boys managed to
+invent a new form of annoyance,--they "damnified the glass;" and a church
+regulation had to be passed to prevent, or rather to try to prevent them
+from "opening the windows or in any way damnifying the glass." It was
+doubtless hot work scuffling and wrestling in the close, shut-in pews high
+up under the roof, and they naturally wished to cool down by opening or
+breaking the windows. Grown persons could not inconsiderately open the
+church windows either. "The Constables are desired to _take notic_
+of the persons that open the windows in the tyme of publick worship." No
+rheumatic-y draughts, no bronchitis-y damps, no pure air was allowed to
+enter the New England meeting-house. The church doubtless took a vote
+before it allowed a single window to be opened.
+
+In Westfield, Massachusetts, the boys became so abominably rampant that the
+church formally decided "that if there is not a Reformation Respecting
+the Disorders in the Pews built on the Great Beam in the time of Publick
+Worship the comite can pul it down."
+
+The fashion of seating the boys in pews by themselves was slow of
+abolishment in many of the churches. In Windsor, Connecticut, "boys' pews"
+were a feature of the church until 1845. As years rolled on, the tithingmen
+became restricted in their authority: they could no longer administer "raps
+and blows;" they were forced to content themselves with loud rappings on
+the floor, and pointing with a staff or with a condemning finger at the
+misdemeanant. At last the deacons usurped these functions, and if rapping
+and pointing did not answer the purpose of establishing order (if the boy
+"psisted"), led the stubborn offender out of meeting; and they had full
+authority soundly to thrash the "wretched boy" on the horse-block. Rev. Dr.
+Dakin tells the story that, hearing a terrible noise and disturbance while
+he was praying in a church in Quincy, he felt constrained to open his eyes
+to ascertain the cause thereof; and he beheld a red-haired boy firmly
+clutching the railing on the front edge of the gallery, while a venerable
+deacon as firmly clutched the boy. The young rebel held fast, and the
+correcting deacon held fast also, until at last the balustrade gave way,
+and boy, deacon, and railing fell together with a resounding crash.
+Then, rising from the wooden debris, the thoroughly subdued boy and the
+triumphant deacon left the meeting-house to finish their little affair;
+and unmistakable swishing sounds, accompanied by loud wails and whining
+protestations, were soon heard from the region of the horse-sheds. Parents
+never resented such chastisings; it was expected, and even desired,
+that boys should be whipped freely by every school-master and person of
+authority who chose so to do.
+
+In some old church-orders for seating, boys were classed with negroes,
+and seated with them; but in nearly all towns the negroes had seats by
+themselves. The black women were all seated on a long bench or in an
+inclosed pew labelled "B.W.," and the negro men in one labelled "B.M." One
+William Mills, a jesting soul, being asked by a pompous stranger where he
+could sit in meeting, told the visitor that he was welcome to sit in Bill
+Mills's pew, and that it was marked "B.M." The man, who chanced to be
+ignorant of the local custom of marking the negro seats, accepted the kind
+invitation, and seated himself in the black men's pew, to the delight of
+Bill Mills, the amusement of the boys, the scandal of the elders, and his
+own disgust.
+
+Sometimes a little pew or short gallery was built high up among the beams
+and joists over the staircase which led to the first gallery, and was
+called the "swallows' nest," or the "roof pue," or the "second gallery." It
+was reached by a steep, ladder-like staircase, and was often assigned to
+the negroes and Indians of the congregation.
+
+Often "ye seat between ye Deacons seat and ye pulpit is for persons hard of
+hearing to sett in." In nearly every meeting a bench or pew full of aged
+men might be seen near the pulpit, and this seat was called, with Puritan
+plainness of speech, the "Deaf Pew." Some very deaf church members (when
+the boys were herded elsewhere) sat on the pulpit stairs, and even in the
+pulpit, alongside the preacher, where they disconcertingly upturned their
+great tin ear-trumpets directly in his face. The persistent joining in the
+psalm-singing by these deaf old soldiers and farmers was one of the bitter
+trials which the leader of the choir had to endure.
+
+The singers' seats were usually in the galleries; sometimes upon the ground
+floor, in the "hind-row on either side." Occasionally the choir sat in two
+rows of seats that extended quite across the floor of the house, in front
+of the deacons' seat and the pulpit. The men singers then sat facing the
+congregation, while the women singers faced the pulpit. Between them ran a
+long rack for the psalm-books. When they sang they stood up, and bawled and
+fugued in each other's faces. Often a square pew was built for the singers,
+and in the centre of this enclosure was a table, on which were laid, when
+at rest, the psalm-books. When they sang, the choir thus formed a hollow
+square, as does any determined band, for strength.
+
+One other seat in the old Puritan meeting-house, a seat of gloom,
+still throws its darksome shadow down through the years,--the stool of
+repentance. "Barbarous and cruel punishments" were forbidden by the
+statutes of the new colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking,
+sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat,
+crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long
+Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled
+and godly congregation, and the cold rebuke of the pious minister's averted
+face; bearing on the poor sinful head a deep-branding paper inscribed in
+"Capitall Letters" with the name of some dark or mysterious crime, or
+wearing on the sleeve some strange and dread symbol, or on the breast a
+scarlet letter.
+
+Let us thank God that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures--so
+degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,--these foul,
+in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never
+frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long time. In 1681
+two women were sentenced to sit during service on a high stool in the
+middle alley of the Salem meeting-house, having on their heads a paper
+bearing the name of their crime; and a woman in Agamenticus at about the
+same date was ordered "to stand in a white sheet publicly two several
+Sabbath-Days with the mark of her offence on her forehead." These are the
+latest records of this punishment that I have chanced to see.
+
+Thus, from old church and town records, we plainly discover that each laic,
+deacon, elder, criminal, singer, and even the ungodly boy had his alloted
+place as absolutely assigned to him in the old meeting-house as was the
+pulpit to the parson. Much has been said in semi-ridicule of this old
+custom of "seating" and "dignifying," yet it did not in reality differ much
+from our modern way of selling the best pews to whoever will pay the most.
+Perhaps the old way was the better, since, in the early churches, age,
+education, dignity, and reputation were considered as well as wealth.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The Tithingman and the Sleepers.
+
+
+
+The most grotesque, the most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure
+in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly
+burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of
+incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of
+monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early
+New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy,
+pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed
+with dangling foxtails,--creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the
+quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the
+drowsy sleepers; for they slept in country churches in the seventeenth
+century, notwithstanding dread of fierce correction, just as they nod
+and doze and softly puff, unawakened and unrebuked, in village churches
+throughout New England in the nineteenth century.
+
+This absurd and distorted type of the English church beadle, this colonial
+sleep banisher, was equipped with a long staff, heavily knobbed at one end,
+with which he severely and pitilessly rapped the heads of the too sleepy
+men, and the too wide-awake boys. From the other end of this wand of office
+depended a long foxtail, or a hare's-foot, which he softly thrust in the
+faces of the sleeping Priscillas, Charitys, and Hopestills, and which
+gently brushed and tickled them into reverent but startled wakefulness.
+
+One zealous but too impetuous tithingman in his pious ardor of office
+inadvertently applied the wrong end, the end with the heavy knob, the
+masculine end, to a drowsy matron's head; and for this severely ungallant
+mistake he was cautioned by the ruling elders to thereafter use "more
+discresing and less heist."
+
+Another over-watchful Newbury "awakener" rapped on the head a nodding man
+who protested indignantly that he was wide-awake, and was only bowing in
+solemn assent and approval of the minister's arguments. Roger Scott, of
+Lynn, in 1643 struck the tithingman who thus roughly and suddenly wakened
+him; and poor sleepy and bewildered Roger, who is branded through all time
+as "a common sleeper at the publick exercise," was, for this most naturally
+resentful act, but also most shockingly grave offence, soundly whipped, as
+a warning both to keep awake and not to strike back in meeting.
+
+Obadiah Turner, of Lynn, gives in his Journal a sad, sad disclosure of
+total depravity which was exposed by one of these sudden church-awakenings,
+and the story is best told in the journalist's own vivid words:--
+
+"June 3, 1616.--Allen Bridges hath bin chose to wake ye sleepers in
+meeting. And being much proude of his place, must needs have a fox taile
+fixed to ye ende of a long staff wherewith he may brush ye faces of them yt
+will have napps in time of discourse, likewise a sharpe thorne whereby he
+may pricke such as be most sound. On ye last Lord his day, as hee strutted
+about ye meeting-house, he did spy Mr. Tomlins sleeping with much comfort,
+hys head kept steadie by being in ye corner, and his hand grasping ye rail.
+And soe spying, Allen did quickly thrust his staff behind Dame Ballard and
+give him a grievous prick upon ye hand. Whereupon Mr. Tomlins did spring
+vpp mch above ye floore, and with terrible force strike hys hand against
+ye wall; and also, to ye great wonder of all, prophanlie exclaim in a loud
+voice, curse ye wood-chuck, he dreaming so it seemed yt a wood-chuck had
+seized and bit his hand. But on coming to know where he was, and ye greate
+scandall he had committed, he seemed much abashed, but did not speak. And I
+think he will not soon again goe to sleepe in meeting."
+
+How clear the picture! Can you not see it?--the warm June sunlight
+streaming in through the narrow, dusty windows of the old meeting-house;
+the armed watcher at the door; the Puritan men and women in their
+sad-colored mantles seated sternly upright on the hard narrow benches; the
+black-gowned minister, the droning murmur of whose sleepy voice mingles
+with the out-door sounds of the rustle of leafy branches, the song of
+summer birds, the hum of buzzing insects, and the muffled stamping of
+horses' feet; the restless boys on the pulpit-stairs; the tired, sleeping
+Puritan with his head thrown back in the corner of the pew; the vain,
+strutting, tithingman with his fantastic and thornéd staff of office; and
+then--the sudden, electric wakening, and the consternation of the whole
+staid and pious congregation at such terrible profanity in the house of
+God. Ah!--it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the
+quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all
+well, just as I saw it last summer in June.
+
+Another catastrophe from too fierce zeal on the part of the tithingman
+is recorded. An old farmer, worn out with a hard Saturday's work at
+sheep-washing, fell asleep ere the hour-glass had once been turned. Though
+he was a man of dignity, for he sat in his own pew, he could not escape the
+rod of the pragmatical tithingman. Being rudely disturbed, but not wholly
+wakened, the bewildered sheep-farmer sprung to his feet, seized his
+astonished and mortified wife by the shoulders and shook her violently,
+shouting at the top of his voice, "Haw back! haw back! Stand still, will
+ye?" Poor goodman and goodwife! many years elapsed ere they recovered from
+that keen disgrace.
+
+The ministers encouraged and urged the tithingmen to faithfully perform
+their allotted work. One early minister "did not love sleepers in ye
+meeting-house, and would stop short in ye exercise and call pleasantlie to
+wake ye sleepers, and once of a warm Summer afternoon he did take hys hat
+off from ye pegg in ye beam, and put it on, saying he would go home and
+feed his fowles and come back again, and maybe their sleepe would be ended,
+and they readie to hear ye remainder of hys discourse." Another time he
+suggested that they might like better the Church of England service of
+sitting down and standing up, and we can be sure that this "was competent
+to keepe their eyes open for a twelvemonth."
+
+All this was in the church of Mr. Whiting, of Lynn, a somewhat jocose
+Puritan,--if jocularity in a Puritan is not too anomalous an attribute
+to have ever existed. We can be sure that there was neither sleeping nor
+jesting allusion to such an irreverence in Mr. Mather's, Mr. Welde's, or
+Mr. Cotton's meetings. In many rigidly severe towns, as in Portsmouth in
+1662 and in Boston in 1667, it was ordered by the selectmen as a proper
+means of punishment that a "cage be made or some other means invented for
+such as sleepe on the Lord's Daie." Perhaps they woke the offender up and
+rudely and summarily dragged him out and caged him at once and kept him
+thus prisoned throughout the nooning,--a veritable jail-bird.
+
+A rather unconventional and eccentric preacher in Newbury awoke one sleeper
+in a most novel manner. The first name of the sleeping man was Mark, and
+the preacher in his sermon made use of these Biblical words: "I say unto
+you, mark the perfect man and behold the upright." But in the midst of his
+low, monotonous sermon-voice he roared out the word "mark" in a loud shout
+that brought the dozing Mark to his feet, bewildered but wide awake.
+
+Mr. Moody, of York, Maine, employed a similar device to awaken and mortify
+the sleepers in meeting. He shouted "Fire, fire, fire!" and when the
+startled and blinking men jumped up, calling out "Where?" he roared back in
+turn, "In hell, for sleeping sinners." Rev. Mr. Phillips, of Andover, in
+1755, openly rebuked his congregation for "sleeping away a great part of
+the sermon;" and on the Sunday following an earthquake shock which was felt
+throughout New England, he said he hoped the "Glorious Lord of the Sabbath
+had given them such a shaking as would keep them awake through one
+sermon-time." Other and more autocratic parsons did not hesitate to call
+out their sleeping parishioners plainly by name, sternly telling them also
+to "Wake up!" A minister in Brunswick, Maine, thus pointedly wakened one of
+his sweet-sleeping church-attendants, a man of some dignity and standing
+in the community, and received the shocking and tautological answer, "Mind
+your own business, and go on with your sermon."
+
+The women would sometimes nap a little without being discovered. "Ye women
+may sometimes sleepe and none know by reason of their enormous bonnets. Mr.
+Whiting doth pleasantlie say from ye pulpit hee doth seeme to be preaching
+to stacks of straw with men among them."
+
+From this seventeenth-century comment upon the size of the women's bonnets,
+it may be seen that objections to women's overwhelming and obscuring
+headgear in public assemblies are not entirely complaining protests of
+modern growth. Other records refer to the annoyance from the exaggerated
+size of bonnets. In 1769 the church in Andover openly "put to vote whether
+the parish Disapprove of the Female sex sitting with their Hats on in the
+Meeting-house in time of Divine Service as being Indecent." The parish did
+Disapprove, with a capital D, for the vote passed in the affirmative. There
+is no record, however, to tell whether the Indecent fashion was abandoned,
+but I warrant no tithingman was powerful enough to make Andover women take
+off their proudly worn Sunday bonnets if they did not want to. Another town
+voted that it was the "Town's Mind" that the women should take off their
+bonnets and "hang them on the peggs," as did the men their headgear. But
+the Town's Mind was not a Woman's Mind; and the big-bonnet wearers, vain
+though they were Puritans, did as they pleased with their own bonnets.
+And indeed, in spite of votes and in spite of expostulations, the female
+descendants of the Puritans, through constantly recurring waves of fashion,
+have ever since been indecently wearing great obscuring hats and bonnets in
+public assemblies, even up to the present day.
+
+The tithingman had other duties than awakening the sleepers and looking
+after "the boyes that playes and rapping those boyes,"--in short, seeing
+that every one was attentive in meeting except himself,--and the duties
+and powers of the office varied in different communities. Several of these
+officers were appointed in each parish. In Newbury, in 1688, there were
+twenty tithingmen, and in Salem twenty-five. They were men of authority,
+not only on Sunday, but throughout the entire week. Each had several
+neighboring families (usually ten, as the word "tithing" would signify)
+under his charge to watch during the week, to enforce the learning of the
+catechism at home, especially by the children, and sometimes he heard them
+"Say their Chatachize." These families he also watched specially on the
+Sabbath, and reported whether all the members thereof attended public
+worship. Not content with mounting guard over the boys on Sundays, he also
+watched on weekdays to keep boys and "all persons from swimming in the
+water." Do you think his duties were light in July and August, when school
+was out, to watch the boys of ten families? One man watching one family
+cannot prevent such "violations of the peace" in country towns now-a-days.
+He sometimes inspected the "ordinaries" and made complaint of any disorders
+which he there discovered, and gave in the names of "idle tiplers and
+gamers," and he could warn the tavern-keeper to sell no more liquor to any
+toper whom he knew or fancied was drinking too heavily. Josselyn complained
+bitterly that during his visit to New England in 1663 at "houses of
+entertainment called ordinaries into which a stranger went, he was
+presently followed by one appointed to that office who would thrust himself
+into his company uninvited, and if he called for more drink than the
+officer thought in his judgment he could soberly bear away, he would
+presently countermand it, and appoint the proportion beyond which he could
+not get one drop." The tithingman had a "spetial eye-out" on all bachelors,
+who were also carefully spied upon by the constables, deacons, elders,
+and heads of families in general. He might, perhaps, help to collect the
+ministerial rate, though his principal duty was by no means the collecting
+of tithes. He "worned peple out of ye towne." This warning was not at all
+because the new-comers were objectionable or undesired, but was simply a
+legal form of precaution, so that the parish would never be liable for the
+keeping of the "worned" ones in case they thereafter became paupers. He
+administered the "oath of fidelity" to new inhabitants. The tithingman
+also watched to see that "no young people walked abroad on the eve of the
+Sabbath,"--that is, on a Saturday night. He also marked and reported all
+those "who lye at home," and others who "prophanely behaved, lingered
+without dores at meeting time on the Lordes Daie," all the "sons of Belial
+strutting about, setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the
+day." These last two classes of offenders were first admonished by the
+tithingman, then "Sett in stocks," and then cited before the Court. They
+were also confined in the cage on the meeting-house green, with the Lord's
+Day sleepers. The tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode at too
+fast a pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who "walked or
+rode unnecessarily on the Sabath." Great and small alike were under his
+control, as this notice from the "Columbian Centinel" of December, 1789,
+abundantly proves. It is entitled "The President and the Tything man:"--
+
+    "The President, on his return to New York from his late tour through
+    Connecticut, having missed his way on Saturday, was obliged to ride a
+    few miles on Sunday morning in order to gain the town at which he had
+    previously proposed to have attended divine service. Before he arrived
+    however he was met by a Tything man, who commanding him to stop,
+    demanded the occasion of his riding; and it was not until the President
+    had informed him of every circumstance and promised to go no further
+    than the town intended that the Tything man would permit him to proceed
+    on his journey."
+
+Various were the subterfuges to outwit the tithingman and elude his
+vigilance on the Sabbath. We all remember the amusing incident in "Oldtown
+Folks." A similar one really happened. Two gay young sparks driving through
+the town on the Sabbath were stopped by the tithingman; one offender said
+mournfully in excuse of his Sabbath travel, "My grandmother is lying dead
+in the next town." Being allowed to drive on, he stood up in his wagon when
+at a safe distance and impudently shouted back, "And she's been lying dead
+in the graveyard there for thirty years."
+
+Thus it may be seen that the ancient tithingman was pre-eminently a general
+_snook_, to use an old and expressive word,--an informer, both in and
+out of meeting,--a very necessary, but somewhat odious, and certainly at
+times very absurd officer. He was in a degree a constable, a selectman, a
+teacher, a tax-collector, an inspector, a sexton, a home-watcher, and above
+all, a Puritan Bumble, whose motto was _Hie et ubique_. He was, in
+fact, a general law-enforcer and order-keeper, whose various duties,
+wherever still necessary and still performed, are now apportioned to
+several individuals. The ecclesiastical functions and authority of the
+tithingman lingered long after the civil powers had been removed or had
+gradually passed away from his office. Persons are now living who in their
+early and unruly youth were rapped at and pointed at by a New England
+tithingman when they laughed or were noisy in meeting.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Length of the Service.
+
+
+Watches were unknown in the early colonial days of New England, and for a
+long time after their introduction both watches and clocks were costly and
+rare. John Davenport of New Haven, who died in 1670, left a clock to his
+heirs; and E. Needham, who died in 1677, left a "Striking clock, a watch,
+and a Larum that dus not Strike," worth £5; these are perhaps the first
+records of the ownership of clocks and watches in New England. The time of
+the day was indicated to our forefathers in their homes by "noon marks" on
+the floor or window-seats, and by picturesque sundials; and in the
+civil and religious meetings the passage of time was marked by a strong
+brass-bound hour-glass, which stood on a desk below or beside the pulpit,
+or which was raised on a slender iron rod and standard, so that all the
+members of the congregation could easily watch "the sands that ran i' the
+clock's behalf." By the side of the desk sat, on the Sabbath, a sexton,
+clerk, or tithingman, whose duty it was to turn the hour-glass as often
+as the sands ran out. This was a very ostentatious way of reminding the
+clergyman how long he had preached; but if it were a hint to bring the
+discourse to an end, it was never heeded; for contemporary historical
+registers tell of most painfully long sermons, reaching up through long
+sub-divisions and heads to "twenty-seventhly" and "twenty-eighthly."
+
+At the planting of the first church in Woburn, Massachusetts, the Rev.
+Mr. Symmes showed his godliness and endurance (and proved that of his
+parishioners also) by preaching between four and five hours. Sermons which
+occupied two or three hours were customary enough. One old Scotch clergyman
+in Vermont, in the early years of this century, bitterly and fiercely
+resented the "popish innovation and Sabbath profanation" of a Sunday-school
+for the children, which some daring and progressive parishioners proposed
+to hold at the "nooning." This canny Parson Whiteinch very craftily and
+somewhat maliciously prolonged his morning sermons until they each occupied
+three hours; thus he shortened the time between the two services to about
+half an hour, and victoriously crowded out the Sunday-school innovators,
+who had barely time to eat their cold lunch and care for their waiting
+horses, ere it was time for the afternoon service to begin. But one man
+cannot stop the tide, though he may keep it for a short time from one
+guarded and sheltered spot; and the rebellious Vermont congregation, after
+two or three years of tedious three-hour sermons, arose in a body and
+crowded out the purposely prolix preacher, and established the wished-for
+Sunday-school. The vanquished parson thereafter sullenly spent the noonings
+in the horse-shed, to which he ostentatiously carried the big church-Bible
+in order that it might not be at the service of the profaning teachers.
+
+An irreverent caricature of the colonial days represents a phenomenally
+long-preaching clergyman as turning the hour-glass by the side of his
+pulpit and addressing his congregation thus, "Come! you are all good
+fellows, we'll take another glass together!" It is recorded of Rev. Urian
+Oakes that often the hour-glass was turned four times during one of his
+sermons. The warning legend, "Be Short," which Cotton Mather inscribed over
+his study door was not written over his pulpit; for he wrote in his diary
+that at his own ordination he prayed for an hour and a quarter, and
+preached for an hour and three quarters. Added to the other ordination
+exercises these long Mather addresses must have been tiresome enough.
+Nathaniel Ward deplored at that time, "Wee have a strong weakness in New
+England that when wee are speaking, wee know not how to conclude: wee make
+many ends before wee make an end."
+
+Dr. Lord of Norwich always made a prayer which was one hour long; and an
+early Dutch traveller who visited New England asserted that he had heard
+there on Fast Day a prayer which was two hours long. These long prayers
+were universal and most highly esteemed,--a "poor gift in prayer" being a
+most deplored and even despised clerical short-coming. Had not the Puritans
+left the Church of England to escape "stinted prayers"? Whitefield prayed
+openly for Parson Barrett of Hopkinton, who could pray neither freely, nor
+well, that "God would open this dumb dog's mouth;" and everywhere in the
+Puritan Church, precatory eloquence as evinced in long prayers was felt to
+be the greatest glory of the minister, and the highest tribute to God.
+
+In nearly all the churches the assembled people stood during prayer-time
+(since kneeling and bowing the head savored of Romish idolatry) and in the
+middle of his petition the minister usually made a long pause in order that
+any who were infirm or ill might let down their slamming pew-seats and sit
+down; those who were merely weary stood patiently to the long and painfully
+deferred end. This custom of standing during prayer-time prevailed in the
+Congregational churches in New England until quite a recent date, and is
+not yet obsolete in isolated communities and in solitary cases. I have seen
+within a few years, in a country church, a feeble, white-haired old deacon
+rise tremblingly at the preacher's solemn words "Let us unite in prayer,"
+and stand with bowed head throughout the long prayer; thus pathetically
+clinging to the reverent custom of the olden time, he rendered tender
+tribute to vanished youth, gave equal tribute to eternal hope and faith,
+and formed a beautiful emblem of patient readiness for the last solemn
+summons.
+
+Sometimes tedious expounding of the Scriptures and long "prophesying"
+lengthened out the already too long service. Judge Sewall recorded that
+once when he addressed or expounded at the Plymouth Church, "being afraid
+to look at the glass, ignorantly and unwittingly I stood two hours and a
+half," which was doing pretty well for a layman.
+
+The members of the early churches did not dislike these long preachings and
+prophesyings; they would have regarded a short sermon as irreligious,
+and lacking in reverence, and besides, would have felt that they had not
+received in it their full due, their full money's worth. They often fell
+asleep and were fiercely awakened by the tithingman, and often they could
+not have understood the verbose and grandiose language of the preacher.
+They were in an icy-cold atmosphere in winter, and in glaring, unshaded
+heat in summer, and upon most uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at
+all seasons; but in every record and journal which I have read, throughout
+which ministers and laymen recorded all the annoyances and opposition which
+the preachers encountered, I have never seen one entry of any complaint or
+ill-criticism of too long praying or preaching. Indeed, when Rev. Samuel
+Torrey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, prayed two hours without stopping, upon
+a public Fast Day in 1696, it is recorded that his audience only wished
+that the prayer had been much longer.
+
+When we consider the training and exercise in prayer that the New England
+parsons had in their pulpits on Sundays, in their own homes on Saturday
+nights, on Lecture Days and Fast Days and Training Days, and indeed upon
+all times and occasions, can we wonder at Parson Boardman's prowess in New
+Milford in 1735? He visited a "praying" Indian's home wherein lay a sick
+papoose over whom a "pow-wow" was being held by a medicine-man at the
+request of the squaw-mother, who was still a heathen. The Christian warrior
+determined to fight the Indian witch-doctor on his own grounds, and while
+the medicine-man was screaming and yelling and dancing in order to cast the
+devil out ol the child, the parson began to pray with equal vigor and power
+of lungs to cast out the devil of a medicine-man. As the prayer and
+pow-wow proceeded the neighboring Indians gathered around, and soon became
+seriously alarmed for the success of their prophet. The battle raged for
+three hours, when the pow-wow ended, and the disgusted and exhausted Indian
+ran out of the wigwam and jumped into the Housatonic River to cool his
+heated blood, leaving the Puritan minister triumphant in the belief, and
+indeed with positive proof, that he could pray down any man or devil.
+
+The colonists could not leave the meeting-house before the long sen ices
+were ended, even had they wished, for the tithingman allowed no deserters.
+In Salem, in 1676, it was "ordered by ye Selectmen yt the three Constables
+doe attend att ye three greate doores of ye meeting-house every Lordes Day
+att ye end of ye sermon, both forenoone and afternoone, and to keep ye
+doores fast and suffer none to goe out before ye whole exercises bee
+ended." Thus Salem people had to listen to no end of praying and
+prophesying from their ministers and elders for they "couldn't get out."
+
+As the years passed on, the church attendants became less referential and
+much more impatient and fearless, and soon after the Revolutionary War one
+man in Medford made a bargain with his minister--Rev. Dr. Osgood--that he
+would attend regularly the church services every Sunday morning, provided
+he could always leave at twelve o'clock. On each Sabbath thereafter, as
+the obstinate preacher would not end his sermon one minute sooner than
+his habitual time, which was long after twelve, the equally stubborn
+limited-time worshipper arose at noon, as he had stipulated, and stalked
+noisily out of meeting.
+
+A minister about to preach in a neighboring parish was told of a custom
+which prevailed there of persons who lived at a distance rising and leaving
+the house ere the sermon was ended. He determined to teach them a lesson,
+and announced that he would preach the first part of his sermon to the
+sinners, and the latter part to the saints, and that the sinners would of
+course all leave as soon as their portion had been delivered. Every soul
+remained until the end of the service.
+
+At last, when other means of entertainment and recreation than church-going
+became common, and other forms of public addresses than sermons were
+frequently given, New England church-goers became so restless and
+rebellious under the regime of hour-long prayers and indefinitely
+protracted sermons that the long services were gradually condensed and
+curtailed, to the relief of both preacher and hearers.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House.
+
+
+
+In colonial days in New England the long and tedious services must have
+been hard to endure in the unheated churches in bitter winter weather, so
+bitter that, as Judge Sewall pathetically recorded, "The communion bread
+was frozen pretty hard and rattled sadly into the plates." Sadly down
+through the centuries is ringing in our ears the gloomy rattle of that
+frozen sacramental bread on the Church plate, telling to us the solemn
+story of the austere and comfortless church-life of our ancestors. Would
+that the sound could bring to our chilled hearts the same steadfast and
+pure Christian faith that made their gloomy, freezing services warm with
+God's loving presence!
+
+Again Judge Sewall wrote: "Extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow. Blows
+much more as coming home at Noon, and so holds on. Bread was frozen at
+Lord's Table. Though 't was so cold John Tuckerman was baptized. At six
+o'clock my ink freezes, so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my
+Wives chamber. Yet was very Comfortable at Meeting." In the penultimate
+sentence of this quotation may be found the clue and explanation of the
+seemingly incredible assertion in the last sentence. The reason why he was
+comfortable in church was that he was accustomed to sit in cold rooms; even
+with the great open-mouthed and open-chimneyed fireplaces full of blazing
+logs, so little heat entered the rooms of colonial dwelling-houses that one
+could not be warm unless fairly within the chimney-place; and thus, even
+while sitting by the fire, his ink froze. Another entry of Judge Sewall's
+tells of an exceeding cold day when there was "Great Coughing" in meeting,
+and yet a new-born baby was brought into the icy church to be baptized.
+Children were always carried to the meeting-house for baptism the first
+Sunday after birth, even in the most bitter weather. There are no entries
+in Judge Sewall's diary which exhibit him in so lovable and gentle a light
+as the records of the baptism of his fourteen children,--his pride when
+the child did not cry out or shrink from the water in the freezing winter
+weather, thus early showing true Puritan fortitude; and also his noble
+resolves and hopes for their future. On this especially cold day when a
+baby was baptized, the minister prayed for a mitigation of the weather,
+and on the same day in another town "Rev. Mr. Wigglesworth preached on the
+text, Who can stand before His Cold? Then by his own and people's sickness
+three Sabbaths passed without public Worship." February 20 he preached from
+these words: "He sends forth his word and thaws them." And the very next
+day a thaw set in which was regarded as a direct answer to his prayer and
+sermon. Sceptics now-a-days would suggest that he chose well the time to
+pray for milder weather.
+
+Many persons now living can remember the universal and noisy turning up
+of great-coat collars, the swinging of arms, and knocking together of the
+heavy-booted feet of the listeners towards the end of a long winter sermon.
+Dr. Hopkins used to say, when the noisy tintamarre began, "My hearers, have
+a little patience, and I will soon close."
+
+Another clergyman was irritated beyond endurance by the stamping,
+clattering feet, a _supplosio pedis_ that he regarded as an irreverent
+protest and complaint against the severity of the weather, rather than as a
+hint to him to conclude his long sermon. He suddenly and noisily closed his
+sermon-book, leaned forward out of his high pulpit, and thundered out these
+Biblical words of rebuke at his freezing congregation, whose startled faces
+stared up at him through dense clouds of vapor. "Out of whose womb came the
+ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are
+hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Knowest thou the
+ordinance of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?
+Great things doth God which we cannot comprehend. He saith to the snow, Be
+thou on the earth. By the breath of God frost is given. He causeth it to
+come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. Hearken unto
+this. _Stand still_, and consider the wondrous works of God." We can
+believe that he roared out the words "stand still," and that there was no
+more noise in that meeting-house on cold Sundays during the remainder of
+that winter.
+
+The ministers might well argue that no one suffered more from the freezing
+atmosphere than they did. In many records I find that they were forced to
+preach and pray with their hands cased in woollen or fur mittens or heavy
+knit gloves; and they wore long camlet cloaks in the pulpit and covered
+their heads with skull caps--as did Judge Sewall--and possibly wore, as he
+did also, a _hood_. Many a wig-hating minister must, in the Arctic
+meeting-house, have longed secretly for the grateful warmth to his head and
+neck of one of those "horrid Bushes of Vanity," a full-bottomed flowing
+wig.
+
+On bitter winter days Dr. Stevens of Kittery used to send a servant to the
+meeting-house to find out how many of his flock had braved the piercing
+blasts. If only seven persons were present, the servant asked them to
+return with him to the parsonage to listen to the sermon; but if there were
+eight members in the meeting-house he so reported to the Doctor, who then
+donned his long worsted cloak, tied it around his waist with a great
+handkerchief, and attired thus, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears,
+and with heavy mittens on his hands, ploughed through the deep snow to
+the church, and in the same dress preached his long, knotty sermon in
+his pulpit, while fierce wintry blasts rattled the windows and shook the
+turret, and the eight godly, shivering souls wished profoundly that one of
+their number had "lain at home in a slothfull, lazey, prophane way," and
+thus permitted the seven others and the minister to have the sermon in
+comfort in the parsonage kitchen before the great blazing logs in the open
+fireplace.
+
+Ah, it makes one shiver even to think of those gloomy churches, growing
+colder, and more congealed through weeks of heavy frost and fierce
+northwesters until they bore the chill of death itself. One can but
+wonder whether that fell scourge of New England, that hereditary
+curse--consumption--did not have its first germs evolved and nourished in
+our Puritan ancestors by the Spartan custom of sitting through the long
+winter services in the icy, death-like meeting-houses.
+
+Of the insufficient clothing of the church attendants of olden times it
+is unnecessary to speak with much detail. The goodmen with their heavy
+top-boots or jack-boots, their milled or frieze stockings, their warm
+periwigs surmounted by fur caps or beaver hats or hoods; and with their
+many-caped great-coats or full round cloaks were dressed with a sufficient
+degree of comfort, though they did not possess the warm woollen and silken
+underclothing which now make a man's winter attire so comfortable. They
+carried muffs too, as the advertisements of the times show. The "Boston
+News Letter" of 1716 offers a reward for a man's muff lost on the Sabbath
+day in the street. In 1725 Dr. Prince lost his black bearskin muff, and in
+1740 a "sableskin man's muff" was advertised as having been lost.
+
+But the Puritan goodwives and maidens were dressed in a meagre and scanty
+fashion that when now considered seems fairly appalling. As soon as
+the colonies grew in wealth and fashion, thin silk or cotton hose were
+frequently worn in midwinter by the wives and daughters of well-to-do
+colonists; and correspondingly thin cloth or kid or silk slippers,
+high-channelled pumps, or low shoes with paper soles and "cross-cut" or
+wooden heels were the holiday and Sabbath-day covering for the feet. In wet
+weather clogs and pattens formed an extra and much needed protection
+when the fair colonists walked. Linen underclothing formed the first
+superstructure of the feminine costume and threw its penetrating chill to
+the very marrow of the bones. Often in mid-winter the scant-skirted French
+calico gowns were made with short elbow sleeves and round, low necks, and
+the throat and shoulders were lightly covered with thin lawn neckerchiefs
+or dimity tuckers. The flaunting hooped-petticoat of another decade was
+worn with a silk or brocade sacque. A thin cloth cape or mantle or spencer,
+lined with sarcenet silk, was frequently the only covering for the
+shoulders. In examining the treasured contents of old wardrobes, trunks,
+and high-chests, and in reading the descriptions of women's winter attire
+worn throughout the eighteenth and half through the nineteenth century, I
+am convinced that the only portions of Puritan female anatomy that were
+clothed with anything approaching respectable regard for health in the
+inclement New England climate were the head and the hands. The hands of
+"New English dames" were carefully protected with embroidered kid or
+leather gloves (for the early New Englanders were great glove wearers) or
+with warm knit woollen mittens, though mittens for women's wear were
+always fingerless. The well-gloved hands were moreover warmly ensconced in
+enormous stuffed muffs of bearskin which were almost as large as a
+flour barrel, or in smaller muffs of rabbit-skin or mink or beaver. The
+goodwives' heads bore, besides the close caps so universally worn, mufflers
+and veils and hoods,--hoods of all kinds and descriptions, from the hoods
+of serge and camlet and gauze and black silk that Mistress Estabrook, wife
+of the Windham parson, proudly owned and wore, from the prohibited "silk
+and tiffany hoods" of the earliest planters down through the centuries'
+inflorescence of "hoods of crimson colored persian," "wild bore and hum-hum
+long hoods," "pointed velvet capuchins," "scarlet gipsys," "pinnered
+and tasselled hoods," "shirred lustring hoods," "hoods of rich pptuna,"
+"muskmelon hoods," to the warm quilted "punkin hoods" worn within this
+century in country churches. These "punkin-hoods" were quilted with great
+rolls of woollen wadding and drawn tight between the rolls with strong
+cords. They formed a deafening and heating head-covering which always had
+to be loosened and thrust back when the wearer was within doors. It
+was only equalled in shapeless clumsiness and unique ugliness by its
+summer-sister of the same date, the green silk calash,--that funniest and
+quaintest of all New England feminine headgear,--a great sunshade that
+could not be called a bonnet, always made of bright green silk shirred on
+strong lengths of rattan or whalebone, and extendible after the fashion of
+a chaise top. It could be drawn out over the face by a little green ribbon
+or "bridle" that was fastened to the extreme front at the top; or it could
+be pushed in a close-gathered mass on the back of the head These calashes
+were frequently a foot and a half in diameter, and thus stood well up from
+the head and did not disarrange the hair nor crush the headdress or cap.
+They formed a perfect and easily-adjusted shade from the sun. Masks, too,
+the fair Puritans wore to further protect their heads and faces,--masks of
+green silk or black vehet, with silver mouthpieces to place within the lips
+and thus enable the wearer to keep the mask firmly in place. Sometimes two
+little strings with a silver bead at one end were fastened to the mask, and
+seined as mouthpieces. With a string and bead at either corner of the
+mouth the mask-wearer could talk quite freely while still retaining her
+face-covering in its protecting position. These masks were never worn
+within doors. In the list of goods ordered by George Washington from Europe
+for his fair bride Martha were several of these riding-masks, and the kind
+step-father even ordered a supply of small masks for "Miss Custis," his
+little step-daughter.
+
+In bitter winter weather women carried to meeting little
+foot-stoves,--metal boxes which stood on legs and were filled with hot
+coals at home, and a second time during the morning from the hearthstone of
+a neighboring farm-house or a noon-house. These foot-warmers helped to make
+endurable to the goodwives the icy chill of the meeting-house; and round
+their mother's foot-stove the shivering little children sat on their low
+crickets, warming their half-frozen fingers.
+
+Some of these foot-stoves were really pretentious church-furnishings. I
+have seen one "brassen foot-stove" which had the owner's cipher cut out of
+the sheet metal, and from the side was hung a wrought brass chain. By this
+chain, a century ago, the shining polished brass stove was carried into
+church in the hands of a liveried black man, who held it ostentatiously at
+arms' length, that neither ash nor scorch might touch his scarlet velvet
+breeches. And after he had tucked it under my lady's tiny feet as she sat
+in her pew, he retired to his freezing loft high up among the beams,--the
+"Nigger Pew,"--where, I am sorry to record, he more than once solaced and
+warmed himself with a bottle of "kill-devil" which he had smuggled into
+church, until he fell ignominiously asleep and his drunken snores so
+disturbed the minister and the congregation, that two tithingmen were
+forced to climb the ladder-like staircase and pull him down and out of
+the church and to the neighboring tavern to sleep off the effects of the
+liquor. For being "a man and a brother" and, above all, in spite of his
+petty idiosyncrasies, a very good and cherished servant, he could not be
+thrust out into the snow to freeze to death.
+
+But with the extreme Puritan contempt of comfort even foot-stoves were
+not always allowed. The First Church of Roxbury, after having one church
+edifice destroyed by fire in 1747, prohibited the use of footstoves in
+meeting, and the Roxbury matrons sat with frozen toes in their fine new
+meeting-house. The Old South Church of Boston was not so rigid, though it
+felt the same dread of fire; for we find this entry on the records of the
+church under the date of January 10, 1771: "Whereas, danger is apprehended
+from the [foot] stoves that arc frequently left in the meeting-house after
+the publick worship is over; Voted, that the Saxton make diligent search on
+the Lord's Day evening and in the evening after a lecture, to see if any
+stoves are left in the house, and that if he find any there he take them
+to his own house; and it is expected that the owners of such stoves make
+reasonable satisfaction to the Saxton for his trouble before they take them
+away."
+
+In Hardwicke, in 1792, it was ordered that "no stows be carried into our
+new meeting-house with fire in them." The Hardwicke women may have found
+comfort in a contrivance which is thus described in by an "old inhabitant:"
+
+      "There to warm their feet
+  Was seen an article now obsolete,
+  A sort of basket tub of braided straw
+  Or husks, in which is placed a heated stone,
+  Which does half-frozen limbs superbly thaw.
+  And warms the marrow of the oldest bone."
+
+In some of the early, poorly built log meeting-houses, fur bags made of
+coarse skins, such as wolf-skin, were nailed or tied to the edges of the
+benches, and into these bags the worshippers thrust their feet for warmth.
+In some communities it was the custom for each family to bring on cold days
+its "dogg" to meeting; where, lying at or on his master's feet, he proved
+a source of grateful warmth. These animal stoves became such an abounding
+nuisance, however, that dog-whippers had to be appointed to serve on
+Sundays to drive out the dogs. All through the records of the early
+churches we find such entries as this: "Whatsoever doggs come into the
+meeting-house in time of public worship, their owners shall each pay
+sixpence." Sixpence seems little, but the thrifty and poor Puritans would
+rather freeze their toes than pay sixpence for their calorific dogs.
+
+The church members made many rules and regulations to keep the cold out of
+the meeting-house during service-time, or perhaps we should say to keep the
+wind out. Thus in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1725 it was ordered that the
+"several doors of the meeting-house be taken care of and kept shut in very
+cold and windy seasons according to the lying of the wind from time to
+time; and that people in such windy weather come in at the leeward doors
+only, and take care that they are easily shut both to prevent the breaking
+of the doors and the making of a noise." In other churches it was ordered
+that "no doors be opened to the windward and only one door to the leeward"
+during winter weather.
+
+The first church of Salem built a "cattied chimney twelve feet long" in its
+meeting-house in 1662, but five years later it was removed, perhaps through
+the colonists' dread lest the building be destroyed by a conflagration
+caused by the combustible nature of the materials of which the chimney was
+composed. Felt, in his "Annals of Salem," asserts that the First Church of
+Boston was the first New England congregation to have a stove for heating
+the meeting-house at the time of public worship; this was in 1773. This
+statement is incorrect. Mr. Judd says the Hadley church had an iron stove
+in their meeting-house as early as 1734--the Hadley people were such
+sybarites and novelty-lovers in those early days! The Old South Church of
+Boston followed in the luxurious fashion in 1783, and the "Evening Post"
+of January 25, 1783, contained a poem of which these four lines show the
+criticising and deprecating spirit:--
+
+  "Extinct the sacred fire of love,
+    Our zeal grown cold and dead,
+  In the house of God we fix a stove
+    To warm us in their stead."
+
+Other New England congregations piously froze during service-time well into
+this century. The Longmeadow church, early in the field, had a stove in
+1810; the Salem people in 1815; and the Medford meeting in 1820. The church
+in Brimfield in 1819 refused to pay for a stove, but ordered as some
+sacrifice to the desire for comfort, two extra doors placed on the
+gallery-stairs to keep out draughts; but when in that town, a few years
+later, a subscription was made to buy a church stove, one old member
+refused to contribute, saying "good preaching kept him hot enough without
+stoves."
+
+As all the church edifices were built without any thought of the
+possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best
+they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually
+placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters,
+there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous
+stove-pipes that too often spread, from every leaky and ill-fastened
+joint, smoke and sooty vapors, and sometimes pyroligneous drippings on the
+congregation. Often tin pails to catch the drippings were hung under the
+stove-pipes, forming a further chaste and elegant church-decoration. Many
+serious objections were made to the stoves besides the aesthetic ones.
+It was alleged that they would be the means of starting many destructive
+conflagrations; that they caused severe headaches in the church attendants;
+and worst of all, that the _heat warped the ladies' tortoise-shell
+back-combs_.
+
+The church reformers contended, on the other hand, that no one could
+properly receive spiritual comfort while enduring such decided bodily
+discomfort. They hoped that with increased physical warmth, fervor in
+religion would be equally augmented,--that, as Cowper wrote,--
+
+  "The churches warmed, they would no longer hold
+  Such frozen figures, stiff as they are cold."
+
+Many were the quarrels and discussions that arose in New England
+communities over the purchase and use of stoves, and many were the meetings
+held and votes taken upon the important subject.
+
+"Peter Parley"--Mr. Samuel Goodrich--gave, in his "Recollections," a very
+amusing account of the sufferings endured by the wife of an anti-stove
+deacon. She came to church with a look of perfect resignation on the
+Sabbath of the stove's introduction, and swept past the unwelcome intruder
+with averted head, and into her pew. She sat there through the service,
+growing paler with the unaccustomed heat, until the minister's words about
+"heaping coals of fire" brought too keen a sense of the overwhelming and
+unhealthful stove-heat to her mind, and she fainted. She was carried out of
+church, and upon recovering said languidly that it "was the heat from the
+stove." A most complete and sudden resuscitation was effected, however,
+when she was informed of the fact that no fire had as yet been lighted in
+the new church-furnishing.
+
+Similar chronicles exist about other New England churches, and bear a
+striking resemblance to each other. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in an address
+delivered in New York on December 20, 1853, the anniversary of the Landing
+of the Pilgrims, referred to the opposition made to the introduction of
+stoves into the old meeting-house in Litchfield, Connecticut, during the
+ministry of his father, and gave an amusing account of the results of the
+introgression. This allusion called up many reminiscences of anti-stove
+wars, and a writer in the "New York Enquirer" told the same story of the
+fainting woman in Litchfield meeting, who began to fan herself and at
+length swooned, saying when she recovered "that the heat of the horrid
+stove had caused her to faint." A correspondent of the "Cleveland Herald"
+confirmed the fact that the fainting episode occurred in the Litchfield
+meeting-house. The editor of the "Hartford Daily Courant" thus added his
+testimony:--
+
+    "Violent opposition had been made to the introduction of a stove in the
+    old meeting-house, and an attempt made in vain to induce the soc
+    to purchase one. The writer was one of seven young men who finally
+    purchased a stove and requested permission to put it up in the
+    meeting-house on trial. After much difficulty the committee consented.
+    It was all arranged on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday we took our
+    seats in the Bass, rather earlier than usual, to see the fun. It was a
+    warm November Sunday, in which the sun shone cheerfully and warmly on
+    the old south steps and into the naked windows. The stove stood in the
+    middle aisle, rather in front of the Tenor Gallery. People came in and
+    stared. Good old Deacon Trowbridge, one of the most simple-hearted and
+    worthy men of that generation, had, as Mr. Beecher says, been induced
+    to give up his opposition. He shook his head, however, as he felt the
+    heat reflected from it, and gathered up the skirts of his great
+    as he passed up the broad aisle to the deacon's seat. Old Uncle Noah
+    Stone, a wealthy farmer of the West End, who sat near, scowled and
+    muttered at the effects of the heat, but waited until noon to utter his
+    maledictions over his nut-cakes and cheese at the intermission. There
+    had in fact been _no fire in the stove_, the day being too warm.
+    We were too much upon the broad grin to be very devotional, and smiled
+    rather loudly at the funny things we saw. But when the editor of the
+    village paper, Mr. Bunce, came in (who was a believer in stoves in
+    churches) and with a most satisfactory air warmed his hands by the
+    stove, keeping the skirts of his great-coat carefully between his
+    knees, we could stand it no longer but dropped invisible behind the
+    breastwork. But the climax of the whole was (as the Cleveland man says)
+    when Mrs. Peck went out in the middle of the service. It was, however,
+    the means of reconciling the whole society; for after that first day we
+    heard no more opposition to the warm stove in the meeting-house."
+
+With all this corroborative evidence I think it is fully proved that the
+event really happened in Litchfield, and that the honor was stolen for
+other towns by unveracious chroniclers; otherwise we must believe in an
+amazing unanimity of church-joking and sham-fainting all over New England.
+
+The very nature, the stern, pleasure-hating and trial-glorying Puritan
+nature, which made our forefathers leave their English homes to come, for
+the love of God and the freedom of conscience, to these wild, barren, and
+unwelcoming shores, made them also endure with fortitude and almost with
+satisfaction all personal discomforts, and caused them to cling with
+persistent firmness to such outward symbols of austere contempt of
+luxury, and such narrow-minded signs of love of simplicity as the lack of
+comfortable warmth during the time of public worship. The religion which
+they had endured such bitter hardships to establish, did not, in their
+minds, need any shielding and coddling to keep it alive, but thrived far
+better on Spartan severity and simplicity; hence, it took two centuries of
+gradual and most tardy softening and modifying of character to prepare the
+Puritan mind for so advanced a reform and luxury as proper warmth in the
+meeting-houses in winter.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Noon-House.
+
+
+
+There might have been seen a hundred years ago, by the side of many an old
+meeting-house in New England, a long, low, mean, stable-like building, with
+a rough stone chimney at one end. This was the "noon-house," or "Sabba-day
+house," or "horse-hows," as it was variously called. It was a place of
+refuge in the winter time, at the noon interval between the two services,
+for the half-frozen members of the pious congregation, who found there the
+grateful warmth which the house of God denied. They built in the rude stone
+fireplace a great fire of logs, and in front of the blazing wood ate their
+noon-day meal of cold pie, of doughnuts, of pork and peas, or of brown
+bread with cheese, which they had brought safely packed in their capacious
+saddlebags. The dining-place smelt to heaven of horses, for often at the
+further end of the noon-house were stabled the patient steeds that, doubly
+burdened, had borne the Puritans and their wives to meeting; but this
+stable-odor did not hinder appetite, nor did the warm equine breaths that
+helped to temper the atmosphere of the noon-house offend the senses of the
+sturdy Puritans. From the blazing fire in this "life-saving station" the
+women replenished their little foot-stoves with fresh, hot coals, and thus
+helped to make endurable the icy rigor of the long afternoon service.
+
+If the winter Sabbath Day were specially severe, a "hired-man," or one of
+the grown sons of the family, was sent at an early hour to the noon-house
+in advance of the other church-attendants, and he started in the rough
+fireplace a fire for their welcome after their long, cold, morning ride;
+and before its cheerful blaze they thoroughly warmed themselves before
+entering the icy meeting-house. The embers were carefully covered over
+and left to start a second blaze at the nooning, covered again during the
+afternoon service, and kindled up still a third time to warm the chilled
+worshippers ere they started for their cold ride home in the winter
+twilight. And when the horses were saddled, or were harnessed and hitched
+into the great box-sleighs or "pungs," and when the good Puritans were well
+wrapped up, the dying coals were raked out for safety and the noon-house
+was left as quiet and as cold as the deserted meeting-house until the
+following Sabbath or Lecture day.
+
+If the meeting-house chanced to stand in the middle of the town (as was
+the universal custom in the earliest colonial days) of course a noon-house
+would be rarely built, for it would plainly not be needed. Nor was a
+"Sabba-day house" always seen in more lonely situations, if the sanctuary
+were placed near the substantial farm-house of a hospitable farmer; for to
+that friendly shelter the whole congregation would at noon-time repair and
+absorb to the fullest degree the welcome cider and warmth.
+
+In Lexington for many years after the Revolutionary War, the winter
+church-goers who came from any distance spent the nooning at the Dudley
+Tavern, where a roaring fire was built in the inn-parlor, and there the
+women and children ate their midday lunch. The men gathered in the bar-room
+and drank flip, and ate the tavern gingerbread and cheese, and talked over
+the horrors and glories of the war. In Haverhill, Derby, and many other
+towns, the school-house, which was built on the village green beside the
+church, was used for a noon-house by the church members, though not by
+their horses. The house of learning was never chimneyless and fireless, as
+was the house of God.
+
+As churches and towns multiplied, a meeting-house was often built to
+accommodate two little settlements or villages (and thus was convenient for
+neither), and was frequently placed in an isolated or inconvenient place,
+the top of a high hill being perhaps the most inconvenient and the most
+favored site. Thus a noon-house became an absolute necessity to Puritan
+health and existence, and often two or three were built near one
+meeting-house; while in some towns, as in Bristol, a whole row of
+disfiguring little "Sabba-day houses" stood on the meeting-house green,
+and in them the farmers (as they quaintly expressed in their petitions for
+permission to erect the buildings) "kept their duds and horses."
+
+In Derby, after several petitions had been granted to build noon-houses, it
+was found necessary, in 1764, to place some restrictions as to the location
+of the buildings, which had hitherto evidently been placed with the
+characteristically Puritanical indifference to general convenience or
+appearance. While the town still permitted the little log-huts to be
+erected, and though they could be placed on either side of the highway, it
+was ordered that the builders must not so locate them as to "incommode any
+highways." As early as 1690 the thoughtful Stonington people built a house
+"14 foot square and seven foot posts" with a chimney at one side, for the
+express purpose of having a place where their minister, Rev. Mr. Noyes,
+could thaw out between services. The New Canaan Church built on the green
+beside their meeting-house a fine "Society House," twenty-one feet long
+and sixteen feet wide, with a big chimney and fireplace. The horses were
+plainly "not in society" in New Canaan, for they were excluded from the
+occupancy and privileges of the Society House.
+
+"James June & all that lives at Larences" were allowed to build a
+"Sabbath-House" on the green near the New Britain meeting-house "as a
+Commodate for their conveniency of comeing to meeting on the Sabbath;" at
+the same time James Slason of the same village was given permission to "set
+yp a house for ye advantage of his having a place to go to" on the Sabbath.
+Frequently the petitions "to build a Sabbath Day House" or a "Housel for
+Shelter for Horss" were made in company by several farmers for their joint
+use and comfort, as shown by entries in the town and church records of
+Norwalk, New Milford, Durham, and Hartford.
+
+Noon-houses were much more frequent in Connecticut than in Massachusetts,
+and in several small towns in the former State they were used weekly
+between Sunday services until within the memory of persons now living;
+and some of the buildings still exist, though changed into granaries or
+stables. There was one also in use for many years and until recent years in
+Topsfield, in Massachusetts. We chanced upon one still standing on a lonely
+Narragansett road. A little enclosed burial-place, with moss-grown and
+weather-smoothed head-stones and neglected graves, was by the side of a
+filled-in cellar, upon which a church evidently had once stood. At a short
+distance from the church-site was a long, low, gray, weather-beaten wooden
+building, with a coarse stone-and-mortar chimney at one end, and a great
+door at the other. Two small windows, destitute of glass, permitted us
+to peer into the interior of this dilapidated old structure, and we saw
+within, a floor of beaten earth, a rough stone fireplace, and a few rude
+horse-stalls. We felt sure that this tumble-down building had been neither
+a dwelling-house nor a stable, but a noon-house; and the occupants of a
+neighboring farm-house confirmed our decision. Too worthless to destroy,
+too out of the way to be of any use to any person, that old noon-house,
+through neglect and isolation, has remained standing until to-day.
+
+It was not until the use of chaises and wagons became universal, and the
+new means of conveyance crowded out the old-fashioned saddle and pillion,
+and the trotting horse superseded the once fashionable but quickly despised
+pacer, that the great stretches of horse-sheds were built which now
+surround and disfigure all our country churches. These sheds protect,
+of course, both horse and carriage from wind and rain. Few churches had
+horse-sheds until after the War of the Revolution, and some not until after
+the War of 1812. In 1796 the Longmeadow Church had "liberty to erect a
+Horse House in the Meeting House Lane." This horse house was a horse-shed.
+
+The "wretched boys" were not permitted even in these noon-houses to talk,
+much less to "sporte and playe." In some parishes it was ordered by the
+minister and the deacons that the Bible should be read and expounded
+to them, or a sermon be read to keep them quiet during the nooning.
+Occasionally some old patriarch would explain to them the notes that he
+had taken during the morning sermon. More unbearable still, the boys were
+sometimes ordered to explain the notes which they had taken themselves. I
+would I had heard some of those explanations! Thus they literally, as was
+written in 1774, throve on the "Good Fare of Brown Bread and the Gospell."
+
+In Andover, Judge Phillips left in his will a silver flagon to the church
+as an expression of interest and hope that the "laudable practice of
+reading between services may be continued so long as even a small number
+shall be disposed to attend the exercise." Mr. Abbott left another silver
+flagon to the Andover Church to encourage reading between services; though
+how this piece of plate encouraged personally, since neither the deacons
+nor the boys got it as a prize, cannot be precisely understood. The
+noon-house in Andover was a large building with a great chimney and open
+fireplace at either end. It has always seemed to me a piece of gratuitous
+posthumous cruelty in Judge Phillips and Mr. Abbott to try to cheat those
+Andover boys of their noon-time rest and relaxation, and to expect them,
+wriggling and twisting with repressed vitality, to listen to a long extra
+sermon, read perhaps by some unskilled reader, or explained by some
+incapable expounder. The Sabbath-school did not then exist, and was not in
+general favor until the noon-houses had begun to disappear. The Reverend
+Jedediah Morse, father of the inventor of the electric telegraph, was
+almost the first New England clergyman who approved of Sabbath-schools and
+established them in his parish. In Salem they were opened in 1808, and the
+scholars came at half-past six on Sunday mornings. Fancy the chill and
+gloom of the unheated, ill-lighted churches at that hour on winter
+mornings. The "Salem Gazette" openly characterized Sunday-schools, when
+first suggested, as profanations of the Sabbath, and for years they were
+not allowed in many Congregational churches. When the Sabbath-schools
+were universally established, and thus the attention and interest of the
+children was gained during the noon interval (the time the schools were
+usually held in country churches), and when each family sat in its own pew,
+and thus the boys were separated, and each under his parents' guardianship,
+the "wretched boys" of the Puritan Sabbath disappeared, and well-behaved,
+quiet, orderly boys were seen instead in the New England churches.
+
+This fashion of sermon-reading at the nooning happily did not obtain in
+all parts of New England. In many villages the meetings in the society
+noon-houses were to the townspeople what a Sunday newspaper is to Sunday
+readers now-a-days, an advertisement and exposition of all the news of the
+past week, and also a suggestion of events to come. At noon they discussed
+and wondered at the announcements and publishings which were tacked on
+the door of the meeting-house or the notices that had been read from the
+pulpit. The men talked in loud voices of the points of the sermon, of the
+doctrines of predestination pedobaptism and antipedobaptism, of original
+sin, and that most fascinating mystery, the unpardonable sin, and in lower
+voices of wolf and bear killing, of the town-meeting, the taxes, the crops
+and cattle; and they examined with keen interest one another's horses,
+and many a sly bargain in horse-flesh or exchange of cows and pigs was
+suggested, bargained over, and clinched in the "Sabba'-day house." Many a
+piece of village electioneering was also discussed and "worked" between the
+services. The shivering women crowded around the blazing and welcome fire,
+and seated themselves on rude benches and log seats while they ate and
+exchanged doughnuts, slices of rusk, or pieces of "pumpkin and Indian mixt"
+pie, and also gave to each other receipts therefor; and they discoursed
+in low voices of their spinning and weaving, of their candle-dipping
+or candle-running, of their success or failure in that yearly trial of
+patience and skill--their soap-making, of their patterns in quilt-piecing,
+and sometimes they slyly exchanged quilt-patterns. A sentence in an old
+letter reads thus: "Anne Bradford gave to me last Sabbath in the Noon House
+a peecing of the Blazing Star; tis much Finer than the Irish Chain or the
+Twin Sisters. I want yelloe peeces for the first joins, small peeces will
+do. I will send some of my lilac flowered print for some peeces of Cicelys
+yelloe India bed vallants, new peeces not washed peeces." They gave one
+another medical advice and prescriptions of "roots and yarbs" for their
+"rheumatiz," "neuralgy," and "tissick;" and some took snuff together, while
+an ancient dame smoked a quiet pipe. And perhaps (since they were women as
+well as Puritans) they glanced with envy, admiration, or disapproval, or
+at any rate with close scrutiny, at one another's gowns and bonnets and
+cloaks, which the high-walled pews within the meeting-house had carefully
+concealed from any inquisitive, neighborly view.
+
+The wood for these beneficent noon-house fires was given by the farmers
+of the congregation, a load by each well-to-do land-owner, if it were a
+"society-house," and occasionally an apple-growing farmer gave a barrel of
+"cyder" to supply internal instead of external warmth. Cider sold in 1782
+for six shillings "Old Tenor" a barrel, so it was worth about the same
+as the wood both in money value and calorific qualities. A hundred years
+previously--in 1679--cider was worth ten shillings a barrel. In 1650, when
+first made in America, it was a costly luxury, selling for £4 4s. a barrel.
+That this thawed-out Sunday barrel of cider would prove invariably a source
+of much refreshment, inspiration, solace, tongue-loosing, and blood-warming
+to the chilled and shivering deacons, elders, and farmers who gathered in
+the noon-house, any one who has imbibed that all-potent and intoxicating
+beverage, oft-frozen "hard" cider, can fervently testify.
+
+Sometimes a very opulent farmer having built a noon-house for his own and
+his family's exclusive use, would keep in it as part of his "duds" a few
+simple cooking utensils in which his wife or daughters would re-heat or
+partially cook his noon-day Sabbath meal, and mix for him a hot toddy or
+punch, or a mug of that "most insinuating drink"--flip. Flip was made of
+home-brewed beer, sugar, and a liberal dash of Jamaica rum, and was mixed
+with a "logger-head"--a great iron "stirring-stick" which was heated in the
+fire until red hot and then thrust into the liquid. This seething iron made
+the flip boil and bubble and imparted to it a burnt, bitter taste which was
+its most attractive attribute. I doubt not that many a "loggerhead" was
+kept in New England noon-houses and left heating and gathering insinuating
+goodness in the glowing coals, while the pious owner sat freezing in the
+meeting-house, also gathering goodness, but internally keeping warm at the
+thought of the bitter nectar he should speedily brew and gladly imbibe at
+the close of the long service.
+
+The comfort of a hot midday dinner on the Sabbath was not regarded with
+much favor, though perhaps with secret envy, by the neighbors of the
+luxury-loving farmer, who saw in it too close an approach to "profanation
+of the Sabbath." The heating and boiling of the flip with the red hot
+"loggerhead" hardly came under the head of "unnecessary Sabbath cooking"
+even in the minds of the most straight-laced descendants of the Puritans.
+
+When stoves were placed and used in the New England meeting-houses, the
+noon-day lunches were eaten within the pews inside the sanctuary, and the
+noon-houses, no longer being needed, followed the law of cause and effect,
+and like many other institutions of the olden times quickly disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+The Deacon's Office.
+
+
+
+The deacons in the early New England churches had, besides their regular
+duties on the Lord's Day, and their special duties on communion Sabbaths,
+the charge of prudential concerns, and of providing for the poor of the
+church. They also "dispensed the word" on Sabbaths to the congregation
+during the absence of the ordained minister. Judge Sewall thus describes
+in his diary under the date of November, 1685, the method at that time of
+appointing or ordaining a deacon:--
+
+    "In afternoon Mr. Willard ordained our Brother Theophilus Frary to the
+    office of a Deacon. Declared his acceptance January 11th first
+    now again. Propounded him to the congregation at Noon. Then in even
+    propounded him if any of the church of other had to object they might
+    speak. Then took the Church's Vote, then call'd him up to the Pulpit,
+    laid his Hand on's head, and said I ordain Thee, etc., etc., gave him
+    his charge, then Prayed & sung 2nd Part of 84th Psalm."
+
+The deacons always sat near the pulpit in a pew, which was generally
+raised a foot or two above the level of the meeting-house floor, and which
+contained, usually, several high-backed chairs and a table or a broad
+swinging-shelf for use at the communion service. These venerable men were
+a group of awe-inspiring figures, who, next to the parson, received the
+respect of the community. In Bristol, Connecticut, the deacons wore
+starched white linen caps in the meeting-house to indicate their office,--a
+singular local custom. One of their duties in many communities was
+naturally to furnish the sacramental wines, and the money for the payment
+thereof was allowed to them from the church-rates, or was raised by special
+taxation. In Farmington, Connecticut, in 1669, each male inhabitant was
+ordered to pay a peck of wheat or one shilling to the deacons of the church
+to defray the expenses of the sacrament. In Groton church, in 1759, "4
+Coppers for every Sacrament for 1 year" was demanded from each communicant.
+In Springfield the "deacon's rate" was paid in "wampam,"--sixpence in
+"wampam" or a peck of Indian corn from each family in the town. This
+special tax was somewhat modified in case a man had no wife, or if he were
+not a church-member, but in the latter case he still had to pay some dues,
+though of course he could not take part in the communion service. In 1734
+the Milton church ordered the deacons to procure "good Canary Wine for
+the Communion Table." Abuses sometimes arose,--abominably poor wines were
+furnished, though full rates were paid for the purchase of wine of
+good quality; and in Newbury the man who was appointed to furnish the
+sacramental wines, sold, under that religious cover, wine and liquors at
+retail.
+
+The deacons also had charge of the vessels used in the communion service.
+These vessels were frequently stored, when not in use, under the pulpit in
+a little closet which opened into "the Ministers wives pue," and which was
+fabled to be at the disposal of the tithingmen and deacons for the darksome
+incarceration of unruly and Sabbath-breaking boys. The communion vessels
+were not always of valuable metal; John Cotton's first church had wooden
+chalices; the wealthier churches owned pieces of silver which had been
+given to them, one piece at a time, by members or friends of the church;
+but communion services of pewter were often seen.
+
+The church in Hanover, Massachusetts, bought a pewter service in 1728, and
+the record of the purchase still exists. It runs thus:--
+
+  3 Pewter Tankards marked C. T.    10 shillings.
+  5   "    Beakers    "    C. E.    6 sh. 6d. each.
+  2   "    Platters   "    C. P.    5 sh. each.
+  1   "    Basin for Baptisms.
+
+This pewter service is still owned by the Hanover church, a highly prized
+relic. Until 1753 the church in Andover used a pewter communion service,
+but when a silver service was given to it, the Andover church sent the
+vessels of baser metal to a sister church in Methuen. In Haverhill the will
+of a church-member named White gave to the church absolutely the pewter
+dishes which were used at the sacrament, and which had been his personal
+property. The "ffirst church" of Hartford had "one Puter fflagon, ffower
+pewter dishes, and a bason" left to it by the bequest of one of its
+members. When the Danvers church was burned in 1805, the pewter communion
+vessels were saved while the silver ones were either burnt or stolen. As
+pewter was, in the early days of New England, far from being a despised
+metal, and as pewter dishes and plates were seen on the tables of the
+wealthiest families, were left by will as precious possessions, were
+engraved with initials and stamped with coats of arms, and polished with
+as much care as were silver vessels, a communion service of pewter was
+doubtless felt to be a thoroughly satisfactory acquisition and appointment
+to a Puritan church.
+
+The deacons of course took charge of the church contributions. Lechford,
+in his "Plaine Dealing," thus describes the manner of giving in the Boston
+church in 1641:--
+
+    "Baptism being ended, follows the contribution, one of the deacons
+    saying, 'Brethren of the Congregation, now there is time left for
+    contribution, whereof as God has prospered you so freely offer.' The
+    Magistrates and chief gentlemen first, and then the Elders and all the
+    Congregation of them, and most of them that are not of the church, all
+    single persons, widows and women in absence of their husbands, came up
+    one after another one way, and bring their offering to the deacon at
+    his seat, and put it into a box of wood for the purpose, if it be money
+    or papers. If it be any other Chattel they set or lay it down before
+    the deacons; and so pass on another way to their seats again; which
+    money and goods the Deacons dispose towards the maintenance of the
+    Minister, and the poor of the Church, and the Churches occasions
+    without making account ordinarily."
+
+Lechford also said he saw a "faire gilt cup" given at the public
+contribution; and other gifts of value to the church and minister were
+often made. Libellous verses too were thrown into the contribution boxes,
+and warning and gloomy messages from the Quakers; and John Rogers,
+in derision of a pompous New London minister, threw in the insulting
+contribution of an old periwig. One Puritan goodwife, sternly unforgiving,
+never saw a contribution taken for proselyting the Indians without
+depositing in the contribution-box a number of leaden bullets, the only
+tokens she wished to see ever dispersed among the red men.
+
+Even our pious forefathers were not always quite honest in their church
+contributions, and had to be publicly warned, as the records show, that
+they must deposit "wampum without break or deforming spots," or "passable
+peage without breaches." The New Haven church was particularly tormented by
+canny Puritans who thus managed to dispose of their broken and worthless
+currency with apparent Christian generosity. In 1650 the New Haven "deacons
+informed the Court that the wampum which is putt into the Church Treasury
+is generally so bad that the Elders to whom they pay it cannot pay it
+away."
+
+In 1651, as the bad wampum was still paid in by the pious New Haven
+Puritans, it was ordered that "no money save silver or bills" be accepted
+by the deacons. After this order the deacons and elders found tremendous
+difficulty in getting any contributions at all, and many are the records of
+the actions and decisions of the church in regard to the perplexing matter.
+It should be said, in justice to the New Haven colonists, though they were
+the most opulent of the New England planters, save the wealthy settlers
+of Narragansett, that money of all kinds was scarce, and that the Indian
+money, wampum-peag, being made of a comparatively frail sea-shell, was more
+easily disfigured and broken than was metal coin; and that there was little
+transferable wealth in the community anyway, even in "Country Pay." The
+broken-wampum-giver of the seventeenth century, who contributed with intent
+to defraud and deceive the infant struggling church was the direct and
+lineal ancestor of the sanctimonious button-giver of nineteenth-century
+country churches.
+
+In Revolutionary times, after the divine service, special contributions
+were taken for the benefit of the Continental Army. In New England large
+quantities of valuable articles were thus collected. Not only money, but
+finger-rings, earrings, watches, and other jewelry, all kinds of male
+attire,--stockings, hats, coats, breeches, shoes,--produce and groceries of
+all kinds, were brought to the meeting-house to give to the soldiers. Even
+the leaden weights were taken out of the window-sashes, made into bullets,
+and brought to meeting. On one occasion Madam Faith Trumbull rose up in
+Lebanon meeting-house in Connecticut, when a collection was being made for
+the army, took from her shoulders a magnificent scarlet cloak, which had
+been a present to her from Count Rochambeau, the commander-in-chief of the
+French allied army, and advancing to the altar, gave it as her offering to
+the gallant men, who were fighting not only the British army, but terrible
+want and suffering. The fine cloak was cut into narrow strips and used as
+red trimmings for the uniforms of the soldiers. The romantic impressiveness
+of Madam Trumbull's patriotic act kindled warm enthusiasm in the
+congregation, and an enormous collection was taken, packed carefully, and
+sent to the army.
+
+One early duty of the deacons which was religiously and severely performed
+was to watch that no one but an accepted communicant should partake of the
+holy sacrament. One stern old Puritan, having been officially expelled from
+church-membership for some temporal rather than spiritual offence, though
+ignored by the all-powerful deacon, still refused to consider himself
+excommunicated, and calmly and doggedly attended the communion service
+bearing his own wine and bread, and in the solitude of his own pew communed
+with God, if not with his fellow-men. For nearly twenty years did this
+austere man rigidly go through this lonely and sad ceremonial, until he
+conquered by sheer obstinacy and determination, and was again admitted to
+church-fellowship.
+
+A very extraordinary custom prevailed in several New England churches.
+Through it the deacons were assigned a strange and serious duty which
+appeared to make them all-important and possibly self-important, and
+which must have weighed heavily upon them, were they truly godly, and
+conscientious in the performance of it. In the rocky little town of Pelham
+in the heart of Massachusetts, toward the close of the eighteenth century
+and during the pastorate of the notorious thief, counterfeiter, and forger,
+Rev. Stephen Burroughs, that remarkable rogue organized and introduced to
+his parishioners the custom of giving during the month a metal check to
+each worthy and truly virtuous church-member, on presentation of which the
+check-bearer was entitled to partake of the communion, and without which he
+was temporarily excommunicated. The duty of the deacon in this matter was
+to walk up and down the aisles of the church at the close of each service
+and deliver to the proper persons (proper in the deacon's halting human
+judgment) the significant checks. The deacon had also to see that this
+religionistic ticket was presented on the communion Sabbath. Great must
+have been the disgrace of one who found himself checkless at the end of the
+month, and greater even than the heart-burnings over seating the meeting
+must have been the jealousies and church quarrels that arose over the
+communion-checks. And yet no records of the protests or complaints of
+indignant or grieving parishioners can be found, and the existence of
+the too worldly, too business-like custom is known to us only through
+tradition.
+
+Many of the little chips called "Presbyterian checks" are, however, still
+in existence. They are oblong discs of pewter, about an inch and a half
+long, bearing the initials "P. P.," which stand, it is said, for "Pelham
+Presbyterian." I could not but reflect, as I looked at the simple little
+stamped slips of metal, that in a community so successful in the difficult
+work of counterfeiting coin, it would have been very easy to form a mould
+and cast from it spurious checks with which to circumvent the deacons and
+preserve due dignity in the meeting.
+
+The Presbyterian checks have never been attributed in Massachusetts to
+other than the Pelham church, and are usually found in towns in the
+vicinity of Pelham; and there the story of their purpose and use is
+universally and implicitly believed. A clergyman of the Pelham church gave
+to many of his friends these Presbyterian checks, which he had found among
+the disused and valueless church-properties, and the little relics of the
+old-time deacons and services have been carefully preserved.
+
+In New Hampshire, however, a similar custom prevailed in the churches of
+Londonderry and the neighboring towns.. The Londonderry settlers were
+Scotch-Irish Presbyterians (and the Pelham planters were an off-shoot of
+the Londonderry settlement), and they followed the custom of the Scotch
+Presbyterians in convening the churches twice a year to partake of the
+Lord's Supper. This assembly was always held in Londonderry, and ministers
+and congregations gathered from all the towns around. Preparatory services
+were held on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Long tables were placed in
+the aisles of the church on the Sabbath; and after a protracted and solemn
+address upon the deep meaning of the celebration and the duties of the
+church-members, the oldest members of the congregation were seated at the
+table and partook of the sacrament. Thin cakes of unleavened bread were
+specially prepared for this sacred service. Again and again were the tables
+refilled with communicants, for often seven hundred church-members were
+present. Thus the services were prolonged from early morning until
+nightfall. When so many were to partake of the Lord's Supper, it seemed
+necessary to take means to prevent any unworthy or improper person from
+presenting himself. Hence the tables were fenced off, and each communicant
+was obliged to present a "token." These tokens were similar to the
+"Presbyterian checks;" they were little strips of lead or pewter stamped
+with the initials "L. D.," which may have stood for "Londonderry" or
+"Lord's Day." They were presented during the year by the deacons and elders
+to worthy and pious church-members. This bi-annual celebration of the
+Lord's Supper--this gathering of old friends and neighbors from the rocky
+wilds of New Hampshire to join, in holy communion--was followed on Monday
+by cheerful thanksgiving and social intercourse, in which, as in every
+feast, our old friend, New England rum, played no unimportant part. The
+three days previous to the communion Sabbath were, however, solemnly
+devoted to the worship of God; a Londonderry man was reproved and
+prosecuted for spreading grain upon a Thursday preceding a communion
+Sunday, just as he would have been for doing similar work upon the Sabbath.
+The use of these "tokens" in the Londonderry church continued until the
+year 1830.
+
+In the coin collection of the American Antiquarian Society are little
+pewter communion-checks, or tokens, stamped with a heart. These were used
+in the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, and were delivered to pious
+church-members at the Friday evening prayer-meeting preceding the communion
+Sabbath. Long tables were set in the aisles, as at Londonderry. In
+practice, belief, and origin, the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania churches
+were sisters.
+
+The deacons had many minor duties to perform in the different parishes.
+Some of these duties they shared with the tithingman. They visited the
+homes of the church-members to hear the children say the catechism, they
+visited and prayed with the sick, and they also reported petty offences,
+though they were not accorded quite so powerful legal authority as the
+tithingmen and constables.
+
+It was much desired by several of the first-settled ministers that there
+should be deaconesses in the New England Puritan church, and many good
+reasons were given for making such appointments. It was believed that
+for the special duty of visiting the sick and afflicted in the community
+deaconesses would be more useful than deacons. There had been an aged
+deaconess in the Puritan church in Holland, who with a "little birchen
+rod" had kept the children in awe and order in meeting, and who had also
+exercised "her guifts" in speaking; but when she died no New England
+successor was appointed to fill her place.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims.
+
+
+We read in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," of the fair Priscilla, when
+John Alden came to woo her for his friend, the warlike little captain, that
+
+    "Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,
+    Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together; Rough-hewn,
+    angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and
+    overhung by the running vine of the verses. Such was the book from
+    whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem."
+
+One of these "well-worn psalm-books of Ainsworth" lies now before me,
+perhaps the very one from which the lonely Priscilla sang as she sat
+a-spinning.
+
+There is something especially dear to the lover and dreamer of the olden
+time, to the book-lover and antiquary as well, in an old, worn psalm or
+hymn book. It speaks quite as eloquently as does an old Bible of loving
+daily use, and adds the charm of interest in the quaint verse to reverence
+for the sacred word. A world of tender fancies springs into life as I turn
+over the pages of any old psalm-book "reading between the lines," and as
+I decipher the faded script on the titlepage. But this "psalm-book of
+Ainsworth," this book loved and used by the Pilgrims, brought over in one
+of those early ships, perhaps in the "Mayflower" itself, this book so
+symbolic of those early struggling days in New England, has a romance, a
+charm, an interest which thrills every drop of Puritan blood in my veins.
+
+It is pleasing, too, this "Ainsworth's Version," aside from any thought of
+its historic associations; its square pages of diversified type are well
+printed, and have a quaint unfamiliar look which is intensely attractive,
+and to which the odd, irregular notes of music, the curiously ornamented
+head and tail pieces, and the occasional Hebrew or Greek letters add their
+undefinable charm.
+
+It is a square quarto of three hundred and forty-eight closely printed
+pages, bound in time-stained but well-preserved parchment, and even the
+parchment itself is interesting, and lovely to the touch. The titlepage is
+missing, but I know that this is the edition printed, as was Priscilla's,
+in Amsterdam in 1612 (not "in England in 1600" as a note written in the
+last blank page states). The full title was "The Book of Psalms. Englished
+both in Prose and Metre. With annotations opening the words and sentences
+by conference with other Scriptures. Eph. v: 18,19. Bee yee filled with
+the Spirit speaking to yourselves in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual-Songs
+singing and making melodie in your hearts to the Lord." The book contains
+besides the Psalms and Annotations, on its first pages, a "Preface
+declaring the reason and use of the Book;" and at the last pages a "Table
+directing to some principal things observed in the Annotations of the
+Psalms," a list of "Hebrew phrases observed which are somewhat hard and
+figurative," and also some "General Observations touching the Psalms."
+
+I can well imagine what a pious delight this book was to our Pilgrim
+Fathers; and what a still greater delight it was to our Pilgrim Mothers,
+in that day and country of few books. They possessed in it, not only a
+wonderful new metrical version of the Psalms for singing, but a prose
+version for comparison as well; and the deeply learned and profoundly
+worded annotations placed at the end of each Psalm were doubtless of
+special interest to such "scripturists with all their hearts" as they were.
+
+There were also, "for the use and edification of the saints," printed above
+each psalm the airs of appropriate tunes. The "rough-hewn, angular notes"
+are irregularly lozenge-shaped, like the notes or "pricks" in Queen
+Elizabeth's "Virginal-Book," and are placed on the staff without bars.
+Ainsworth, in his preface, says, "Tunes for the Psalms I find none set of
+God: so that ech people is to use the most grave decent and comfortable
+manner that they know how, according to the general rule. The singing notes
+I have most taken from our Englished psalms when they will fit the mesure
+of the verse: and for the other long verses I have also taken (for the most
+part) the gravest and easiest tunes of the French and Dutch psalmes." Easy
+the tunes certainly are, to the utmost degree of simplicity.
+
+Great diversity too of type did the Pilgrims find in their Psalm-book:
+Roman type, Italics, black-letter, all were used; the verse was printed in
+Italics, the prose in Roman type, and the annotation in black-letter and
+small Roman text with close-spaced lines. This variety though picturesque
+makes the text rather difficult to read; for while one can decipher
+black-letter readily enough when reading whole pages of it, when it is
+interspersed with other type it makes the print somewhat confusing to the
+unaccustomed eye.
+
+One curious characteristic of the typography is the frequent use of the
+hyphen, compound words or rather compound phrases being formed apparently
+without English rule or reason. Such combinations as these are given as
+instances: "highly-him-preferre," "renowned-name," "repose-me-quietlie,"
+"in-mind-uplay," "turn-to-ashes," "my-alonely-soul," "beat-them-final,"
+"pouring-out-them-hard," "inveyers-mak-streight," and
+"condemn-thou-them-as-guilty,"--which certainly would make fit verses to
+be sung to the accompaniment of Master Mace's
+"excellent-large-plump-lusty-fullspeaking-organ."
+
+Ainsworth's Version when read proves to be a scholarly book, exhibiting far
+better grammar and punctuation and more uniformity of spelling than "The
+New England Psalm-book," which at a later date displaced Ainsworth in the
+affections and religious services of the New England Puritans and Pilgrims.
+Both versions are somewhat confused in sense, and of uncouth and grotesque
+versification; though the metre of Ainsworth is better than the rhyme. It
+is all written in "common metre," nearly all in lines of eight and six
+syllables alternately.
+
+The name of the author of this version was Henry Ainsworth; he was the
+greatest of all the Holland Separatists, a typical Elizabethan Puritan,
+who left the church in which he was educated and attached himself to the
+Separatists, or Brownists, as they were called. He went into exile in
+Amsterdam in 1593, and worked for some time as a porter in a book-seller's
+shop, living (as Roger Williams wrote) "upon ninepence in the weeke with
+roots boyled." He established, with the Reverend Mr. Johnson, the new
+church in Holland; and when it was divided by dissension, he became the
+pastor of the "Ainsworthian Brownists" and so remained for twelve years.
+He was a most accomplished scholar, and was called the "rabbi of his age."
+Governor Bradford, in his "Dialogue," written in 1648, says of Ainsworth,
+"He had not his better for the Hebrew tongue in the University nor scarce
+in Europe." Hence, naturally, he was constantly engaged upon some work of
+translating or commentating, and still so highly prized is some of his work
+that it has been reprinted during this century. He also, being a skilful
+disputant, wrote innumerable controversial pamphlets and books, many
+of which still exist. It is said that he once had a long and spirited
+controversy with a brother divine as to whether the ephod of Aaron were
+blue or green. I fear we of to-day have lost much that the final, decisive
+judgment from so learned scholars and students as to the correct color has
+not descended to us, and now, if we wish to know, we shall have to fight it
+all over again.
+
+In spite of his power of argument (or perhaps on account of it) the most
+prominent part which Ainsworth seemed to take in Amsterdam for many years
+was that of peacemaker, as many of his contemporaries testify: for they
+quarrelled fiercely among themselves in the exiled church, though they
+had such sore need of unity and good fellowship; and they had many church
+arguments and judgments and lawsuits. They quarrelled over the exercise of
+power in the church; over the true meaning of the text Matthew xviii. 17;
+whether the members of the congregation should be allowed to look on their
+Bibles during the preaching or on their Psalm-books during the singing;
+whether they should sing at all in their meetings; over the power of the
+office of ruling elder (a fruitful source of dissension and disruption in
+the New England congregations likewise) and above all, they quarrelled long
+and bitterly over the unseemly and gay dress of the parson's wife, Madam
+Johnson. These were the terrible accusations that were brought against that
+bedizened Puritan: that she wore "her bodies tied to the petticote with
+points as men do their doublets and hose; contrary to I Thess. v: 22,
+conferred with Deut. xx: 11;" that she also wore "lawn coives," and
+"busks," and "whalebones in the petticote bodies," and a "veluet hoode,"
+and a "long white brest;" and that she "stood gazing bracing and vaunting
+in the shop dores;" and that "men called her a bounceing girl" (as if
+she could help that!). And one of her worst and most bitterly condemned
+offences was that she wore "a topish hat." This her husband vehemently
+denied; and long discussions and explanations followed on the hat's
+topishness,--"Mr. Ainsworth dilating much upon a greeke worde" (as of
+course so learned a man would). For the benefit of unlearned modern
+children of the Puritans let me give the old Puritan's precise explanation
+and classification of topishness. "Though veluet in its nature were not
+topish, yet if common mariners should weare such it would be a sign of
+pride and topishness in them. Also a gilded raper and a feather are not
+topish in their nature, neither in a captain to weare them, and yet if a
+minister should weare them they would be signs of great vanity topishness
+and lightness." I wonder that topish hat had not undone the whole Puritan
+church in Holland.
+
+In settling all these and many other disputes, in translating,
+commentating, and versifying, did Henry Ainsworth pass his days; until,
+worn out by hard labor, and succumbing to long continued weakness, he died
+in 1623. This romantic story of his death is told by Neal. "It was sudden
+and not without suspicion of violence; for it is reported that, having
+found a diamond of very great value in the streets of Amsterdam, he
+advertised it in print; and when the owner, who was a Jew, came to demand
+it, he offered him any acknowledgment he would desire, but Ainsworth though
+poor would accept of nothing but conference with some of his rabbis upon
+the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the Messiah, which the
+other promised, but not having interest enough to obtain it he was
+poisoned." This rather ambiguous sentence means that Ainsworth was
+poisoned, not the Jew. Brooks's account of the story is that the conference
+took place, the Jews were vanquished, and in revenge poisoned the champion
+of Christianity afterwards. Dexter most unromantically throws cold water on
+this poisoning story, and adduces much circumstantial testimony to prove
+its improbability; but it could hardly have been invented in cold blood by
+the Puritan historians, and must have had some foundation in truth. And
+since he is dead, and the thought cannot harm him, I may acknowledge that I
+firmly believe and I like to believe that he died in so romantic a way.
+
+The Puritans were psalm-singers ever; and in Holland the Brownist division
+of the church came under strong influences from Geneva and Wittenberg, the
+birth-places of psalm-singing, that made them doubly fond of "worship in
+song." Hence the Pilgrim Fathers, Brewster, Bradford, Carver, and Standish,
+for love of music as well as in affectionate testimony to their old pastor
+and friend, brought to the New World copies of his version of the Psalms
+and sang from it with delight and profit to themselves, if not with ease
+and elegance.
+
+Dexter says very mildly of Ainsworth's literary work that "there are
+diversities of gifts, and it is no offence to his memory to conclude that
+he shone more as an exegete than as a poet." Poesy is a gift of the gods
+and cometh not from deep Hebrew study nor from vast learning, and we must
+accept Ainsworth's pious enthusiasm in the place of poetic fervor. Of the
+quality of his work, however, it is best to judge for one's self. Here is
+his rendition of the Nineteenth Psalm, so well known to us in verse by
+Addison's glorious "The spacious firmament on high." The prose version is
+printed in one column and the verse by its side.
+
+    1. To the Mayster of the Musik: A Psalm of David
+
+    2. The heavens, doo tel the glory of God: and the out-spred firmament
+    shevveth; the work of his hand.
+
+    3. Day unto day uttereth speech: and night unto night manifesteth
+    knowledge:
+
+    4. No speech, and no words: not heard is their voice
+
+    5. Through all the earth, gone-forth is their line: and unto the
+    utmost-end of the world their speakings: he hath put a tent in them for
+    the sun.
+
+    6. And he; as a bridegroom, going-forth out of his privy-chamber:
+    joyes as a mighty-man to run a race
+
+    7. From the utmost end of the heavens is his egress; and his
+    compassing-regress is unto the utmost-ends of them: and none _is_
+    hidd, from his heat.
+
+    2. The heav'ne, doo tel the glory of God and his firmament dooth
+    preach.
+
+    3. work of his hands. Day unto day dooth largely-utter speach and night
+    unto night dooth knowledge shew
+
+    4. No speach, and words are none.
+
+    5. thier voice it-is not heard. Thier line through all the earth is
+    gone: and to the worlds end, thier speakings: in them he did dispose,
+
+    6. tent for the Sun. Who-bride-groom-like out of his chamber goes:
+    joyes strong-man-like, to run a race
+
+    7. From heav'ns end, his egress: and his regress to the end of them
+    hidd from his heat, none is:
+
+In order to show the proportion of annotation in the book, and to indicate
+the mental traits of the author, let me state that this psalm, in both
+prose and metrical versions, occupies about one page; while the closely
+printed annotations fill over three pages; which is hardly "explaining with
+brevitie," as Ainsworth says in his preface. With this psalm the notes
+commence thus:--
+
+"2. (the out-spred-firmament) the whole cope of heaven, with the aier which
+though it be soft and liquid and spred over the Earth, yet it is fast and
+firm and therefore called of us according to the common Greek version a
+firmament: the holy Ghost expresseth it by another term Mid-heaven.
+This out-spred-firmament of expansion God made amidds the waters for a
+separation and named it Heaven, which of David is said to be stretched out
+as courtayn and elsewhere is said to be as firm as moulten glass. So under
+this name firmament be commised the orbs of the heav'ns and the aier and
+the whole spacious country above the earth."
+
+These annotations must have formed to the Pilgrims not only a dictionary
+but a perfect encyclopædia of useful knowledge. Things spiritual and things
+temporal were explained therein. Scientific, historic, and religious
+information were dispensed impartially. Much and varied instruction was
+given in Natural History, though viewed of course from a strictly religious
+point of view. The little Pilgrims learned from their Psalm-Book that the
+"Leviathan is the great whalefish or seadragon, so called of the fast
+joyning together of his scales as he is described Job 40: 20, 41 and
+is used to resemble great tyrants." They also learned that "Lions of
+sundry-kinds have sundry-names. Tear-in-pieces like a lion. That he ravin
+not, make-a-prey; called a plueker Renter or Tearer, and elsewhere Laby
+that is, Harty and couragious; Kphir, this lurking, Couchant. The reason
+of thier names is shewed, as The renting-lion as greedy to tear, and the
+lurking-Lion as biding in covert places. Other names are also given to this
+kind as Shachal, of ramping, of fierce nature; and Lajith of subduing his
+prey. Psalm LVI Lions called here Lebain, harty, stowt couragious, Lions.
+Lions are mentioned in the Scriptures for the stowtness of thier hart,
+boldnes, and grimnes of thier countenance."
+
+Here are other annotations taken at hap-hazard. The lines,
+
+  "Al they that doo upon me look
+    a scoff at me doe make
+  they with the lip do make-a-mow
+    the head they scornful-shake,"
+
+Ainsworth thus explains: "Make-a-mow, making-an-opening with the lip
+which may be taken both for mowing and thrusting out of the lip and for
+licentious opening thereof to speak reproach." The expression "Keep thou me
+as the black of the apple of the eye" is thus annotated: "The black, that
+is, the sight in the midds of the eye wherein appeareth the resemblance of
+a little man, and thereupon seemeth to be called in Hebrew Ishon which is a
+man. And as that part is blackish so this word is also used for other black
+things as the blackness of night. The apple so we call that which the
+Hebrew here calleth bath and babath that is the babie or little image
+appearing in the eye." Anger receives this definition: "ire, outward in
+the face, grauue, grimnes or fiercenes of countenance. The original Aph
+signifieth both the nose by which one breatheth, and Anger which appeareth
+in the snuffing or breathing of the nose."
+
+Before the Holland exiles had this version of Ainsworth's to sing from,
+they used the book known as "Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms." They gave it
+up gladly to show honor to the work of their loved pastor, and perhaps also
+with a sense of pleasure in not having to sing any verses which had been
+used and authorized by the Church of England. In doing this they had to
+abandon, however, such spirited lines as Sternhold's--
+
+  "The earth did shake, for feare did quake
+    the hills their bases shook.
+  Removed they were, in place most fayre
+    at God's right fearfull looks.
+
+  "He rode on hye, and did soe flye
+    Upon the cherubins
+  He came in sight and made his flight
+    Upon the winges of windes."
+
+They sung instead,--
+
+  "And th' earth did shake and quake and styrred bee
+  grounds of the mount: & shook for wroth was hee
+  Smoke mounted, in his wrath, fyre did eat
+  out of his mouth: from it burned-with heat."
+
+Alas, poor Priscilla! how could she sing with ease or reverence such
+confused verses? The tune, too, set in the psalm-book seems absolutely
+unfitted to the metre. I fear when she sang from the pages "the old Puritan
+anthem" that she was forced to turn it into a chant, else the irregular
+lines could never have been brought within the compass of the melody; and
+yet, the metre is certainly better than the sense.
+
+It may be thought that these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for
+their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome
+that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the
+most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the
+reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot be hidden, even by
+the wording of the learned Puritan minister:--
+
+    1. Jehovah feedeth me: I shall not lack
+
+    2. In grassy fields, he downe dooth make me lye: he gently-leads mee,
+    quiet-Waters by.
+
+    3. He dooth return my soul: for his name-sake in paths of justice
+    leads-me-quietly.
+
+    4. Yea, though I walk in dale of deadly-shade ile fear none yll, for
+    with me thou wilt be thy rod, thy staff eke, they shall comfort mee.
+
+But few of these psalm-books of Ainsworth are now in existence; but few
+indeed came to New England. Elder Brewster owned one, as is shown by
+the inventory of the books in his library. Not every member of the
+congregation, not every family possessed one; many were too poor, many
+"lacked skill to read," and in some communities only one psalm-book was
+owned in the entire church. Hence arose the odious custom of "deaconing" or
+"lining" the psalm, by which each line was read separately by the deacon or
+elder and then sung by the congregation. There is no doubt, however,
+that this Ainsworth's Version was used in many of the early New England
+meetings. Reverend Thomas Symmes, in his "Joco-Serious Dialogue," printed
+in 1723, wrote: "Furthermore the Church of Plymouth made use of Ainsworths
+Version of the Psalms until the year 1692. For altho' our New England
+version of the Psalms was compiled by sundry hands and completed by
+President Dunster about the year 1640; yet that church did not use it, it
+seems, 'till two and fifty years after but stuck to Ainsworth; and until
+about 1682 their excellent custom was to sing without reading the lines."
+
+John Cotton's account of the Salem church written in 1760, says, "On June
+19, 1692, the pastor propounded to the church that seeing many of the
+psalms in Mr. Ainsworth's translation which had hitherto been sung in the
+congregation had such difficult tunes that none in the church could set,
+they would consider of some expedient that they might sing all the psalms.
+After some time of consideration on August 7 following, the church voted
+that when the tunes were difficult in the translation then used, they
+would make use of the New England psalm-book, long before received in
+the churches of the Massachusetts colony, not one brother opposing the
+conclusion. But finding it inconvenient to use two psalm-books, they at
+length, in June 1696 agreed wholly to lay aside Ainsworth and with general
+consent introduced the other which is used to this day, 1760. And here it
+will be proper to observe that it was their practice until the beginning of
+October, 1681 to sing the psalms without reading the lines; but then, at
+the motion of a brother who otherwise could not join in the ordinance [I
+suppose because he could not read] they altered the custom, and reading
+was introduced, the elder performing that service after the pastor had
+first expounded the psalm, which were usually sung in course."
+
+On the blank leaf of the copy of Ainsworth now lying before me are written
+these words, "This was used in Salem half-a-century from the first
+settlement." In a record of the Salem church is this entry of a church
+meeting: "4 of 5th month, 1667. The pastor having formerly propounded
+and given reason for the use of the Bay Psalm Book in regard to the
+_difficulty of the tunes_ and that we could not sing them so well
+as formerly and _that there was a singularity in our using Ainsworths
+tunes_: but especially because we had not the liberty of singing all the
+scripture Psalms according to Col. iii. 16. He did not again propound the
+same, and after several brethren had spoken, there was at last a unanimous
+consent with respect to the last reason mentioned, that the Bay Psalm Book
+should be used together with Ainsworth to supply the defects of it."
+
+It is significant enough of the "low state of the musik in the meetings"
+when we find that the simple tunes written in Ainsworth's Version were too
+difficult for the colonists to sing. To such a condition had church-music
+been reduced by "lining the psalm" and by the lack of musical instruments
+to guide and control the singers. It was not much better in old England;
+for we find in the preface of Rous' Psalms (which were published in
+1643 and authorized to be used in the English Church) references to the
+"difficulty of Ainsworth's tunes."
+
+Hood says, "There is almost a certainty that no other version than
+Ainsworth was ever used in the colonies until the New England Version was
+published. But if any one was used in one or two of the churches it was
+Sternhold and Hopkins." I cannot feel convinced of this, but believe that
+both Ravenscroft's and Sternhold and Hopkins' Versions were used at first
+in many of the Bay settlements. Salem church had a peculiar connection in
+its origin with the church of Plymouth, which would account, doubtless,
+for its protracted use of the version so loved by the Pilgrims; but the
+Puritans of the Bay, coming directly from England, must have brought with
+them the version which they had used in England, that of Sternhold and
+Hopkins; and they would hardly have wished, nor would it have been possible
+for them to acquire speedily in the new land the Ainsworth's Version used
+by the Pilgrims from Holland.
+
+The second edition of Ainsworth's Version was printed in 1617, a third
+in 1618; the fourth, in London in 1639, was a folio; and the sixth, in
+Amsterdam in 1644, was an octavo. A little 24mo copy is in the Essex
+Institute in Salem, and an octavo is in the Prince Library, now in the
+custody of the Public Library of the City of Boston. The latter copy has
+a note in it written by the Rev. Thomas Prince: "Plymouth, May 1, 1732. I
+have seen an edition of this version of 1618; and this version was sung
+in Plymouth Colony and I suppose in the rest of New England 'till the New
+England Version was printed."
+
+There is a copy of the first edition of Ainsworth in the Bodleian Library
+and one in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The American Antiquarian
+Society and the Lenox Library are the only public libraries in America that
+possess copies, so far as I know. The one in the library of the American
+Antiquarian Society was presented to it in 1815 by the Rev. William Bentley
+of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom also belonged the copy of the Bay Psalm
+Book now in the library at Worcester. He was a divine and a bibliophile and
+an antiquary, but there also ran in his veins blood of warmer flow. During
+the war of 1812, when the report came, in meeting-time, that the frigate
+"Constitution" was being chased into Marblehead harbor, the loyal parson
+Bentley locked up his church, and tucked up his gown, and sallied forth
+with his whole flock of parishioners to march to Marblehead with the
+soldiers, ready to "fight unto death" if necessary. Being short and fat,
+and the mercury standing at eighty-five degrees, the doctor's physical
+strength gave out, and he had to be hoisted up astride a cannon to ride to
+the scene of conflict,--martial in spirit though weak in the legs.
+
+But this association with the old book is comparatively of our own day; and
+the most pleasing fancy which the "psalm-book of Ainsworth" brings to my
+mind, the most sacred and reverenced thought, is of a far more remote, a
+more peaceful and quiet scene; though men of warlike blood and fighting
+stock were there present and took part therein. It is with that Sabbath Day
+before the Landing at Plymouth which was spent by the Pilgrims, as Mather
+says, "in the devout and pious exercises of a sacred rest." And though
+Matthew Arnold thought that the Mayflower voyagers would have been
+intolerable company for Shakespeare and Virgil, yet in that quiet day of
+devout prayer and praise they show a calm religious peace and trust that
+is, perhaps, the highest spiritual type of "sweetness and light." And from
+this quaint old book their lips found words and music to express in song
+their pure and holy faith.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The Bay Psalm-Book.
+
+
+
+It seems most proper that the first book printed in New England should be
+now its rarest one, and such is the case. It was also meet that the first
+book published by the Puritan theocracy should be a psalm-book. This New
+England psalm-book, being printed by the colony at Massachusetts Bay, is
+familiarly known as "The Bay Psalm-Book," and was published two hundred
+and fifty years ago with this wording on the titlepage: "The Whole Book of
+Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre. Whereunto is prefixed a
+discourse declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the
+Heavenly Ordinance of Singing Psalmes in the Churches of God.
+
+"Coll. III. Let the word of God dwell plenteously in you in all wisdome,
+teaching, and exhorting one another in Psalmes, Himnes, and spirituall
+Songs, singing to the Lord with grace in your hearts.
+
+"James V. If any be afflicted, let him pray; and if any be merry let him
+sing psalmes. Imprinted 1640."
+
+The words "For the Use, Edification, and Comfort of the Saints in Publick
+and Private especially in New England," though given in Thomas's "History
+of Printing," Lowndes's "Bibliographers Manual," Hood's "History of Music
+in New England," and many reliable books of reference, as part of the
+correct title, were in fact not printed upon the titlepage of this first
+edition, but appeared on subsequent ones. Mr. Thomas, at the time he wrote
+his history, knew of but one copy of the first edition; "an entire copy
+except the title-page is now in the possession of rev. mr. Bentley of
+Salem." The titlepage being missing, he probably fell into the error of
+copying the title of a later edition, and other cataloguers and manualists
+have blindly followed him.
+
+There were in 1638 thirty ministers in New England, all men of intelligence
+and education; and to three of them, Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John
+Eliot was entrusted the literary part of the pious work. They managed to
+produce one of the greatest literary curiosities in existence. The book
+was printed in the house of President Dunster of Harvard College upon a
+"printery," or printing-press, which had cost £50, and was the gift of
+friends in Holland to the new community in 1638, the name-year of Harvard
+College. Governor Winthrop in his journal tells us that the first sheet
+printed on this press was the Freeman's Oath, certainly a characteristic
+production; the second an almanac for New England, and the third, "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." Some, who deem an almanac a book, call this psalm-book the
+second book printed in British America.
+
+A printer named Steeven Daye was brought over from England to do the
+printing on this new press. Now Steeven must have been given entire charge
+of the matter, and could not have been a very literate fellow (as we
+know positively he was a most reprehensible one), or the three reverend
+versifiers must have been most uncommonly careless proof-readers, for
+certainly a worse piece of printer's work than "The Bay Psalm Book" could
+hardly have been struck off. Diversity and grotesqueness of spelling were
+of course to be expected, and paper might have been coarse without reproof,
+in that new and poor country; but the type was good and clear, the paper
+strong and firm, and with ordinary care a very presentable book might have
+been issued. The punctuation was horrible. A few commas and periods and
+a larger number of colons were "pepered and salted" _à la_ Timothy
+Dexter, apparently quite by chance, among the words. Periods were placed
+in the middle of sentences; words of one syllable were divided by hyphens;
+capitals and italics were used after the fashion of the time, apparently
+quite at random; and inverted letters were common enough. The pages were
+unnumbered, and on every left-hand page the word "Psalm" in the title was
+spelled correctly, while on the right-hand page it is uniformly spelled
+"Psalme." But after all, these typographical blemishes might be forgiven if
+the substance, the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification
+was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the
+sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with
+the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical
+construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct.
+Such amazing verses as these may be found:--
+
+  "And sayd He would not them waste: had not
+  Moses stood (whom He chose)
+  'fore him i' th' breach; to turne his wrath
+  lest that he should waste those."
+
+Cotton Mather, in his "Magnalia," gives thus the full story of the
+production of "The Bay Psalm-book":--
+
+    "About the year 1639, the New-English reformers, considering that their
+    churches enjoyed the other ordinances of Heaven in their scriptural
+    purity were willing that the 'The singing of Psalms' should be restored
+    among them unto a share of that _purity_. Though they blessed God
+    for the religious endeavours of them who translated the Psalms into the
+    _meetre _usually annexed at the end of the Bible, yet they beheld
+    in the translation so many _detractions _from, _additions
+    _to, and _variations _of, not only the text, but the very
+    _sense _of the psalmist, that it was an offense unto them.
+    Resolving then upon a new translation, the chief divines in the country
+    took each of them a portion to be translated; among whom were Mr. Welds
+    and Mr. Eliot of Eoxbury, and Mr. Mather of Dorchester. These like the
+    rest were so very different a _genius_ for their poetry that Mr.
+    Shephard, of Cambridge, on the occasion addressed them to this purpose:
+
+      You Roxb'ry poets keep clear of the crime
+      Of missing to give us very good rhime.
+      And you of Dorchester, your verses lengthen
+      And with the text's own words, you will them strengthen.
+
+    The Psalms thus turned into _meetre_ were printed at Cambridge, in
+    the year 1640. But afterwards it was thought that a little more of art
+    was to be employed upon them; and for that cause they were committed
+    unto Mr. Dunster, who revised and refined this translation; and (with
+    some assistance from Mr. Richard Lyon who being sent over by Sir Henry
+    Mildmay as an attendant unto his, son, then a student at Harvard
+    College, now resided in Mr. Dunster's house:) he brought it
+    the condition wherein our churches have since used it. Now though
+    I heartily join with those gentlemen who wish that the _poetry_
+    thereof were mended, yet I must confess, that the Psalms have never
+    yet seen a _translation_ that I know of nearer to the Hebrew
+    original; and I am willing to receive the excuse which our translators
+    themselves do offer us when they say: 'If the verses are not always so
+    elegant as some desire or expect, let them consider that God's
+    altar needs not our pollishings; we have respected rather a plain
+    translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any
+    paraphrase. We have attended conscience rather than elegance, fidelity
+    rather than ingenuity, that so we may sing in Zion the Lord's songs of
+    praise, according unto his own will, until he bid us enter into our
+    Master's joy to sing eternal hallelujahs.'"
+
+I have never liked Cotton Mather so well as after reading this calm
+and kindly account of the production of "The Bay-Psalm-Book." He was a
+scholarly man, and doubtless felt keenly and groaned inwardly at the
+inelegance, the appalling and unscholarly errors in the New England
+version; and yet all he mildly said was that "it was thought that a little
+more of art was to be employed upon them," and that he "wishes the poetry
+hereof was mended." Such justice, such self-repression, such fairness
+make me almost forgive him for riding around the scaffold on which his
+fellow-clergyman was being executed for witchcraft, and urging the crowd
+not to listen to the poor martyr's dying words. I can even almost overlook
+the mysterious fables, the outrageous yarns which he imposed upon us under
+the guise of history.
+
+The three reverend versifiers who turned out such questionable poetry are
+known to have been writers of clear, scholarly, and vigorous prose. They
+were all graduated at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the nursery of Puritans.
+Mr. Welde soon returned to England and published there two intelligent
+tracts vindicating the purity of the New England worship. Richard Mather
+was the general prose-scribe for the community; he drafted the "Cambridge
+Platform" and other important papers, and was clear and scholarly enough
+in all his work _except_ the "Bay Psalm-Book." From his pen came the
+tedious, prolix preface to the work; and the first draft of it in his own
+handwriting is preserved in the Prince Library. The other co-worker was
+John Eliot, that glory of New England Puritanism, the apostle to the
+Indians. His name heads my list of the saints of the Puritan calendar; but
+I confess that when I consider his work in "The Bay Psalm-Book," I have
+sad misgivings lest the hymns which he wrote and published in the Indian
+language may not have proved to the poor Massachusetts Indians all that our
+loving and venerating fancy has painted them. It is said also that Francis
+Quarles, the Puritan author of "Divine Emblems," sent across the Atlantic
+some of his metrical versions of the psalms as a pious contribution to the
+new version of the new church in the new land.
+
+The "little more of art" which was bestowed by the improving President
+Dunster left the psalms still improvable, as may be seen by opening at
+random at any page of the revised editions. Mr. Lyon conferred also upon
+the New England church the inestimable boon of a number of hymns or
+"Scripture-Songs placed in order as in the Bible." They were printed in
+that order from the third until at least the sixteenth edition, but in
+subsequent editions the hymns were all placed at the end of the book after
+the psalms. I doubt not that the Puritan youth, debarred of merry catches
+and roundelays, found keen delight in these rather astonishing renditions
+of the songs of Solomon, portions of Isaiah, etc. Those Scripture-Songs
+should be read quite through to be fully appreciated, as no modern
+Christian could be full enough of grace to sing them. Here is a portion of
+the song of Deborah and Barak:--
+
+  24. Jael the Kenite Hebers wife
+  'bove women blest shall be:
+  Above the women in the tent
+  a blessed one is she.
+  25. He water ask'd: she gave him milk
+  him butter forth she fetch'd
+  26. In lordly dish: then to the nail
+  she forth her left hand stretched.
+
+  Her right the workman's hammer held
+  and Sisera struck dead:
+  She pierced and struck his temple through
+  and then smote off his head.
+  27. He at her feet bow'd, fell, lay down
+  he at her feet bow'd, where
+  He fell: ev'n where he bowed down
+  he fell destroyed there.
+
+  28. Out of a window Sisera
+  his mother looked and said
+  The lattess through in coming why
+  so long his chariot staid?
+  His chariot wheels why tarry they?
+  29.   her wise dames, answered
+  Yea she turned answer to herself
+  30.   and what have they not sped?
+
+  31. The prey by poll; a maid or twain
+  what parted have not they?
+  Have they not parted, Sisera,
+  a party-colour'd prey
+  A party-colour'd neildwork prey
+  of neildwork on each side
+  That's party-colour'd meet for necks
+  of them that spoils divide?
+
+Our Pilgrim Fathers accepted these absurd, tautological verses gladly, and
+sang them gratefully; but we know the spirit of poesy could never have
+existed in them, else they would have fought hard against abandoning such
+majestic psalms as Sternhold's--
+
+  "The Lord descended from above
+    and bow'd the heavens hye
+  And underneath his feete he cast
+    the darkness of the skye.
+
+  "On cherubs and on cherubines
+    full royally he road
+  And on the winges of all the windes
+    came flying all abroad."
+
+They gave up these lines of simple grandeur, to which they were accustomed,
+for such wretched verses as these of the New England version:--
+
+  9.  Likewise the heavens he downe-bow'd and he descended, & there was
+      under his feet a gloomy cloud
+  10. And he on cherub rode and flew; yea, he flew on the wings of winde.
+  11. His secret place hee darkness made his covert that him round confide.
+
+I cannot understand why they did not sing the psalms of David just as
+they were printed in the English Bible; it would certainly be quite as
+practicable as to sing this latter selection.
+
+President Dunster's improving hand and brain evolved this rendition:--
+
+  "Likewise the heavens he down-bow'd
+    and he descended: also there
+  Was at his feet a gloomy cloud
+    and he on cherubs rode apace.
+  Yea on the wings of wind he flew
+    he darkness made his secret place
+  His covert round about him drew."
+
+Though the grotesque wording and droll errors of these old psalm-books can,
+after the lapse of centuries, be pointed out and must be smiled at, there
+is after all something so pathetic in the thought of those good, scholarly
+old New England saints, hampered by poverty, in dread of attack of Indians,
+burdened with hard work, harassed by "eighty-two pestilent heresies," still
+laboring faithfully and diligently in their strange new home at their
+unsuited work,--something so pathetic, so grand, so truly Christian, that
+when I point out any of the absurdities or failures in their work, I dread
+lest the shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather, of Eliot, brand me as of
+old, "in capitall letters," as "AN OPEN AND OBSTINATE CONTEMNER OF GOD'S
+HOLY ORDINANCES," or worse still, with that mysterious, that dread name, "A
+WANTON GOSPELLER."
+
+The second edition of the "New England Psalm-Book" was published in 1647;
+the one copy known to exist has sold for four hundred and thirty-five
+dollars. The third edition was the one revised by President Dunster and
+Mr. Lyon, and was printed in 1650. In 1691 the unfortunate book was again
+"pollished" by a committee of ministers, who thus altered the last two
+stanzas of the Song of Deborah and Barak:--
+
+  28. Out of a window Sisera
+        His mother look'd and said
+      The lattess through in coming why
+        So long's chariot staid?
+      His chariot-wheels why tarry they?
+        Her ladies wise reply'd
+  29. Yea to herself the answer made,
+  30.     Have they not speed? she cry'd.
+
+  31. The prey to each a maid or twain
+        Divided have not they?
+      To Sisera have they not shar'd
+        A divers-colour'd prey?
+      Of divers-colour'd needle-work
+        Wrought curious on each side
+      Of various colours meet for necks
+        Of those who spoils divide?
+
+Rev. Elias Nason wittily says of "The Bay Psalm-Book," "Welde, Eliot, and
+Mather mounted the restive steed Pegasus, Hebrew psalter in hand, and
+trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical
+psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and slashing,
+mending and patching, twisting and turning, finally produced what must ever
+remain the most unique specimen of poetical tinkering in our literature."
+
+Other editions quickly followed these "pollishings" until, in 1709, sixteen
+had been printed. Mr. Hood stated that at least seventy editions in all
+were brought out. Some of these were printed in England and Scotland, in
+exceedingly fine and illegible print, and were intended to be bound up with
+the Bible; and occasionally duodecimo Bibles were sent from Scotland to
+New England with "The Bay Psalm-Book" bound at the back part of the book.
+Strange as it may seem, the poor, halting New England version was used in
+some of the English dissenting congregations and Scotch kirks, instead of
+the smoother verses composed in England for the English churches.
+
+The Reverend Thomas Prince, after two years of careful work thereon,
+published in 1758 a revised edition of the much-published book, and it was
+adopted by his church, the Old South, of Boston, the week previous to his
+death. It was used by his congregation until 1786. He clung closely to the
+form of the old editions, changing only an occasional word. In his preface
+Dr. Prince says that "The Bay Psalm-Book" "had the honor of being the
+first book printed in North America, and as far as I can find, in this
+New World." We have fuller means of information now-a-days than had the
+reverend reviser, and we know that as early as 1535 a book called "The
+Book of St. John Climacus or The Spiritual Ladder" had been printed in the
+Spanish tongue, in Mexico; and no less than one hundred and sixteen other
+Spanish works in the sixteenth century, as the "Bibliografia Mexicana"
+testifies.
+
+If the printing of all these various editions was poor, and the diction
+worse, the binding certainly was good and could be copied in modern times
+to much advantage. No flimsy cloth or pasteboard covers, no weak paper
+backs, no ill-pasted leaves, no sham-work of any kind was given; securely
+sewed, firmly glued, with covers of good strong leather, parchment, kid, or
+calfskin, these psalm-books endured constant _daily_ (not weekly) use
+for years, for decades, for a century, and are still whole and firm.
+They were carried about in pockets, in saddle-bags, and were opened, and
+handled, and conned, as often as were the Puritan Bibles, and they bore the
+usage well. They were distinctively characteristic of the unornamental,
+sternly pious, eminently honest, and sturdily useful race that produced
+them.
+
+Judge Sewall makes frequent mention in his famous diary of "the New Psalm
+Book." He bought one "bound neatly in Kids Leather" for "3 shillings &
+sixpence" and gave it to a widow whom he was wooing. Rather a serious
+lover's gift, but characteristic of the giver, and not so gloomy as
+"Dr. Mathers Vials of Wrath," "Dr. Sibbs Bowels," "Dr. Preston's Church
+Carriage," and "Dr. Williard's Fountains opened," all of which he likewise
+presented to her.
+
+The Judge frequently gave a copy as a bridal gift, after singing from it
+"Myrrh aloes," to the gloomy tune of Windsor, at the wedding.
+
+  8. Myrrh Aloes and Cussias _smell_
+       all of thy garments _had_
+     Out of the yvory pallaces
+       whereby they made thee glad:
+
+  9. Amongst thine honourable maids
+       kings daughters present were
+     The Queen is set at thy right hand
+       in fine gold of Ophir.
+
+But his most frequent mention of the "new psalm-book" is in his "Humbell
+acknowledgement" made to God of the "great comfort and merciful kindness
+received through singing of His Psalmes;" and the pages of the diary bear
+ample testimony that whatever the book may appear to us now, it was to the
+early colonists the very Word of God.
+
+As years passed on, however, and singing-schools multiplied, it became much
+desired, and even imperative that there should be a better style and manner
+of singing, and open dissatisfaction arose with "The Bay Psalm-Book;" the
+younger members of the congregations wished to adopt the new and smoother
+versions of Tate and Brady, and of Watts. Petitions were frequently made in
+the churches to abolish the century-used book. Here is an opening sentence
+of one church-letter which is still in existence; it was presented to the
+ministers and elders of the Roxbury church September 11th, 1737, and was
+signed by many of the church members:--
+
+"The New England Version of Psalms however useful it may formerly have
+been, has now become through the natural variableness of Language, not only
+very uncouth but in many Places unintelligible; whereby the mind instead
+of being Raised and spirited in Singing The Praises of Almighty God and
+thereby being prepared to Attend to other Parts of Divine Service is Damped
+and made Spiritless in the Performance of the Duty at least such is the
+Tendency of the use of that Version," etc., etc.
+
+Great controversy arose over the abolition of the accustomed book, and
+church-quarrels were rife; but the end of the century saw the dearly loved
+old version consigned to desuetude, uever again to be opened, alas! but by
+critical or inquisitive readers.
+
+There is owned by the American Antiquarian Society, and kept carefully
+locked in the iron safe in the building of that Society in Worcester, a
+copy of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm Book." It is a quarto (not
+octavo, as Thomas described it in his "History of Printing") and is in very
+good condition, save that the titlepage is missing. It is in the original
+light-colored, time-stained parchment binding, and contains the autograph
+of Stephen Sewall. It also bears on the inside of the front cover the
+book-plate of Isaiah Thomas, and at the back, in the veteran printer's
+clear and beautiful handwriting, this statement: "After advertising for
+another copy of this book and making enquiry in many places in New England
+&c. I was not able to obtain or even hear of another. This copy is
+therefore invaluable and must be preserved with the greatest care. Isaiah
+Thomas, Sep. 20. 1820." His "History of Printing," was published in 1810,
+and the Society had acquired through the gift of "the rev. mr. Bentley" the
+copy which Thomas mentioned in his book.
+
+It is strange that Thomas should have been ignorant of the existence of
+other copies of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm-Book," for there were
+at that time six copies belonging to the Prince Library in the possession
+of the Old South Church of Boston. One would fancy that the Prince Library
+would have been one of his first objective points of search, save that a
+dense cloud of indifference had overshadowed that collection for so long
+a time. Five of those copies remained in the custody of the deacons and
+pastor of the Old South Church until 1860, and they were at one time all
+deposited in the Public Library of the City of Boston. Two still remain in
+that suitable place of deposit; they are almost complete in paging, but are
+in modern bindings. The other three copies were surrendered by Lieut-Gov.
+Samuel Armstrong (who, as one of the deacons of the Old South Church,
+had joint custody of the Prince Library), severally, to Mr. Edward
+Crowninshield of Boston, Dr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff of Boston, and Mr.
+George Livermore of Cambridge. Governor Armstrong surrendered these three
+books in consideration of certain modern books being given to the Prince
+Library, and of the modern bindings bestowed on the two other copies; which
+seems to us hardly a brilliant or judicious exchange.
+
+In Dr. Shurtleff "The Bay Psalm-Book" found a congenial and loving owner;
+and under his careful superintendence an exact reprint was published in
+1862 in the Riverside Press at Cambridge. He wrote for it a preface. It was
+published by subscription; one copy on India paper, fifteen on thick paper,
+and fifty on common paper. Copies on the last named paper have sold readily
+for thirty dollars each. All the typographical errors of the original were
+carefully reproduced in this reprint.
+
+At Dr. Shurtleffs death, his "Bay Psalm-Book" was catalogued with the rest
+of his library, which was to be sold on Dec. 2, 1875; but an injunction was
+obtained by the deacons of the Old South Church, to prevent the sale of the
+old psalm-book. They were rather late in the day however, to try to obtain
+again the too easily parted with book, and the ownership of it was adjudged
+to the estate. The book was sold Oct. 12, 1876, at the Library salesroom,
+Beacon Street, Boston, for one thousand and fifty dollars. It is now in the
+library of Mrs. John Carter Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island. Special
+interest attaches to this copy, because it was "Richard Mather, His Book"
+as several autographs in it testify; and the author's own copy is always of
+extra value. Cotton Mather, a grandson of Richard, was the close friend of
+the Reverend Thomas Prince, who founded the Prince Library, and who left it
+by will to the Old South Church in 1758. Mr. Prince's book-plate is on the
+reverse of the titlepage of this copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book," and is in
+itself a rarity. It reads thus:--
+
+     "This Book belongs to
+      The New England Library
+  Begun to be collected by Thomas Prince
+  upon his ent'ring Harvard-College July 6
+  1703, and was given by said Prince, to
+      remain therein forever."
+
+There was a sixth copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book" in the Prince Library in
+1830 when Dr. Wisner wrote his four sermons on the Old South Church of
+Boston,--a copy annotated by Dr. Prince and used by him while he was
+engaged on his revision. It has disappeared, together with many other
+important books and manuscripts belonging to the same library. The
+vicissitudes through which this most valuable collection has passed--lying
+neglected for years on shelves, in boxes, and in barrels in the
+steeple-room of the Old South Church, depleted to use for lighting fires,
+injured by British soldiery, but injured still more by the neglect and
+indifference of its custodians--are too painful to contemplate or relate.
+They contribute to the scholarly standing and honor of neither pastors nor
+congregations during those years. It is enough to state, however, that it
+is to the noble and ill-requited forethought of Dr. Prince that we owe all
+but three of the copies of the Bay Psalm-Book which are now known to be in
+existence.
+
+There is also a perfect copy of the first edition of the old book in the
+Lenox Library in New York, and the manner in which it was acquired (and
+also some further accounts of two of our old friends of the Prince Library,
+the acquisitions of Messrs. Crowninshield and Liverraore) is told so
+entertainingly by Henry Stevens, of Vermont, in his charming book,
+"Recollections of Mr. James Lenox" that it is best to quote his account in
+full:--
+
+    "For nearly ten years Mr. Lenox had entertained a longing de
+    to possess a perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book.' He gave me to
+    understand that if an opportunity occurred of securing a copy for him I
+    might go as far as one hundred guineas. Accordingly from 1847 till his
+    death, six years later, my good friend William Pickering and I put our
+    heads and book-hunting forces together to run down this rarity. The
+    only copy we knew of on this side the Atlantic was a spotless one in
+    the Bodleian Library, which had lain there unrecognized for ages, and
+    even in the printed catalogue of 1843 its title was recorded without
+    distinction among the common herd of Psalms in verse. I had handled it
+    several times with great reverence, and noted its many peculiar points,
+    but, as agreed with Mr. Pickering, without making any sign or imparting
+    any information to our good and obliging friend Dr. Bandinel, Bodley's
+    Librarian. We thought that when we had secured a copy for oursel
+    it would be time enough to acquaint the learned Doctor that he was
+    entertaining unawares this angel of the New World.
+
+    "Under these circumstances, therefore, only an experienced collector
+    can judge of my surprise and inward satisfaction, when on the 12
+    January, 1855, at Sotheby's, at one of the sales of Pickering's stock,
+    after untying parcel after parcel to see what I might chance to see,
+    and keeping ahead of the auctioneer, Mr. Wilkinson, on resolving to
+    prospect in one parcel more before he overtook me, my eye rested
+    an instant only on the long-lost Benjamin, clean and unspotted. I
+    instantly closed the parcel (which was described in the Catalogue as
+    Lot '531 Psalmes, other editions, 1630 to 1675 black letter, a parcel')
+    and tightened the string just as Alfred came to lay it on the table. A
+    cool-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing to the table behind Mr.
+    Lilly I quietly bid, in a perfectly natural tone, 'Sixpence,' and so
+    the bids went on increasing by sixpence until half a crown was reached,
+    and Mr. Lilly had loosened the string. Taking up this very volume he
+    turned to me and remarked that 'This looks a rare edition, Mr. Stevens,
+    don't you think so? I do not remember having seen it before,' and
+    raised the bid to five shillings. I replied that I had little doubt of
+    its rarity though comparatively a late edition of the Psalms,
+    at the same time gave Mr. Wilkinson a six-penny nod. Thenceforth a
+    'spirited competition' arose between Mr. Lilly and myself, until
+    finally the lot was knocked down to 'Stevens' for nineteen shillings. I
+    then called out with perhaps more energy than discretion, 'Delivered!'
+    On pocketing this volume, leaving the other seven to take the usual
+    course, Mr. Lilly and others inquired with some curiosity, 'What rarity
+    have you got now?' 'Oh, nothing,' said I, 'but the first English book
+    printed in America.' There was a pause in the sale, while all had a
+    good look at the little stranger. Some said jocularly, 'There has
+    evidently been a mistake; put up the lot again.' Mr. Stevens, with the
+    book again safely in his pocket, said, 'Nay, if Mr. Pickering, whose
+    cost mark of [3s] did not recognize the prize he had won, certainly the
+    cataloguer might be excused for throwing it away into the hands of the
+    right person to rescue, appreciate, and preserve it. I am now fully
+    rewarded for my long and silent hunt of seven years.'
+
+    "On reaching Morley's I eagerly collated the volume, and at first found
+    it right witli all the _usual_ signatures correct. The leaves were
+    not paged or folioed. But on further collation I missed sundry of the
+    Psalms, enough to fill four leaves. The puzzle was finally solved when
+    it was discovered that the inexperienced printer had marked the sheet
+    with the signature w after v, which is very unusual.
+
+    "This was a very disheartening disappointment, but I held my tongue,
+    and knowing that my old friend and correspondent, George Liverm
+    of Cambridge, N. E., possessed an imperfect copy, which he and Mr.
+    Crowninshield, after the noble example of the 'Lincoln Nosegay,' had
+    won from the Committee of the 'Old South' together with another and
+    perfect copy, I proposed an advantageous exchange and obtained
+    four missing leaves. Mr. Crowninshield strongly advised Mr. Livermore
+    against parting with his four leaves, because, as he said, 'They would
+    enable Stevens to complete his copy and to place it in the library of
+    Mr. Lenox, who would then crow over us because he also had a perfect
+    copy of "The Bay-Psalm Book."'
+
+    "Having thus completed my copy and had it bound by Francis Bedford in
+    his best style, I sent it to Mr. Lenox for £80. Five years later I
+    bought the Crowninshield Library in Boston for $10,000, mainly to
+    obtain his perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book,' and brought the whole
+    library to London. This second copy, after being held several months,
+    was at the suggestion of Mr. Thomas Watts, offered to the British
+    Museum for £150. The Keeper of the Printed Books, however, never had
+    the courage to send it before the Trustees for approval and payment; so
+    after waiting five or six years longer the volume was withdrawn, bound
+    by Bedford, taken to America in 1868, and sold to Mr. George Brinley
+    for 150 guineas. At the Brinley sale, in March, 1878, it was bought by
+    Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for $1200, or more than three times the cost
+    of my first copy to Mr. Lenox."
+
+We hear the expression of a book being "worth its weight in gold." "The Bay
+Psalm-Book," in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society, weighs
+nine ounces, hence Mr. Vanderbilt paid at least seven times its weight in
+gold for his precious book. Lowndes's "Bibliographers' Manual" says, "This
+volume, which is extremely rare and would at an auction in America produce
+from four to six thousand dollars, is familiarly termed 'The Bay Psalm
+Book.'" This must have been intended to be printed four to six hundred
+dollars, and is about as correct as the remainder of the description in
+that manual.
+
+The copy which is spoken of by Mr. Stevens as being in the Bodleian Library
+at Oxford was once the property of Bishop Tanner, the famous antiquary.
+Thus it is seen that there are seven copies at least of the first edition
+of "The Bay Psalm-Book" now in existence in America, instead of "five or
+at the most six," as a recent writer in "The Magazine of American History"
+states.
+
+And of all the manifold later editions of the New England Psalm-Book
+comparatively few copies now remain. Occasionally one is discovered in an
+old church library or seen in the collection of an antiquary. It is usually
+found to bear on its titlepage the name of its early owner, and often,
+also, in a different handwriting, the simple record and date of his death.
+Tender little memorial postils are frequently written on the margins of
+the pages: "Sung this the day Betty was baptized"--"This Psalm was sung at
+Mothers Funeral" "Gods Grace help me to heed this word." Sometimes we see
+on the blank pages, in a fine, cramped handwriting, the record of the
+births and deaths of an entire family. More frequently still we find the
+familiar and hackneyed verses of ancient titlepage lore, such as are
+usually seen on the blank leaves of old Bibles. This script was written in
+a "Bay Psalm-Book" of the sixteenth edition, and with the characteristic
+indifference of our New England forefathers for tiresome repetition, or
+possibly with their disdain of novelty, was seen on each and every blank
+page of the book:--
+
+  "Israel Balch, His Book,
+  God give him Grace theirin to look
+  And when the Bell for him doth toal
+  May God have mearcy on his Sole."
+
+What the diction lacked in variety is quite made up, however, in the
+spelling, which was painstakingly different on each page.
+
+Another Psalm-Book bore, inscribed in an elegant, minute handwriting, these
+lines, which were probably intended for verse, since the first word of each
+line commenced with a capital letter:--
+
+  "Abednego Prime His Book
+  When he withein these pages looks
+  May he find Grace to sing therein
+  Seventeen hundred and forty-seven."
+
+This is certainly pretty bad poetry,--bad enough to be worthy a place in
+"The Bay Psalm Book,"--but is also a most noble, laudable, and necessary
+aspiration; for power of Grace was plainly needed to enable Abednego or any
+one else to sing from those pages; and our pious New England forefathers
+must have been under special covenant of grace when they persevered against
+such obstacles and under such overwhelming disadvantages in having singing
+in their meetings.
+
+Another copy of the old New England Psalm-Book was thus inscribed:--
+
+      "Elam Noyes His Book
+  You children of the name of Noyes
+  Make Jesus Christ your only choyse."
+
+The early members of the Noyes family all seemed to be exceedingly and
+properly proud of this rhyming couplet; it formed a sort of patent of
+nobility. They wrote the pious injunction to their descendants in their
+Psalm-Books and their Bibles, in their wills, their letters; and they,
+with the greatest unanimity of feeling, had it cut upon their several
+tombstones. It was their own family motto,--their totem, so to speak.
+
+In a New England Psalm-Book in the possession of the American Antiquarian
+Society there is written in the distinct handwriting of Isaiah Thomas these
+explanatory words:--
+
+"This was the Pocket Psalm-book of John Symmons who died at Salem at
+100 years. He was born at North Salem went a-fishing in his youth was a
+prisoner with the Indians in Nova Scotia afterwards followed his labours in
+a Shipyard and till great old age laboured upon his lands and died
+without pain Aet 100. 31 October, 1791. He was a worthy conscientious and
+well-informed man and agreeable until the last hour of his life."
+
+I can think of no pleasanter tribute to be given to the character of any
+one than the simple words, "He was agreeable until the last hour of his
+life." What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and
+enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present
+influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant
+study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet
+agreeability which so characterized John Symmons.
+
+There lies now before me a copy of one of the early editions of "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." As I open the little dingy octavo volume, with its worn
+and torn edges, I am conscious of that distinctive, penetrating,
+_old-booky_ smell,--that ancient, that fairly _obsolete_ odor that
+never is exhaled save from some old, infrequently opened, leather-bound
+volume, which has once in years far past been much used and handled. A book
+which has never been familiarly used and loved cannot have quite the same
+antique perfume. The mouldering, rusty, flaky leather comes off in a
+yellow-brown powder on my fingers as I take up the book; and the cover
+nearly breaks off as I open it, though with tender, book-loving usage. The
+leather, though strong and honest, has rotted or disintegrated until it has
+almost fallen into dust. Across the yellow, ill-printed pages there runs,
+zig-zagging sideways and backwards crab-fashion on his crooked brown legs,
+one of those pigmy book-spiders,--those ugly little bibliophiles that seem
+flatter even than the close-pressed pages that form their home.
+
+Fair Puritan hands once held this dingy little book, honest Puritan eyes
+studied its ill-expressed words, and sweet Puritan lips sang haltingly but
+lovingly from its pages. This was "Cicely Morse Her Book" in the year 1710,
+and bears on many a page her name and the simple little couplet:--
+
+  "In youth I praise
+  And walk thy ways."
+
+And pretty it were to see Cicely in her praiseful and godly-walking youth,
+as she stood primly clad in her sad-colored gown and long apron, with a
+quoif or ciffer covering her smooth hair, and a red whittle on her slender
+shoulders, a-singing in the old New England meeting-house through the
+long, tedious psalms, which were made longer and more tedious still by the
+drawling singing and the deacons' "lining." Truly that were a pretty sight
+for our eyes, and for other eyes than ours, without doubt. Staid Puritan
+youth may have glanced soberly across the old meeting-house at the fair
+girl as she sung the Song of Solomon, with its ardent wording, without any
+very deep thought of its symbolic meaning:--
+
+  "Let him with kisses of his mouth
+    be pleased me to kiss,
+  Because much better than the wine
+    thy loving-kindness is.
+  To troops of horse in Pharoahs coach,
+    my love, I thee compare,
+  Thy neck with chains, with jewels new,
+    thy cheeks full comely are.
+  Borders of gold with silver studs
+    for thee make up we will,
+  Whilst that the king at's table sits
+    my spikenard yields her smell.
+
+  Like as of myrrh a bundle is
+    my well-belov'd to be,
+  Through all the night betwixt my breasts
+    his lodging-place shall be;
+  My love as in Engedis vines
+    like camphire-bunch to me,
+  So fair, my love, thou fair thou art
+    thine eyes as doves eyes be."
+
+Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school--that
+safety-valve of young New England life--had not then been established or
+even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical
+love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old
+meeting-house at Cicely as she sung.
+
+But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book. She may
+have been stately and prosperous and seated in the dignified "foreseat;"
+she may have been feeble and infirm in her place in the "Deaf Pue;" and she
+may have been careworn and sad, tired of fighting against poverty, worn
+with dread of fierce Indians, weary of the howls of the wolves in the dense
+forests so near, and home-sick and longing for the yonderland, her "faire
+Englishe home;" but were she sad or careworn or heartsick, in her treasured
+psalm-book she found comfort,--comfort in the halting verses as well as
+in the noble thoughts of the Psalmist. And the glamour of eternal,
+sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the
+inscription in the old psalm-book,--
+
+  "In youth I praise
+  And walk thy ways,"--
+
+the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole
+New World was young.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms.
+
+
+
+The metrical translation of the Psalms known as Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was doubtless used in the public worship of God in many of the
+early New England settlements, especially those of the Connecticut River
+Valley, though the old register of the town of Ipswich is the only local
+record that gives positive proof of its use in the Puritan church. In
+1693 an edition of Sternhold and Hopkins was printed in Cambridge,
+Massachusetts. It was not a day nor a land where a whole edition of such a
+book would be printed for reference or comparison only; and to thus publish
+the work of the English psalmists in the very teeth of the popularity of
+"The Bay Psalm Book" is to me a proof that Sternhold and Hopkins' Version
+was employed far more extensively in the colonial churches and homes than
+we now have records of, and than many of our church historians now fancy.
+Certainly the familiar English psalm-books must have been brought across
+the ocean and used temporarily until the newly landed colonists could
+acquire the version of Ainsworth or of the New England divines.
+
+An everlasting interest attaches to this metrical arrangement of the
+Psalms, to Americans as well as to Englishmen, because it was the earliest
+to be adopted in public worship in England. According to Strype, in his
+Memorial, the singing of psalms was allowed in England as early as 1548,
+but it was not until 1562 that the versified psalms of Sternhold and
+Hopkins were appended to the Book of Common Prayer. Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was also the first to give all the psalms of David in English verse
+to the English public.
+
+Very little is known of the authors of this version. Sternhold was educated
+at Oxford; was Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., was a
+"bold and busy Calvinist," and died in 1549. The little of interest told
+of John Hopkins is that he was a minister and schoolmaster, and that he
+assisted the work of Sternhold.
+
+The full reason for Sternhold's pious work is thus given by an old English
+author, Wood: "Being a most zealous reformer and a very strict liver he
+became so scandalyzed at the loose amorous songs used in the court that he
+forsooth turned into English metre fifty-one of Davids Psalms, and caused
+musical notes to be set to them, thinking thereby that the courtiers
+would sing them instead of their sonnets; but they did not, only some few
+excepted." The preface printed in the book stated Sternhold's wish and
+intention that the verses should be sung by Englishmen, not only in church,
+but "moreover in private houses for their godly solace and comfort; laying
+apart all ungodly Songs & Ballads which tend only to the nourishment of
+vice & corrupting of youth."
+
+The first edition contained nineteen psalms only, which were all versified
+by Sternhold. It was published in 1548 or 1549, under this title, "Certayn
+Psalmes chosen out of the Psalter of Daid and drawen into English Metre by
+Thomas Sternhold Groom of ye Kynges Maiesties Roobes." I believe no copy of
+this edition is now known to exist.
+
+The praise which Sternhold received for his pious rhymes had the same
+effect upon him as did similar encomiums upon his predecessor, the French
+psalm-writer Marot,--it encouraged him to write more psalm-verses.
+
+The second edition was printed in 1549, and contained thirty-seven psalms
+by Sternhold and seven by Hopkins. It bore this title, "Al such Psalmes of
+David as Thomas Sternehold late grome of his maiesties robes did in his
+lyfe tyme drawe into English metre." It was a well-printed book and copies
+are still preserved in the British Museum and the Public Library of
+Cambridge, England. This second and enlarged edition was dedicated, in a
+four-page preface, to King Edward VI., and a pretty story is told of the
+young king's interest in the verses. The delicate and gentle boy of twelve
+heard Sternhold when "singing them to his organ" as Strype says, and
+wandered in to hear the music and listen to the words. So great was his
+awakened interest in the sacred songs that Sternhold resolved to write in
+verse for him still further of the psalms. The dedication reads: "Seeing
+that your tender and godly zeale dooth more delight in the holye songs of
+veritie than in any fayncd rymes of vanytie, I am encouraged to travayle
+further in the said booke of Psalmes." This young king restored to the
+English people the free reading of the Bible, which his wicked father,
+Henry VIII., had forbidden them, and he was of a sincerely religious
+nature. He also was a music-lover, and encouraged the art as much as his
+short life and troubled reign permitted.
+
+Hopkins also wrote a preface for his share of the work, in which he spoke
+with much modesty of himself and much praise of Sternhold. He said his own
+verses were not "in any parte to bee compared with his [Sternhold's] most
+exquisite dooynges." He thinks, however, that his owne are "fruitfull
+though they bee not fyne."
+
+The third edition, in 1556, contained fifty-one psalms; the fourth, in
+1560, had sixty-seven psalms; the fifth, in 1561, increased the number to
+eighty-seven; and in 1562 or 1563 the whole book of psalms appeared. Other
+authors had some share in this work: Norton, Whyttyngham (a Puritan divine
+who married Calvin's sister), Kethe, who wrote the 100th Psalm, "All people
+that on earth do dwell," which is still seen in some of our hymn-books. Of
+all these men, sly old Thomas Fuller truthfully and quaintly said, "They
+were men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more
+of Jordan than of Helicon."
+
+For over one hundred years from the first publication there was a steady
+outpour of editions of these Psalms. Before the year 1600 there were
+seventy-four editions,--a most astonishing number for the times; and from
+1600 to 1700 two hundred and thirty-five editions. In 1868 six hundred and
+one editions were known, including twenty-one in this nineteenth century
+and doubtless there were still others uncatalogued and forgotten. Among
+other editions this version had in the time of Charles II. two in
+shorthand, one printed by "Thos. Cockerill at the Three Legs and Bible in
+the Poultry." Two copies of these editions are in the British Museum. They
+are tiny little 64mos, of which half a dozen could be laid side by side on
+the palm of the hand. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version had also in 1694 the
+honor of having arranged for it a Concordance.
+
+Upon no production of the religious Muse in the English tongue has greater
+diversity of criticism been displayed or more extraordinary or varied
+judgment been rendered than upon Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. A world of
+testimony could be adduced to fortify any view which one chose to take
+of them. At the time of their early publication they induced a swarm of
+stinging lampoons and sneering comments, that often evince most plainly
+that a difference in religious belief or scorn for an opposing sect brought
+them forth. The poetry of that and the succeeding century abounds in
+allusions to them. Phillips wrote:--
+
+      "Singing with woful noise
+  Like a crack'd saints bell jarring in the steeple,
+  Tom Sternhold's wretched prick-song for the people."
+
+Another poet, a courtier, wrote:--
+
+  "Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms
+  When they translated David's psalms."
+
+But I see no signs of qualmishness; they show to me rather a healthy
+sturdiness as one of their strongest characteristics.
+
+Pope at a later day wrote:--
+
+  "Not but there are who merit other palms
+    Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms.
+  The boys and girls whom charity maintains
+    Implore your help in these pathetic strains.
+  How could devotion touch the country pews
+    Unless the gods bestowed a proper muse."
+
+Wesley sneered at this version, saying, "When it is seasonable to sing
+praises to God we do it, not in the scandalous doggrel of Hopkins and
+Sternhold, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such
+as would provoke a _critic_ to turn _Christian_ rather than a
+_Christian_ to turn _critic_."
+
+The edition of 1562 was printed with the notes of melodies that were then
+called Church Tunes. They formed the basis of all future collections of
+psalm-music for over a century. They soon were published in harmony in four
+parts, "which may be sung to all musical instrumentes set forth for the
+encrease of vertue and abolyshing of other vayne and tryfling ballads." In
+1592 a very important collection of psalm-tunes was published to use with
+Sternhold and Hopkins' words. It is called "The Whole Booke of Psalmes:
+with their wonted tunes as they are sung in Churches composed into four
+parts." This book is noteworthy because in it the tunes are for the first
+time named after places, as is still the custom. The music contained square
+or oblong notes and also lozenge-shaped notes. The square note was a
+"semy-brave," the lozenge-shaped note was a "prycke" or a "mynymme," and
+"when there is a prycke by the square note, that prycke is half as much as
+the note that goeth before."
+
+Music at that time was said to be pricked, not printed,--the word being
+derived from the prick or dot which formed the head of the note. Any song
+which was printed in various parts was called a prick-song, to distinguish
+it from one sung extemporaneously or by ear. The word prick-song occurs not
+only in all the musical books, but in the literature of the time, and in
+Shakespeare. "Tom Sternhold's" songs were entitled to be called prick-songs
+because they had notes of music printed with them. Many of the tunes
+in this collection were taken from the Genevan Psalter and Luther's
+Psalm-Book, or from Marot and Beza's French Book of Psalms. Hence they were
+irreverently called "Genevan Jiggs," and "Beza's Ballets."
+
+There is much difference shown in the wording of these various editions of
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. The earlier ones were printed as Sternhold
+wrote them; but with the Genevan editions began great and astonishing
+alterations. Warton, who was no lover of Sternhold and Hopkins' verses,
+calling them "the disgrace of sacred poetry," said of these attempted
+improvements, with vehemence, that "many stanzas already too naked and weak
+like a plain old Gothic edifice stripped of its signatures of antiquity,
+have lost that little and almost only strength and support which they
+derived from ancient phrases." Other old critics thought that Sternhold,
+could he return to life, would hardly know his own verses.
+
+This is Sternhold's rendering of the Psalm in the edition of 1549:--
+
+  1.  The heavens & the fyrmamente
+        do wondersly declare
+      The glory of God omnipotent
+        his workes and what they are.
+
+  2.  Ech daye declareth by his course
+        an other daye to come
+      And By the night we know lykwise
+        a nightly course to run.
+
+  3.  There is no laguage tong or speche
+        where theyr sound is not heard,
+      In al the earth and coastes thereof
+        theyr knowledge is conferd.
+
+  4.  In them the lord made royally
+        a settle for the sunne
+      Where lyke a Gyant joyfully
+        he myght his iourney runne.
+
+  5.  And all the skye from ende to ende
+        he compast round about
+      No man can hyde hym from his heate
+        but he wll fynd hym out
+
+In order to show the liberties taken with the text we can compare with it
+the Genevan edition printed in 1556. The second verse of that presumptuous
+rendering reads,--
+
+  "The wonderous works of God appears
+    by every days success
+  The nyghts which likewise their race runne
+    the selfe same thinges expresse."
+
+The fourth,--
+
+  "In them the lorde made for the sunne
+    a place of great renoune
+  Who like a bridegrome rady-trimed
+    doth from his chamber come."
+
+The expression "rady-trimed," meaning close-shaven, is often instanced as
+one of the inelegancies of Sternhold, but he surely ought not to be held
+responsible for the "improvements" of the Genevan edition published after
+his death.
+
+The Genevan editors also invented and inserted an extra verse:--
+
+  "And as a valiant champion
+    who for to get a prize
+  With joye doth hast to take in hande
+    some noble enterprise."
+
+The fifth verse is thus altered:--
+
+  "And al the skye from ende to ende
+    he compasseth about,
+  Nothing can hyde it from his heate
+    but he wil finde it out."
+
+I cannot express the indignation with which I read these belittling and
+weakening alterations and interpolations; they are so unjust and
+so degrading to the reputation of Sternhold. It seems worse than
+forgery--worse than piracy; for instead of stealing from the defenceless
+dead poet, it foists upon him a spurious and degrading progeny; there is no
+word to express this tinkering libellous literary crime.
+
+Cromwell had a prime favorite among these psalms; it was the one hundred
+and ninth and is known as the "cursing psalm." Here are a few lines from
+it:--
+
+  "As he did cursing love, it shall
+    betide unto him so,
+  And as he did not blessing love
+    it shall be farre him fro,
+  As he with cursing clad himselfe
+    so it like water shall
+  Into his bowels and like oyl
+    Into his bones befall.
+  As garments let it be to him
+    to cover him for aye
+  And as a girdle wherewith he
+    may girded be alway."
+
+Another authority gives the "cursing psalm" as the nineteenth of King
+James's version; but there is nothing in "The heavens declare the glory of
+God," &c. to justify the nickname of "cursing."
+
+It is said when the tyrannical ruler Andros visited New Haven and attended
+church there that (Sternhold and Hopkins' Version being used) the fearless
+minister very inhospitably gave out the fifty-second psalm to be sung. The
+angry governor, who took it as a direct insult, had to listen to the lining
+and singing of these words, and I have no doubt they were roared out with a
+lusty will:--
+
+  1.  Why dost thou tyrant boast thyself
+        thy wicked deeds to praise
+      Dost thou not know there is a God
+        whose mercies last alwaies?
+
+  2.  Why doth thy mind yet still deuise
+        such wisked wiles to warp?
+      Thy tongue untrue, in forging lies
+        is like a razer sharp.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  4.  Thou dost delight in fraude & guilt
+        in mischief bloude and wrong:
+      Thy lips have learned the flattering stile
+        O false deceitful tongue.
+
+  5.  Therefore shall God for eye confounde
+        and pluck thee from thy place.
+      Thy seed and root from out the grounde
+        and so shall thee deface;
+
+  6.  The just when they behold thy fall
+        with feare will praise the Lord:
+      And in reproach of thee withall
+        cry out with one accord.
+
+When the unhappy King Charles fled from Oxford to a camp of troops he also
+was insulted by having the same psalm given out in his presence by the
+boorish chaplain of the troops. After the cruel words were ended the
+heartsick king rose and asked the soldiers to sing the fifty-sixth psalm.
+Whenever I read the beautiful and pathetic words, as peculiarly appropriate
+as if they had been written for that occasion only, I can see it all before
+me,--the great camp, the angry minister, the wretched but truly royal king;
+and I can hear the simple and noble song as it pours from the lips of
+hundreds of rude soldiers:
+
+  1.  Have mercy Lord on mee I pray
+        for man would mee devour.
+      He fighteth with me day by day
+        and troubleth me each hour.
+
+  2.  Mine enemies daily enterprise
+        to swallow mee outright
+      To fight against me many rise
+        O thou most high of might
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  5.  What things I either did or spake
+        they wrest them at thier wil:
+      And all the councel that they take
+        is how to work me il.
+
+  6.  They all consent themselves to hide
+        close watch for me to lay:
+      They spie my pathes, and snares have layd
+        to take my life away.
+
+  7.  Shall they thus scape on mischief set,
+        thou God on them wilt frowne:
+      For in his wrath he will not let
+        to throw whole kingdomes downe.
+
+It would perhaps be neither just nor conducive to proper judgment to gather
+only a florilege of noble verses from Sternhold and Hopkins' Version and
+point out none of the "weedy-trophies," the quaint and even uncouth lines
+which disfigure the work. We must, however, in considering and judging
+them, remember that many words and even phrases which at present
+seem rather ludicrous or undignified had, in the sixteenth century,
+significations which have now become obsolete, and which were then neither
+vulgar nor unpoetical. I also have been forced to take my selections from
+a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins printed in 1599, and bound up with a
+"Breeches Bible;" for I have access to no earlier edition. Sternhold
+and Hopkins themselves may not be in truth responsible for many of
+the crudities. Hopkins, in his rendition of the 12th verse of the
+seventy-fourth Psalm, thus addresses the Deity:--
+
+  "Why doost withdraw thy hand abacke
+    and hide it in thy lappe?
+  O pluck it out and bee not slacke
+    to give thy foes a rap."
+
+"Rap" may have meant a heavier, a mightier blow then than it does
+now-a-days.
+
+Here is another curious verse from the seventieth psalm,--
+
+  "Confounde them that apply
+    and seeke to make my shame
+  And at my harme doe laugh & crye
+    So So there goeth the game."
+
+The sixth verse of the fifty-eighth psalm is rendered thus:--
+
+  "O God breake thou thier teeth at once
+    within thier mouthes throughout;
+  The tuskes that in thier great jawbones
+    like Lions whelpes hang out."
+
+Another verse reads thus:--
+
+  "The earth did quake, the raine pourde down
+    Heard men great claps of thunder
+  And Mount Sinai shooke in such state
+    As it would cleeve in sunder."
+
+One verse of the thirty-fifth psalm reads thus:--
+
+  "The belly-gods and flattering traine
+    that all good things deride
+  At me doe grin with greate disdaine
+    and pluck thier mouths aside.
+  Lord when wilt thou amend this geare
+    why dost thou stay & pause?
+  O rid my soul, my onely deare,
+    out of these Lions clawes."
+
+The word tush occurs frequently and quaintly: "Tush I an sure to fail;"
+"Tush God forgetteth this."
+
+  "And with a blast doth puff against
+  such as would him correct
+  Tush Tush saith he I have no dread."
+
+Here are some of the curious expressions used:--
+
+  "Though gripes of grief and pangs full sore
+    shall lodge with us all night."
+
+  "For why their hearts were nothing lent
+    to Him nor to His trade."
+
+  "Our soul in God hath joy and game."
+
+  "They are so fed that even for fat
+    thier eyes oft-times out start."
+
+  "They grin they mow they nod thier heads."
+
+  "While they have war within thier hearts."
+    as butter are thier words."
+
+  "Divide them Lord & from them pul
+    thier devilish double-tongue."
+
+  "My silly soul uptake."
+
+  "And rained down Manna for them to eat
+    a food of mickle-wonder."
+
+  "For joy I have both gaped & breathed."
+
+But it is useless to multiply these selections, which, viewed individually,
+are certainly absurd and inelegant. They often indicate, however, the exact
+thought of the Psalmist, and are as well expressed as the desire to be
+literal as well as poetic will permit them to be. Sternhold's verses
+compare quite favorably, when looked at either as a whole or with regard to
+individual lines, with those of other poets of his day, for Chaucer was the
+only great poet who preceded him.
+
+I must acknowledge quite frankly in the face of critics of both this and
+the past century that I always read Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms with a
+delight, a satisfaction that I can hardly give reasons for. Many of the
+renderings, though unmelodious and uneven, have a rough vigor and a
+sweeping swing that is to me wonderfully impressive, far more so than many
+of the elegant and polished methods of modern versifiers. And they are so
+thoroughly antique, so devoid of any resemblance to modern poems, that I
+love them for their penetrating savor of the olden times; and they seem no
+more to be compared and contrasted with modern verses than should an old
+castle tower be compared with a fine new city house. We prefer the latter
+for a habitation, it is infinitely better in every way, but we can admire
+also the rough grandeur of the old ruin.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Other Old Psalm-Books.
+
+
+
+There are occasionally found in New England on the shelves of old
+libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old
+farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a
+pile of dusty books in a barrel,--there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered
+psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly
+used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed
+in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some
+colonist, in affectionate remembrance of the church of his youth, and sung
+from only with tender reminiscent longing in his own home. But when groups
+of settlers who were neighbors and friends in their old homes came to
+America and formed little segregated communities by themselves, there is no
+doubt that they sung for a time from the psalm-books that they brought with
+them.
+
+A rare copy is sometimes seen of Marot and Beza's French Psalm-book,
+brought to America doubtless by French Huguenot settlers, and used by them
+until (and perhaps after) the owners had learned the new tongue. Some of
+the Huguenots became members of the Puritan churches in America, others
+were Episcopalians. In Boston the Fancuils, Baudoins, Boutineaus,
+Sigourneys, and Johannots were all Huguenots, and attended the little brick
+church built on School Street in 1704, which was afterwards occupied by
+the Twelfth Congregational Society of Boston, and in 1788 became a Roman
+Catholic church.
+
+The pocket psalm-book of Gabriel Bernon, the builder of the old French Fort
+at Oxford, is one of Marot and Beza's Version, and is still preserved and
+owned by one of his descendants; other New England families of French
+lineage cherish as precious relics the French psalm-books of their Huguenot
+ancestors. There has been in France no such incessant production of new
+metrical versions of the psalms as in England. From the time of the
+publication of the first versified psalms in 1540, through nearly three
+centuries the psalm-book of all French Protestants has been that of Marot
+and Beza. This French version of the psalms is of special interest to all
+thoughtful students of the history of Protestantism, because it was the
+first metrical translation of the psalms ever sung and used by the people;
+and it was without doubt one of the most powerful influences that assisted
+in the religious awakening of the Reformation.
+
+Clement Marot was the "Valet of the Bed-chamber to King Francis I.," and
+was one of the greatest French poets of his time; in fact, he gave his
+name to a new school of poetry,--"Marotique." He had tried his hand at
+an immense variety of profane verse, he had written ballades, chansons,
+pastourelles, vers équivoques, eclogues, laments, complaints, epitaphs,
+chants-royals, blasons, contreblasons, dizains, huitains, envois; he had
+been, Warton says, "the inventor of the rondeau and the restorer of the
+madrigal;" and yet, in spite of his well-known ingenuity and versatility,
+it occasioned much surprise and even amusement when it was known that the
+gay poet had written psalm-songs and proposed to substitute them for the
+love-songs of the French court. I doubt if Marot thought very deeply of the
+religious influence of his new songs, in spite of Mr. Morley's belief in
+the versifier's serious intent. He was doubtless interested and perhaps
+somewhat infected by "Lutheranisme," though perhaps he was more of a
+free-thinker than a Protestant. He himself said of his faith:--
+
+              "I am not a Lutherist
+  Nor Zuinglian and less Anabaptist,
+  I am of God through his son Jesus Christ.
+  I am one who has many works devised
+  From which none could extract a single line
+  Opposing itself to the law divine."
+
+And again:--
+
+  "Luther did not come down from heaven for me
+  Luther was not nailed to the cross to be
+  My Saviour; for my sins to suffer shame,
+  And I was not baptized in Luther's name.
+  The name I was baptized in sounds so sweet
+  That at the sound of it, what we entreat
+  The Eternal Father gives."
+
+In the year 1540, at the instigation of King Francis, Marot presented a
+manuscript copy of his thirty new psalm-songs to Charles V., king of Spain,
+receiving therefor two hundred gold doubloons. Francis encouraged him by
+further gifts, and so praised his work that the author soon published the
+thirty in a book which he dedicated to the king; and to which he also
+prefixed a metrical address to the ladies of France, bidding these fair
+dames to place their
+
+    "doigts sur les espinettes
+  Pour dire sainctes chansonnettes."
+
+These "sainctes chansonnettes" became at once the rage; courtiers and
+princes, lords and ladies, ever ready for some new excitement, seized at
+once upon the novel psalm-songs, and having no special or serious music for
+them, cheerfully sang the sacred words to the ballad-tunes of the times,
+and to their gailliards and measures, without apparently any very deep
+thought of their religious meaning. Disraeli says that each of the royal
+family and each nobleman chose for his favorite song a psalm expressive of
+his own feeling or sentiments. The Dauphin, as became a brave huntsman,
+chose
+
+  "Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre,"
+
+  "As the hart panteth after the water-brook,"
+
+and he gayly and noisily sang it when he went to the chase. The Queen chose
+
+  "Ne vueilles pas, ô sire,
+  Me reprendre en ton ire."
+
+  "Rebuke me not in thine indignation."
+
+Antony, king of Navarre, sung
+
+  "Revenge moy prens la querelle,"
+
+  "Stand up, O Lord! to revenge my quarrel,"
+
+to the air of a dance of Poitou. Diane de Poictiers chose
+
+  "Du fond de ma pensée."
+
+  "From the depth of my heart."
+
+But when from interest in her psalm-song she wished to further read and
+study the Bible, she was warned from the danger with horror by the Cardinal
+of Lorraine. This religious awakening and inquiry was of course deprecated
+and dreaded by the Romish Church; to the Sorbonne all this rage for
+psalm-singing was alarming enough. What right had the people to sing God's
+word, "I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall be continually
+in my mouth"? The new psalm-songs were soon added to the list of "Heretical
+Books" forbidden by the Church, and Marot fled to Geneva in 1543. He had
+ere this been under ban of the Church, even under condemnation of death;
+had been proclaimed a heretic at all the cross-ways throughout the kingdom,
+and had been imprisoned. But he had been too good a poet and courtier to be
+lost, and the king had then interested himself and obtained the release of
+the versatile song writer. The fickle king abandoned for a second time the
+psalm versifier, who never again returned to France.
+
+The austere and far-seeing Calvin at once adopted Marot's version of the
+Psalms, now enlarged to the number of fifty, and added them to the Genevan
+Confession of Faith,--recommending however that they be sung with the grave
+and suitable strains written, for them by Guillaume Frane.
+
+The collection was completed with the assistance of Theodore Beza, the
+great theologian, and the demand for the books was so great that the
+printers could not supply them quickly enough. Ten thousand copies were
+sold at once,--a vast number for the times.
+
+But Marot was not happy in Geneva with Calvin and the Calvinists, as we can
+well understand. Beza, in his "History of the French Reformed Churches"
+said, "He (Marot) had always been bred up in a very bad school, and could
+not live in subjection to the reformation of the Gospel, and therefore
+went and spent the rest of his days in Piedmont, which was then in the
+possession of the king, where he lived in some security under the favor of
+the governor." He lived less than a year, however, dying in 1544.
+
+These psalms of Marot's passed through a great number and variety of
+editions. In addition to the Genevan publications, an immense number were
+printed in England. Nearly all the early editions were elegant books;
+carefully printed on rich paper, beautifully bound in rich moroccos and
+leathers, often emblazoned with gold on the covers, and with corners and
+clasps of precious metals,--they show the wealth and fashion of the owners.
+When, however, it came to be held an infallible sign of "Lutheranisme" to
+be a singer of psalms, simpler and cheaper bindings appear; hence the dress
+of the French Psalm-Book found in New England is often dull enough, but
+invariably firm and substantial.
+
+These psalms of Marot's are written in a great variety of song-measures,
+which seem scarcely as solemn and religious as the more dignified and even
+metres used by the early English writers. Some are graceful and smooth,
+however, and are canorous though never sonorous. They are pleasing to read
+with their quaint old spelling and lettering.
+
+In the old Sigourney psalm-book the nineteenth psalm was thus rendered:--
+
+  "Les cieux en chaque lieu
+  La puissance de Dieu
+    Racourent aux humains
+  Ce grand entour espars
+  Publie en toutes parts
+    L'ouvrage de ses mains.
+
+  "Iour apres iour coulant
+  Du Saigneur va parlant
+    Par longue experience.
+  La nuict suivant la nuict,
+  Nous presche et nous instruicst
+    De sa grád sapience"
+
+Another much-employed metre was this, of the hundred and thirty-third
+psalm:--
+
+  "Asais aux bors do ce superbe fleuve
+  Que de Babel les campagnes abreuve,
+  Nos tristes coeurs ne pensoient qu' à Sion.
+  Chacun, helas, dans cette affliction
+  Les yeux en pleurs la morte peinte au visage
+  Pendit sa harpe aux saules du rivage."
+
+A third and favorite metre was this:--
+
+  "Mais sa montagne est un sainct lieu:
+  Qui viendra done au mont de Dieu?
+    Qui est-ce qui là tiendra place?
+  Le homine de mains et coeur lavé,
+  En vanité non éslevé
+    Et qui n'a juré en fallace."
+
+Marot wrote in his preface to the psalms:--
+
+  "Thrice happy they who shall behold
+  And listen in that age of gold
+  As by the plough the laborer strays
+  And carman 'mid the public ways
+  And tradesman in his shop shall swell
+  The voice in psalm and canticle,
+  Sing to solace toil; again
+  From woods shall come a sweeter strain,
+  Shepherd and shepherdess shall vie
+  In many a tender Psalmody,
+  And the Creator's name prolong
+  As rock and stream return their song."
+
+Though these words seem prophetic, the gay and volatile Marot could never
+have foreseen what has proved one of the most curious facts in religious
+history,--that from the airy and unsubstantial seed sown by the French
+courtier in such a careless, thoughtless manner, would spring the
+great-spreading and deep-rooted tree of sacred song.
+
+Little volumes of the metrical rendering of the Psalms, known as "Tate and
+Brady's Version," are frequently found in New England. It was the first
+English collection of psalms containing any smoothly flowing verses. Many
+of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal
+renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were
+"tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were
+certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate.
+It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able
+to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too
+modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write
+an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel.
+Brady--equally modest--translated the Aeneid in rivalry of Dryden. "This
+translation," says Johnson, "when dragged into the world did not live long
+enough to cry."
+
+Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a
+stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's
+hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them
+we owe, however, these noble lines, which were written thus:--
+
+  "Be thou, O God, exalted High,
+  And as thy glory fills the Skie
+  So let it be on Earth displaid
+  Till thou art here as There obeyed."
+
+The hymn commencing,--
+
+  "My soul for help on God relies,
+    From him alone my safety flows,"
+
+is also of their composition.
+
+The first edition of these psalms was printed in 1696, and bore this
+title, "The Book of Psalms, a new version in metre fitted to the tunes used
+in Churches. By N. Tate and N. Brady." It was dedicated to King William,
+and though its use was permitted in English churches, it never supplanted
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version. In New England Tate and Brady's Psalms
+became more universally popular,--not, however, without fierce opposing
+struggles from the older church-members at giving up the venerated "Bay
+Psalm-Book."
+
+Another version of Psalms which is occasionally found in New England is
+known as "Patrick's Version." The title is "The Psalms of David in Metre
+Fitted to the Tunes used in Parish Churches by John Patrick, D.D. Precentor
+to the Charter House London." A curious feature of this octavo edition of
+1701, which I have, is, "An Explication of Some Words of less Common
+Use For the Benefit of the Common People." Here are a few of the
+"explications:"--
+
+  "Celebrate--Make renown'd.
+  Climes--Countries differing in length of days.
+  Detracting--Lessening one's credit.
+  Fluid--Yielding.
+  Infest--Annoy.
+  Theam--Matter of Discourse.
+  Uncessant--Never ceasing.
+  Stupemlious--Astonishing."
+
+Baxter said of Patrick, "His holy affection and harmony hath so far
+reconciled the Nonconformists that diverse of them use his Psalms in
+their congregation." I doubt if the version were used in New England
+Nonconformist congregations. Some of his verses read thus:--
+
+  "Lord hear the pray'rs and mournfull cries
+    Of mine afflicted estate,
+  And with thy Comforts chear my soul,
+    Before it is too late.
+
+  "My days consume away like Smoak
+    Mine anguish is so great,
+  My bones are not unlike a hearth
+    Parched & dry with heat.
+
+  "Such is my grief I little else
+    Can do but sigh and groan.
+  So wasted is my flesh I'm left
+    Nothing but skin and bone.
+
+  "Like th' Owl and Pelican that dwell
+    In desarts out of sight,
+  I sadly do bemoan myself,
+    In solitude delight.
+
+  "The wakeful bird that on Housetops
+    Sits without company
+  And spends the night in mournful cries
+    Leads such a life as I.
+
+  "The Ashes I rowl in when I eat
+    Are tasted with my bread,
+  And with my Drink are mixed the tears
+    I plentifully shed."
+
+A version of the Psalms which seems to have demanded and deserved more
+attention than it received was written by Cotton Mather. He was doomed to
+disappointment in seeing his version adopted by the New England churches
+just as his ambitions and hopes were disappointed in many other ways. This
+book was published in 1718. It was called "Psalterium Americanum. A Book
+of Psalms in a translation exactly conformed unto the Original; but all
+in blank verse. Fitted unto the tunes commonly used in the Church." By a
+curious arrangement of brackets and the use of two kinds of print these
+psalms could be divided into two separate metres and could be sung to
+tunes of either long or short metre. After each psalm were introduced
+explanations written in Mather's characteristic manner,--a manner both
+scholarly and bombastic. I have read the "Psalterium Americanum" with care,
+and am impressed with its elegance, finish, and dignity. It is so popular,
+however, even now-a-days, to jibe at poor Cotton Mather, that his Psalter
+does not escape the thrusts of laughing critics. Mr. Glass, the English
+critic, holds up these lines as "one of the rich things:"--
+
+  "As the Hart makes a panting cry
+    For cooling streams of water,
+  So my soul makes a panting cry
+    For thee--O Mighty God."
+
+I have read these lines over and over again, and fail to see anything very
+ludicrous in them, though they might be slightly altered to advantage.
+Still they may be very absurd and laughable from an English point of view.
+
+So superior was Cotton Mather's version to the miserable verses given in
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" that one wonders it was not eagerly accepted by the
+New England churches. Doubtless they preferred rhyme--even the atrocious
+rhyme of "The Bay Psalm Book." And the fact that the "Psalterium
+Americanum" contained no musical notes or directions also militated against
+its use.
+
+Other American clergymen prepared metrical versions of the psalms that were
+much loved and loudly sung by the respective congregations of the writers.
+The work of those worthy, painstaking saints we will neither quote nor
+criticise,--saying only of each reverend versifier, "Truly, I would
+the gods had made thee poetical." Rev. John Barnard, who preached for
+fifty-four years in Marblehead, published at the age of seventy years a
+psalm-book for his people. Though it appeared in 1752, a time when "The Bay
+Psalm Book" was being shoved out of the New England churches, Barnard's
+Version of the Psalms was never used outside of Marblehead. Rev. Abijah
+Davis published another book of psalms in which he copied whole pages from
+Watts without a word of thanks or of due credit, which was apparently
+neither Christian, clerical nor manly behavior.
+
+Watts's monosyllabic Hymns, which were not universally used in America
+until after the Revolution, are too well known and are still too frequently
+seen to need more than mention. Within the last century a flood of new
+books of psalms of varying merit and existence has poured out upon the New
+England churches, and filled the church libraries and church, pews, the
+second-hand book shops, the missionary boxes, and the paper-mills.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+The Church Music.
+
+
+
+Of all the dismal accompaniments of public worship in the early days of New
+England, the music was the most hopelessly forlorn,--not alone from the
+confused versifications of the Psalms which were used, but from the
+mournful monotony of the few known tunes and the horrible manner in which
+those tunes were sung. It was not much better in old England. In 1676
+Master Mace wrote of the singing in English churches, "'T is sad to
+hear what whining, toling, yelling or shreaking there is in our country
+congregations."
+
+A few feeble efforts were made in America at the beginning of the
+eighteenth century to attempt to guide the singing. The edition of 1698 of
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" had "Some few Directions" regarding the singing added
+on the last pages of the book, and simple enough they were in matter if not
+in form. They commence, "_First_, observe how many note-compass the
+tune is next the place of your first note, and how many notes above and
+below that so as you may begin the tune of your first note, as the rest may
+be sung in the compass of your and the peoples voices without Squeaking
+above or Grumbling below."
+
+This "Squeaking above and Grumbling below" had become far too frequent in
+the churches; Judge Sewall writes often with much self-reproach of his
+failure in "setting the tune," and also records with pride when he "set the
+psalm well." Here is his pathetic record of one of his mistakes: "He spake
+to me to set the tune. I intended Windsor and fell into High Dutch, and
+then essaying to set another tune went into a Key much to high. So I pray'd
+to Mr. White to set it which he did well. Litchfield Tune. The Lord Humble
+me and Instruct me that I should be the occasion of any interruption in the
+worship of God."
+
+The singing at the time must have been bad beyond belief; how much of its
+atrocity was attributable to the use of "The Bay Psalm-Book," cannot now
+be known. The great length of many of the psalms in that book was a fatal
+barrier to any successful effort to have good singing. Some of them were
+one hundred and thirty lines long, and occupied, when lined and sung, a
+full half-hour, during which the patient congregation stood. It is told of
+Dr. West, who preached in Dartmouth in 1726, that he forgot one Sabbath Day
+to bring his sermon to meeting. He gave out a psalm, walked a quarter of a
+mile to his house, got his sermon, and was back in his pulpit long before
+the psalm was finished. The irregularity of the rhythm in "The Bay Psalm
+Book" must also have been a serious difficulty to overcome. Here is the
+rendering given of the 133d Psalm:--
+
+  1. How good and sweet to see
+       i'ts for bretheren to dwell
+       together in unitee:
+
+  2. Its like choice oyle that fell
+       the head upon
+       that down did flow
+       the beard unto
+       beard of Aron:
+       The skirts of his garment
+       that unto them went down:
+
+  3. Like Hermons dews descent
+       Sions mountains upon
+       for there to bee
+       the Lords blessing
+       life aye lasting
+       commandeth hee.
+
+How this contorted song could have been sung even to the simplest tune by
+unskilled singers who possessed no guiding notes of music is difficult
+to comprehend. Small wonder that Judge Sewall was forced to enter in his
+diary, "In the morning I set York tune and in the second going over, the
+gallery carried it irresistibly to St. Davids which discouraged me very
+much." We can fancy him stamping his foot, beating time, and roaring York
+at the top of his old lungs, and being overcome by the strong-voiced
+gallery, and at last sadly succumbing to St. David's. Again he writes: "I
+set York tune and the Congregation went out of it into St. Davids in the
+very 2nd going over. They did the same 3 weeks before. This is the 2nd
+Sign. It seems to me an intimation for me to resign the Praecentor's Place
+to a better Voice. I have through the Divine Long suffering and Favour done
+it for 24 years and now God in his Providence seems to call me off, my
+voice being enfeebled." Still a third time he "set Windsor tune;" they "ran
+over into Oxford do what I would." These unseemly "running overs" became
+so common that ere long each singer "set the tune" at his own will and the
+loudest-voiced carried the day. A writer of the time, Rev. Thomas Walter,
+says of this reign of _concordia discors_: "The tunes are now
+miserably tortured and twisted and quavered, in some Churches, into a
+horrid Medly of confused and disorderly Voices. Our tunes are left to the
+Mercy of every unskilful Throat to chop and alter, to twist and change,
+according to their infinitely divers and no less Odd Humours and Fancies.
+I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two Men in the
+Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good
+Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with
+perpetual Interfearings with one another."
+
+Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and
+unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they
+possessed,--a foretaste of heaven;
+
+      "for all we know
+  Of what the blessed do above
+  Is that they sing and that they love."
+
+And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous
+melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal.
+
+Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the
+early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering
+and holding the colonists together in love. And they reverenced their poor
+halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever
+a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a
+psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he
+doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must
+believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,--
+
+    "There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged,
+    I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune."
+
+Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved
+to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words.
+"The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears
+at the words, _bought with thy blood_." He also, with a vehemence of
+language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that
+he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of
+his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield,
+Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs.
+
+About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously
+prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing
+Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These
+thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound
+often with "The Bay Psalm-Book." They were reprinted from Playford's "Book
+of Psalms" and the notes of the staff were replaced with letters and dots,
+and the bars marking the measures were omitted. To the Puritans, this great
+number of new tunes appeared fairly monstrous, and formed the signal for
+bitter objections and fierce quarrels.
+
+In 1647 a tract had appeared on church-singing which had attracted much
+attention. It was written by Rev John Cotton to attempt to influence the
+adoption and universal use of "The Bay Psalm-Book." This tract thoroughly
+considered the duty of singing, the matter sung, the singers, and the
+manner of singing, and, like all the literature of the time, was full of
+Biblical allusion and quotation. It had been said that "man should sing
+onely and not the women. Because it is not permitted to a woman to speake
+in the Church, how then shall they sing? Much lesse is it permitted to them
+to prophecy in the church and singing of Psalms is a kind of Prophecying."
+Cotton fully answered and contradicted these false reasoners, who would
+have had to face a revolution had they attempted to keep the Puritan women
+from singing in meeting. The tract abounds in quaint expressions, such as,
+"they have scoffed at Puritan Ministers as calling the people to sing one
+of _Hopkins-Jiggs_ and so _hop_ into the pulpit." Though he wrote
+this tract to encourage good singing in meeting, his endorsement of "lining
+the Psalm" gave support to the very element that soon ruined the singing.
+His reasons, however, were temporarily good, "because many wanted books and
+skill to read." At that time, and for a century later, many congregations
+had but one or two psalm-books, one of which was often bound with the
+church Bible and from which the deacon lined the psalm.
+
+So villanous had church-singing at last become that the clergymen arose in
+a body and demanded better performances; while a desperate and disgusted
+party was also formed which was opposed to all singing. Still another band
+of old fogies was strong in force who wished to cling to the same way of
+singing that they were accustomed to; and they gave many objections to the
+new-fangled idea of singing by note, the chief item on the list being the
+everlasting objection of all such old fossils, that "the old way was good
+enough for our fathers," &c. They also asserted that "_the names of
+the notes were blasphemous_;" that it was "popish;" that it was a
+contrivance to get money; that it would bring musical instruments into the
+churches; and that "no one could learn the tunes any way." A writer in the
+"New England Chronicle" wrote in 1723, "Truly I have a great jealousy
+that if we begin to _sing_ by _rule_, the next thing will be
+to _pray_ by rule and _preach_ by rule and _then comes popery_."
+
+It is impossible to overestimate the excitement, the animosity, and the
+contention which arose in the New England colonies from these discussions
+over "singing by rule" or "singing by rote." Many prominent clergymen wrote
+essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of
+Regular Singing," also a "Joco-serious Dialogue on Singing," by Reverend
+Mr. Symmes; "Cases of Conscience," compiled by several ministers; "The
+Accomplished Singer," by Cotton Mather, were the most important. "Singing
+Lectures" also were given in many parts of New England by various prominent
+ministers. So high was party feud that a "Pacificatory Letter" was
+necessary, which was probably written by Cotton Mather, and which soothed
+the troubled waters. The people who thought the "old way was the best" were
+entirely satisfied when they were convinced that the oldest way of all was,
+of course, by note and not by rote.
+
+This naive extract from the records of the First Church of Windsor,
+Connecticut, will show the way in which the question of "singing by rule"
+was often settled in the churches, and it also gives a very amusing glimpse
+of the colonial manner of conducting a meeting:--
+
+"July 2. 1736. At a Society meeting at which Capt. Pelatiah Allyn
+Moderator. The business of the meeting proceeded in the following manner
+Viz. the Moderator proposed as to the consideration of the meeting in the
+1st Place what should be done respecting that part of publick Woiship
+called Singing viz. whether in their Publick meetings as on Sabbath day,
+Lectures &c they would sing the way that Deacon Marshall usually sung in
+his lifetime commonly called the 'Old Way' or whether they would sing the
+way taught by Mr. Beal commonly called 'Singing by Rule,' and when the
+Society had discoursed the matter the Moderator pioposed to vote for said
+two ways as followeth viz. that those that were for singing in publick in
+the way practiced by Deacon Marshall should hold up their hands and be
+counted, and then that those that were desirous to sing in Mr. Beals way
+called 'by Rule' would after show their minds by the same sign which method
+was proceeded upon accordingly. But when the vote was passed there being
+many voters it was difficult to take the exact number of votes in order to
+determine on which side the major vote was; whereupon the Moderator ordered
+all the voters to go out of the seats and stand in the alleys and then
+those that were for Deacon Marshalls way should go into the mens seats and
+those that were for Mr. Beals way should go into the womens seat and
+after much objections made against that way, which prevailed not with the
+Moderator, it was complied with, and then the Moderator desired that those
+that were of the mind that the way to be practiced for singing for the
+future on the Sabbath &c should be the way sung by Deacon Marshall as
+aforesaid would signify the same by holding up their hands and be counted,
+and then the Moderator and myself went and counted the voters and the
+Moderator asked me how many there was. I answered 42 and he said there was
+63 or 64 and then we both counted again and agreed the number being 43.
+Then the Moderator was about to count the number of votes for Mr. Beals
+way of Singing called 'by Rule' but it was offered whether it would not be
+better to order the voters to pass out of the Meeting House door and there
+be counted who did accordingly and their number was 44 or 45. Then the
+Moderator proceeded and desired that those who were for singing in Public
+the way that Mr. Beal taught would draw out of their seats and pass out of
+the door and be counted. They replied they were ready to show their minds
+in any proper way where they were if they might be directed thereto but
+would not go out of the door to do the same and desired that they might be
+led to a vote where they were and they were ready to show their minds which
+the Moderator refused to do and thereupon declared that it was voted that
+Deacon Marshalls way of singing called the 'Old Way' should be sung in
+Publick for the future and ordered me to record the same as the vote of the
+Said Society which I refused to do under the circumstances thereof and have
+recorded the facts and proceedings."
+
+Good old lining, droning Deacon Marshall! though you were dead and gone,
+you and your years of psalm-singings were not forgotten. You lived, an
+idealized memory of pure and pious harmony, in the hearts of your old
+church friends. Warmly did they fight for your "way of singing;" with
+most undeniable and open partiality, with most dubious ingenuousness and
+rectitude, did your old neighbor, Captain Pelatiah Allyn, conduct that hot
+July music-meeting, counting up boldly sixty-three votes in favor of your
+way, when there were only forty-three voters on your side of the alley, and
+crowding a final decision in your favor. It is sad to read that when icy
+winter chilled the blood, warm partisanship of old friends also cooled, and
+innovative Windsor youth carried the day and the music vote, and your good
+old way was abandoned for half the Sunday services, to allow the upstart
+new fashion to take control.
+
+One happy result arose throughout New England from the victory of the
+ardent advocates of the "singing by rule,"--the establishment of the New
+England "singing-school,"--that outlet for the pent-up, amusement-lacking
+lives of young people in colonial times. What that innocent and
+happy gathering was in the monotonous existence of our ancestors and
+ancestresses, we of the present pleasure-filled days can hardly comprehend.
+
+Extracts from the records of various colonial churches will show how soon
+the respective communities yielded to the march of improvement and "seated
+the taught singers" together, thus forming choirs. In 1762 the church
+at Rowley, Massachusetts, voted "that those who have learned the art of
+Singing may have liberty to sit in the front gallery." In 1780 the same
+parish "requested Jonathan Chaplin and Lieutenant Spefford to assist the
+deacons in Raising the tune in the meeting house." In Sutton, in 1791, the
+Company of Singers were allowed to sit together, and $13 was voted to pay
+for "larning to sing by Rule." The Roxbury "First Church" voted in 1770
+"three seats in the back gallery for those inclined to sit together for
+the purpose of singing" The church in Hanover, in 1742, took a vote to
+see whether the "church will sing in the new way" and appoint a tuner. In
+Woodbury, Connecticut, in 1750 the singers "may sitt up Galery all day if
+they please but to keep to there own seat & not to Infringe on the Women
+Pues." In 1763, in the Ipswich First Parish, the singers were allowed to
+sit "two back on each side of the front alley." Similar entries may be
+found in nearly every record of New England churches in the middle or
+latter part of that century.
+
+The musical battle was not finished, however, when the singing was at last
+taught by rule, and the singers were allowed to sit together and form a
+choir. There still existed the odious custom of "lining" or "deaconing"
+the psalm. To this fashion may be attributed the depraved condition of
+church-singing of which Walters so forcibly wrote, and while it continued
+the case seemed hopeless, in spite of singing-schools and singing-teachers.
+It would be trying to the continued uniformity of pitch of an ordinary
+church choir, even now-a-days, to have to stop for several seconds between
+each line to listen to a reading and sometimes to an explanation of the
+following line.
+
+The Westminster Assembly had suggested in 1664 the alternate reading and
+singing of each line of the psalm to those churches that were not well
+supplied with psalm-books. The suggestion had not been adopted without
+discussion, It was in 1680 much talked over in the church in Plymouth, and
+was adopted only after getting the opinion of each male church member.
+When once taken into general use the custom continued everywhere, through
+carelessness and obstinacy, long after the churches possessed plenty of
+psalm-books. An early complaint against it was made by Dr. Watts in the
+preface of his hymns, which were published by Benjamin Franklin in 1741. As
+Watts' Psalms and Hymns were not, however, in general use in New England
+until after the Revolution, this preface with its complaint was for a long
+time little seen and little heeded.
+
+It is said that the abolition came gradually; that the impetuous and
+well-trained singers at first cut off the last word only of the deacon's
+"lining;" they then encroached a word or two further, and finally sung
+boldly on without stopping at all to be "deaconed." This brought down
+a tempest of indignation from the older church-members, who protested,
+however, in vain. A vote in the church usually found the singers
+victorious, and whether the church voted for or against the "lining," the
+choir would always by stratagem vanquish the deacon. One old soldier took
+his revenge, however. Being sung down by the rampant choir, he still showed
+battle, and rose at the conclusion of the psalm and opened his psalm-book,
+saying calmly, "_Now_ let the _people of the Lord sing_."
+
+The Rowley church tried diplomacy in their struggle against "deaconing,"
+by instituting a gradual abolishing of the custom. In 1785 the choir was
+allowed "to sing once on the Lord's Day without reading by the Deacon." In
+five years the Rowley singers were wholly victorious, and "lining out" the
+psalm was entirely discontinued.
+
+In 1770, dissatisfaction at the singing in the church was rife in
+Wilbraham, and a vote was taken to see whether the town would be willing
+to have singing four times at each service; and it was voted to "take into
+consideration the Broken State of this Town with regard to singing on the
+Sabbath Day." Special and bitter objection was made against the leader
+beating time so ostentatiously. A list of singers was made and a
+singing-master appointed. The deacon was allowed to lead and line and beat
+time in the forenoon, while the new school was to have control in the
+afternoon; and "whoever leads the singing shall be at liberty to use the
+motion of his hand while singing for the space of three months only." It is
+needless to state who came off victorious in the end. The deacon left as a
+parting shot a request to "make Inquiry into the conduct of those who call
+themselves the Singers in this town."
+
+In Worcester, in 1779, a resolution adopted at the town meeting was "that
+the mode of singing in the congregation here be without reading the psalms
+line by line." "The Sabbath succeeding the adoption of this resolution,
+after the hymn had been read by the minister, the aged and venerable Deacon
+Chamberlain, unwilling to abandon the custom of his fathers and his own
+honorable prerogative, rose and read the first line according to his usual
+practice. The singers, previously prepared to carry the desired alteration
+into effect, proceeded in their singing without pausing at the conclusion
+of the line. The white-haired officer of the church with the full power
+of his voice read on through the second line, until the loud notes of the
+collected body of singers overpowered his attempt to resist the progress
+of improvement. The deacon, deeply mortified at the triumph of the musical
+reformation, then seized his hat and retired from the meeting-house in
+tears." His conduct was censured by the church, and he was for a time
+deprived of partaking in the communion, for "absenting himself from the
+public services of the Sabbath;" but in a few weeks the unhouselled deacon
+was forgiven, and never attempted to "line" again.
+
+Though the opponents of "lining" were victorious in the larger villages and
+towns, in smaller parishes, where there were few hymn-books, the lining
+of the psalms continued for many years. Mr. Hood wrote, in 1846, the
+astonishing statement that "the habit of lining prevails to this day over
+three-fourths of the United States." This I can hardly believe, though I
+know that at present the practice obtains in out of the way towns with poor
+and ignorant congregations. The separation of the lines often gives a very
+strange meaning to the words of a psalm; and one wonders what the Puritan
+children thought when they heard this lino of contradictions that Hood
+points out:--
+
+  "The Lord will come and He will not,"
+
+and after singing that line through heard the second line,--
+
+  "Keep silence, but speak out."
+
+Many new psalm-books appeared about the time of the Revolutionary War, and
+many church petitions have been preserved asking permission to use the
+new and more melodious psalm and hymn books. Books of instruction also
+abounded,--books in which the notes were not printed on the staff, and
+books in which there were staffs but no notes, only letters or other
+characters (these were called "dunce notes"); books, too, in which the
+notes were printed so thickly that they could scarcely be distinguished one
+from the other.
+
+  "A dotted tribe with ebon heads
+  That climb the slender fence along,
+  As black as ink, as thick as weeds,
+  Ye little Africans of song."
+
+One book--perhaps the worst, since it was the most pretentious--was "The
+Compleat Melody or Harmony of Sion," by William Tansur,--"Ingenious
+Tans'ur Skilled in Musicks Art." It was a most superficial, pedantic, and
+bewildering composition. The musical instruction was given in the form of a
+series of ill-spelled dialogues between a teacher and pupil, interspersed
+with occasional miserable rhymes. It was ill-expressed at best, and
+such musical terms as "Rations of Concords," "Trilloes," "Trifdiapasons,"
+"Leaps," "Binding cadences," "Disallowances," "Canons," "Prime Flower
+of Florid," "Consecutions of Perfects," and "Figurates," make the book
+exceedingly difficult of comprehension to the average reader, though
+possibly not to a student of obsolete musical phraseology.
+
+A side skirmish on the music field was at this time fought between the
+treble and the tenor parts. Ravenscroft's Psalms and Walter's book had
+given the melody, or plain-song, to the tenor. This had, of course, thrown
+additional difficulties in the way of good singing; but when once the
+trebles obtained the leading part, after the customary bitter opposition,
+the improved singing approved the victory.
+
+Many objections, too, were made to the introduction of "triple-time" tunes.
+It gave great offence to the older Puritans, who wished to drawl out all
+the notes of uniform length; and some persons thought that marking and
+accenting the measure was a step toward the "Scarlet Woman." The time was
+called derisively, "a long leg and a short one."
+
+These old bigots must have been paralyzed at the new style of psalm-singing
+which was invented and introduced by a Massachusetts tanner and
+singing-master named Billings, and which was suggested, doubtless, by the
+English anthems. It spread through the choirs of colonial villages and
+towns like wild-fire, and was called "fuguing." Mr. Billings' "Fuguing
+Psalm Singer" was published in 1770. It is a dingy, ill-printed book with
+a comically illustrated frontispiece, long pages of instruction, and this
+motto:--
+
+  "O, praise the Lord with one consent
+    And in this grand design
+  Let Britain and the Colonies
+    Unanimously join."
+
+The succeeding hymn-books, and the patriotic hymns of Billings in
+post-Revolutionary years have no hint of "Britain" in them. The names
+"Federal Harmony," "Columbian Harmony," "Continental Harmony," "Columbian
+Repository," and "United States Sacred Harmony" show the new nation.
+Billings also published the "Psalm Singer's Amusement," and other
+singing-books. The shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather must have groaned
+aloud at the suggestions, instructions, and actions of this unregenerate,
+daring, and "amusing" leader of church-singing.
+
+It seems astonishing that New England communities in those times of anxious
+and depressing warfare should have so delightedly seized and adopted this
+unusual and comparatively joyous style of singing, but perhaps the new
+spirit of liberty demanded more animated and spirited expression; and
+Billings' psalm-tunes were played with drum and fife on the battlefield to
+inspire the American soldiers. Billings wrote of his fuguing invention, "It
+has more than twenty times the power of the old slow tunes. Now the solemn
+bass demands their attention, next the manly tenor, now the lofty counter,
+now the volatile treble. Now here! Now there! Now here again! Oh ecstatic,
+push on, ye sons of harmony!" Dr. Mather Byles wrote thus of fuguing:--
+
+  "Down starts the Bass with Grave Majestic Air,
+  And up the Treble mounts with shrill Career,
+  With softer Sounds in mild melodious Maze
+  Warbling between, the Tenor gently plays
+  And, if th' inspiring Altos joins the Force
+  See! like the Lark it Wings its towering Course
+  Thro' Harmony's sublimest Sphere it flies
+  And to Angelic Accents seems to rise."
+
+A more modern poet in affectionate remembrance thus sings the fugue:--
+
+  "A fugue let loose cheers up the place,
+    With bass and tenor, alto, air,
+  The parts strike in with measured grace,
+    And something sweet is everywhere.
+
+  "As if some warbling brood should build
+    Of bits of tunes a singing nest;
+  Each bringing that with which it thrilled
+    And weaving it with all the rest."
+
+All public worshippers in the meetings one hundred years ago did not,
+however, regard fuguing as "something sweet everywhere," nor did they agree
+with Billings and Byles as to its angelic and ecstatic properties. Some
+thought it "heartless, tasteless, trivial, and irreverent jargon." Others
+thought the tunes were written more for the absurd inflation of the singers
+than for the glory of God; and many fully sympathized with the man who
+hung two cats over Billings's door to indicate his opinion of Billings's
+caterwauling. An old inhabitant of Roxbury remembered that when fuguing
+tunes were introduced into his church "they produced a literally fuguing
+effect on the older people, who went out of the church as soon as the first
+verse was sung." One scandalized and belligerent old clergyman, upon the
+Sabbath following the introduction of fuguing into his church, preached
+upon the prophecy of Amos, "The songs of the temple shall be turned
+into howling," while another took for his text the sixth verse of the
+seventeenth chapter of Acts, "Those that have turned the world upside down,
+are come hither also." One indignant and disgusted church attendant thus
+profanely recorded in church his views:--
+
+"Written out of temper on a Pannel in one of the Pues in Salem Church:--
+
+  "Could poor King David but for once
+    To Salem Church repair;
+  And hear his Psalms thus warbled out,
+    Good Lord, how he would swear
+
+  "But could St Paul but just pop in,
+    From higher scenes abstracted,
+  And hear his Gospel now explained,
+    By Heavens, he'd run distracted."
+
+These lines were reprinted in the "American Apollo" in 1792.
+
+The repetition of a word or syllable in fuguing often lead to some
+ridiculous variations in the meanings of the lines. Thus the words--
+
+  "With reverence let the saints appear
+  And bow before the Lord,"
+
+were forced to be sung, "And bow-wow-wow, And bow-ow-ow," and so on until
+bass, treble, alto, counter, and tenor had bow-wowed for about twenty
+seconds; yet I doubt if the simple hearts that sung ever saw the absurdity.
+
+It is impossible while speaking of fuguing to pass over an extraordinary
+element of the choir called "singing counter." The counter-tenor parts in
+European church-music were originally written for boys' voices. From
+thence followed the falsetto singing of the part by men; such was also
+the "counter" of New England. It was my fortune to hear once in a country
+church an aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and
+respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start
+of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and
+apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir,
+but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however
+chosen, would fail in attempting to describe the grotesque and uncanny
+sound.
+
+It is very evident, when once choirs of singers were established and
+attempts made for congregations to sing the same tune, and to keep
+together, and upon the same key, that in some way a decided pitch must be
+given to them to start upon. To this end pitch-pipes were brought into the
+singers' gallery, and the pitch was given sneakingly and shamefacedly to
+the singers. From these pitch-pipes the steps were gradual, but they led,
+as the Puritan divines foresaw, to the general introduction of musical
+instruments into the meetings.
+
+This seemed to be attacking the very foundations of their church; for the
+Puritans in England had, in 1557, expressly declared "concerning singing of
+psalms we allow of the people joining with one voice in a plain tune, but
+not in tossing the psalms from one side to the other with mingling of
+organs." The Round-heads had, in 1664, gone through England destroying the
+noble organs in the churches and cathedrals. They tore the pipes from the
+organ in Westminster Abbey, shouting, "Hark! how the organs go!" and, "Mark
+what musick that is, that is lawful for a Puritan to dance," and they sold
+the metal for pots of ale. Only four or five organs were left uninjured in
+all England. 'Twas not likely, then, that New England Puritans would take
+kindly to any musical instruments. Cotton Mather declared that there was
+not a word in the New Testament that authorized the use of such aids to
+devotion. The ministers preached often and long on the text from the
+prophecy of Amos, "I will not hear the melody of thy viols;" while,
+Puritan-fashion, they ignored the other half of the verse, "Take thou away
+from me the noise of thy songs." Disparaging comparisons were made with
+Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut,
+and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical
+knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players."
+
+Some of the first pitch-pipes were comical little apple-wood instruments
+that looked like mouse-traps, and great pains was taken to conceal them as
+they were passed surreptitiously from hand to hand in the choir. I have
+seen one which was carefully concealed in a box that had a leather binding
+like a book, and which was ostentatiously labelled in large gilt letters
+"Holy Bible;" a piece of barefaced and unnecessary deception on the part of
+some pious New England deacon or chorister.
+
+Little wooden fifes were also used, and then metal tuning-forks. A canny
+Scotchman, who abhorred the thought of all musical instruments anywhere,
+managed to have one fling at the pitch-pipe. The pitch had been given but
+was much too high, and before the first verse was ended the choir had to
+cease singing. The Scotchman stood up and pointed his long finger to the
+leader, saying in broad accents of scorn, "Ah, Johnny Smuth, now ye can
+have a chance to blaw yer braw whustle agaen." At a similar catastrophe
+owing to the mistake of the leader in Medford, old General Brooks rose in
+his pew and roared in an irritated voice of command, "Halt! Take another
+pitch, Bailey, take another pitch."
+
+In 1713 there was sent to America an English organ, "a pair of organs" it
+was called, which had chanced, by being at the manufacturers instead of in
+a church, to have escaped the general destruction by the Round-heads. It
+was given by Thomas Brattle to the Brattle Street Church in Boston. The
+congregation voted to refuse the gift, and it was then sent to King's
+Chapel, where it remained unpacked for several months for fear of hostile
+demonstrations, but was finally set up and used. In 1740 a Bostonian named
+Bromfield made an organ, and it was placed in a meeting-house and used
+weekly. In 1794 the church in Newbury obtained an organ, and many
+unpleasant and disparaging references were made by clergymen of other
+parishes to "our neighbor's box of whistles," "the tooting tub."
+
+Violoncellos, or bass-viols, as they were universally called, were almost
+the first musical instruments that were allowed in the New England
+churches. They were called, without intentional irreverence, "Lord's
+fiddles." Violins were widely opposed, they savored too much of low, tavern
+dance-music. After much consultation a satisfactory compromise was agreed
+upon by which violins were allowed in many meetings, if the performers
+"would play the fiddle wrong end up." Thus did our sanctimonious
+grandfathers cajole and persuade themselves that an inverted fiddle was
+not a fiddle at all, but a small bass-viol. An old lady, eighty years old,
+wrote thus in the middle of this century, of the church of her youth:
+"After awhile there was a bass-viol Introduced and brought into meeting and
+did not suit the Old people; one Old Gentleman got up, took his hat off
+the peg and marched off. Said they had begun fiddling and there would be
+dancing soon." Another church-member, in derisive opposition to a clarinet
+which had been "voted into the choir," brought into meeting a fish-horn,
+which he blew loud and long to the complete rout of the clarinet-player and
+the singers. When reproved for this astounding behavior he answered stoutly
+that "if one man could blow a horn in the Lord's House on the Sabbath day
+he guessed he could too," and he had to be bound over to keep the peace
+before the following Sunday. A venerable and hitherto decorous old deacon
+of Roxbury not only left the church when the hated bass-viol began its
+accompanying notes, but he stood for a long time outside the church door
+stridently "caterwauling" at the top of his lungs. When expostulated with
+for this unseemly and unchristianlike annoyance he explained that he was
+"only mocking the banjo." To such depths of rebellion were stirred the
+Puritan instincts of these religious souls.
+
+Many a minister said openly that he would like to walk out of his pulpit
+when the obnoxious and hated flutes, violins, bass-viols, and bassoons were
+played upon in the singing gallery. One clergyman contemptuously announced
+"We will now sing and fiddle the forty-fifth Psalm." Another complained of
+the indecorous dress of the fiddle-player. This had reference to the almost
+universal custom, in country churches in the summer time, of the bass-viol
+player removing his coat and playing "in his shirt sleeves." Others hated
+the noisy tuning of the bass-viol while the psalm was being read. Mr.
+Brown, of Westerly, sadly deplored that "now we have only catgut and resin
+religion."
+
+In 1804 the church in Quincy, being "advanced," granted the singers the
+sum of twenty-five dollars to buy a bass-viol to use in meeting, and a few
+other churches followed their lead. From the year 1794 till 1829 the
+church in Wareham, Massachusetts, was deeply agitated over the question of
+"Bass-Viol, or No Bass-Viol." They voted that a bass-viol was "expedient,"
+then they voted to expel the hated abomination; then was obtained "Leave
+for the Bass Viol to be brought into ye meeting house to be Played On every
+other Sabbath & to Play if chosen every Sabbath in the Intermission between
+meetings & not to Pitch the Tunes on the Sabbaths that it don't Play" Then,
+they tried to bribe the choir for fifty dollars not to use the "bars-vile,"
+but being unsuccessful, many members in open rebellion stayed away from
+church and were disciplined therefor. Then they voted that the bass-viol
+could not be used unless Capt. Gibbs were previously notified (so he and
+his family need not come to hear the hated sounds); but at last, after
+thirty years, the choir and the "fiddle-player" were triumphant in Wareham
+as they were in other towns.
+
+We were well into the present century before any cheerful and also simple
+music was heard in our churches; fuguing was more varied and surprising
+than cheerful. Of course, it was difficult as well as inappropriate to
+suggest pleasing tunes for such words as these:--
+
+  "Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+    The land of horror and despair,
+  Justice hath built a dismal hell,
+    And laid her stores of vengeance there:
+
+  "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+    Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+  And darts to inflict immortal pains,
+    Dyed in the blood of damned souls."
+
+But many of the words of the old hymns were smooth, lively, and
+encouraging; and the young singers and perhaps the singing-masters craved
+new and less sober tunes. Old dance tunes were at first adapted; "Sweet
+Anne Page," "Babbling Echo," "Little Pickle" were set to sacred words. The
+music of "Few Happy Matches" was sung to the hymn "Lo, on a narrow neck
+of land;" and that of "When I was brisk and young" was disguised with
+the sacred words of "Let sinners take their course." The jolly old tune,
+"Begone dull care," which began,--
+
+  "My wife shall dance, and I will sing,
+  And merrily pass the day."
+
+was strangely appropriated to the solemn words,--
+
+  "If this be death, I soon shall be
+  From every pain and sorrow free,"
+
+and did not seem ill-fitted either.
+
+"Sacred arrangements," "spiritual songs," "sacred airs," soon followed, and
+of course demanded singers of capacity and education to sing them. From
+this was but a step to a paid quartette, and the struggle over this last
+means of improvement and pleasure in church music is of too recent a date
+to be more than referred to.
+
+I attended a church service not many years ago in Worcester, where an old
+clergyman, the venerable "Father" Allen, of Shrewsbury, then too aged
+and feeble to preach, was seated in the front pew of the church. When a
+quartette of singers began to render a rather operatic arrangement of a
+sacred song he rose, erect and stately, to his full gaunt height, turned
+slowly around and glanced reproachfully over the frivolous, backsliding
+congregation, wrapped around his spare, lean figure his full cloak
+of quilted black silk, took his shovel hat and his cane, and stalked
+indignantly and sadly the whole length of the broad central aisle, out
+of the church, thus making a last but futile protest against modern
+innovations in church music. Many, in whom the Puritan instincts and blood
+are still strong, sympathize internally with him in this feeling; and all
+novelty-lovers must acknowledge that the sublime simplicity and deep piety
+in which the old Puritan psalm-tunes abound, has seldom been attained in
+the modern church-songs. Even persons of neither musical knowledge, taste,
+nor love, feel the power of such a tune as Old Hundred; and more modern and
+more difficult melodies, though they charm with their harmony and novelty,
+can never equal it in impressiveness nor in true religious influence.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+The Interruptions of the Services.
+
+
+
+Though the Puritans were such a decorous, orderly people, their religious
+meetings were not always quiet and uninterrupted. We know the torment they
+endured from the "wretched boys," and they were harassed by other
+annoying interruptions. For the preservation of peace and order they made
+characteristic laws, with characteristic punishments. "If any interrupt
+or oppose a preacher in season of worship, they shall be reproved by the
+Magistrate, and on repetition, shall pay £5, or stand two hours on a block
+four feet high, with this inscription in Capitalls, 'A WANTON GOSPELLER.'"
+As with other of their severe laws the rigid punishment provoked the crime,
+for Wanton Gospellers abounded. The Baptists did not hesitate to state
+their characteristic belief in the Puritan meetings, and the Quakers or
+"Foxians," as they were often called, interrupted and plagued them sorely.
+Judge Sewall wrote, in 1677, "A female quaker, Margaret Brewster, in
+sermon-time came in, in a canvass frock, her hair dishevelled loose like a
+Periwig, her face as black as ink, led by two other quakers, and two other
+quakers followed. It occasioned the greatest and most amazing uproar that I
+ever saw." More grievous irruptions still of scantily clad and even naked
+Quaker women were made into other Puritan meetings; and Quaker men shouted
+gloomily in through the church windows, "Woe! Woe! Woe to the people!"
+and, "The Lord will destroy thee!" and they broke glass bottles before
+the minister's very face, crying out, "Thus the Lord will break thee in
+pieces!" and they came into the meeting-house, in spite of the fierce
+tithingman, and sat down in other people's seats with their hats on their
+heads, in ash-covered coats, rocking to and fro and groaning dismally, as
+if in a mournful obsession. Quaker women managed to obtain admission to the
+churches, and they jumped up in the quiet Puritan assemblies screaming out,
+"Parson! thou art an old fool," and, "Parson! thy sermon is too long," and,
+"Parson! sit down! thee has already said more than thee knows how to say
+well," and other unpleasant, though perhaps truthful personalities. It is
+hard to believe that the poor, excited, screaming visionaries of those
+early days belonged to the same religious sect as do the serene,
+low-voiced, sweet-faced, and retiring Quakeresses of to-day. And there is
+no doubt that the astounding and meaningless freaks of these half-crazed
+fanatics were provoked by the cruel persecutions which they endured from
+our much loved and revered, but alas, intolerant and far from perfect
+Puritan Fathers. These poor Quakers were arrested, fined, robbed, stripped
+naked, imprisoned, laid neck and heels, chained to logs of wood, branded,
+maimed, whipped, pilloried, caged, set in the stocks, exiled, sold
+into slavery and hanged by our stern and cruel ancestors. Perhaps some
+gentle-hearted but timid Puritan souls may have inwardly felt that the
+Indian wars, and the destructive fires, and the earthquakes, and the dead
+cattle, blasted wheat, and wormy peas, were not judgments of God for small
+ministerial pay and periwig-wearing, but punishments for the heartrending
+woes of the persecuted Quakers.
+
+Others than the poor Quakers spoke out in colonial meetings. In Salem
+village and in other witch-hunting towns the crafty "victims" of the
+witches were frequently visited with their mock pains and sham fits in the
+meeting-houses, and they called out and interrupted the ministers most
+vexingly. Ann Putnam, the best and boldest actress among those cunning
+young Puritan witch-accusers, the protagonist of that New England tragedy
+known as the Salem Witchcraft, shouted out most embarrassingly, "There is
+a yellow-bird sitting on the minister's hat, as it hangs on the pin in the
+pulpit." Mr. Lawson, the minister, wrote with much simplicity that "these
+things occurring in the time of public worship did something interrupt me
+in my first prayer, being so unusual." But he braced himself up in spite
+of Ann and the demoniacal yellow-bird, and finished the service. These
+disorderly interruptions occurred on every Lord's Day, growing weekly
+more constant and more universal, and must have been unbearable. Some few
+disgusted members withdrew from the church, giving as reason that "the
+distracting and disturbing tumults and noises made by persons under
+diabolical power and delusions, preventing sometimes our hearing and
+understanding and profiting of the word preached; we having after many
+trials and experiences found no redress in this case, accounted ourselves
+under a necessity to go where we might hear the word in quiet." These
+withdrawing church-members were all of families that contained at least
+one person that had been accused of practising witchcraft. They were thus
+severely intolerant of the sacrilegious and lawless interruptions of the
+shy young "victims," who received in general only sympathy, pity, and even
+stimulating encouragement from their deluded and excited neighbors.
+
+One very pleasing interruption,--no, I cannot call it by so severe a
+name,--one very pleasing diversion of the attention of the congregation
+from the parson was caused by an innocent custom that prevailed in many a
+country community. Just fancy the flurry on a June Sabbath in Killingly, in
+1785, when Joseph Gay, clad in velvet coat, lace-frilled shirt, and white
+broadcloth knee-breeches, with his fair bride of a few days, gorgeous in a
+peach-colored silk gown and a bonnet trimmed "with sixteen yards of white
+ribbon," rose, in the middle of the sermon, from their front seat in the
+gallery and stood for several minutes, slowly turning around in order to
+show from every point of view their bridal finery to the eagerly gazing
+congregation of friends and neighbors. Such was the really delightful and
+thoughtful custom, in those fashion-plateless days, among persons of
+wealth in that and other churches; it was, in fact, part of the wedding
+celebration. Even in midwinter, in the icy church, the blushing bride would
+throw aside her broadcloth cape or camblet roquelo and stand up clad in a
+sprigged India muslin gown with only a thin lace tucker over her neck, warm
+with pride in her pretty gown, her white bonnet with ostrich feathers and
+embroidered veil, and in her new husband.
+
+The services in the meeting-house on the Sabbath and on Lecture days
+were sometimes painfully varied, though scarcely interrupted, by a very
+distressing and harrowing custom of public abasement and self-abnegation,
+which prevailed for many years in the nervously religious colonies. It was
+not an enforced punishment, but a voluntary one. Men and women who had
+committed crimes or misdemeanors, and who had sincerely repented of their
+sins, or who were filled with remorse for some violation of conscience, or
+even with regret for some neglect of religious ethics, rose in the Sabbath
+meeting before the assembled congregation and confessed their sins, and
+humbly asked forgiveness of God, and charity from their fellows. At
+other times they stood with downcast heads while the minister read their
+confession of guilt and plea for forgiveness. A most graphic account of one
+of those painful scenes is thus given by Governor Winthrop in his "History
+of New England:"--
+
+    "Captain Underhill being brought by the blessing of God in this
+    church's censure of excommunication, to remorse for his foul sins,
+    obtained, by means of the elders, and others of the church of Boston, a
+    safe conduct under the hand of the governor and one of the council to
+    repair to the church. He came at the time of the court of assistants,
+    and upon the lecture day, after sermon, the pastor called him forth and
+    declared the occasion, and then gave him leave to speak: and in
+    it was a spectacle winch caused many weeping eyes, though it afforded
+    matter of much rejoicing to behold the power of the Lord Jesus in his
+    ordinances, when they are dispensed in his own way, holding forth the
+    authority of his regal sceptre in the simplicity of the gospel
+    came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his
+    bravery and neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close
+    to his eyes; and standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs
+    and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his
+    hypocrisy, his persecution of God's people here, and especially his
+    pride (as the root of all which caused God to give him over to his
+    other sinful courses) and contempt of the magistrates.... He spake
+    well save that his blubbering &c interrupted him, and all along he
+    discovered a broken and melting heart and gave good exhortations to
+    take heed of such vanities and beginnings of evil as had occasioned his
+    fall; and in the end he earnestly and humbly besought the church to
+    have compassion of him and to deliver him out of the hands of Satan."
+
+What a picture! what a story! "Of all tales 'tis the saddest--and more sad
+because it makes us smile."
+
+Captain John Underhill was a brave though somewhat bumptious soldier, who
+had fought under the Prince of Orange in the War of the Netherlands, and
+had been employed as temporal drill-master in the church-militant in New
+England. He did good service for the colonists in the war with the Pequot
+Indians, and indeed wherever there was any fighting to be done. "He thrust
+about and justled into fame" He also managed to have apparently a very good
+time in the new land, both in sinning and repenting. When he stood up on
+the church-seat before the horrified, yet wide-open eyes of pious Boston
+folk, in his studiously and theatrically disarranged garments, and
+blubbered out his whining yet vain-glorious repentance, he doubtless acted
+his part well, for he had twice before been through the same performance,
+supplementing his second rehearsal by kneeling down before an injured
+husband in the congregation, and asking earthly forgiveness. I wish I
+could believe that this final repentance of the resilient captain were
+sincere--but I cannot. Nor did Boston people believe it either, though that
+noble and generous-minded man, Winthrop, thought he saw at the time of
+confession evidences of a truly contrite heart. The Puritans sternly and
+eagerly cast out the gay captain to the Dutch when he became an Antinomian,
+and he came to live and fight and gallant in a town on the western end of
+Long Island, where he perhaps found a church-home with members less severe
+and less sharp-eyed than those of his Boston place of martyrdom, and a
+people less inclined to resent and punish his frailties and his ways of
+amusing himself.
+
+In justice to Underhill (or perhaps to show his double-dealing) I will say
+that he left behind him a letter to Hanserd Knollys, complaining of the
+ill-treatment he had received; and in it he gives a very different account
+of this little affair with the Boston Church from that given us by Governor
+Winthrop. The offender says nothing about his hypocrisy, his public and
+self-abasing confession, nor of his sanctimonious blubbering and wishes for
+death. He explains that his offence was mild and purely mental, that in an
+infaust moment he glanced (doubtless stared soldier-fashion) at "Mistris
+Miriam Wildbore" as she sat in her "pue" at meeting. The elders, noting his
+admiring and amorous glances, thereupon accused him of sin in his heart,
+and severely asked him why he did not look instead at Mistress Newell or
+Mistress Upham. He replied very spiritedly and pertinently that these dames
+were "not desiryable women as to temporal graces," which was certainly
+sufficient and proper reason for any man to give, were he Puritan or
+Cavalier. Then acerb old John Cotton and some other Boston ascetics
+(perhaps Goodman Newell and Goodman Upham, resenting for their wives the
+_spretæ injuria formæ_) at once hunted up some plainly applicable
+verses from the Bible that clearly proved him guilty of the alleged
+sin--and summarily excommunicated him. He also wrote that the pious church
+complained that the attractive, the temporally graced Mistress Wildbore
+came vainly and over-bravely clad to meeting, with "wanton open-worked
+gloves slitt at the thumbs and fingers for the purpose of taking snuff,"
+and he resented this complaint against the fair one, saying no harm could
+surely come from indulging in the "good creature called tobacco." He would
+naturally feel that snuff-taking was a proper and suitable church-custom,
+since his own conversion,--dubious though it was,--his religious belief had
+come to him, "the spirit fell home upon his heart" while he was indulging
+in a quiet smoke.
+
+The story of his offences as told b his contemporaries does not assign to
+him so innocuous a diversion as staring across the meeting-house, but the
+account is quite as amusing as his own plaintive and deeply injured version
+of his arraignment.
+
+Other letters of his have been preserved to us,--letters blustering as
+was Ancient Pistol, and equally sanctimonious, letters fearfully and
+phonetically spelt. Here is the opening of a letter written while he
+was under sentence of excommunication from the Boston Church, and of
+banishment. It is to Governor Winthrop, his friend and fellow-emigrant:--
+
+"Honnored in the Lord,--
+
+"Your silenc one more admirse me. I Youse chrischan playnnes. I know you
+love it.... Silene can not reduce the hart of youer lovd brother: I would
+the rightchous would smite me espechah youerslfe & the honnered Depoti to
+whom I also dereckt this letter.... I would to God you would tender me
+soule so as to youse playnnes with me. I wrot to you both but now answer: &
+here I am dayli abused by malishous tongue. John Baker I here hath wrot to
+the honnored depoti how as I was drouck & like to be cild & both falc, upon
+okachon I delt with Wannerton for intrushon & finddmg them resolutli bent
+to rout all gud a mong us & advanc there superstischous ways & by boystrous
+words indeferd to fritten men to accomplish his end. & he abusing me to
+my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent & dastardli
+sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with
+intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered
+him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too
+month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let
+justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to soggest youer will to this
+barrer you will find him tracktabel."
+
+My sense of drollery is always most keenly tickled when I read Underhill's
+epistles, with their amazing and highly-varied letter concoctions, and
+remember that he also--wrote a book. What that seventeenth-century printer
+and proof-reader endured ere they presented his "edited" volume to the
+public must have been beyond expression by words. It was a pretty good book
+though, and in it, like many another man of his ilk, he tendered to his
+much-injured wife loud and diffuse praise, ending with these sententious
+words, "Let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife--though she be a
+woman."
+
+And yet, upon careful examination we find a method, a system, in
+Underhill's orthography, or rather in his cacography. He thinks a final
+tion should be spelt chon--and why not? "proposichon," "satisfackchon,"
+"oblegachon," "persekuchon," "dereckchon," "himelyachon"--thus he spells
+such words. And his plurals are plain when once you grasp his laws:
+"poseschouse" and "considderachonse," "facktse," and "respecktse." And
+his ly is alwajs li, "exacktli," "thorroli," "fidelliti," "charriti,"
+"falsciti." And why is not "indiered," as good as 'endeared,' "pregedic,"
+as 'prejudice,' "obstrucktter" as 'obstructer,' "pascheges," and
+"prouydentt," and "antyentt," just as clear as our own way of spelling
+these words? A "painful" speller you surely were, my gay Don Juan
+Underbill, as your pedantic "writtingse" all show, and the most dramatic
+and comic figure among all the early Puritans as well, though you scarcely
+deserve to be called a Puritan; we might rather say of you, as of Malvolio,
+"The devil a Puritan that he was, or anything constantly but a
+time-pleaser ... his ground of faith that all who looked on him loved him."
+
+In keen contrast to this sentimental excitement is the presence of noble
+Judge Sewall, white-haired and benignant, standing up calmly in Boston
+meeting, with dignified face and demeanor, but an aching and contrite
+heart, to ask through the voice of his minister humble forgiveness of God
+and man for his sad share as a judge in the unjust and awful condemnation
+and cruel sentencing to death of the poor murdered victims of that terrible
+delusion the Salem Witchcraft. Years of calm and unshrinking reflection, of
+pleading and constant communion with God had brought to him an overwhelming
+sense of his mistaken and over-influenced judgment, and a horror and
+remorse for the fatal results of his error. Then, like the steadfast and
+upright old Puritan that he was, he publicly acknowledged his terrible
+mistake. It is one of the finest instances of true nobility of soul and of
+absolute self-renunciation that the world affords. And the deep strain, the
+sharp wrench of the step is made more apparent still by the fact of the
+disapproval of his fellow-judges of his public confession and recantation.
+The yearly entries in his diary, simply expressed yet deeply speaking,
+entries of the prayerful fasts which he spent alone in his chamber when
+the anniversary of the fatal judgment-day returned, show that no half-vain
+bigotry, no emotional excitement filled and moved him to the open words of
+remorse. The lesson of his repentance is farther reaching than he
+dreamed, when the story of his confession can so move and affect this
+nineteenth-century generation, and fill more than one soul with a nobler
+idea of the Puritan nature, and with a higher and fuller conception of the
+absolute truth of the Puritan Christianity.
+
+Some very prosaic and earthly interruptions to the church services are
+recorded as being made, and possibly by the church-members themselves. In
+one church, in 1661, a fine of five shillings was imposed on any one "who
+shot off a gun or led a horse into the meeting-house." These seem to me
+quite as unseemly, irreverent, and disagreeable disturbances as shouting
+out, Quaker-fashion, "Parson, your sermon is too long;" but possibly the
+house of God was turned into a stable on week-days, not on the Sabbath.
+
+In many parishes church-attendants were fined who brought their "doggs"
+into the meeting-house. Dogs swarmed in the colony, for they had been
+imported from England, "sufficient mastive dogs, hounds and beagles," and
+also Irish wolf-hounds; and they caused an interruption in one afternoon
+service by chasing into the meeting-house one of those pungently offensive,
+though harmless, animals that abounded even in the earliest colonial
+days, and whose mephitic odor, in this case, had power to scatter the
+congregation as effectively as would have a score of armed Indian braves.
+Officially appointed "Dogg-whippers" and the never idle tithingman expelled
+the intruding and unwelcome canine attendants from the meeting-house with
+fierce blows and fiercer yelps. The swarming dogs, though they were trained
+to hunt the Indians and wolves and tear them in pieces, were much fonder of
+hunting and tearing the peaceful sheep, and thus became such unmitigated
+nuisances, out of meeting as well as in, that they had to be muzzled and
+hobbled, and killed, and land was granted (as in Newbury in 1703) on
+condition that no dog was ever kept thereon. As late as the year 1820, it
+was ordered in the town of Brewster that any dog that came into meeting
+should be killed unless the owner promised to thenceforth keep the intruder
+out.
+
+Alarms of fire in the neighborhood frequently disturbed the quiet of
+the early colonial services; for the combustible catted chimneys were
+a constant source of conflagration, especially on Sundays, when the
+fireplaces with their roaring fires were left unwatched; and all the men
+rushed out of the meeting at sound of the alarm to aid in quenching the
+flames, which could however be ill-fought with the scanty supply of
+water that could be brought in a few leathern fire-buckets and
+milk-pails,--though at a very early date as an aid in extinguishing
+fires each New England family was ordered by law to own a fire-ladder.
+Occasionally the town's ladder and poles and hooks and cedar-buckets were
+kept in the meeting-house, and thus were handy for Sunday fires.
+
+Sometimes armed men, bearing rumors of wars and of hostile attacks, rode
+clattering up to the church-door, and strode with jingling spurs and
+rattling swords into the excited assembly with appeal for more soldiers to
+bear arms, or for more help for those already in the army, and the whole
+congregation felt it no interruption but a high religious privilege and
+duty, to which they responded in word and deed. On some happy Sabbaths the
+armed riders bore good news of great victories, and great was the rejoicing
+thereat in prayer and praise in the old meeting-house.
+
+But usually through the Sabbath services, though the quiet was not that
+of our modern carpeted, cushioned, orderly churches, but few interrupting
+sounds were heard. The cry of a waking infant, the scraping of restless
+feet on the sanded floor, the lumbering noise of the motions of a cramped
+farmer as he stood up to lean over the pew-door or gallery-rail, the
+clatter of an overturned cricket, the twittering of swallows in the
+rafters, and in the summer-time the bumping and buzzing of an invading
+bumble-bee as he soared through the air and against the walls, were
+the only sounds within the meeting-house that broke the monotonous
+"thirteenthly" and "fourteenthly" of the minister's sermon.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+The Observances of the Day.
+
+
+
+The so-called "False Blue Laws" of Connecticut, which were foisted upon the
+public by the Reverend Samuel Peter, have caused much indignation among all
+thoughtful descendants and all lovers of New England Puritans. Three of
+his most bitterly resented false laws which refer to the observance of the
+Sabbath read thus:--
+
+"No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or
+shave on the Sabbath Day.
+
+"No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.
+
+"No one shall ride on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere
+except reverently to and from meeting."
+
+Though these laws were worded by Dr. Peters, and though we are disgusted to
+hear them so often quoted as historical facts, still we must acknowledge
+that though in detail not correct, they are in spirit true records of the
+old Puritan laws which were enacted to enforce the strict and decorous
+observance of the Sabbath, and which were valid not only in Connecticut and
+Massachusetts, but in other New England States. Even a careless glance at
+the historical record of any old town or church will give plenty of details
+to prove this.
+
+Thus in New London we find in the latter part of the seventeenth century a
+wicked fisherman presented before the Court and fined for catching eels on
+Sunday; another "fined twenty shillings for sailing a boat on the Lord's
+Day;" while in 1670 two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused
+of and tried for "sitting together on the Lord's Day under an apple tree in
+Goodman Chapman's Orchard,"--so harmless and so natural an act. In Plymouth
+a man was "sharply whipped" for shooting fowl on Sunday; another was fined
+for carrying a grist of corn home on the Lord's Day, and the miller who
+allowed him to take it was also fined. Elizabeth Eddy of the same town was
+fined, in 1652, "ten shillings for wringing and hanging out clothes." A
+Plymouth man, for attending to his tar-pits on the Sabbath, was set in the
+stocks. James Watt, in 1658, was publicly reproved "for writing a note
+about common business on the Lord's Day, _at least in the evening
+somewhat too soon._" A Plymouth man who drove a yoke of oxen was
+"presented" before the Court, as was also another offender, who drove some
+cows a short distance "without need" on the Sabbath.
+
+In Newbury, in 1646, Aquila Chase and his wife were presented and fined for
+gathering peas from their garden on the Sabbath, but upon investigation the
+fines were remitted, and the offenders were only admonished. In Wareham,
+in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the
+Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham
+citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five
+shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put
+in his shoe" to protect his foot--for doing this piece of heavy work on the
+Lord's Day, was fined, and paid forty shillings.
+
+Captain Kemble of Boston was in 1656 set for two hours in the public stocks
+for his "lewd and unseemly behavior," which, consisted in his kissing his
+wife "publicquely" on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, when
+he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years. The lewd
+offender was a man of wealth and influence, the father of Madam Sarah
+Knights, the "fearfull female travailler" whose diary of a journey from
+Boston to New York and return, written in 1704, rivals in quality if not in
+quantity Judge Sewall's much-quoted diary. A traveller named Burnaby tells
+of a similar offence of an English sea-captain who was soundly whipped for
+kissing his wife on the street of a New England town on Sunday, and of his
+retaliation in kind, by a clever trick upon his chastisers; but Burnaby's
+narrative always seemed to me of dubious credibility.
+
+Abundant proof can be given that the act of the legislature in 1649 was not
+a dead letter which ordered that "whosoever shall prophane the Lords daye
+by doeing any seruill worke or such like abusses shall forfeite for euery
+such default ten shillings or be whipt."
+
+The Vermont "Blue Book" contained equally sharp "Sunday laws." Whoever was
+guilty of any rude, profane, or unlawful conduct on the Lord's Day, in
+words or action, by clamorous discourses, shouting, hallooing, screaming,
+running, riding, dancing, jumping, was to be fined forty shillings and
+whipped upon the naked back not to exceed ten stripes. The New Haven code
+of laws, more severe still, ordered that "Profanation of the Lord's Day
+shall be punished by fine, imprisonment, or corporeal punishment; and
+if proudly, and with a high hand against the authority of God--_with
+death_."
+
+Lists of arrests and fines for walking and travelling unnecessarily on the
+Sabbath might be given in great numbers, and it was specially ordered
+that none should "ride violently to and from meeting." Many a pious New
+Englander, in olden days, was fined for his ungodly pride, and his desire
+to "show off" his "new colt" as he "rode violently" up to the meeting-house
+green on Sabbath morn. One offender explained in excuse of his unnecessary
+driving on the Sabbath that he had been to visit a sick relative, but
+his excuse was not accepted. A Maine man who was rebuked and fined for
+"unseemly walking" on the Lord's Day protested that he ran to save a man
+from drowning. The Court made him pay his fine, but ordered that the money
+should be returned to him when he could prove by witnesses that he had
+been on that errand of mercy and duty. As late as the year 1831, in
+Lebanon, Connecticut, a lady journeying to her father's home was arrested
+within sight of her father's house for unnecessary travelling on the
+Sabbath; and a long and fiercely contested lawsuit was the result, and
+damages were finally given for false imprisonment. In 1720 Samuel Sabin
+complained of himself before a justice in Norwich that he visited on
+Sabbath night some relatives at a neighbor's house. His morbidly tender
+conscience smote him and made him "fear he had transgressed the law,"
+though he felt sure no harm had been done thereby. In 1659 Sam Clarke, for
+"Hankering about on men's gates on Sabbath evening to draw company out
+to him," was reproved and warned not to "harden his neck" and be "wholly
+destrojed." Poor stiff-necked, lonely, "hankering" Sam! to be so harshly
+reproved for his harmlessly sociable intents. Perhaps he "hankered" after
+the Puritan maids, and if so, deserved his reproof and the threat of
+annihilation.
+
+Sabbath-breaking by visiting abounded in staid Worcester town to a most
+base extent, but was severely punished, as local records show. In Belfast,
+Maine, in 1776, a meeting was held to get the "Towns Mind" with regard to
+a plan to restrain visiting on the Sabbath. The time had passed when such
+offences could be punished either by fine or imprisonment, so it was voted
+"that if any person makes unnecessary Vizits on the Sabeth, They shall be
+Look't on with Contempt." This was the universal expression throughout the
+Puritan colonies; and looked on with contempt are Sabbath-breakers and
+Sabbath-slighters in New England to the present day. Even if they committed
+no active offence, the colonists could not passively neglect the Church
+and its duties. As late as 1774 the First Church of Roxbury fined
+non-attendance at public worship. In 1651 Thomas Scott "was fyned ten
+shillings unless he have learned Mr. Norton's 'Chatacise' by the next
+court" In 1760 the legislature of Massachusetts passed the law that "any
+person able of Body who shall absent themselves from publick worship of God
+on the Lord's Day shall pay ten shillings fine." By the Connecticut code
+ten shillings was the fine, and the law was not suspended until the year
+1770. By the New Haven code five shillings was the fine for non-attendance
+at church, and the offender was often punished as well. Captain Dennison,
+one of New Haven's most popular and respected citizens, was fined fifteen
+shillings for absence from church. William Blagden, who lived in New Haven
+in 1647, was "brought up" for absence from meeting. He pleaded that he had
+fallen into the water late on Saturday, could light no fire on Sunday to
+dry his clothes, and so had lain in bed to keep warm while his only suit of
+garments was drying. In spite of this seemingly fair excuse, Blagden was
+found guilty of "sloathefuluess" and sentenced to be "publiquely whipped."
+Of course the Quakers contributed liberally to the support of the Court,
+and were fined in great numbers for refusing to attend the church which
+they hated, and which also warmly abhorred them; and they were zealously
+set in the stocks, and whipped and caged and pilloried as well,--whipped
+if they came and expressed any dissatisfaction, and whipped if they stayed
+away.
+
+Severe and explicit were the orders with regard to the use of the "Creature
+called Tobacko" on the Sabbath. In the very earliest days of the colony
+means had been taken to present the planting of the pernicious weed
+except in very small quantities "for meere necessitie, for phisick, for
+preseruaceon of health, and that the same be taken privatly by auncient
+men." In Connecticut a man could by permission of the law smoke once if
+he went on a journey of ten miles (as some slight solace for the arduous
+trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house.
+Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the
+law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a
+long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor
+buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men
+love it now, they somehow invoked or spirited it into their pipes, though
+they never could smoke it in public unfined and unpunished. The shrewd and
+thrifty New Haven people permitted the raising of it for purposes of trade,
+though not for use, thus supplying the "devil's weed" to others, chiefly
+the godless Dutch, but piously spurning it themselves--in public. Its use
+was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on the Sabbath within two
+miles of the meeting-house, which (since at that date all the homes were
+clustered around the church-green) was equivalent to not smoking it at all
+on the Lord's Day, if the lav were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed,
+poor slaves of habit, who were in Duxbury fined ten shillings for each
+offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it
+told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston
+the fine for "drinking tobacco in the meeting-house" was five shillings for
+each drink, which I take to mean chewing tobacco rather than smoking it;
+many men were fined for thus drinking, and solacing the weary hours, though
+doubtless they were as sly and kept themselves as unobserved as possible.
+Four Yarmouth men--old sea-dogs, perhaps, who loved their pipe--were, in
+1687, fined four shillings each for smoking tobacco around the end of the
+meeting-house. Silly, ostrich-brained Yarmouth men! to fancy to escape
+detection by hiding around the corner of the church; and to think that the
+tithingman had no nose when he was so Argus-eyed. Some few of the ministers
+used the "tobacco weed." Mr. Baily wrote with distress of mind and
+abasement of soul in his diary of his "exceeding in tobacco." The hatred of
+the public use of tobacco lingered long in New England, even in large towns
+such as Providence, though chiefly on account of universal dread lest
+sparks from the burning weed should start conflagrations in the towns.
+Until within a few years, in small towns in western Massachusetts,
+Easthampton and neighboring villages, tobacco-smoking on the street was not
+permitted either on weekdays or Sundays.
+
+Not content with strict observance of the Sabbathday alone, the Puritans
+included Saturday evening in their holy day, and in the first colonial
+years these instructions were given to Governor Endicott by the New England
+Plantation Company: "And to the end that the Sabeth may be celebrated in
+a religious man ner wee appoint that all may surcease their labor every
+Satterday throughout the yeare at three of the clock in the afternoone, and
+that they spend the rest of the day in chatechizing and preparacoon for
+the Sabeth as the ministers shall direct." Cotton Mather wrote thus of his
+grandfather, old John Cotton: "The Sabbath he begun the evening before, for
+which keeping from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming
+to New England, and I suppose 't was from his reason and practice that the
+Christians of New England have generally done so too." He then tells of the
+protracted religious services held in the Cotton household every Saturday
+night,--services so long that the Sabbath-day exercises must have seemed in
+comparison like a light interlude.
+
+John Norton described these Cotton Sabbaths more briefly thus: "He [John
+Cotton] began the Sabbath at evening; therefore then performed family-duty
+after supper, being longer than ordinary in Exposition. After which he
+catechized his children and servants and then returned unto his study. The
+morning following, family-worship being ended, he retired into his study
+until the bell called him away. Upon his return from meeting he returned
+again into his study (the place of his labor and prayer) unto his private
+devotion; where, having a small repast carried him up for his dinner, he
+continued until the tolling of the bell. The public service being over, he
+withdrew for a space to his pre-mentioned oratory for his sacred addresses
+to God, as in the forenoon, then came down, _repeated the sermon in the
+family_, prayed, after supper sang a Psalm, and towards bedtime betaking
+himself again to his study he closed the day with prayer. Thus he spent the
+Sabbath continually." Just fancy the Cotton children and servants listening
+to his long afternoon sermon a second time!
+
+All the New England clergymen were rigid in the prolonged observance of
+Sunday. From sunset on Saturday until Sunday night they would not shave,
+have rooms swept, nor beds made, have food prepared, nor cooking utensils
+and table-ware washed. As soon as their Sabbath began they gathered their
+families and servants around them, as did Cotton, and read the Bible and
+exhorted and prayed and recited the catechism until nine o'clock, usually
+by the light of one small "dip candle" only; on long winter Saturdays it
+must have been gloomy and tedious indeed. Small wonder that one minister
+wrote back to England that he found it difficult in the new colony to get a
+servant who "_enjoyed catechizing and family duties_." Many clergymen
+deplored sadly the custom which grew in later years of driving, and even
+transacting business, on Saturday night. Mr. Bushnell used to call it
+"stealing the time of the Sabbath," and refused to countenance it in any
+way.
+
+It was very generally believed in the early days of New England that
+special judgments befell those who worked on the eve of the Sabbath.
+Winthrop gives the case of a man who, having hired help to repair a
+milldam, worked an hour on Saturday after sunset to finish what he had
+intended for the day's labor. The next day his little child, being left
+alone for some hours, was drowned in an uncovered well in the cellar of his
+house. "The father freely, in open congregation, did acknowledge it the
+righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day."
+
+Visitors and travellers from other countries were forced to obey the rigid
+laws with regard to Saturday-night observance. Archibald Henderson, the
+master of a vessel which entered the port of Boston, complained to the
+Council for Foreign Plantations in London that while he was in sober Boston
+town, being ignorant of the laws of the land, and having walked half an
+hour after sunset on Saturday night, as punishment for this unintentional
+and trivial offence, a constable entered his lodgings, seized him by the
+hair of his head, and dragged him to prison. Henderson claimed £800 damages
+for the detention of his vessel during his prosecution. I have always
+suspected that the gay captain may have misbehaved himself in Boston
+on that Saturday night in some other way than simply by walking in
+the streets, and that the Puritan law-enforcers took advantage of the
+Sabbath-day laws in order to prosecute and punish him. We know of
+Bradford's complaint of the times; that while sailors brought "a greate
+deale" of money from foreign parts to New England to spend, they also
+brought evil ways of spending it--"more sine I feare than money."
+
+The Puritans found in Scripture support for this observance of Saturday
+night, in these words, "The evening and the morning were the first day,"
+and they had many followers in their belief. In New England country towns
+to this day, descendants of the Puritans regard Saturday night, though in
+a modified way, as almost Sunday, and that evening is never chosen for any
+kind of gay gathering or visiting. As late as 1855 the shops in Hartford
+were never open for customers upon Saturday night.
+
+Much satire was directed against this Saturday night observance both by
+English and by American authors. In the "American Museum" for February,
+1787, appeared a poem entitled, "The Connecticut Sabbath." After saying at
+some length that God had thought one day in seven sufficient for rest, but
+New England Christians had improved his law by setting apart a day and a
+half, the poet thus runs on derisively:--
+
+  "And let it be enacted further still
+  That all our people strict observe our will;
+  Five days and a half shall men, and women, too,
+  Attend their bus'ness and their mirth pursue,
+  But after that no man without a fine
+  Shall walk the streets or at a tavern dine.
+  One day and half 'tis requisite to rest
+  From toilsome labor and a tempting feast.
+  Henceforth let none on peril of their lives
+  Attempt a journey or embrace their wives;
+  No barber, foreign or domestic bred,
+  Shall e'er presume to dress a lady's head;
+  No shop shall spare (half the preceding day)
+  A yard of riband or an ounce of tea."
+
+And many similar rhymes might be given.
+
+Sunday night, being shut out of the Sabbath hours, became in the eighteenth
+century a time of general cheerfulness and often merry-making. This sudden
+transition from the religious calm and quiet of the afternoon to the noisy
+gayety of the evening was very trying to many of the clergymen, especially
+to Jonathan Edwards, who preached often and sadly against "Sabbath evening
+dissipations and mirth-making." In some communities singing-schools were
+held on Sunday nights, which afforded a comparatively decorous and orderly
+manner of spending the close of the day.
+
+Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm
+Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath,--sign and token to them,
+not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal
+rest to come. The universal quiet and peace of the community showed the
+primitive instinct of a pure, simple devotion, the sincere religion which
+knew no compromise in spiritual things, no half-way obedience to God's
+Word, but rested absolutely on the Lord's Day--as was commanded. No work,
+no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was
+seen except the necessary care of the patient cattle and other dumb beasts,
+the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the nooning,
+a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead. This
+absolute obedience to the letter as well as to the spirit of God's Word
+was one of the most typical traits of the character of the Puritans, and
+appeared to them to be one of the most vital points of their religion.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The Authority of the Church and the Ministers.
+
+
+
+Severely were the early colonists punished if they ventured to criticise
+or disparage either the ministers or their teachings, or indeed any of the
+religious exercises of the church. In Sandwich a man was publicly whipped
+for speaking deridingly of God's words and ordinances as taught by the
+Sandwich minister. Mistress Oliver was forced to stand in public with a
+cleft stick on her tongue for "reproaching the elders." A New Haven man was
+severely whipped and fined for declaring that he received no profit from
+the minister's sermons. We also know the terrible shock given the Windham
+church in 1729 by the "vile and slanderous expressions" of one unregenerate
+Windhamite who said, "I had rather hear my dog bark than Mr. Bellamy
+preach." He was warned that he would be "shakenoff and givenup," and
+terrified at the prospect of so dire a fate he read a confession of his
+sorrow and repentance, and promised to "keep a guard over his tongue," and
+also to listen to Mr. Bellamy's preaching, which may have been a still more
+difficult task. Mr. Edward Tomlins, of Boston, upon retracting his opinion
+which he had expressed openly against the singing in the churches, was
+discharged without a fine. William Howes and his son were in 1744 fined
+fifty shillings "apeece for deriding such as sing in the congregation,
+tearming them fooles." The church music was as sacred to the Puritans as
+were the prayers, but it must have been a sore trial to many to keep still
+about the vile manner and method of singing. In 1631 Phillip Ratcliffe,
+for "speaking against the churches," had his ears cut off, was whipped and
+banished. We know also the consternation caused in New Haven in 1646 by
+Madam Brewster's saying that the custom of carrying contributions to
+the Deacons' table was popish--was "like going to the High Alter,"
+and "savored of the Mass." She answered her accusers in such a bold,
+highhanded, and defiant manner that her heinous offence was considered
+worthy of trial in a higher court, whose decision is now lost.
+
+The colonists could not let their affection and zeal for an individual
+minister cause them to show any disrespect or indifference to the Puritan
+Church in general. When the question of the settlement of the Reverend Mr.
+Lenthal in the church of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was under discussion, the
+tyranny of the Puritan Church over any who dared oppose or question it was
+shown in a marked manner, and may be cited as a typical case. Mr. Lenthal
+was suspected of being poisoned with the Anne Hutchinson heresies, and he
+also "opposed the way of gathering churches." Hence his ordination over the
+church in the new settlement was bitterly opposed by the Boston divines,
+though apparently desired by the Weymouth congregation. One Britton, who
+was friendly towards Lenthal and who spoke "reproachfully" and slurringly
+of a book which defended the course of the Boston churches, was whipped
+with eleven stripes, as he had no money to pay the imposed fine. John
+Smythe, who "got hands to a blank" (which was either canvassing for
+signatures to a proxy vote in favor of Lenthal or obtaining signatures
+to an instrument declaring against the design of the churches), for thus
+"combining to hinder the orderly gathering" of the Weymouth church at this
+time, was fined £2. Edward Sylvester for the same offence was fined and
+disfranchised. Ambrose Martin, another friend of Lenthal's, for calling
+the church covenant of the Boston divines "a stinking carrion and a human
+invention," was fined £10, while Thomas Makepeace, another Weymouth
+malcontent, was informed by those in power that "they were weary of him,"
+or, in modern slang, that "he made them tired." Parson Lenthal himself,
+being sent for by the convention, weakened at once in a way his church
+followers must have bitterly despised; he was "quickly convinced of his
+error and evil." His conviction was followed with his confession, and in
+open court he gave under his hand a laudable retraction, which retraction
+he was ordered also to "utter in the assembly at Weymouth, and so no
+further censure was passed on him." Thus the chief offender got the
+lightest punishment, and thus did the omnipotent Church rule the whole
+community.
+
+The names of loquacious, babbling Quakers and Baptists who spoke
+disrespectfully of some or all of the ordinances of the Puritan church
+might be given, and would swell the list indefinitely; they were fined and
+punished without mercy or even toleration.
+
+All profanity or blaspheming against God was severely punished. One very
+wicked man in Hartford for his "fillthy and prophane expressions," namely,
+that "hee hoped to meet some of the members of the Church in Hell before
+long, and he did not question but hee should," was "committed to prison,
+there to be kept in safe custody till the sermon, and then to stand the
+time thereof in the pillory, and after sermon to be severely whipped." What
+a severe punishment for so purely verbal an offence! New England ideas of
+profanity were very rigid, and New England men had reason to guard well
+their temper and tongue, else that latter member might be bored with a
+hot iron; for such was the penalty for profanity. We know what horror Mr.
+Tomlins's wicked profanity, "Curse ye woodchuck!" caused in Lynn meeting,
+and Mr. Dexter was "putt in ye billboes ffor prophane saying dam ye cowe."
+The Newbury doctor was sharply fined also for wickedly cursing. When
+drinking at the tavern he raised his glass and said,--
+
+  "I'll pledge my friends, and for my foes
+  A plague for their heels, and a poxe for their toes."
+
+He acknowledged his wickedness and foolishness in using the "olde proverb,"
+and penitently promised to curse no more.
+
+Sad to tell, Puritan women sometimes lost their temper and their
+good-breeding and their godliness. Two wicked Wells women were punished in
+1669 "for using profane speeches in their common talk; as in making answer
+to several questions their answer is, The Devil a bit." In 1640, in
+Springfield, Goody Gregory, being grievously angered, profanely abused an
+annoying neighbor, saying, "Before God I coulde breake thy heade!" But she
+acknowledged her "great sine and faulte" like a woman, and paid her fine
+and sat in the stocks like a man, since she swore like the members of that
+profane sex.
+
+Sometimes the sins of the fathers were visited on the children in a most
+extraordinary manner. One man, "for abusing N. Parker at the tavern," was
+deprived of the privilege of bringing his children to be baptized, and was
+thus spiritually punished for a very worldly offence. For some offences,
+such as "speaking deridingly of the minister's powers," as was done in
+Plymouth, "casting uncharitable reflexions on the minister," as did an
+Andover man; and also for absenting one's self from church services; for
+"sloathefulness," for "walking prophanely," for spoiling hides when tanning
+and refusing explanation thereof; for selling short weight in grain,
+for being "given too much to Jearings," for "Slanndering," for being a
+"Makebayte," for "ronging naibors," for "being too Proude," for "suspitions
+of stealing pinnes," for "pnishouse Squerilouse Odyouse wordes," and for
+"lyeing," church-members were not only fined and punished but were deprived
+of partaking of the sacrament. In the matter of lying great distinction was
+made as to the character and effect of the offence. George Crispe's wife,
+who "told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly," was simply
+admonished and remonstrated with. Will Randall, who told a "plain lie," was
+fined ten shillings. While Ralph Smith, who "lied about seeing a whale,"
+was fined twenty shillings and excommunicated.
+
+In some communities, of which Lechford tells us New Haven was one, these
+unhouselled Puritans were allowed, if they so desired, to stand outside the
+meeting-house door at the time of public worship and catch what few words
+of the service they could. This humble waiting for crumbs of God's word was
+doubtless regarded as a sign of repentance for past deeds, for it was often
+followed by full forgiveness. As excommunicated persons were regarded with
+high disfavor and even abhorrence by the entire pious and godly walking
+community, this apparently spiritual punishment was more severe in its
+temporal effects than at first sight appears. From the Cambridge Platform,
+which was drawn up and adopted by the New England Synod in 1648, we learn
+that "while the offender remains excommunicated the church is to refrain
+from all communion with him in civil things," and the members were
+specially "to forbear to eat and drink with him;" so his daily and even his
+family life was made wretched. And as it was not necessary to wait for the
+action of the church to pronounce excommunication, but the "pastor of a
+church might by himself and authoritatively suspend from the Lord's table
+a brother _suspected_ of scandal" until there was time for full
+examination, we can see what an absolute power the church and even the
+minister had over church-members in a New England community.
+
+Nor could the poor excommunicate go to neighboring towns and settlements to
+start afresh. No one wished him or would tolerate him. Lancaster, in 1653,
+voted not to receive into its plantation "any excommunicat or notoriously
+erring agt the Docktrin & Discipline of churches of this Commonwealth."
+Other towns passed similar votes. Fortunately, Rhode Island--the island of
+"Aquidnay" and the Providence Plantations--opened wide its arms as a place
+of refuge for outcast Puritans. Universal freedom and religious toleration
+were in Rhode Island the foundations of the State. Josiah Quincy said that
+liberty of conscience would have produced anarchy if it had been permitted
+in the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century, but the
+flourishing Narragansett, Providence, and Newport plantations seem to prove
+the absurdity of that statement. Liberty of conscience was there allowed,
+as Dr. MacSparran, the first clergyman of the Narragansett Church,
+complained in his "America Dissected," "to the extent of no religion at
+all." The Gortonians, the Foxians, and Hutchinsonians, the Anabaptists, the
+Six Principle Baptists, the Church of England, apparently all the followers
+of the eighty-two "pestilent heresies" so sadly enumerated and so bitterly
+hated and "cast out to Satan" by the Massachusetts Puritan divines,--all
+the excommunicants and exiles found in Rhode Island a home and
+friends--other friends than the Devil to whom they had been consigned.
+
+Though the early Puritan ministers had such powerful influence in every
+other respect, they were not permitted to perform the marriage-service
+nor to raise their voices in prayer or exhortation at a funeral. Sewall
+jealously notes when the English burial-service began to be read at
+burials, saying, "the office for Burial is a Lying very bad office makes no
+difference between the precious and the vile." The office of marriage was
+denied the parson, and was generally relegated to the magistrate. In this,
+Governor Bradford states, they followed "ye laudable custome of ye Low
+Countries." Not rulers and magistrates only were empowered to perform the
+marriage ceremony; squires, tavern-keepers, captains, various authorized
+persons might wed Puritan lovers; any man of dignity or prominence in the
+community could apparently receive authority to perform that office except
+the otherwise all-powerful parson.
+
+As years rolled on, though the New Englanders still felt great reverence
+and pride for their church and its ordinances, the minister was no longer
+the just man made perfect, the oracle of divine will. The church-members
+escaped somewhat from ecclesiastical power, and some of them found fault
+with and openly disparaged their ministers in a way that would in early
+days have caused them to be pilloried, whipped, caged, or fined; and often
+the derogatory comments were elicited by the most trivial offences. One
+parson was bitterly condemned because he managed to amass eight hundred
+dollars by selling the produce of his farm. Another shocking and severely
+criticised offence was a game of bowls which one minister played and
+enjoyed. Still another minister, in Hanover, Massachusetts, was reproved
+for his lack of dignity, which was shown in his wearing stockings "footed
+up with another color;" that is, knit stockings in which the feet were
+colored differently from the legs. He also was found guilty of having
+jumped over the fence instead of decorously and clerically walking through
+the gate when going to call on one of his parishioners. Rev. Joseph Metcalf
+of the Old Colony was complained of in 1720 for wearing too worldly a wig.
+He mildly reproved and shamed the meddlesome women of his church by asking
+them to come to him and each cut off a lock of hair from the obnoxious
+wig until all the complainers were satisfied that it had been rendered
+sufficiently unworldly. Some Newbury church-members, in 1742, asserted that
+their minister unclerically wore a colored kerchief instead of a band. This
+he indignantly denied, saying that he "had never buried a babe even in most
+tempestuous weather," when he rode several miles, but he always wore a
+band, and he complained in turn that members of his congregation turned
+away from him on the street, and "glowered" at him and "sneered at him."
+Still more unseemly demonstrations of dislike were sometimes shown, as in
+South Hadley, in 1741, when a committee of disaffected parishioners
+pulled the Rev. Mr Rawsom out of the pulpit and marched him out of the
+meeting-house because they did not fancy his preaching. But all such
+actions were as offensive to the general community then as open expressions
+of dissatisfaction and contempt are now.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The Ordination of the Minister.
+
+
+
+The minister's ordination was, of course, an important social as well as
+spiritual event in such a religious community as was a New England colonial
+town. It was always celebrated by a great gathering of people from far and
+near, including all the ministers from every town for many miles around;
+and though a deeply serious service, was also an excuse for much
+merriment. In Connecticut, and by tradition also in Massachusetts, an
+"ordination-ball" was frequently given. It is popularly supposed that at
+this ball the ministers did not dance, nor even appear, nor to it in any
+way give their countenance; that it was only a ball given at the time of
+the ordination because so many people would then be in the town to take
+part in the festivity. That this was not always the case is proved by
+a letter of invitation still in existence written by Reverend Timothy
+Edwards, who was ordained in Windsor in 1694; it was written to Mr. and
+Mrs. Stoughton, asking them to attend the ordination-ball which was to be
+given in his, the minister's house. But whether the parsons approved and
+attended, or whether they strongly discountenanced it, the ordination-ball
+was always a great success. It is recorded that at one in Danvers a young
+man danced so vigorously and long on the sanded floor that he entirely wore
+out a new pair of shoes. The fashion of giving ordination-balls did not die
+out with colonial times. In Federal days it still continued, a specially
+gay ball being given in the town of Wolcott at an ordination in 1811.
+
+There was always given an ordination supper,--a plentiful feast, at which
+visiting ministers and the new pastor were always present and partook with
+true clerical appetite. This ordination feast consisted of all kinds of New
+England fare, all the mysterious compounds and concoctions of Indian corn
+and "pompions," all sorts of roast meats, "turces" cooked in various ways,
+gingerbread and "cacks," and--an inevitable feature at the time of every
+gathering of people, from a corn-husking or apple-bee to a funeral--a
+liberal amount of cider, punch, and grog was also supplied, which latter
+compound beverages were often mixed on the meeting-house green or even in
+punch-bowls on the very door-steps of the church. Beer, too, was specially
+brewed to honor the feast. Rev. Mr. Thatcher, of Boston, wrote in his diary
+on the twentieth of May, 1681, "This daye the Ordination Beare was brewed."
+Portable bars were sometimes established at the church-door, and strong
+drinks were distributed free of charge to the entire assemblage. As late
+as 1825, at the installation of Dr. Leonard Bacon over the First
+Congregational Church in New Haven, free drinks were furnished at an
+adjacent bar to all who chose to order them, and were "settled for" by the
+generous and hospitable society. In considering the extravagant amount of
+moneys often recorded as having been paid out for liquor at ordinations,
+one must not fail to remember that the seemingly large sums were often
+spent in Revolutionary times during the great depreciation of Continental
+money. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars were disbursed for the
+entertainment of the council at the ordination of Mr. Kilbourn, of
+Chesterfield; but the items were really few and the total amount of liquor
+was not great,--thirty-eight mugs of flip at twelve dollars per mug; eleven
+gills of rum bitters at six dollars per gill, and two mugs of sling at
+twenty-four dollars per mug. The church in one town sent the Continental
+money in payment for the drinks of the church-council in a wheelbarrow to
+the tavern-keeper, and he was not very well paid either.
+
+It gives one a strange sense of the customs and habits of the olden times
+to read an "ordination-bill" from a tavern-keeper which is thus endorsed,
+"This all Paid for exsept the Minister's Rum." To give some idea of the
+expense of "keeping the ministers" at an ordination in Hartford in 1784,
+let me give the items of the bill:--
+
+                          £  s. d.
+  To keeping Ministers    0  2  4
+  2 Mugs tody             0  5 10
+  5 Segars                0  3  0
+  1 Pint wine             0  0  9
+  3 lodgings              0  9  0
+  3 bitters               0  0  9
+  3 breakfasts            0  3  6
+  15 boles Punch          1 10  0
+  24 dinners              1 16  0
+  11 bottles wine         0  3  6
+  5 mugs flip             0  5 10
+  3 boles punch           0  6  0
+  3 boles tody            0  3  6
+
+One might say with Falstaff, "O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread
+to this intolerable deal of sack!" I sadly fear me that at that Hartford
+ordination our parson ancestors got grievsously "gilded," to use a choice
+"red-lattice phrase."
+
+Many accounts of gay ordination parties have been preserved in diaries for
+us. Reverend Mr. Smith, who was settled in Portland in the early part of
+the eighteenth century, wrote thus in his journal of an ordination which
+he attended: "Mr. Foxcroft ordained at New Gloucester. We had a pleasant
+journey home. Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry. A _jolly ordination_.
+We lost all sight of decorum." The Mr. L. referred to was Mr. Stephen
+Longfellow, greatgrandfather of the poet.
+
+Bills for ordination-expenses abound in items of barrels of rum and cider
+and metheglin, of bowls of flip and punch and toddy, of boxes of lemons and
+loaves of sugar, in punches, and sometimes broken punchbowls, and in one
+case a large amount of Malaga and Canary wine, spices and "ross water,"
+from which was brewed doubtless an appetizing ordination-cup which may have
+rivalled Josselyn's New England nectar of "cyder, Maligo raisins, spices,
+and sirup of clove-gillyflowers."
+
+In Massachusetts, in January, 1759, the subject of the frequent disorders
+and irregularities in connection with ordination-services, especially in
+country towns, came before the council of the province, who referred
+its consideration to a convention of ministers. The ministers at that
+convention were recommended to each give instruction, exhortation, and
+advice against excesses to the members of his congregation whenever an
+ordination was about to take place in the vicinity of his church. In this
+way it was hoped that the reformation would be aided, and temperance,
+order, and decorum established. The newspapers were free in their
+condemnation of the feasting and roistering at ordination-services. When
+Dr. Cummings was ordained over the Old South Church of Boston in February,
+1761, a feast took place at the Rev. Dr. Sewall's house which occasioned
+much comment. A four-column letter of criticism appeared in the Boston
+Gazette of March 9, 1761, over the signature of "Countryman," which
+provoked several answers and much newspaper controversy. As Dr. Sewall had
+been moderator of the meeting of ministers held only two years previously
+with the hope, and for the purpose of abolishing ordination revelries, it
+is not strange that the circumstance of the feast being given in his house
+should cause public comment and criticism.
+
+"Countryman" complained that "the price of provisions was raised a quarter
+cart in Boston for several days before the instalment by reason of the
+great preparations therefor, and the readiness of the ecclesiastical
+caterers to give almost any price that was demanded. Many Boston people
+complained the town had, by this means, in a few days lost a large sum of
+money; which was, as it were, levied on and extorted from them. If the
+poor were the _better for what remained of so plentiful and splendid a
+feast_ I am very glad but yet think it is a pity the charity were not
+better timed." He reprovingly enumerates, "There were six tables that held
+one with another eighteen persons each, upon each table a good rich plumb
+pudding, a dish of boil'd pork and fowls, and a corn'd leg of pork with
+sauce proper for it, a leg of bacon, a piece of alamode beef, a leg of
+mutton with caper sauce, a roast line of veal, a roast turkey, a venison
+pastee, besides chess cakes and tarts, cheese and butter. Half a dozen
+cooks were employed upon this occasion, upwards of twenty tenders to wait
+upon the tables; they had the best of old cyder, one barrel of Lisbon wine,
+punch in plenty before and after dinner, made of old Barbados spirit. The
+cost of this moderate dinner was upwards of fifty pounds lawful money."
+This special ordination-feast, even as detailed by the complaining
+"Countryman," does not seem to me very reprehensible. The standing of the
+church, the wealth of the congregation, the character of the guests (among
+whom were the Governor and the judges of the Superior Court) all make
+this repast appear neither ostentatious nor extravagant. Fifty pounds was
+certainly not an enormous sum to spend for a dinner with wine for over one
+hundred persons, and such a good dinner too. Nor is it probable that a city
+as large as was Boston at that date could through that dinner have been
+swept of provisions to such an extent that prices would be raised a quarter
+part. I suspect some personal malice caused "Countryman's" attacks, for he
+certainly could have found in other towns more flagrant cases to complain
+of and condemn.
+
+Though no record exists to prove that "the poor were the better for
+what remained" after this Boston feast, in other towns letters
+and church-entries show that any fragments remaining after the
+ordination-dinner were well disposed of. Sometimes they furnished forth the
+new minister's table. In one case they were given to "a widowed family"
+("widowed" here being used in the old tender sense of bereaved). In
+Killingly "the overplush of provisions" was sold to help pay the arrearages
+of the salary of the outgoing minister, thus showing a laudable desire to
+"settle up and start square."
+
+If the church were dedicated at the time of the ordination, that would
+naturally be cause for additional gayety. A very interesting and graphic
+account of the feast at the dedication of the Old Tunnel Meeting-House of
+Lynn in the year 1682 has been preserved. It thus describes the scene:--
+
+"Ye Deddication Dinner was had in ye greate barne of Mr. Hoode which by
+reason of its goodly size was deemed ye most fit place. It was neatly
+adorned with green bows and other hangings and made very faire to look
+upon, ye wreaths being mostly wrought by ye young folk, they meeting
+together, both maides and young men, and having a merry time in doing ye
+work. Ye rough stalls and unbowed posts being gaily begirt and all ye
+corners and cubbies being clean swept and well aired, it truly did appear
+a meet banquetting hall. Ye scaffolds too from which ye provinder had been
+removed were swept cleane as broome could make them. Some seats were put up
+on ye scaffoldes whereon might sitt such of ye antient women as would see &
+ye maides and children. Ye greate floor was all held for ye company which
+was to partake of ye feast of fat things, none others being admitted there
+save them that were to wait upon ye same. Ye kine that were wont to be
+there were forced to keep holiday in the field."
+
+Then follows a minute account of how the fowls persisted in flying in
+and roosting over the table, scattering feathers and hay on the parsons
+beneath.
+
+"Mr. Shepard's face did turn very red and he catched up an apple and hurled
+it at ye birds. But he thereby made a bad matter worse for ye fruit being
+well aimed it hit ye legs of a fowl and brought him floundering and
+flopping down on ye table, scattering gravy, sauce and divers things upon
+our garments and in our faces. But this did not well please some, yet with
+most it was a happening that made great merryment. Dainty meats were on ye
+table in great plenty, bear-stake, deer-meat, rabbit, and fowle, both wild
+and from ye barnyard. Luscious puddings we likewise had in abundance,
+mostly apple and berry, but some of corn meal with small bits of sewet
+baked therein; also pyes and tarts. We had some pleasant fruits, as apples,
+nuts and wild grapes, and to crown all, we had plenty of good cider and ye
+inspiring Barbadoes drink. Mr. Shepard and most of ye ministers were
+grave and prudent at table, discoursing much upon ye great points of ye
+deddication sermon and in silence laboring upon ye food before them. But I
+will not risque to say on which they dwelt with most relish, ye discourse
+or ye dinner. Most of ye young members of ye Council would fain make a
+jolly time of it. Mr. Gerrish, ye Wenham minister, tho prudent in his
+meat and drinks, was yet in right merry mood. And he did once grievously
+scandalize Mr. Shepard, who on suddenly looking up from his dish did spy
+him, as he thot, winking in an unbecoming way to one of ye pretty damsels
+on ye scaffold. And thereupon bidding ye godly Mr. Rogers to labor with him
+aside for his misbehavior, it turned out that ye winking was occasioned by
+some of ye hay seeds that were blowing about, lodging in his eye; whereat
+Mr. Shepard felt greatly releaved.
+
+"Ye new Meeting house was much discoursed upon at ye table. And most thot
+it as comely a house of worship as can be found in the whole Collony save
+only three or four. Mr. Gerrish was in such merry mood that he kept ye end
+of ye table whereby he sat in right jovial humour. Some did loudly laugh
+and clap their hands. But in ye middest of ye merryment a strange disaster
+did happen unto him. Not having his thots about him he endeavored ye
+dangerous performance of gaping and laughing at the same time which he must
+now feel is not so easy or safe a thing. In doing this he set his jaws open
+in such wise that it was beyond all his power to bring them together again.
+His agonie was very great, and his joyful laugh soon turned to grievous
+gioaning. Ye women in ye scaffolds became much distressed for him. We did
+our utmost to stay ye anguish of Mr. Gerrish, but could make out little
+till Mr. Rogers who knoweth somewhat of anatomy did bid ye sufferer to sit
+down on ye floor, which being done Mr. Rogers took ye head atween his legs,
+turning ye face as much upward as possible and then gave a powerful blow
+and then sudden press which brot ye jaws into working order. But Mr.
+Geirish did not gape or laugh much more on that occasion, neither did he
+talk much for that matter.
+
+"No other weighty mishap occurred save that one of ye Salem delegates, in
+boastfully essaying to crack a walnut atween his teeth did crack, instead
+of ye nut, a most usefull double tooth and was thereby forced to appear at
+ye evening with a bandaged face."
+
+This ended this most amusing chapter of disasters to the ministers, though
+the banquet was diversified by interrupting crows from invading roosters,
+fierce and undignified counter-attacks with nuts and apples by the
+clergymen, a few mortifyingly "mawdlin songs and much roistering laughter,"
+and the account ends, "so noble and savoury a banquet was never before
+spread in this noble town, God be praised." What a picture of the good old
+times! Different times make different manners; the early Puritan ministers
+did not, as a rule, drink to excess, any more than do our modern clergymen;
+but it is not strange that though they were of Puritan blood and belief,
+they should have fallen into the universal custom of the day, and should
+have "gone to their graves full of years, honor, simplicity, and rum." The
+only wonder is, when the ministers had the best places at every table, at
+every feast, at every merry-making in New England, that stories of their
+roistering excesses should not have come down to us as there have of the
+intemperate clergy of Virginia.
+
+The ordination services within the meeting-houses were not always decorous
+and quiet scenes. In spite of the reverence which our forefathers had for
+their church and their ministers, it did not prevent them from bitterly
+opposing the settlement of an unwished-for clergyman over them, and many
+towns were racked and divided, then as now, over the important question.
+As years passed on the church members grew bold enough to dare to offer
+personal and bodily opposition. At the ordination of the Rev. Peter
+Thatcher in the New North Church in Boston, in 1720, there were two
+parties. The members who did not wish him to be settled over the church
+went into the meeting-house and made a great disorder and clamor. They
+forbade the proceedings, and went into the gallery, and threw from thence
+water and missiles on the friends of the clergymen who were gathered around
+him at the altar. Perhaps they obtained courage for these sacrilegious acts
+from the barrels of rum and the bowls of strong punch. And this was in
+Puritanical Boston, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of the landing
+of the Mayflower. Thus had one century changed the absolute reverence and
+affectionate regard of the Pilgrims for their church, their ministers,
+and their meeting-houses, to irreverent and obstinate desire for personal
+satisfaction. No wonder that the ministers at that date preached and
+believed that Satan was making fresh and increasing efforts to destroy the
+Puritan church. The hour was ready for Whitefield, for Edwards, for any
+new awakening; and was above all fast approaching for the sadly needed
+temperance reform.
+
+In the seventeenth century a minister was ordained and re-ordained at
+each church over which he had charge; but after some years the name of
+installation was given to each appointment after the first ordination, and
+the ceremony was correspondingly changed.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+The Ministers.
+
+
+
+The picture which Colonel Higginson has drawn of the Puritan minister is so
+well known and so graphic that any attempt to add to it would be futile.
+All the succeeding New England parsons, as years rolled by, were not,
+however, like the black-gowned, black-gloved, stately, and solemn man whom
+he has so clearly shown us. Men of rigid decorum, and grave ceremony there
+were, such as Dr. Emmons and Jonathan Edwards; but there were parsons also
+of another type,--eccentric, unconventional, and undignified in demeanor
+and dress. Parson Robinson, of Duxbury, persisted in wearing in the pulpit,
+as part of his clerical attire, a round jacket instead of the suitable
+gown or Geneva cloak, and he was known thereby as "Master Jack." With
+astonishing inconsistency this Master Jack objected to the village
+blacksmith's wearing his leathern apron into the church, and he assailed
+the offender again and again with words and hints from his pulpit. He was
+at last worsted by the grimaces of the victorious smith (where was the
+Duxbury tithingman?), and indignantly left the pulpit, ejaculating, "I'll
+not preach while that man sits before me." A remonstrating parishioner
+said afterward to Master Jack, "I'd not have left if the Devil sat there."
+"Neither would I", was the quick answer.
+
+Another singular article of attire was worn in the pulpit by Father Mills,
+of Torrington, though neither in irreverence nor indifference. When his
+dearly loved wife died he pondered how he, who always wore black, could
+express to the world that he was wearing mourning; and his simple heart hit
+upon this grotesque device: he left off his full-flowing wig, and tied
+up his head in a black silk handkerchief, which he wore thereafter as a
+trapping of woe.
+
+Parson Judson, of Taunton, was so lazy that he used to preach while sitting
+down in the pulpit; and was so contemptibly fond of comfort that he would
+on summer Sundays give out to the sweltering members of his congregation
+the longest psalm in the psalm-book, and then desert them--piously
+perspiring and fuguing--and lie under a tree enjoying the cool outdoor
+breezes until the long psalm was ended, escaping thus not only the heat but
+the singing; and when we consider the quantity and quality of both, and
+that he condemned his good people to an extra amount of each, it seems
+a piece of clerical inhumanity that would be hard to equal. Surely this
+selfish Taunton sybarite was the prosaic ideal of Hamlet's words:--
+
+  "Some ungracious pastors do
+  Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven,
+  Whilst like a puff'd and reckless libertine
+  Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
+  And recks not his own rede."
+
+But lazy and slothful ministers were fortunately rare in New England. No
+primrose path of dalliance was theirs; industrious and hard-working were
+nearly all the early parsons, preaching and praying twice on the Sabbath,
+and preaching again on Lecture days; visiting the sick and often giving
+medical and "chyrurgycal" advice; called upon for legal counsel and
+adjudication; occupied in spare moments in teaching and preparing young
+men for college; working on their farms; hearing the children say their
+catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,--truly
+they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded
+on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan
+vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John
+Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher,"
+while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a
+contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious
+epithets and descriptions were applied to the parsons; they were called
+"holy-heavenly," "sweet-affecting," "soul-ravishing," "heaven-piercing,"
+"angel-rivalling," "subtil," "irrefragable," "angelical," "septemfluous,"
+"holy-savoured," "princely," "soul-appetizing," "full of antic tastes"
+(meaning having the tastes of an antiquary), "God-bearing." Of two of the
+New England saints it was written:--
+
+  "Thier Temper far from Injucundity,
+  Thier tongues and pens from Infecundity."
+
+Many other fulsome, turgid, and even whimsical expressious of praise might
+be named, for the Puritans were rich in classic sesquipedalian adjectives,
+and their active linguistic consciences made them equally fertile in
+producing new ones.
+
+Ready and unexpected were the solemn Puritans in repartee. A party of gay
+young sparks, meeting austere old John Cotton, determined to guy him. One
+of the young reprobates sent up to him and whispered in his ear, "Cotton,
+thou art an old fool." "I am, I am," was the unexpected answer; "the Lord
+make both thee and me wiser than we are." Two young men of like intent met
+Mr. Haynes, of Vermont, and said with mock sad faces, "Have you heard the
+news? the Devil is dead." Quick came the answer, "Oh, poor, fatherless
+children! what will become of you?"
+
+Gloomy and depressed of spirits they were often. The good Warham, who could
+take faithful and brave charge of his flock in the uncivilized wilds
+of Connecticut among ferocious savages, was tortured by doubts and
+"blasphemous suggestions," and overwhelmed by unbelief, enduring specially
+agonizing scruples about administering and partaking of the Lord's Supper,
+and was thus perplexed and buffeted until the hour of his sad death. The
+ministers went through various stages of uncertainty and gloom, from the
+physical terror of Dr. Cogswell in a thunderstorm, through vacillating and
+harassing convictions about the Half Way Covenant, through doubt of God,
+of salvation, of heaven, of eternite, particularly distressing suspicions
+about the reality of hell and the personality of the Devil, to the stage
+of deep melancholy which was shown in its highest type in "Handkerchief
+Moody," who preached and prayed and always appeared in public with a
+handkerchief over his face, and gave to Hawthorne the inspiration for his
+story of "The Black Veil." Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of
+Charlestown, was so hypochondriacal that he was afraid to preach in the
+pulpit, feeling sure that he would die if he entered therein; so he always
+delivered his sermons to his patient congregation from the deacons' pew.
+Mr. Bradstreet was unconventional in many other respects, and was far from
+being a typical Puritan minister. He seldom wore a coat, but generally
+appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth,--a
+most disreputable addition to the clerical toilet at that date, or, in
+truth, at any date. He was a learned and pious man, however, and was thus
+introduced to a fellow clergyman, "Here is a man who can whistle Greek."
+
+Scarcely one of the early Puritan ministers was free from the sad shadow of
+doubt and fear. No "rose-pink or dirty-drab views of humanity" were theirs;
+all was inky-black. And it is impossible to express the gloom and the
+depression of spirit which fall on one now, after these centuries of
+prosperous and cheerful years, when one considers thoughtfully the deep and
+despairing agony of mind endured by these good, brave, steadfast, godly
+Puritan ministers. Read, for instance, the sentences from the diary of the
+Rev. John Baily, or of Nathaniel Mather, as given by Cotton Mather in his
+"Magnalia." Mather says that poor, sad, heart-sick Baily was filled with
+"desponding jealousies," "disconsolate uneasinesses," gloomy fears, and
+thinks the words from his diary "may be profitable to some discouraged
+minds." Profitable! Ah, no; far from it! The overwhelming blackness
+of despair, the woful doubts and fears about destruction and utter
+annihilation which he felt so deeply and so continually, fall in a heavy,
+impenetrable cloud upon us as we read, until we feel that we too are in the
+"Suburbs of hell" and are "eternally damned."
+
+But in succeeding years they were not always gloomy and not always staid,
+as we know from the stories of the cheerful parties at ordination-times;
+and I doubt not the reverend Assembly of Elders at Cambridge enjoyed to the
+full degree the twelve gallons of sack and six gallons of white wine sent
+to them by the Court as a testimony of deep respect. And the group of
+clergymen who were painted over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of
+Newbury, must have been far from gloom, as the punch-bowl and drinking-cups
+and tobacco and pipes would testify, and their cheerful motto likewise: "In
+essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." And
+the Rev. Mr. ---- no, I will not tell his name--kept an account with
+one Jerome Ripley, a storekeeper, and on one page of this account-book,
+containing thirty-nine entries, twenty-one were for New England rum.
+It somewhat lessens in our notions the personal responsibility, or the
+personal potatory capability of the parson, to discover that there was
+an ordination in town during that rum-paged week, and that the visiting
+ministers probably drank the greater portion of Jerome Ripley's liquor.
+But I wish the store-keeper had--to save this parson's reputation among
+succeeding generations--called and entered the rum as hay, or tea, or
+nails, or anything innocent and virtuous and clerical. When we read of all
+these doings and drinkings of the old New England ministers,--"if ancient
+tales say true, nor wrong these ancient men"--we feel that we cannot so
+fiercely resent nor wonder at the degrading coupling in Byron's sneering
+lines:--
+
+  "There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms,
+  As rum and true religion."
+
+All the cider made by the New England elders did not tend to gloom,
+and they were celebrated for their fine cider. The best cider in
+Massachusetts--that which brought the highest price--was known as the
+Arminian cider, because the minister who furnished it to the market was
+suspected of having Arminian tendencies. A very telling compliment to the
+cider of one of the first New England ministers is thus recorded: "Mr.
+Whiting had a score of appill-trees from which he made delicious cyder.
+And it hath been said yt an Indyan once coming to hys house and Mistress
+Whiting giving him a drink of ye cyder, he did sett down ye pot and smaking
+his lips say yt Adam and Eve were rightlie damned for eating ye appills in
+ye garden of Eden, they should have made them into cyder." This perverse
+application of good John Eliot's teaching would have vexed the apostle
+sorely. Of so much account were the barrels of cider, and so highly were
+they prized by the ministers, that one honest soul did not hesitate to
+thank the Lord in the pulpit for the "many barrels of cider vouchsafed to
+us this year."
+
+Stronger liquors than cider were also manufactured by the ministers,--and
+by God-fearing, pious ministers also. They did not hesitate to own and
+operate distilleries. Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church of
+Hartford and author of the hymn "Swell the anthem, raise the song," was
+engaged in the distilling business and did not make a success of it either.
+Having become bankrupt, he did not dare show his head anywhere in public
+for some time, except on Sunday, for fear of arrest. This disreputable and
+most unclerical affair did not operate against him in the minds of the
+contemporaneous public, for ten years later he received the degree of
+Doctor of Divinity from Princeton College; and he did not hesitate to joke
+about his liquor manufacturing, saying to two of his brother-clergymen,
+"Oh, we are all three in the same boat together,--Brother Prime raises the
+grain, I distil it, and Brother Flint drinks it."
+
+Impostors there were--false parsons--in the early struggling days of New
+England (since "the devil was never weary and never ceasing in disturbing
+the peace of the new English church"), and they plagued the colonists
+sorely. The very first shepherd of the wandering flock--Mr. Lyford, who
+preached to the planters in 1624--was, as Bradford says, "most unsavory
+salt," a most agonizing and unbearable thorn in the flesh and spirit of the
+poor homesick Pilgrims; and he was finally banished to Virginia, where it
+was supposed that he would find congenial and un-Puritanlike companions.
+Another bold-faced cheat preached to the colonists a most impressive sermon
+on the text, "Let him that stole steal no more," while his own pockets were
+stuffed out with stolen money. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth
+speaketh."
+
+Dicky Swayn, "after a thousand rogueries," set up as a parson in Boston.
+But, unfortunately for him, he prayed too loud and too long on one
+occasion, and his prayer attracted the attention of a woman whose servant
+he had formerly been. She promptly exposed his false pretensions and past
+villanies, and he left Boston and an army of cheated creditors. In 1699
+two other attractive and plausible scamps--Kingsbury and May--garbed and
+curried themselves as ministers, and went through a course of unchecked
+villany, building only on their agreeable presence. Cotton Mather wrote
+pertinently of one of these charmers, "Fascination is a thing whereof
+mankind has more Experience than Comprehension;" and he also wrote very
+despitefully of the adventurer's scholarly attainments saying there were
+"eighteen horrid false spells and not one point in one very short note I
+received from him." As the population increased, so also did the list of
+dishonest impostors, who made a cloak of religion most effectively to
+aid them in deceiving the religious community; and sometimes, alas! the
+ordained clergymen became sad backsliders.
+
+Nor were the pious and godly Puritan divines above the follies and
+frailties of other men in other places and in other times. It can be said
+of them, as of the Jew, had they not "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions,
+senses, affections, passions?"--were they not as other men? It is recorded
+of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, that "once coming among a gay partie of
+yong people he kist all ye maides and said yt he felt all ye better for
+it." And who can doubt it? Even that extreme type, that highest pinnacle
+of American Puritanical bigotry,--solemn and learned Cotton Mather,--had,
+when he was a mourning widower, a most amusing amorous episode with a
+rather doubtful, a decidedly shady, young Boston woman, whom he styled an
+"Ingenious Child," but who was far from being an ingenuous child. "She," as
+he proudly stated, "became charmed with my person to such a degree that she
+could not but break in upon me with her most importunate requests." And a
+very handsome and thoroughly attractive person does his portrait show
+even to modern eyes. Poor Cotton resisted the wiles of the devil in this
+alluring form, though he had to fast and pray three consecutive nights ere
+the strong Puritan spirit conquered the weak flesh, and he could consent
+and resolve to give up the thought of marrying the siren. His self-denial
+and firmness deserved a better reward than the very trying matrimonial
+"venture" that he afterwards made.
+
+Many another Puritan parson has left record of his wooings that are warm
+to read. And well did the parsons' wives deserve their ardent wooings and
+their tender love-letters. Hard as was the minister's life, over-filled as
+was his time, highly taxed as were his resources, all these hardships were
+felt in double proportion by the minister's wife. The old Hebrew standard
+of praise quoted by Cotton Mather, "A woman worthy to be the wife of a
+priest," was keenly epigrammatic; and ample proof of the wise insight
+of the standard of comparison may be found in the lives of "the pious,
+prudent, and prayerful" wives of New England ministers. What wonder that
+their praises were sung in many loving though halting threnodies, in
+long-winded but tender eulogies, in labored anagrams, in quaintly spelled
+epitaphs?--for the ministers' wives were the saints of the Puritan
+calendar.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+The Ministers' Pay.
+
+
+
+The salaries of New England clergymen were not large in early days, but the
+£60 or £70 which they each were yearly voted was quite enough to suitably
+support them in that new country of plain ways and plain living, if they
+only received it, which was, alas! not always the case. The First Court of
+Massachusetts, in 1630, set the amount of the minister's annual stipend
+to be £20 or £30 according to the wealth of the community, and made it a
+public charge. In 1659 the highest salary paid in Suffolk County was £100
+to Mr. Thatcher, and the lowest was £40 to the clergyman at Hull. The
+minister of the Andover church was voted a salary of £60, and "when he
+shall have occacion to marry, £10 more." He was very glad, however, to take
+£42 in hard cash instead of £60 in corn and labor, which were at that time
+the most popular forms of ministerial remuneration; even though the "hard
+cash" were in the form of wampum, beaver-skins, or leaden bullets.
+
+Many congregations, though the members were so pious and godly, were pretty
+sharp in bargaining with their preachers; for instance, the church in New
+London made its new parson sign a contract that "in case he remove before
+the year is out, he returneth the £80 paid him." Often clergymen would
+"supply" (or "Sipploye," or "syploy" or "sipply," or "sciploy," as various
+records have it) from month to mouth without "settling." As they got the
+"keepe of a hors," and their own board for Saturday and Sunday, and on
+Monday morning a cash payment for preaching (though often the amount was
+only twelve shillings), they were richer than with a small yearly salary
+that was irregularly and inconveniently paid. Often too they entered by
+preference into a yearly contract with a church, without any wish for
+regular settlement or ordination.
+
+A large portion of the stipends in early parishes being paid in corn and
+labor, the amounts were established by fixed rate upon the inhabitants;
+and the amount of land owned and cultivated by each church-member was
+considered in reckoning his assessment. These amounts were called voluntary
+contributions. If, however, any citizen refused to "contribute," he
+was taxed; and if he refused to pay his church-tax he could be fined,
+imprisoned, or pilloried. For one hundred years the ministers' salaries
+in Boston were paid by these so-called "voluntary contributions." In one
+church it was voted that "the Deacons have liberty for a quarter of a yeare
+to git in every mans sume either in a Church way or in a Christian way."
+I would the process employed in the "Church way" were recorded, since it
+differed so from the Christian way.
+
+It is one of the Puritan paradoxes that abounded in New England, that the
+community of New Haven, a "State whose Desire was Religion," and religion
+alone, was particularly backward in paying the minister who had spiritual
+charge there. After much trouble in deciding about the form and quality
+of the currency which should be used in pay, since so much bad wampum was
+thrust upon the deacons at the public contributions, it was in 1651 enacted
+that "whereas it is taken notice of that Divers give not into the Treasury
+at all on the Lords Day, it is decreed that all such if they give not
+freely, of themselves be rated according to the Jurisdiction order for the
+Ministers Maintaynance." The delinquents were ordered to bring their "rate"
+to the Deacon's house at once. A presuming young man ventured to suggest
+that the recreant members who would not pay in the face of the whole
+congregation would hardly rush to the Deacon's door to give in their
+"rate." He was severely ordered to keep silence in the company of wiser and
+elder people; but time proved his simply wise supposition to be correct;
+and many and various were the devices and forces which the deacons were
+obliged to use to obtain the minister's rate in New Haven.
+
+Some few bold Puritan souls dared to protest against being forced to pay
+the church rate whether they wished to or not. Lieutenant Fuller, of
+Barnstable, was fined fifty shillings for "prophanely" saying "that the law
+enacted about the ministers maintenance was a wicked and devilish one, and
+that the devil sat at the helm when the law was made." Such courageous
+though profane expressions of revolt but little availed; for not only
+were members and attendants of the Puritan churches taxed, but Quakers,
+Baptists, and Church-of-England men were also "rated," and if they refused
+to pay to help support the church that they abhorred, they were fined and
+imprisoned. One man, of Watertown, named Briscoe, dared to write a book
+against the violent enforcement of "voluntary" subscriptions. He was fined
+£10 for his wickedness; and the printer of the book was also punished. A
+virago in New London, more openly courageous, threw scalding water on the
+head of the tithingman who came to collect the minister's rate. Old John
+Cotton preached long and earnestly upon the necessity and propriety of
+raising the money for the minister's salary, and for other expenses of the
+church, wholly by voluntary and eagerly given contributions,--the "Lord
+having directed him to make it clear by Scripture." He believed that tithes
+and church-taxes were productive of "pride, contention and sloth," and
+indicated a declining spiritual condition of the church. But it was a
+strange voluntary gift he wished, that was forced by dread of the pillory
+and cage!
+
+Since, as Higginson said, "New England was a plantation of Religion, not a
+plantation of Trade," the church and its support were of course the first
+thought in laying out a new town-settlement, and some of the best town-lots
+were always set aside for the "yuse of the minister." Sometimes these lots
+were a gift outright to the first settled preacher, in other townships they
+were set aside as glebes, or "ministry land" as it was called. It was a
+universal custom to build at once a house for the minister, and some very
+queer contracts and stipulations for the size, shape, and quality of the
+parson's home-edifice may be read in church-records. To the construction
+of this house all the town contributed, as also to the building of the
+meeting-house; some gave work; some, the use of a horse or ox-team; some,
+boards; some, stones or brick; some, logs; others, nails; and a few, a very
+few, money. At the house-raising a good dinner was provided, and of course,
+plenty of liquor. Some malcontents rebelled against being forced to work on
+the minister's house. Entries of fines are common enough for "refusing
+to dig on the Minister's Selor," for neglecting to send "the Minister's
+Nayles," for refusing to "contribute clay-boards," etc. As with the
+town-lot, the house sometimes was a gift outright to the clergyman, and
+ofttimes the ownership was retained by the church, and the free use only
+was given to each minister.
+
+It was a universal custom to allow free pasturage for the minister's
+horse, for which the village burial-ground was assigned as a favorite
+feeding-ground. Sometimes this privilege of free pasturage was abused. In
+Plymouth, in 1789, Rev. Chandler Robbins was requested "not to have more
+horses than shall be necessary, for his many horses that had been pastured
+on 'Burial Hill'" had sadly damaged and defaced the gravestones,--perhaps
+the very headstones placed over the bones of our Pilgrim Fathers.
+
+The "strangers' money," which was the money contributed by visitors who
+chanced to attend the services, and which was sometimes specified as "all
+the silver and black dogs given by strangers," was usually given to the
+minister. A "black dog" was a "dog dollar."
+
+Often a settlement or a sum of money was given outright to the clergyman
+when he was first ordained or settled in the parish. At a town meeting in
+Sharon, January 8, 1755, which was held with regard to procuring a new
+minister, it was voted "that a committe confer with Mr. Smith, and know
+which will be more acceptable to him, to have a larger settlement and a
+smaller salary, or a larger salary and a smaller settlement, and make
+report to this meeting." On Jan. 15th it was voted "that we give to said
+Mr. Smith 420 ounces of silver or equivalent in old Tenor bills, for a
+settlement, to be paid in three years after settlement. That we give to
+said Mr. Smith 220 Spanish dollars or an equivalent in old Tenor bills for
+his yearly salary." Mr. Smith was very generous to his new parish, for his
+acceptance of its call contains this clause: "As it will come heavy upon
+some perhaps to pay salary and settlement together I have thought of
+releasing part of the payment of the salary for a time to be paid to me
+again. The first year I shall allow you out of the salary you have voted me
+40 dollars, the 2nd 30 dollars, the 3rd 15, the 4th year 20 to be repaid
+to me again, the 5th year 20 more, the 6th year 20 more and the 25 dollars
+that remain, I am willing that the town should keep 'em for its own use."
+He was apparently "willing to live very low," as Parson Eliot humbly and
+pathetically wrote in a petition to his church.
+
+The Puritan ministers in New England in the eighteenth century were all
+good Whigs; they hated the English kings, fully believing that those stupid
+rulers, who really cared little for the Church of England, were burning
+with pious zeal to make Episcopacy the established church of the colonies,
+and knowing that were that deed accomplished they themselves would probably
+lose their homes and means of livelihood. They were the most eager of
+Republicans and patriots, and many of them were good and brave soldiers in
+the Revolution.
+
+When the minister acquired the independence he so longed and fought for,
+it was not all his fancy painted it. He found himself poor
+indeed,--practically penniless. He complained sadly that he was paid his
+salary in the worthless continental paper money, and he refused to take it.
+Often he cannily took merchandise of all kinds instead of the low-valued
+paper money, and he became a good and sharp trader, exchanging his various
+goods for whatever he needed--and could get. Merchandise was, indeed, far
+preferable to money. The petition of Rev. Mr. Barnes to his Willsborough
+people has been preserved, and he thus speaks of his salary: "In 1775 the
+war comenced & Paper money was emitted which soon began to depreciate and
+the depreciation was so rappid that in may 1777 your Pastor gave the whole
+of his years Salary for one sucking Calf, the next year he gave the whole
+for a small store pig. Your Pastor has not asked for any consideration
+being willing to try to Scrabble along with the people while they are in
+low circumstances." His neighbor, Rev. Mr. Sprague, of Dublin, formally
+petitioned his church not to increase his salary, "as I am plagued to death
+to get what is owing to me now," or to buy anything with it when he got it.
+The minister in Scarborough had to be paid £5,400 in paper money to make
+good his salary of £60 in gold which had been voted him.
+
+"Living low" and "scrabbling along" seems to have been the normal and
+universal condition of the New England minister for some time after the War
+of Independence. He was obliged to go without his pay, or to take it in
+whatever shape it might chance to be tendered. Indeed, from the earliest
+colonial days it was true that of whatever they had, the church-members
+gave; meal, maize, beans, cider, lumber, merchantable pork, apples,
+"English grains," pumpkins,--all were paid to the parson. Part of the
+stipend of a minister on Cape Cod was two hundred fish yearly from each
+parishioner, with which to fertilize his sandy corn-land. In Plymouth,
+in 1662, the following method of increasing the minister's income was
+suggested: "The Court Proposeth it as a thing that they judge would be very
+commendable and beneficiall to the townes where God's providence shall cast
+any whales, if they should agree to set aparte some p'te of every such fish
+or oyle for the Incouragement of an able and godly minister among them." In
+Sandwich, also, the parson had a part of every whale that came ashore.
+
+Various gifts, too, came to the preachers. In Newbury the first salmon
+caught each year in the weir was left by will to the parson. Judge Sewall
+records that he visited the minister and "carried him a Bushel of
+Turnips, cost me five shillings, and a Cabbage cost half a Crown." Such a
+high-priced cabbage!
+
+That New England country institution--the "donation party" to the
+minister--was evolved at a later date. At these donation parties the
+unfortunate shepherd of the flock often received much that neither he
+nor the wily donors could use, while more valuable and useful gifts were
+lacking.
+
+A very material plenishing of the minister's house was often furnished in
+the latter part of the eighteenth century by the annual "Spinning Bee." On
+a given day the women of the parish, each bearing her own spinning-wheel
+and flax, assembled at the minister's house and spun for his wife great
+"runs" of linen thread, which were afterward woven into linen for the use
+of the parson and his family. In Newbury, April 20,1768, "Young ladies met
+at the house of the Rev. Mr. Parsons, who preached to them a sermon from
+Proverbs 31-19. They spun and presented to Mrs. Parsons two hundred and
+seventy skeins of good yarn." They drank "liberty tea." This makeshift of
+a beverage was made of the four-leaved loosestrife. The herb was pulled
+up like flax, its stalks were stripped of the leaves and were boiled. The
+leaves were put in a kettle and basted with the liquor distilled from the
+stalks. After this the leaves were dried in an oven to use in the same
+manner as tea-leaves. Liberty tea sold readily for sixpence a pound. In
+1787 these same Newbury women spun two hundred and thirty-six skeins
+of thread and yarn for the wife of the Rev. Mr. Murray. Some were busy
+spinning, some reeling and carding, and some combing the flax, while the
+minister preached to them on the text from Exodus xxxv. 25: "And all
+the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands." These
+spinning-bees were everywhere in vogue, and formed a source of much profit
+to the parson, and of pleasure to the spinners, in spite of the sermons.
+
+Pieced patchwork bed-quilts for the minister's family were also given by
+the women of the congregation. Sometimes each woman furnished a neatly
+pieced square, and all met at the parsonage and joined and quilted the
+coverlet. At other times the minister's wife made the patchwork herself,
+but the women assembled and transformed it into quilts for her. The parson
+was helped also in his individual work. When the rye or wheat or grain on
+the minister's land was full grown and ready for reaping and mowing, the
+men in his parish gave him gladly a day's work in harvesting, and in turn
+he furnished them plenty of good rum to drink, else there were "great
+uneasyness." The New England men were not forced to drink liberty tea.
+
+One universal contribution to the support of the minister all over New
+England was cord-wood; and the "minister's wood" is an institution up to
+the present day in the few thickly wooded districts that remain. A load of
+wood was usually given by each male church-member, and he was expected to
+deliver the gift at the door of the parsonage. Sixty loads a year were a
+fair allowance, but the number sometimes ran up to one hundred, as was
+furnished to Parson Chauncey, of Durham. Rev. Mr. Parsons, of East Hadley,
+was the greatest wood-consumer among the old ministers of whom I have
+chanced to read. Good, cheerful, roaring fires must the Parsons family have
+kept; for in 1774 he had eighty loads of wood supplied to him; in 1751 he
+was furnished with one hundred loads; in 1763 the amount had increased to
+one hundred and twenty loads, when the parish was glad to make a compromise
+with their extravagant shepherd and pay him instead £13 6s 8d annually
+in addition to his regular salary, and let him buy or cut his own wood.
+Firewood at that time in that town was worth only the expense of cutting
+and hauling to the house. A "load" of wood contained about three quarters
+of a cord, and until after the Revolutionary War was worth in the vicinity
+of Hadley only three shillings a load. The minister's loads were expected
+to be always of good "hard-wood." One thrifty parson, while watching a
+farmer unload his yearly contribution, remarked, "Isn't that pretty soft
+wood?" "And don't we sometimes have pretty soft preaching?" was the answer.
+It was well that the witty retort was not made a century earlier; for the
+speaker would have been punished by a fine, since they fined so sharply
+anything that savored of "speaking against the minister." In some towns a
+day was appointed which was called a "wood-spell," when it was ordered that
+all the wood be delivered at the parson's door; and thus the farmers formed
+a cheerful gathering, at which the minister furnished plentiful flip, or
+grog, to the wood-givers. Rev. Stephen Williams, of Longmeadow, never
+failed to make a note of the "wood-sleddings" in his diary. He wrote on
+Jan. 25, 1757, "Neighbors sledded wood for me and shewed a Good Humour.
+I rejoice at it. The Lord bless them that are out of humour and brot no
+wood." In other towns the wood did not always come in when it was wanted or
+needed, and winter found the parsonage woodshed empty. Rev. Mr. French, of
+Andover, gave out this notice in his pulpit one Sunday in November: "I will
+write two discourses and deliver them in this meeting-house on Thanksgiving
+Day, _provided I can manage to write them without a fire_." We can be
+sure that Monday morning saw several loads of good hard wood deposited at
+the parson's door.
+
+Other ministers did not hesitate to demand their cord-wood most openly,
+while still others became adepts in hinting and begging, not only for wood,
+but for other supplies. It is told of a Newbury parson that he rode from
+house to house one winter afternoon, saying in each that he "wished he had
+a slice of their good cheese, for his wife expected company." On his way
+home his sleigh, unfortunately, upset, and the gathering darkness could not
+conceal from the eyes of the astonished townspeople, who ran to "right the
+minister," the nine great cheeses that rolled out into the snow.
+
+Another source of income to New England preachers was the sale of the
+gloves and rings which were given to them (and indeed to all persons of
+any importance) at weddings, funerals, and christenings. In reading Judge
+Sewall's diary one is amazed at the extraordinary number of gloves he thus
+received, and can but wonder what became of them all, since, had he had
+as many hands as Briareus, he could hardly have worn them. The manuscript
+account-book of the Rev. Mr. Elliot, who was ordained pastor of the New
+North Church of Boston in 1742, shows that he, having a frugal mind, sold
+both gloves and rings. He kept a full list of the gloves he received, the
+kid gloves, the lambswool gloves, and the long gloves,--which were for his
+wife. It seems incredible, but in thirty-two years he received two thousand
+and nine hundred and forty pairs of gloves. Of these, though dead men's
+gloves did not have a very good market, he sold through various salesmen
+and dealers about six hundred and forty dollars worth. One wonders that he
+did not "combine" with the undertaker or sexton who furnished the gloves to
+mourners, and thus do a very thrifty business.
+
+The parson, especially in a low-salaried, rural district, had to practise a
+thousand petty and great economies to eke out his income. He and his family
+wore homespun and patched clothing, which his wife had spun and wove and
+cut and made. She knitted woollen mittens and stockings by the score. She
+unfortunately could not make shoes, and to keep the large family shod was a
+serious drain on the clerical purse, one minister declaring vehemently
+that he should have died a rich man if he and his family could have gone
+barefoot. The pastors of seaboard and riverside parishes set nets, like the
+Apostles of old, and caught fish with which they fed their families until
+the over-phosphorized brains and stomachs rebelled. They set snares and
+traps and caught birds and squirrels and hare, to replenish their tables,
+and from the skins of the rabbits and woodchucks and squirrels, the
+parsons' wives made fur caps for the husbands and for the children.
+
+The whole family gathered in large quantities from roadsides and pastures
+the oily bayberries, and from them the thrifty and capable wife made scores
+of candles for winter use, patiently filling and refilling her few moulds,
+or "dipping" the candles again and again until large enough to use. These
+pale-green bayberry tallow candles, when lighted in the early winter
+evening, sent forth a faint spicy fragrance--a true New England
+incense--that fairly perfumed and Orientalized the atmosphere of the
+parsonage kitchen. They were very saving, however, even of these home-made
+candles, blowing them out during the long family prayers.
+
+Some parsons could not afford always to use candles. In the home of one
+well-known minister the wife always knitted, the children ciphered and
+studied, and the husband wrote his sermon by the flickering fire-light (for
+they always had wood in plenty), with his scraps of sermon paper placed on
+the side of the great leathern bellows as it lay in his lap; a pretty home
+scene that was more picturesque to behold than comfortable to take part in.
+
+Country ministers could scarcely afford paper to write on, as it was taxed
+and was high priced. They bought their sermon paper by the pound; but they
+made the first drafts of their addresses, in a fine, closely written hand,
+on wrapping-paper, on the backs of letters, on the margins of their few
+newspapers, and copied them when finished in their sermon-books with a
+keen regard for economy of space and paper. The manuscript sermons of New
+England divines are models of careful penmanship, and may be examined with
+interest by a student of chirography. The letters are cramped and crabbed,
+like the lives of many of the writers, but the penmanship is methodical,
+clear, and distinct, without wavering lines or uncertain touch.
+
+As every parsonage had some glebe land, the parson could raise at least a
+few vegetables to supply his table. One minister, prevented by illness from
+planting his garden, complained with bitterness that, save for a few rare
+gifts of vegetables from his parishioners, his family had no green thing
+all summer save "messes of dandelion greens" which he had dug by the
+roadside, and the summer's succession of wild berries and mushrooms. The
+children had gathered the berries and had sold them when they could, but of
+course no one would buy the mushrooms, hence they had been forced to eat
+them at the parsonage; and he spoke despitefully and disdainfully of the
+mean, unnourishing, and doubtfully healthful food.
+
+In winter the parson's family fared worse; one minister declared that he
+had had nothing but mush and milk with occasional "cracker johnny-cakes"
+all winter, and that he had not once tasted meat in that space of time,
+save at a funeral or ordination-supper, where I doubt not he gorged with
+the composure and capacity of a Sioux brave at a war feast.
+
+Often the low state of the parsonage larder was quite unknown to the
+unthinking members of the congregation, who were not very luxuriously fed
+themselves; and in the profession of preaching as in all other walks of
+life much depended on the way the parson's money was spent,--economy and
+good judgment in housekeeping worked wonders with the small salary. Dr.
+Dwight, in eulogizing Abijah Weld, pastor at Attleborough, declared that
+on a salary of two hundred and twenty dollars a year Mr. Weld brought up
+eleven children, kept a hospitable house, and gave liberally in charity to
+the poor. I fear if we were to ask some carnal-minded person, who knew not
+the probity of Dr. Dwight, how Mr. Weld could possibly manage to accomplish
+such wonderful results with so little money, that we should meet with
+scepticism as to the correctness of the facts alleged. Such cases were,
+however, too common to be doubted. My answer to the puzzling financial
+question would be this: examine and study the story of the home life, the
+work of _Mrs_. Weld, that unsalaried helper in clerical labor; therein
+the secret lies.
+
+In many cases, in spite of the never failing and never ceasing economy,
+care, and assistance of the hard-working, thrifty wife, in spite of
+tributes, tithes and windfalls--in country parishes especially--the
+minister, unless he fortunately had some private wealth, felt it incumbent
+upon him to follow some money-making vocation on week-days. Many were
+farmers on week-days. Many took into their families young men who wished
+to be taught, or fitted for college. Rev. Mr. Halleck in the course of his
+useful and laborious life educated over three hundred young Puritans in his
+own household. It is not recorded how Mrs. Halleck enjoyed the never ending
+cooking for this regiment of hungry young men. Some parsons learned to draw
+up wills and other legal documents, and thus became on a small scale the
+lawyers of the town. Others studied the mystery of medicine, and bought a
+small stock of the nauseous drugs of the times, which they retailed
+with accompanying advice to their parishioners. Some were coopers, some
+carpenters, rope-makers, millers, or cobblers. One cobbler clergyman in
+Andover, Vermont, worked at his shoe-mending all the week with his Bible
+open on his bench before him, and he marked the page containing any text
+which bore on the subject of his coming sermon, with a marker of waxed
+shoe-thread. Often the Bible, in his pulpit on Sunday, had thirty or forty
+of these shoe-thread guides hanging down from it.
+
+One minister, having been reproved for his worldliness in amassing a large
+enough fortune to buy a good farm, answered his complaining congregation
+thus: "I have obtained the money to buy this farm by neglecting to follow
+the maxim to 'mind my own business.' My business was to study the word of
+God and attend to my parish duties and preach good sermons. All this I
+acknowledge I have not done, for I have been meddling with your business.
+_That_ was to support me and my family; that _you_ have not done.
+But remember this: while I have performed your duties, you have not done
+mine, so I think you cannot complain."
+
+Some of the early ministers, in addition to preaching in the meeting-house,
+did not disdain to take care of the edifice. Parson Everitt of Sandwich was
+paid three dollars a year for sweeping out the meeting-house in which he
+preached; and after he resigned this position of profit, the duties were
+performed by the town physician "as often as there shalbe ocation to keepe
+it deesent." The thrifty Mr. Everitt had a pleasing variety of occupations;
+he was also a successful farmer, a good fence-builder, and he ran a
+fulling-mill.
+
+So, altogether, as they were wholly exempt from taxation, the New England
+parsons did not fare ill, though Mr. Cotton said that "ministers and milk
+were the only cheap things in New England," and he deemed various ills,
+such as attacks by fierce Indians, loss of cattle, earthquakes, and failure
+of crops, to be divine judgments for the small ministerial pay; while
+Cotton Mather, in one of his pompous and depressing jokes, called the
+minister's stipend "Synecdotical Pay." A search in a treatise on rhetoric
+or in a dictionary will discover the point of this witticism--if it be
+worth searching for.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit.
+
+
+
+One thing which always interests and can but amuse every reader of the
+old Puritan sermons is the astonishingly familiar way in which these New
+England divines publicly shared their domestic joys and sorrows with
+the members of their congregations; and we are equally surprised at the
+ingenuity which they displayed in finding texts that were suitable for
+the various occasions and events. The Reverend Mr. Turell was specially
+ingenious. Of him Dr. Holmes wrote,--
+
+  "You've heard, no doubt, of Parson Turell;
+  Over at Medford he used to dwell,--
+  Married one of the Mathers' folks."
+
+His wife, Jane Coleman, was a handsome brunette. The bridegroom preached
+his first sermon after his wedding on this text, "I am black but comely, O
+ye daughters of Jerusalem." When he married a second time he chose as his
+text, "He is altogether lovely, this is my beloved, and this my friend, O
+daughters of Jerusalem!" It is possible that each of Parson Turell's brides
+may have chosen the text from which he preached her honeymoon sermon. It
+was the universal custom for many years thoughout New England to allow a
+bride the privilege of selecting for the parson who had solemnized her
+marriage, or at whose church she first appeared after the wedding, the text
+from which he should preach on the bridal Sabbath. Thus when John Physick
+and Mary Prescott were married in Portland, on July 4, 1770, the bride gave
+to Rev. Mr. Deane this text: "Mary hath chosen that good part;" and from it
+Parson Deane preached the "wedding sermon." When Abby Smith, daughter of
+Parson Smith, married 'Squire John Adams, whom her father disliked and
+would not invite home to dinner, she chose this text for her wedding
+sermon: "John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he
+hath a devil." The high-spirited bride had the honor of living to be the
+wife of one President of the United States, and mother of another.
+
+Another ingenious clergyman gave out one morning as his text, "Unto us a
+son is born;" and thus notified the surprised congregation of an event
+which they had been awaiting for some weeks. Another preached on the text,
+"My servant lieth at home sick," which was literally true. Another, a
+bachelor, dared to announce this abbreviated text: "A wonder was seen in
+heaven--a woman." Dr. Mather Byles, of Boston, being disappointed through
+the non-appearance of a minister named Prince, who had been expected to
+deliver the sermon, preached himself upon the text, "Put not your trust
+in princes." But Dr. Byles was one who would always "court a grin when he
+should win a soul."
+
+One minister felt it necessary to reprove a money-making parishioner who
+had stored and was holding in reserve (with the hope of higher prices) a
+large quantity of corn which was sadly needed for consumption in the town.
+The parson preached from this appropriate text, Proverbs xi. 26. "He that
+withholdeth his corn, the people shall curse him; but blessings shall be
+upon the head of him that selleth it." As the minister grew warmer in his
+explanation and application of the text, the money-seeking corn-storer
+defiantly and unregenerately sat up stiff and unmoved, until at last the
+preacher, provoked out of prudence and patience, roared out, "Colonel
+Ingraham, Colonel Ingraham! you know I mean you; why don't you hang down
+your head?" In a similar case another stern parson employed the text,
+"Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone;" though the personalities
+of the sermon made unnecessary the open reference in the text to the
+offender's name.
+
+The ministers were such autocrats in the Puritan community that they never
+hesitated to show their authority in any manner in the pulpit. Judge Sewall
+records with much bitterness a libel which his pastor, Mr. Pemberton,
+launched at him in the meeting through the medium of the psalm which
+he gave out to be sung. They had differed over the adjustment of some
+church-matter and on the following Sunday the clergyman assigned to be sung
+the libellous and significant psalm. Such lines as these must have been
+hard indeed for Judge Sewall to endure:--
+
+  "Speak, oh ye Judges of the Earth
+    if just your Sentence be
+  Or must not Innocence appeal
+    to Heav'n from your decree
+
+  "Your Wicked Hearts and Judgments are
+    alike by Malice sway'd
+  Your griping Hands by mighty Bribes
+    to violence betrayed.
+
+  "No Serpent of parch'd Afric's breed
+    doth Ranker poison bear
+  The drowsy Adder will as soon
+    unlock his Sullen Ear
+
+  "Unmov'd by good Advice, and dead
+    As Adders they remain
+  From whom the skilful Charmer's voice
+    can no attention gain."
+
+Small wonder that Judge Sewall writhed under the infliction of these lines
+as they were doubly thrust upon him by the deacon's "lining" and the
+singing of the congregation; and the words, "The drowsy Adder will as soon
+unlock his Sullen Ear" seemed to particularly irritate him; doubtless he
+felt sure that no one could doubt his integrity, but feared that some might
+think him stupid and obstinate.
+
+Another arbitrary clergyman, having had an altercation with some unruly
+singers in the choir, gave out with much vehemence on the following Sunday
+the hymn beginning,--
+
+  "And are you wretches yet alive
+  And do you yet rebel?"
+
+with a very significant glower towards the singers' gallery. In a similar
+situation another minister gave out to the rebellious choir the hymn
+commencing,--
+
+  "Let those refuse to sing
+  Who never knew our God."
+
+A visiting clergyman, preaching in a small and shabby church built in a
+parish of barren and stony farm-land, very spitefully and sneeringly read
+out to be sung the hymn of Watts' beginning,--
+
+  "Lord, what a wretched land is this,
+  That yields us no supplies!"
+
+But his malicious intent was frustrated and the tables were adroitly turned
+by the quick-witted choir-master, who bawled out in a loud voice as if
+in answer, "Northfield,"--the name of the minister's own home and
+parish,--while he was really giving out to the choir, as was his wont, the
+name of the tune to which the hymn was to be sung.
+
+Nor did the parsons hesitate to be personal even in their prayers. Rev. Mr.
+Moody, who was ordained pastor at York in the year 1700, reproved in an
+extraordinary manner a young man who had called attention to some fine new
+clothing which he wore by coming in during prayer time and thus attracting
+the notice of the congregation. Mr. Moody, in an elevated tone of voice,
+at once exclaimed, "And O Lord! we pray Thee, cure Ned Ingraham of that
+ungodly strut," etc. Another time he prayed for a young lady in the
+congregation and ended his invocation thus, "She asked me not to pray for
+her in public, but I told her I would, and so I have, Amen."
+
+Rev. Mr. Miles, while praying for rain, is said to have used this
+extraordinary phraseology: "O Lord, Thou knowest we do not want Thee to
+send us a rain which shall pour down in fury and swell our streams and
+carry away our hay-cocks, fences, and bridges; but, Lord, we want it to
+come drizzle-drozzle, drizzle-drozzle, for about a week, Amen."
+
+They did not think it necessary always to give their congregations novel
+thoughts and ideas nor fresh sermons. One minister, after being newly
+ordained in his parish, preached the same sermon three Sundays in
+succession; and a deacon was sent to him mildly to suggest a change. "Why,
+no," he answered, "I can see no evidence yet that this one has produced any
+effect."
+
+Rev. Mr. Daggett, of Yale College, had an entire system of sermons which
+took him four years to preach throughout. And for three successive years he
+delivered once a year a sermon on the text, "Is Thy servant a dog that he
+should do this thing?" And the fourth year he varied it with, "And the dog
+did it."
+
+Dr. Coggswell, of Canterbury, Connecticut, had a sermon which he thrust
+upon his people every spring for many years as being suitable to the time
+when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. In it he soberly
+reproved the young church attendants for gazing so much at each other in
+the meeting. This annual anti-amatory advice never failed to raise a smile
+on the face of each father and son in the congregation as he listened to
+the familiar and oft-repeated words.
+
+The Puritan ministers gave advice in their sermons upon most personal and
+worldly matters. Roger Williams instructed the women of his parish to wear
+veils when they appeared in public; but John Cotton preached to them
+one Sunday morning and proved to them that veils were a sign of undue
+subjection to their husbands; and in the afternoon the fair Puritans
+appeared with bare faces and showed that women had even at that early day
+"rights."
+
+How the varieties of headgear did torment the parsons! They denounced
+from many a pulpit the wearing of wigs. Mr. Noyes preached long and often
+against the fashion. Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the
+Indians, found time even in the midst of his arduous and incessant duties
+to deliver many a blast against "prolix locks,"--"with boiling zeal," as
+Cotton Mather said,--and he labelled them a "luxurious feminine protexity;"
+but lamented late in life that "the lust for wigs is become insuperable."
+He thought the horrors in King Philip's War were a direct punishment from
+God for wig-wearing. Increase Mather preached warmly against wigs, saying
+that "such Apparel is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture," and that "Monstrous Perriwigs such as some of our church
+members indulge in make them resemble ye locusts that came out of ye
+Bottomless Pit." To learn how these "Horrid Bushes of Vanity" were
+despised by a real live Puritan wig-hater one needs only to read the
+many disparaging, regretful, and bitter references to wig-wearing and
+wig-wearers in Judge Sewall's diary, which reached a culmination when a
+widow whom he was courting suggested most warmly that he ought to wear,
+what his very soul abominated, a periwig.
+
+Eliot had also a strong aversion to tobacco, and denounced its use in
+severe terms; but his opposition in this case was as ineffectual as it was
+against wigs. Allen said, "In contempt of all his admonitions the head
+would be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and the pipe would send up
+volumes of smoke."
+
+Rev. Mr. Rogers preached against long natural hair,--the "disguisement of
+long ruffianly hair,"--as did also President Chauncey of Harvard College;
+while Mr. Wigglesworth's sermon on the subject has often been reprinted,
+and is full of logical arguments. This offence was named on the list of
+existing evils which was made by the General Court: that "the men wore long
+hair like women's hair," while the women were complained of for "cutting
+and curling and laying out of hair, especially among the younger sort."
+Still, the Puritan magistrates, omnipotent as they were, did not dare to
+force the be-curled citizens to cut their long love-locks, though they
+instructed and bribed them to do so. A Salem man was, in 1687, fined ten
+shillings for a misdemeanor, but "in case he shall cutt off his long har of
+his head into a sevill (civil?) frame in the mean time shall have abated
+five shillings of his fine." John Eliot hated long natural hair as well
+as false hair. Cotton Mather said of him, in a very unpleasant figure of
+speech, "The hair of them that professed religion grew too long for him to
+swallow." Other fashions and habits brought forth denunciations from the
+pulpit,--hooped petticoats, gold-laced coats (unless worn by gentlemen),
+pointed shoes, chaise-owning, health-drinking, tavern-visiting, gossiping,
+meddling, tale-bearing, and lying.
+
+Political and business and even medical and sanitary subjects were popular
+in the early New England pulpit. Mr. Peters preached many a long sermon
+to urge the formation of a stock company for fishing, and canvassed all
+through the commonwealth for the same purpose. Cotton Mather said plainly
+that ministers ought to instruct themselves and their congregations in
+politics; and in Connecticut it was ordered by law that each minister
+should give sound and orthodox advice to his congregation at the time of
+civil elections.
+
+Every natural phenomenon, every unusual event called forth a sermon, and
+the minister could find even in the common events of every-day life plain
+manifestations of Divine wrath and judgment. He preached with solemn
+delight upon comets, and earthquakes, and northern lights, and great storms
+and droughts, on deaths and diseases, and wonders and scandals (for there
+were scandals even in puritanical New England), on wars both at home and
+abroad, on shipwrecks, on safe voyages, on distinguished visitors, on noted
+criminals and crimes,--in fact, upon every subject that was of spiritual or
+temporal interest to his congregation or himself. And his people looked
+for his religious comment upon passing events just as now-a-days we read
+articles upon like subjects in the newspaper. Thus was the Puritan minister
+not only a preacher, but a teacher, adviser, and friend, and a pretty
+plain-spoken one too.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+The Early Congregations.
+
+
+
+On Sunday morning in New England in the olden time, the country
+church-members whose homes were near the meeting-house walked reverently
+and slowly across the green meadows or the snowy fields to meeting.
+Townspeople, at the sound of the bell or drum or horn, walked decorously
+and soberly along the irregular streets to the house of God. Farmers who
+lived at a greater distance were up betimes to leave their homes and ride
+across the fields and through the narrow bridle-paths, which were then the
+universal and almost the only country roads. These staid Puritan planters
+were mounted on sturdy farmhorses, and a pillion was strapped on behind
+each saddle, and on it was seated wife, daughter, or perhaps a young
+child--I should like to have seen the church-going dames perched up proudly
+in all their Sunday finery, masked in black velvet, a sober Puritan
+travesty of a gay carnival fashion. Riding-habits were hardly known until
+a century ago, and even after their introduction were never worn
+a-pillion-riding, so the Puritan women rode in their best attire.
+Sometimes, in unusually muddy or dusty weather, a very daintily dressed
+"nugiperous" dame would don a linen "weather skirt" to protect her fine
+silken petticoats.
+
+The wealthier Puritans were mounted on fine pacing horses, "once so highly
+prized, now so odious deemed;" for trotting horses were not in much demand
+or repute in America until after the Revolutionary War. There were, until
+that date, professional horse-trainers, whose duties were to teach horses
+to pace; though by far the best saddle-horses were the natural-gaited
+"Narragansett Pacers," the first distinctively American race of horses.
+These remarkably easy-paced animals were in such demand in the West Indies
+for the use of the wives and daughters of the wealthy sugar-planters, and
+in Philadelphia and New York for rich Dutch and Quaker colonists, that
+comparatively few of them were allowed to remain in New England, and they
+were, indeed too high-priced for poor New England colonists. The natural
+and singular pace of these Narragansett horses, which did not incline the
+rider from side to side, nor jolt him up and down, and their remarkable
+sureness of foot and their great endurance, rendered them of much value
+in those days of travel in the saddle. They were also phenomenally
+broad-backed,--shaped by nature for saddle and pillion.
+
+When trotting-horses became fashionable, the trainers placed logs of wood
+at regular intervals across the road, and by exercising the animals
+over this obstructed path forced them to raise their feet at the proper
+intervals, and thus learn to trot.
+
+Long distances did many of the pre-revolutionary farmers of New England
+have to ride to reach their churches, and long indeed must have been the
+time occupied in these Sunday trips, for a horse was too well-burdened with
+saddle and pillion and two riders to travel fast. The worshippers must
+often have started at daybreak. When we see now an ancient pillion--a relic
+of olden times--brought out in jest or curiosity, and strapped behind a
+saddle on a horse's back, and when we see the poor steed mounted by two
+riders, it seems impossible for the over-burdened animal to endure a long
+journey, and certainly impossible for him to make a rapid one.
+
+Horse-flesh, and human endurance also, was economized in early days by what
+was called the "ride and tie" system. A man and his wife would mount saddle
+and pillion, ride a couple of miles, dismount, tie the steed, and walk
+on. A second couple, who had walked the first two miles, soon mounted the
+rested horse, rode on past the riders for two or three miles, dismounted,
+and tied the animal again. In that way four persons could ride very
+comfortably and sociably half-way to meeting, though they must have had
+to make an early start to allow for the slow gait and long halts. At the
+church the disburdened horses were tied during the long services to palings
+and to trees near the meeting-house (except the favored animals that found
+shelter in the noon-houses) and the scene must have resembled the outskirts
+of a gypsy camp or an English horse-fair. Such obedience did the Puritans
+pay to the letter of the law that when the Newbury people were forbidden,
+in tying their horses outside the church paling, to leave them near enough
+to the footpath to be in the way of church pedestrians, it did not prevent
+the stupid or obstinate Newburyites from painstakingly bringing their
+steeds within the gates and tying them to the gate-posts where they were
+much more seriously and annoyingly in the way.
+
+It is usual to describe and to think of the Puritan congregations as like
+assemblies of Quakers, solemn, staid, and uniform and dull of dress; but
+I can discover in historical records nothing to indicate simplicity,
+soberness, or even uniformity of apparel, except the uniformity of fashion,
+which was powerful then as now. The forbidding rules and regulations
+relating to the varied and elaborate forms of women's dress--and of men's
+attire as well--would never have been issued unless such prohibited apparel
+had been common and universally longed-for, and unless much diversity and
+elegance of dress had abounded.
+
+Indeed the daughters of the Pilgrims were true "daughters of Zion, walking
+with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, and mincing as they go." Save
+for the "nose jewels," the complaining and exhaustive list of the prophet
+Isaiah might serve as well for New England as for Judah and Jerusalem:
+"their cauls and their round tires like moons; the chains and the bracelets
+and the mufflers; the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the head
+bands, and the tablets, and the ear-rings; the rings and nose jewels; the
+changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the
+crisping pins; the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods and the
+veils." Nor has the day yet come to pass in the nineteenth century when the
+bravery of the daughters has been taken away.
+
+Pleasant it is to think of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and
+goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have
+been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote,"
+a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with
+"Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and
+a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or
+ciffer" (New England French for coiffure) with "long wings" at the side,
+and a silk or tiffany hood on her drooping head,--Priscilla in this attire
+were pretty indeed.
+
+Nor did sober John Alden and doughty Miles Standish lack for variety in
+their dress; besides their soldier's garb, their sentinel's armor, they
+had a vast variety of other attire to choose from; they could select their
+head-wear from "redd knitt capps" or "monmouth capps" or "black hats lyned
+at the browes with leather." They could have a "sute" of "dublett and hose
+of leather lyned with oyled-skin-leather," fastened with hooks and eyes
+instead of buttons; or one of "hampshire kerseys lyned." They could have
+"mandillions" (whatever they may have been) "lyned with cotton," and
+"wast-coats of greene cotton bound about with red tape," and breeches of
+oiled leather and leathern drawers (I do not know whether these leathern
+drawers were under-garments or leathern draw-strings at the knees of the
+breeches). They could wear "gloves of sheeps or calfs leather" or of kid,
+and fine gold belts, and "points" at the knees. In fact, the invoices of
+goods to the earliest settlers show that they had a choice of various
+materials for garments, including "gilford and gedleyman, holland and
+lockerum and buckerum, fustian, canvass, linsey-woolsey, red ppetuna,
+cursey, cambrick, calico-stuff, loom-work, Dutch serges, and English
+jeans"--enough for diversity, surely. Sad-colored mantles the goodmen wore,
+but their doublets were scarlet, and with their green waistcoats and red
+caps, surely the Puritan men were sufficiently gayly dressed to suit any
+fancy save that of a cavalier. Later in the history of the colony, when
+hooped petticoats and laced hoods and mantles, and long, embroidered gloves
+fastened with horsehair "glove tightens," and when velvet coats and satin
+breeches and embroidered waistcoats, gold lace, sparkling buckles, and
+cocked hats with full bottomed wigs were worn, the gray, sombre old
+meeting-house blossomed like a tropical forest, and vied with the worldly
+Church of England in gay-garbed church attendants.
+
+Stern and severe of face were many of the members of these early New
+England congregations, else they had not been true Puritans in heart, and
+above all, they had not been Pilgrims. Long and thin of feature were they,
+rarely smiling, yet not devoid of humor. Some handsome countenances
+were seen,--austere, bigoted Cotton Mather being, strangely enough, the
+handsomest and most worldly looking of them all. What those brave, stern
+men and women were, as well as what they looked, is known to us all, and
+cannot be dwelt upon here, any more than can here be shown and explained
+the details of their religious faith and creed. Patient, frugal,
+God-fearing, and industrious, cruel and intolerant sometimes, but never
+cowardly, sternly obeying the word of God in the spirit and the letter, but
+erring sometimes in the interpretation thereof,--surely they had no traits
+to shame us, to keep us from thrilling with pride at the drop of their
+blood which runs in our backsliding veins. Nothing can more plainly show
+their distinguishing characteristics, nothing is so fully typical of the
+motive, the spirit of their lives, as their reverent observance of the
+Lord's day.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sabbath in Puritan New England, by 
+Alice Morse Earle
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+<head>
+<title>The Sabbath in Puritan New England, by Alice Morse Earle</title>
+
+<style type="text/css">
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+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Sabbath in Puritan New England, by Alice Morse Earle
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sabbath in Puritan New England
+
+Author: Alice Morse Earle
+
+Posting Date: April 8, 2014 [EBook #8659]
+Release Date: August, 2005
+First Posted: July 30, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<p>
+<br /><br />
+PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar and
+spelling from that old time, the word "their" is spelled as "thier" 17 times.
+It has been left there as "thier".
+<br /><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<h1>The Sabbath in Puritan New England</h1>
+
+<p align="center" class="smallcaps">by</p>
+
+<h2>Alice Morse Earle</h2>
+
+<h3>Seventh Edition</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<h4>To the Memory of my Mother.</h4>
+
+
+
+<h1>Contents.</h1>
+
+
+<ol style="list-style-type: upper-roman">
+<li><a href="#chap01">The New England Meeting-House</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap02">The Church Militant</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap03">By Drum and Horn and Shell</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap04">The Old-Fashioned Pews</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap05">Seating the Meeting</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap06">The Tithingman and the Sleepers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap07">The Length of the Service</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap08">The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap09">The Noon-House</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap10">The Deacon's Office</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap11">The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap12">The Bay Psalm-Book</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap13">Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap14">Other Old Psalm-Books</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap15">The Church Music</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap16">The Interruptions of the Services</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap17">The Observance of the Day</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap18">The Authority of the Church and the Ministers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap19">The Ordination of the Minister</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap20">The Ministers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap21">The Ministers' Pay</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap22">The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit</a></li>
+<li><a href="#chap23">The Early Congregations</a></li>
+</ol>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>The Sabbath in Puritan New England.</h1>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap01"></a>I</h1>
+
+<h2>The New England Meeting-House.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord's
+Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong
+and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every
+Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they
+worshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,
+the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein for
+the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton
+Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply
+such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the
+Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as
+bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the
+Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.</p>
+
+<p>The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these
+houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that
+theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England
+to create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slow
+or indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 that
+a meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if the
+people failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,
+and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of members
+necessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in the
+Platform of Church Discipline: "A church ought not to be of greater number
+than can ordinarilie meet convenientlie in one place, nor ordinarilie
+fewer than may convenientlie carry on church-work." Each church was quite
+independent in its work and government, and had absolute power to admit,
+expel, control, and censure its members.</p>
+
+<p>These first meeting-houses were simple buildings enough,--square log-houses
+with clay-filled chinks, surmounted by steep roofs thatched with long
+straw or grass, and often with only the beaten earth for a floor. It was
+considered a great advance and a matter of proper pride when the settlers
+had the meeting-house "lathed on the inside, and so daubed and whitened
+over workmanlike." The dimensions of many of these first essays at church
+architecture are known to us, and lowly little structures they were. One,
+indeed, is preserved for us under cover at Salem. The first meeting-house
+in Dedham was thirty-six feet long, twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high
+"in the stud;" the one in Medford was smaller still; and the Haverhill
+edifice was only twenty-six feet long and twenty wide, yet "none other than
+the house of God."</p>
+
+<p>As the colonists grew in wealth and numbers, they desired and built better
+sanctuaries, "good roomthy meeting-houses" they were called by Judge
+Sewall, the most valued and most interesting journal-keeper of the times.
+The rude early buildings were then converted into granaries or storehouses,
+or, as was the Pentucket meeting-house, into a "house of shelter or a house
+to sett horses in." As these meeting-houses had not been consecrated, and
+as they were town-halls, forts, or court-houses as well as meeting-houses,
+the humbler uses to which they were finally put were not regarded as
+profanations of holy places.</p>
+
+<p>The second form or type of American church architecture was a square wooden
+building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which
+was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or
+turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which
+was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this
+second style of architecture. These square meeting-houses, so much alike,
+soon abounded in New England; for a new church, in its contract for
+building, would often specify that the structure should be "like in every
+detaile to the Lynn meeting-house," or like the Hadley, Milford, Boston,
+Danvers, or New Haven meeting-house. This form of edifice was the prototype
+of the fine great First Church of Boston, a large square brick building,
+with three rows of windows and two galleries, which stood from the year
+1713 to 1808, and of which many pictures exist.</p>
+
+<p>The third form of the Puritan meeting-house, of which the Old South Church
+of Boston is a typical model, has too many representatives throughout New
+England to need any description, as have also the succeeding forms of New
+England church architecture.</p>
+
+<p>The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow
+lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the
+colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile
+of the meeting-house. Soon, however, the houses became too closely crowded
+for the most convenient uses of a farming community; pasturage for the
+cattle had to be obtained at too great a distance from the farmhouse;
+firewood had to be brought from too distant woods; nearness to water
+also had to be considered. Thus the law became a dead letter, and each
+new-coming settler built on outlying and remote land, since the Indians
+were no longer so deeply to be dreaded. Then the meeting-houses, having
+usually to accommodate a whole township of scattered farms, were placed on
+remote and often highly elevated locations; sometimes at the very top of a
+long, steep hill,--so long and so steep in some cases, especially in one
+Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down on horseback
+from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading
+their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The
+second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly
+pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England
+Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his
+dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he
+leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and
+surrounding): "This is very like the way to heaven; 'tis uphill. The Lord
+by His grace fetch us up."</p>
+
+<p>The location on a hilltop was chosen and favored for various reasons. The
+meeting-house was at first a watch-house, from which to keep vigilant
+lookout for any possible approach of hostile or sneaking Indians; it was
+also a landmark, whose high bell-turret, or steeple, though pointing to
+heaven, was likewise a guide on earth, for, thus stationed on a high
+elevation, it could be seen for miles around by travellers journeying
+through the woods, or in the narrow, tree-obscured bridle-paths which were
+then almost the only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for
+sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan
+ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb
+uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of
+having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of
+envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously
+remote and painfully inaccessible locations chosen for the site of many
+fine, roomy churches must astonish any observing traveller on the byroads
+of New England. Too often, alas! these churches are deserted, falling down,
+unopened from year to year, destitute alike of minister and congregation.
+Sometimes, too, on high hilltops, or on lonesome roads leading through a
+tall second growth of woods, deserted and neglected old graveyards--the
+most lonely and forlorn of all sad places--by their broken and fallen
+headstones, which surround a half-filled-in and uncovered cellar, show
+that once a meeting-house for New England Christians had stood there. Tall
+grass, and a tangle of blackberry brambles cover the forgotten graves,
+and perhaps a spire of orange tiger-lilies, a shrub of southernwood or of
+winter-killed and dying box, may struggle feebly for life under the shadow
+of the "plumed ranks of tall wild cherry," and prove that once these lonely
+graves were cared for and loved for the sake of those who lie buried in
+this now waste spot. No traces remain of the old meeting-house save the
+cellar and the narrow stone steps, sadly leading nowhere, which once were
+pressed by the feet of the children of the Pilgrims, but now are trodden
+only by the curious and infrequent passer-by, or the epitaph-seeking
+antiquary.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult often to understand the details in the descriptions of
+these early meeting-houses, the colonial spelling is so widely varied,
+and so cleverly ingenious. Uniformity of spelling is a strictly modern
+accomplishment, a hampering innovation. "A square roofe without Dormans,
+with two Lucoms on each side," means, I think, without dormer windows, and
+with luthern windows. Another church paid a bill for the meeting-house roof
+and the "Suppolidge." They had "turritts" and "turetts" and "turits" and
+"turyts" and "feriats" and "tyrryts" and "toryttes" and "turiotts" and
+"chyrits," which were one and the same thing; and one church had orders
+for "juyces and rayles and nayles and bymes and tymber and gaybels and a
+pulpyt, and three payr of stayrs," in its meeting-house,--a liberal supply
+of the now fashionable <i>y</i>'s. We read of "pinakles" and "pyks" and
+"shuthers" and "scaffills" and "bimes" and "lynters" and "bathyns" and
+"chymbers" and "bellfers;" and often in one entry the same word will be
+spelt in three or four different ways. Here is a portion of a contract in
+the records of the Roxbury church: "Sayd John is to fence in the Buring
+Plas with a Fesy ston wall, sefighiattly don for Strenk and workmanship
+as also to mark a Doball gatt 6 or 8 fote wid and to hing it."
+<i>Sefighiattly</i> is "sufficiently;" but who can translate "Fesy"? can it
+mean "facy" or faced smoothly?</p>
+
+<p>The church-raising was always a great event in the town. Each citizen was
+forced by law to take part in or contribute to "raring the Meeting hows."
+In early days nails were scarce,--so scarce that unprincipled persons set
+fire to any buildings which chanced to be temporarily empty, for the sake
+of obtaining the nails from the ruins; so each male inhabitant supplied
+to the new church a certain "amount of nayles." Not only were logs, and
+lumber, and the use of horses' and men's labor given, but a contribution
+was also levied for the inevitable barrel of rum and its unintoxicating
+accompaniments. "Rhum and Cacks" are frequent entries in the account books
+of early churches. No wonder that accidents were frequent, and that men
+fell from the scaffolding and were killed, as at the raising of the
+Dunstable meeting-house. When the Medford people built their second
+meeting-house, they provided for the workmen and bystanders, five barrels
+of rum, one barrel of good brown sugar, a box of fine lemons, and two
+loaves of sugar. As a natural consequence, two thirds of the frame fell,
+and many were injured. In Northampton, in 1738, ten gallons of rum were
+bought for &pound;8 "to raise the meeting-house"--and the village doctor got "&pound;3
+for setting his bone Jonathan Strong, and &pound;3 10s. for setting Ebenezer
+Burt's thy" which had somehow through the rum or the raising, both gotten
+broken. Sometimes, as in Pittsfield in 1671, the sum of four shillings was
+raised on every acre of land in the town, and three shillings a day were
+paid to every man who came early to work, while one shilling a day was
+apportioned to each worker for his rum and sugar. At last no liquor was
+allowed to the workmen until after the day's work was over, and thus fatal
+accidents were prevented.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest meeting-houses had oiled paper in the windows to admit the
+light. A Pilgrim colonist wrote to an English friend about to emigrate,
+"Bring oiled paper for your windows." Higginson, however, writing in 1629,
+asks for "glasse for windowes." When glass was used it was not set in the
+windows as now. We find frequent entries of "glasse and nayles for it," and
+in Newbury, in 1665, the church ordered that the "Glasse in the windows
+be ... look't to if any should happen to be loosed with winde to be nailed
+close again." The glass was in lozenge-shaped panes, set in lead in the
+form of two long narrow sashes opening in the middle from top to bottom,
+and it was many years before oblong or square panes came into common use.</p>
+
+<p>These early churches were destitute of shade, for the trees in the
+immediate vicinity were always cut down on account of dread of the fierce
+fires which swept often through the forests and overwhelmed and destroyed
+the towns. The heat and blazing light in summer were as hard to bear in
+these unscreened meeting-houses as was the cold in winter.</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Old house of Puritanic wood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Through whose unpainted windows streamed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;On seats as primitive and rude<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As Jacob's pillow when he dreamed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The white and undiluted day."</blockquote>
+
+<p>We have all heard the theory advanced that it is impossible there should be
+any true religious feeling, any sense of sanctity, in a garish and bright
+light,--"the white and undiluted day,"--but I think no one can doubt that
+to the Puritans these seething, glaring, pine-smelling hothouses were truly
+God's dwelling-place, though there was no "dim, religious light" within.</p>
+
+<p>Curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and the sunlight streamed in with
+unobstructed and unbroken rays. Heavy shutters for protection were often
+used, but to close them at time of service would have been to plunge
+the church into utter darkness. Permission was sometimes given, as in
+Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of
+the sun there,"--a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As
+years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches
+became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and
+fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which
+was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked
+live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed
+abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great
+hemlock-tree back of the pulpit window." Another minister, Dr. Storrs,
+having struggled to read his sermon in an ill-lighted, gloomy church, said
+he would never speak in that building again while it was so overshadowed
+with trees. A few years later he was invited to preach to the same
+congregation; but when he approached the church, and saw the great
+umbrageous tree still standing, he rode away, and left the people
+sermonless in their darkness. The chill of these sunless, unheated
+buildings in winter can well be imagined.</p>
+
+<p>Strange and grotesque decorations did the outside of the earliest
+meeting-houses bear,--grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and
+by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped
+from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his
+destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear,
+which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough.
+The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September,
+twenty bears were killed within two miles of Boston. This bear story
+requires unlimited faith in Puritan probity, and confidence in Puritan
+records to credit it, but believe it, ye who can, as I do! In Salem and in
+Ipswich, in 1640, any man who brought a living wolf to the meeting-house
+was paid fifteen shillings by the town; if the wolf were dead, ten
+shillings. In 1664, if the wolf-killer wished to obtain the reward, he was
+ordered to bring the wolf's head and "nayle it to the meeting-house and
+give notis thereof." In Hampton, the inhabitants were ordered to "nayle the
+same to a little red oake tree at northeast end of the meeting-house." One
+man in Newbury, in 1665, killed seven wolves, and was paid the reward
+for so doing. This was a great number, for the wary wolf was not easily
+destroyed either by musket or wolf-hook. In 1723 wolves were so abundant
+in Ipswich that parents would not suffer their children to go to and from
+church and school without the attendance of some grown person. As late as
+1746 wolves made sad havoc in Woodbury, Connecticut; and a reward of five
+dollars for each wolf's head was offered by law in that township in 1853.</p>
+
+<p>In 1718 the last public reward was paid in Salem for a wolf's head, but
+so late as the year 1779 the howls of wolves were heard every night in
+Newbury, though trophies of shrivelled wolves' heads no longer graced the
+walls of the meeting-house.</p>
+
+<p>All kinds of notices and orders and regulations and "bills" were posted on
+the meeting-house, often on the door, where they would greet the eye of
+all who entered: prohibitions from selling guns and powder to the Indians,
+notices of town meetings, intentions of marriage, copies of the laws
+against Sabbath-breaking, messages from the Quakers, warnings of "vandoos"
+and sales, lists of the town officers, and sometimes scandalous and
+insulting libels, and libels in verse, which is worse, for our forefathers
+dearly loved to rhyme on all occasions. On the meeting-house green stood
+those Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, whipping-post,
+pillory, and cage; and on lecture days the stocks and pillory were
+often occupied by wicked or careless colonists, or those everlasting
+pillory-replenishers, the Quakers. It is one of the unintentionally comic
+features of absurd colonial laws and punishments in which the early legal
+records so delightfully abound, that the first man who was sentenced to and
+occupied the stocks in Boston was the carpenter who made them. He was thus
+fitly punished for his extortionate charge to the town for the lumber
+he used in their manufacture. This was rather better than "making the
+punishment fit the crime," since the Boston magistrates managed to force
+the criminal to furnish his own punishment. In Shrewsbury, also, the
+unhappy man who first tested the wearisome capacity and endured the public
+mortication of the town's stocks was the man who made them. He "builded
+better than he knew." Pillories were used as a means of punishment until
+a comparatively recent date,--in Salem until the year 1801, and in Boston
+till 1803.</p>
+
+<p>Great horse-blocks, rows of stepping-stones, or hewn logs further graced
+the meeting-house green; and occasionally one fine horse-block, such as the
+Concord women proudly erected, and paid for by a contribution of a pound of
+butter from each house-wife.</p>
+
+<p>The meeting-house not only was employed for the worship of God and for town
+meetings, but it was a storehouse as well. Until after the Revolutionary
+War it was universally used as a powder magazine; and indeed, as no fire in
+stove or fireplace was ever allowed within, it was a safe enough place for
+the explosive material. In Hanover, the powder room was in the steeple,
+while in Quincy the "powder-closite" was in the beams of the roof. Whenever
+there chanced to be a thunderstorm during the time of public worship, the
+people of Beverly ran out under the trees, and in other towns they left
+the meeting-house if the storm seemed severe or near; still they built no
+powder houses. Grain, too, was stored in the loft of the meeting-house for
+safety; hatches were built, and often the corn paid to the minister was
+placed there. "Leantos," or "linters," were sometimes built by the side of
+the building for use for storage. In Springfield, Mr. Pyncheon was allowed
+to place his corn in the roof chamber of the meeting-house; but as the
+people were afraid that the great weight might burst the floor, he was
+forbidden to store more than four hundred bushels at a time, unless he
+"underpropped the floor."</p>
+
+<p>In one church in the Connecticut valley, in a township where it was
+forbidden that tobacco be smoked upon the public streets, the church
+loft was used to dry and store the freshly cut tobacco-leaves which the
+inhabitants sold to the "ungodly Dutch." Thus did greed for gain lead even
+blue Connecticut Christians to profane the house of God.</p>
+
+<p>The early meeting-houses in country parishes were seldom painted, such
+outward show being thought vain and extravagant. In the middle of the
+eighteenth century paint became cheaper and more plentiful, and a gay
+rivalry in church-decoration sprang up. One meeting-house had to be as fine
+as its neighbor. Votes were taken, "rates were levied," gifts were asked
+in every town to buy "colour" for the meeting-house. For instance, the new
+meeting-house in Pomfret, Connecticut, was painted bright yellow; it proved
+a veritable golden apple of discord throughout the county. Windham town
+quickly voted that its meeting-house be "coloured something like the
+Pomfret meeting-house." Killingly soon ordered that the "cullering of the
+body of our meeting-house should be like the Pomfret meeting-house, and the
+Roff shal be cullered Read." Brooklyn church then, in 1762, ordered that
+the outside of its meeting-house be "culered" in the approved fashion.
+The body of the house was painted a bright orange; the doors and "bottom
+boards" a warm chocolate color; the "window-jets," corner-boards, and
+weather-boards white. What a bright nosegay of color! As a crowning glory
+Brooklyn people put up an "Eleclarick Rod" on the gorgeous edifice, and
+proudly boasted that--Brooklyn meeting-house was the "newest biggest and
+yallowest" in the county. One old writer, however, spoke scornfully of the
+spirit of envious emulation, extravagance, and bad taste that spread and
+prevailed from the example of the foolish and useless "colouring" of the
+Pomfret meeting-house.</p>
+
+<p>Within the meeting-house all was simple enough: raftered walls, sanded
+floors, rows of benches, a few pews, and the pulpit, or the "scaffold,"
+as John Cotton called it. The bare rafters were often profusely hung with
+dusty spiders' webs, and were the home also of countless swallows, that
+flew in and out of the open bell-turret. Sometimes, too, mischievous
+squirrels, attracted by the corn in the meeting-house loft, made their
+homes in the sanctuary; and they were so prolific and so omnivorous that
+the Bible and the pulpit cushions were not safe from their nibbling
+attacks. On every Sunday afternoon the Word of God and its sustaining
+cushion had to be removed to the safe shelter of a neighboring farmhouse or
+tavern, to prevent total annihilation by these Puritanical, Bible-loving
+squirrels.</p>
+
+<p>The pulpits were often pretentious, even in the plain and undecorated
+meeting-houses, and were usually high desks, to which a narrow flight of
+stairs led. In the churches of the third stage of architecture, these
+stairs were often inclosed in a towering hexagonal mahogany structure,
+which was ornamented with pillars and panels. Into this the minister
+walked, closed the door behind him, and invisibly ascended the stairs;
+while the children counted the seconds from the time he closed the door
+until his head appeared through the trap-door at the top of the pulpit. The
+form known as a tub-pulpit was very popular in the larger churches. The
+pulpit of one old, unpainted church retained until the middle of this
+century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring
+eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the
+great, all-seeing eye of God.</p>
+
+<p>As the ceiling and rafters were so open and reverberating, it was generally
+thought imperative to hang above the pulpit a great sounding-board, which
+threatened the minister like a giant extinguisher, and was really as devoid
+of utility as it was curious in ornamentation, "reflecting most part an
+empty ineffectual sound." This great sound-killer was decorated with carved
+and painted rosettes, as in the Shrewsbury meeting-house; with carved ivy
+leaves, as in Farmington; with a carved bunch of grapes or pomegranates, as
+in the Leicester church; with letters indicating a date, as, "M. R. H." for
+March, in the Hadley church; with appropriate mottoes and texts, such as
+the words, "Holiness is the Lords," in the Windham church; with cords and
+tassels, with hanging fringes, with panels and balls; and thus formed a
+great ornament to the church, and a source of honest pride to the church
+members. The clumsy sounding-board was usually hung by a slight iron rod,
+which looked smaller still as it stretched up to the high, raftered roof,
+and always appeared to be entirely insufficient to sustain the great weight
+of the heavy machine. In Danvers, one of these useless though ornamental
+structures hung within eighteen inches of the preacher's nose, on a slender
+bar thirty feet in length; and every Sunday the children gazed with
+fascinated anticipation at the slight rod and the great hexagonal
+extinguisher, thinking and hoping that on this day the sounding-board would
+surely drop, and "put out" the minister. In fact, it was regarded by many
+a child, though this idea was hardly formulated in the little brain, as
+a visible means of possible punishment for any false doctrine that might
+issue from the mouth of the preacher.</p>
+
+<p>Another pastime and source of interest to the children in many old churches
+was the study of the knots and veins in the unpainted wood of which the
+pews and galleries were made. Age had developed and darkened and rendered
+visible all the natural irregularities in the wood, just as it had brought
+out and strengthened the dry-woody, close, unaired, penetrating scent which
+permeated the meeting-house and gave it the distinctive "church smell." The
+children, and perhaps a few of the grown people, found in these clusters
+of knots queer similitudes of faces, strange figures and constellations,
+which, though conned Sunday after Sunday until known by heart, still seemed
+ever to show in their irregular groupings a puzzling possibility of the
+discovery of new configurations and monstrosities.</p>
+
+<p>The dangling, dusty spiders' webs afforded, too, an interesting sight and
+diversion for the sermon-hearing, but not sermon-listening, young Puritans,
+who watched the cobwebs swaying, trembling, forming strange maps of
+imaginary rivers with their many tributaries, or outlines of intersecting
+roads and lanes. And if little Yet-Once, Hate-Evil, or Shearjashub chanced,
+by good fortune, to be seated near a window where a crafty spider and a
+foolish buzzing fly could be watched through the dreary exposition and
+attempted reconciliation of predestination and free will, that indeed were
+a happy way of passing the weary hours.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap02"></a>II</h1>
+
+<h2>The Church Militant.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>For many years after the settlement of New England the Puritans, even in
+outwardly tranquil times, went armed to meeting; and to sanctify the Sunday
+gun-loading they were expressly forbidden to fire off their charges at
+any object on that day save an Indian or a wolf, their two "greatest
+inconveniencies." Trumbull, in his "Mac Fingal," Avrites thus in jest of
+this custom of Sunday arm-bearing:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"So once, for fear of Indian beating,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting,--<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Each man equipped on Sunday morn<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;With psalm-book, shot, and powder-horn,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And looked in form, as all must grant,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Like the ancient true church militant."</blockquote>
+
+<p>In 1640 it was ordered in Massachusetts that in every township the
+attendants at church should carry a "competent number of peeces, fixed
+and compleat with powder and shot and swords every Lords-day to the
+meeting-house;" one armed man from each household was then thought
+advisable and necessary for public safety. In 1642 six men with muskets and
+powder and shot were thought sufficient for protection for each church. In
+Connecticut similar mandates were issued, and as the orders were neglected
+"by divers persones," a law was passed in 1643 that each offender should
+forfeit twelve pence for each offence. In 1644 a fourth part of the
+"trayned hand" was obliged to come armed each Sabbath, and the sentinels
+were ordered to keep their matches constantly lighted for use in their
+match-locks. They were also commanded to wear armor, which consisted of
+"coats basted with cotton-wool, and thus made defensive against Indian
+arrows." In 1650 so much dread and fear were felt of Sunday attacks from
+the red men that the Sabbath-Day guard was doubled in number. In 1692, the
+Connecticut Legislature ordered one fifth of the soldiers in each town to
+come armed to each meeting, and that nowhere should be present as a guard
+at time of public worship fewer than eight soldiers and a sergeant. In
+Hadley the guard was allowed annually from the public treasury a pound of
+lead and a pound of powder to each soldier.</p>
+
+<p>No details that could add to safety on the Sabbath were forgotten or
+overlooked by the New Haven church; bullets were made common currency at
+the value of a farthing, in order that they might be plentiful and in every
+one's possession; the colonists were enjoined to determine in advance what
+to do with the women and children in case of attack, "that they do not hang
+about them and hinder them;" the men were ordered to bring at least six
+charges of powder and shot to meeting; the farmers were forbidden to "leave
+more arms at home than men to use them;" the half-pikes were to be headed
+and the whole ones mended, and the swords "and all piercing weapons
+furbished up and dressed;" wood was to be placed in the watch-house; it was
+ordered that the "door of the meeting-house next the soldiers' seat be kept
+clear from women and children sitting there, that if there be occasion
+for the soldiers to go suddenly forth, they may have free passage." The
+soldiers sat on either side of the main door, a sentinel was stationed
+in the meeting-house turret, and armed watchers paced the streets; three
+cannon were mounted by the side of this "church militant," which must
+strongly have resembled a garrison.</p>
+
+<p>Military duty and military discipline and regard for the Sabbath, and for
+the House of God as well, did not always make the well-equipped occupants
+of these soldiers' seats in New Haven behave with the dignity and decorum
+befitting such guardians of the peace and protectors in war. Serious
+disorders and disturbances among the guard were reported at the General
+Court on June 16, 1662. One belligerent son of Mars, as he sat in the
+meeting-house, threw lumps of lime--perhaps from the plastered chinks in
+the log wall--at a fellow-warrior, who in turn, very naturally, kicked his
+tormentor with much agility and force. There must have ensued quite a free
+fight all around in the meeting-house, for "Mrs. Goodyear's boy had his
+head broke that day in meeting, on account of which a woman said she
+doubted not the wrath of God was upon us." And well might she think so, for
+divers other unseemly incidents which occurred in the meeting-house at the
+same time were narrated in Court, examined into, and punished.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of these events in the New Haven church (which were certainly
+exceptional), the seemingly incongruous union of church and army was
+suitable enough in a community that always began and ended the military
+exercises on "training day" with solemn prayer and psalm-singing; and that
+used the army and encouraged a true soldier-like spirit not chiefly as aids
+in war, but to help to conquer and destroy the adversaries of truth, and to
+"achieve greater matters by this little handful of men than the world is
+aware of."</p>
+
+<p>The Salem sentinels wore doubtless some of the good English armor owned by
+the town,--corselets to cover the body; gorgets to guard the throat;
+tasses to protect the thighs; all varnished black, and costing each suit
+"twenty-four shillings a peece." The sentry also wore a bandileer, a large
+"neat's leather" belt thrown over the right shoulder, and hanging down
+under the left arm. This bandileer sustained twelve boxes of cartridges,
+and a well-filled bullet-bag. Each man bore either a "bastard musket with
+a snaphance," a "long fowling-piece with musket bore," a "full musket," a
+"barrell with a match-cock," or perhaps (for they were purchased by the
+town) a leather gun (though these leather guns may have been cannon).
+Other weapons there were to choose from, mysterious in name, "sakers,
+minions, ffaulcons, rabinets, murthers (or murderers, as they were
+sometimes appropriately called) chambers, harque-busses, carbins,"--all
+these and many other death-dealing machines did our forefathers bring and
+import from their war-loving fatherland to assist them in establishing
+God's Word, and exterminating the Indians, but not always, alas! to aid
+them in converting those poor heathen.</p>
+
+<p>The armed Salem watcher, besides his firearms and ammunition, had attached
+to his wrist by a cord a gun-rest, or gun-fork, which he placed upon
+the ground when he wished to fire his musket, and upon which that
+constitutional kicker rested when touched off. He also carried a sword and
+sometimes a pike, and thus heavily burdened with multitudinous arms and
+cumbersome armor, could never have run after or from an Indian with much
+agility or celerity; though he could stand at the church-door with his
+leather gun,--an awe-inspiring figure,--and he could shoot with his
+"harquebuss," or "carbin," as we well know.</p>
+
+<p>These armed "sentinells" are always regarded as a most picturesque
+accompaniment of Puritan religious worship, and the Salem and Plymouth
+armed men were imposing, though clumsy. But the New Haven soldiers, with
+their bulky garments wadded and stuffed out with thick layers of cotton
+wool, must have been more safety-assuring and comforting than they were
+romantic or heroic; but perhaps they too wore painted tin armor, "corselets
+and gorgets and tasses."</p>
+
+<p>In Concord, New Hampshire, the men, who all came armed to meeting, stacked
+their muskets around a post in the middle of the church, while the honored
+pastor, who was a good shot and owned the best gun in the settlement,
+preached with his treasured weapon in the pulpit by his side, ready from
+his post of vantage to blaze away at any red man whom he saw sneaking
+without, or to lead, if necessary, his congregation to battle. The church
+in York, Maine, until the year 1746, felt it necessary to retain the custom
+of carrying arms to the meeting-house, so plentiful and so aggressive were
+Maine Indians.</p>
+
+<p>Not only in the time of Indian wars were armed men seen in the
+meeting-house, but on June 17, 1775, the Provincial Congress recommended
+that the men "within twenty miles of the sea-coast carry their arms and
+ammunition with them to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they
+meet for public worship." And on many a Sabbath and Lecture Day, during the
+years of war that followed, were proved the wisdom and foresight of that
+suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant
+dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and
+left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe
+exit of the latter. This custom prevailed from habit until a late date in
+many churches in New England, all the men, after the benediction and the
+exit of the parson, walking out in advance of the women. So also the custom
+of the men always sitting at the "head" or door of the pew arose from the
+early necessity of their always being ready to seize their arms and rush
+unobstructed to fight. In some New England village churches to this day,
+the man who would move down from his end of the pew and let a woman sit
+at the door, even if it were a more desirable seat from which to see the
+clergyman, would be thought a poor sort of a creature.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap03"></a>III</h1>
+
+<h2>By Drum and Horn and Shell.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>At about nine o'clock on the Sabbath morning the Puritan colonists
+assembled for the first public service of the holy day; they were gathered
+together by various warning sounds. The Haverhill settlers listened for the
+ringing toot of Abraham Tyler's horn. The Montague and South Hadley people
+were notified that the hour of assembling had arrived by the loud blowing
+of a conch-shell. John Lane, a resident of the latter town, was engaged
+in 1750 to "blow the Cunk" on the Sabbath as "a sign for meeting." In
+Stockbridge a strong-lunged "praying" Indian blew the enormous shell, which
+was safely preserved until modern times, and which, when relieved from
+Sunday use, was for many years sounded as a week-day signal in the
+hay-field. Even a conch-shell was enough of an expense to the poor colonial
+churches. The Montague people in 1759 paid &pound;1 10s. for their "conk," and
+also on the purchase year gave Joseph Root 20 shillings for blowing the new
+shell. In 1785 the Whately church voted that "we will not improve anybody
+to blow the conch," and so the church-attendants straggled to Whately
+meeting each at his own time and pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>In East Hadley the inhabitant who "blew the kunk" (as phonetic East
+Hadleyites spelt it) and swept out the meeting-house was paid annually the
+munificent sum of three dollars for his services. Conch-blowing was not
+so difficult and consequently not so highly-paid an accomplishment as
+drum-beating. A verse of a simple old-fashioned hymn tells thus of the
+gathering of the Puritan saints:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"New England's Sabbath day<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Is heaven-like still and pure,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When Israel walks the way<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Up to the temple's door.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The time we tell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When there to come<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;By beat of drum<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Or sounding shell."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The drum, as highly suitable for such a military people, was often used as
+a signal for gathering for public worship, and was plainly the favorite
+means of notification. In 1678 Robert Stuard, of Norwalk, "ingages yt his
+son James shall beate the Drumb, on the Sabbath and other ocations," and in
+Norwalk the "drumb," the "drumne," the "drumme," and at last the drum was
+beaten until 1704, when the Church got a bell. And the "Drumber" was paid,
+and well paid too for his "Cervices," fourteen shillings a year of the
+town's money, and he was furnished a "new strong drumme;" and the town
+supplied to him also the flax for the drum-cords which he wore out in the
+service of God. Johnson, in his "Wonder Working Providence," tells of the
+Cambridge Church: "Hearing the sound of a drum he was directed toward it by
+a broade beaten way; following this rode he demands of the next man he met
+what the signall of the drum ment; the reply was made they had as yet no
+Bell to call men to meeting and therefore made use of the drum." In 1638
+a platform was made upon the top of the Windsor meeting-house "from the
+Lanthornc to the ridge to walk conveniently to sound a trumpet or a drum to
+give warning to meeting."</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes three guns were fired as a signal for "church-time." The signal
+for religious gathering, and the signal for battle were always markedly
+different, in order to avoid unnecessary fright.</p>
+
+<p>In 1647 Robert Basset was appointed in New Haven to drum "twice upon Lordes
+Dayes and Lecture Dayes upon the meeting house that soe those who live farr
+off may heare the more distinkly." Robert may have been a good drummer, but
+he proved to be a most reprehensible and disreputable citizen; in the local
+Court Records of August 1, 1648, we find a full report of an astounding
+occurrence in which he played an important part. Ten men, who Avere nearly
+all sea-faring men,--gay, rollicking sailors,--went to Bassctt's house and
+asked for strong drink. The magistrates had endeavored zealously, and in
+the main successfully, to prevent all intoxication in the community,
+and had forbidden the sale of liquor save in very small quantities. The
+church-drummer, however, wickedly unmindful of his honored calling,
+furnished to the sailors six quarts of strong liquor, with which they all,
+host and visitors, got prodigiously drunk and correspondingly noisy. The
+Court Record says: "The miscarriage continued till betwixt tenn and eleven
+of the clock, to the great provocation of God, disturbance of the peace,
+and to such a height of disorder that strangers wondered at it." In the
+midst of the carousal the master of the pinnace called the boatswain
+"Brother Loggerheads." This must have been a particularly insulting
+epithet, which no respectable boatswain could have been expected quietly to
+endure, for "at once the two men fell fast to wrestling, then to blowes and
+theirin grew to that feircnes that the master of the pinnace thought the
+boatswain would have puled out his eies; and they toumbled on the ground
+down the hill into the creeke and mire shamefully wallowing theirin."
+In his pain and terror the master called out, "Hoe, the Watch! Hoe, the
+Watch!" "The Watch made hast and for the present stopped the disorder, but
+in his rage and distemper the boatswaine fell a-swearinge Wounds and Hart
+as if he were not only angry with men but would provoke the high
+and blessed God." The master of the pinnace, being freed from his
+fellow-combatant, returned to Basset's house--perhaps to tell his tale
+of woe, perhaps to get more liquor--and was assailed by the drummer with
+amazing words of "anger and distemper used by drunken companions;" in
+short, he was "verey offensive, his noyes and oathes being hearde to
+the other side of the creeke." For aiding and abetting this noisy and
+disgraceful spree, and also for partaking in it, Drummer Basset was fined
+&pound;5, which must have been more than his yearly salary, and in disgrace, and
+possibly in disgust, quitted drumming the New Haven good people to meeting
+and moved his residence to Stamford, doubtless to the relief and delight of
+both magistrates and people of the former town.</p>
+
+<p>Another means of notification of the hour for religious service was by the
+use of a flag, often in addition to the sound of the drum or bell. Thus in
+Plymouth, in 1697, the selectmen were ordered to "procure a flagg to be put
+out at the ringing of the first bell, and taken in when the last bell was
+rung." In Sutherland also a flag was used as a means of announcement of
+"meeting-time," and an old goody was paid ten shillings a year for "tending
+the flagg."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gosse, in his "Early Bells of Massachusetts," gives a full and
+interesting account of the church-bells of the first colonial towns in that
+State. Lechford, in his "Plaine Dealing," wrote in 1641 that they came
+together in Boston on the Lord's Day by "the wringing of a bell," and it is
+thought that that bell was a hand-bell. The first bells, for the lack
+of bell-towers, were sometimes hung on trees by the side of the
+meeting-houses, to the great amazement and distress of the Indians, who
+regarded them with superstitious dread, thinking--to paraphrase Herbert's
+beautiful line--"when the bell did chime 't was devils' music;" but more
+frequently the bells were hung in a belfry or bell-turret or "bellcony,"
+and from this belfry depended a long bell-rope quite to the floor; and thus
+in the very centre of the church the sexton stood when he rung the summons
+for lire or for meeting. This rope was of course directly in front of the
+pulpit; and Jonathan Edwards, who was devoid of gestures and looked always
+straight before him when preaching, was jokingly said to have "looked-off"
+the bell-rope, when it fell with a crash in the middle of his church.</p>
+
+<p>At the first sound of the drum or horn or bell the town inhabitants issued
+from their houses in "desent order," man and wife walking first, and the
+children in quiet procession after them. Often a man-servant and a maid
+walked on either side of the heads of the family. In some communities the
+congregation waited outside the church door until the minister and his wife
+arrived and passed into the house; then the church-attendants followed, the
+loitering boys always contriving to scuffle noisily in from the horse-sheds
+at the last moment, making much scraping and clatter with their heavy boots
+on the sanded floor, and tumbling clumsily up the uucarpeted, creaking
+stairs.</p>
+
+<p>In other churches the members of the congregation seated themselves in
+their pews upon their arrival, but rose reverently when the parson, dressed
+in black skull-cap and Geneva cloak, entered the door; and they stood, in
+token of respect, until after he entered the pulpit and was seated.</p>
+
+<p>It was also the honor-giving and deferential custom in many New England
+churches, in the eighteenth century, for the entire congregation to remain
+respectfully standing within the pews at the end of the serice until the
+minister had descended from his lofty pulpit, opened the door of his wife's
+pew, and led her with stately dignity to the church-porch, where, were he
+and she genial and neighborly minded souls, they in turn stood and greeted
+with carefully adjusted degrees of warmth, interest, respect, or patronage,
+the different members of the congregation as they slowly passed out.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap04"></a>IV</h1>
+
+<h2>The Old-Fashioned Pews.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow,
+uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks
+placed on legs like milking-stools. They were without any support or rest
+for the back; and perhaps the stiff-backed Pilgrims and Puritans required
+or wished no support. Quickly, as the colonies grew in wealth and the
+colonists in ambition and importance, "Spots for Pues" were sold (or
+"pitts" as they were sometimes called), at first to some few rich or
+influential men who wished to sit in a group together, and finally each
+family of dignity or wealth sat in its own family-pew. Often it was
+stipulated in the permission to build a pew that a separate entrance-door
+should be cut into it through the outside wall of the meeting-house, thus
+detracting grievously from the external symmetry of the edifice, but
+obviating the necessity of a space-occupying entrance aisle within the
+church, where there was little enough sitting-room for the quickly
+increasing and universally church-going population. As these pews were
+either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted,
+and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the
+kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style
+of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted. A man who had
+a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by
+the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were
+individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house
+destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was
+being razed, the old building materials to use in the construction of her
+new home. She was not allowed, however, to remove the wood which formed the
+pews, as they were adjudged to be the property of the members who had built
+them, and those owners only could sell or remove the materials of which
+they were built.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the pews in the old meeting-houses had towering partition walls,
+which extended up so high that only the tops of the tallest heads could be
+seen when the occupants were seated. Permissions to build were often given
+with modifying restrictions to the aspiring pew-builders, as for instance
+is recorded of the Haverhill church, "provided they would not build so high
+as to damnify and hinder the light of them windows," or of the Waterbury
+church, "if the pues will not progodish the hous." Often the floor of the
+pews was several inches and occasionally a foot higher than the floor of
+the "alleys," thus forming at the entrance-door of the pew one or two
+steps, which were great stumbling-blocks to clumsy and to childish feet,
+that tripped again when within the pew over the "crickets" and foot-benches
+which were, if the family were large, the accepted and lowly church-seats
+of the little children. Occasionally one long, low foot-rest stretched
+quite across one side of the pew-floor. I have seen these long benches
+with a tier of three shelves; the lower and broader shelf was used as a
+foot-rest, the second one was to hold the hats of the men, and the third
+and narrower shelf was for the hymn-books and Bibles. Such comfortable and
+luxurious pew-furnishings could never have been found in many churches.</p>
+
+<p>An old New Englander relates a funny story of his youth, in which one of
+these triple-tiered foot-benches played an important part. When he was
+a boy a travelling show visited his native town, and though he was not
+permitted to go within the mystic and alluring tent, he stood longingly at
+the gate, and was prodigiously diverted and astonished by an exhibition of
+tight-rope walking, which was given outside the tent-door as a bait to
+lure pleasure-loving and frivolous townspeople within, and also as a
+tantalization to the children of the saints who were not allowed to enter
+the tent of the wicked. Fired by that bewildering and amazing performance,
+he daily, after the wonderful sight, practised walking on rails, on fences,
+on fallen trees, and on every narrow foothold which he could find, as a
+careful preparation for a final feat and triumph of skill on his mother's
+clothes-line. In an evil hour, as he sat one Sunday in the corner of his
+father's pew, his eyes rested on the narrow ledge which formed the top of
+the long foot-bench. Satan can find mischief for idle boys within church as
+well as without, and the desire grew stronger to try to walk on that
+narrow foothold. He looked at his father and mother, they were peacefully
+sleeping; so also were the grown-up occupants of the neighboring pews;
+the pew walls were high, the minister seldom glanced to right or left; a
+thousand good reasons were whispered in his ear by the mischief-finder,
+and at last he willingly yielded, pulled off his heavy shoes, and softly
+mounted the foot-bench. He walked forward and back with great success
+twice, thrice, but when turning for a fourth tour he suddenly lost his
+balance, and over he went with a resounding crash--hats, psalm-books,
+heavy bench, and all. He crushed into hopeless shapelessness his father's
+gray beaver meeting-hat, a long-treasured and much-loved antique; he nearly
+smashed his mother's kid-slippered foot to jelly, and the fall elicited
+from her, in the surprise of the sudden awakening and intense pain, an
+ear-piercing shriek, which, with the noisy crash, electrified the entire
+meeting. All the grown people stood up to investigate, the children climbed
+on the seats to look at the guilty offender and his deeply mortified
+parents; while the minister paused in his sermon and said with cutting
+severity, "I have always regretted that the office of tithingman has been
+abolished in this community, as his presence and his watchful care
+are sadly needed by both the grown persons and the children in this
+congregation." The wretched boy who had caused all the commotion and
+disgrace was of course uninjured by his fall, but a final settlement at
+home between father and son on account of this sacrilegious piece of church
+disturbance made the unhappy would-be tight-rope walker wish that he had at
+least broken his arm instead of his father's hat and his mother's pride and
+the peace of the congregation.</p>
+
+<p>The seats were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three
+sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the
+minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian
+benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite
+justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in
+one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay,
+"What! must I be shut up in a closet and sit on a shelf?" Often elderly
+people petitioned to build separate small pens of pews with a single wider
+seat as "through the seats being so very narrow" they could not sit in
+comfort.</p>
+
+<p>The seats were, until well into this century, almost universally hung on
+hinges, and could be turned up against the walls of the pew, thus enabling
+the standing congregation to lean for support against the sides of the pews
+during the psalm-singing and the long, long prayers.</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And when at last the loud Amen<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Fell from aloft, how quickly then<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The seats came down with heavy rattle,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Like musketry in fiercest battle."</blockquote>
+
+<p>This noise of slamming pew-seats could easily be heard over half a mile
+away from the meeting-house in the summer time, for the perverse boys
+contrived always in their salute of welcome to the Amen to give vent in
+a most tremendous bang to a little of their pent up and ill-repressed
+energies. In old church-orders such entries as this (of the Haverhill
+church) are frequently seen: "The people are to Let their Seats down
+without Such Nois." "The boyes are not to wickedly noise down there
+pew-seats." A gentleman attending the old church in Leicester heard at
+the beginning of the prayer, for the first time in his life, the noise of
+slamming pew-seats, as the seats were thrust up against the pew-walls. He
+jumped into the aisle at the first clatter, thinking instinctively that the
+gallery was cracking and falling. Another stranger, a Southerner, entering
+rather late at a morning service in an old church in New England, was
+greeted with the rattle of falling seats, and exclaimed in amazement, "Do
+you Northern people applaud in church?"</p>
+
+<p>In many meeting-houses the tops of the pews and of the high gallery
+railings were ornamented with little balustrades of turned wood, which were
+often worn quite bare of paint by childish fingers that had tried them all
+"to find which ones would turn," and which, alas! would also squeak. This
+fascinating occupation whiled away many a tedious hour in the dreary
+church, and in spite of weekly forbidding frowns and whispered reproofs for
+the shrill, ear-piercing squeaks elicited by turning the spindle-shaped
+balusters, was entirely too alluring a time-killer to be abandoned, and
+consequently descended, an hereditary church pastime, from generation to
+generation of the children of the Puritans; and indeed it remained so
+strong an instinct that many a grown person, visiting in after life a
+church whose pews bore balustrades like the ones of his childhood, could
+scarce keep his itching fingers from trying them each in succession "to see
+which ones would turn."</p>
+
+<p>These open balustrades also afforded fine peep-holes through which, by
+standing or kneeling upon "the shelf," a child might gaze at his neighbor;
+and also through which sly missiles--little balls of twisted paper--could
+be snapped, to the annoyance of some meek girl or retaliating boy, until
+the young marksman was ignominiously pulled down by his mother from his
+post of attack. And through these balustrades the same boy a few years
+later could thrust sly missives, also of twisted paper, to the girl whom he
+had once assailed and bombarded with his annoying paper bullets.</p>
+
+<p>Through the pillared top-rail a restless child in olden days often
+received, on a hot summer Sabbath from a farmer's wife or daughter in an
+adjoining pew, friendly and quieting gifts of sprigs of dill, or fennel,
+or caraway, famous anti-soporifics; and on this herbivorous food he would
+contentedly browse as long as it lasted. An uneasy, sermon-tired little
+girl was once given through the pew-rail several stalks of caraway, and
+with them a large bunch of aromatic southernwood, or "lad's-love" which had
+been brought to meeting by the matron in the next pew, with a crudely and
+unconsciously aesthetic sense that where eye and ear found so little to
+delight them, there the pungent and spicy fragrance of the southernwood
+would be doubly grateful to the nostrils. Little Missy sat down delightedly
+to nibble the caraway-seed, and her mother seeing her so quietly and
+absorbingly occupied, at once fell contentedly and placidly asleep in her
+corner of the pew. But five heads of caraway, though each contain many
+score of seeds, and the whole number be slowly nibbled and eaten one seed
+at a time, will not last through the child's eternity of a long doctrinal
+sermon; and when the umbels were all devoured, the young experimentalist
+began upon the stalks and stems, and they, too, slowly disappeared. She
+then attacked the sprays of southernwood, and in spite of its bitter,
+wormwoody flavor, having nothing else to do, she finished it, all but the
+tough stems, just as the long sermon was brought to a close. Her waking
+mother, discovering no signs of green verdure in the pew, quickly drew
+forth a whispered confession of the time-killing Nebuchadnezzar-like feast,
+and frightened and horrified, at once bore the leaf-gorged child from
+the church, signalling in her retreat to the village doctor, who quickly
+followed and administered to the omnivorous young New Englander a bolus
+which made her loathe to her dying day, through a sympathetic association
+and memory, the taste of caraway, and the scent of southernwood.</p>
+
+<p>An old gentleman, lamenting the razing of the church of his childhood,
+told the story of his youthful Sabbaths in rhyme, and thus refers with
+affectionate enthusiasm to the old custom of bringing bunches of esculent
+"sallet" herbs to meeting:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And when I tired and restless grew,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Our next pew neighbor, Mrs. True,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Reached her kind hand the top rail through<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To hand me dill, and fennel too,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And sprigs of caraway.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And as I munched the spicy seeds,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I dimly felt that kindly deeds<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;That thus supply our present needs,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Though only gifts of pungent weeds,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Show true religion.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And often now through sermon trite<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And operatic singer's flight,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I long for that old friendly sight,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The hand with herbs of value light,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To help to pass the time."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Were the dill and "sweetest fennel" chosen Sabbath favorites for their
+old-time virtues and powers?</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Vervain and dill<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Hinder witches of their ill."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And of the charmed fennel Longfellow wrote:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The fennel with its yellow flowers<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;That, in an earlier age than ours,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Was gifted with the wondrous powers,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Lost vision to restore."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And traditions of mysterious powers, dream-influencing, spirit-exorcising,
+virtue-awakening, health-giving properties, hung vaguely around the
+southernwood and made it specially fit to be a Sabbath-day posy. These
+traditions are softened by the influence of years into simply idealizing,
+in the mind of every country-bred New Englander, the peculiar refreshing
+scent of the southernwood as a typical Sabbath-day fragrance. Half a
+century ago, the pretty feathery pale-green shrub grew in every country
+door-yard, humble or great, throughout New England; and every church-going
+woman picked a branch or spray of it when she left her home on Sabbath
+morn. To this day, on hot summer Sundays, many a staid old daughter of
+the Puritans may be seen entering the village meeting-house, clad in
+a lilac-sprigged lawn or a green-striped bar&egrave;ge,--a scanty-skirted,
+surplice-waisted relic of past summers,--with a lace-bordered silk cape
+or a delicate, time-yellowed, purple and white cashmere scarf on her bent
+shoulders, wearing on her gray head a shirred-silk or leghorn bonnet, and
+carrying in her lace-mitted hand a fresh handkerchief, her spectacle-case
+and well-worn Bible, and a great sprig of the sweet, old-fashioned
+"lad's-love." A rose, a bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy
+for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was
+ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing
+things,--southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is
+half so fresh, so countrified, so memory-sweet.</p>
+
+<p>The benches and the pew-seats in the old churches were never cushioned.
+Occasionally very old or feeble women brought cushions to meeting to sit
+upon. It is a matter of recent tradition that Colonel Greenleaf caused a
+nine days' talk in Newbury town at the beginning of this century when
+he cushioned his pew. The widow of Sir William Pepperell, who lived in
+imposing style, had her pew cushioned and lined and curtained with
+worsted stuff, and carpeted with a heavy bear-skin. This worn, faded, and
+moth-eaten furniture remained in the Kittery church until the year 1840,
+just as when Lady Pepperell furnished and occupied the pew. Nor were even
+the seats of the pulpit cushioned. The "cooshoons" of velvet or leather,
+which were given by will to the church, and which were kept in the pulpit,
+and were nibbled by the squirrels, were for the Bible, not the minister, to
+rest upon.</p>
+
+<p>In many churches--in Durham, Concord and Sandwich--the pews had
+swing-shelves, "leaning shelves," upon which a church attendant could rest
+his paper and his arm when taking notes from the sermon, as was at one time
+the universal custom, and in which even school-boys of a century ago had
+to take part. Funny stories are told of the ostentatious notes taken by
+pompous parishioners who could neither write nor read, but who could
+scribble, and thus cut a learned figure.</p>
+
+<p>The doors of the pews were usually cut down somewhat lower than the
+pew-walls, and frequently had no top-rails. They sometimes bore the name of
+the pew-owner painted in large white letters. They were secured when
+closed by clumsy wooden buttons. In many country congregations the elderly
+men--stiff old farmers--had a fashion of standing up in the middle of the
+sermon to stretch their cramped limbs, and they would lean against and hang
+over the pew door and stare up and down the aisle. In Andover, Vermont,
+old Deacon Puffer never let a summer Sunday pass without thus resting and
+diverting himself. One day, having ill-secured the wooden button at the
+door of his pew, the leaning-place gave way under his weight, and out he
+sprawled on all-fours, with a loud clatter, into the middle of the aisle,
+to the amusement of the children, and the mortification of his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it may be seen, as an old autobiography phrases it, "diversions was
+frequent in meeting, and the more duller the sermon, the more likely it was
+that some accident or mischief would be done to help to pass the time."</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap05"></a>V</h1>
+
+<h2>Seating the Meeting.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>Perhaps no duty was more important and more difficult of satisfactory
+performance in the church work in early New England than "seating the
+meeting-house." Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all
+forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was
+the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the
+seat in which each person should sit during public worship. A committee of
+dignified and influential men was appointed to assign irrevocably to each
+person his or her place, according to rank and importance. Whittier wrote
+of this custom:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"In the goodly house of worship, where in order due and fit,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As by public vote directed, classed and ranked the people sit;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mistress first and goodwife after, clerkly squire before the clown,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;From the brave coat, lace embroidered: to the gray frock shading down."</blockquote>
+
+<p>In many cases the members of the committee were changed each year or at
+each fresh seating, in order to obviate any of the effects of partiality
+through kinship, friendship, personal esteem, or debt. A second committee
+was also appointed to seat the members of committee number one, in order
+that, as Haverhill people phrased it, "there may be no Grumbling at them
+for picking and placing themselves."</p>
+
+<p>This seating committee sent to the church the list of all the attendants
+and the seats assigned to them, and when the list had been twice or thrice
+read to the congregation, and nailed on the meeting-house door, it became a
+law. Then some such order as this of the church at Watertown, Connecticut,
+was passed: "It is ordered that the next Sabbath Day every person shall
+take his or her seat appointed to them, and not go to any other seat where
+others are placed: And if any one of the inhabitants shall act contrary, he
+shall for the first offence be reproved by the deacons, and for a second
+pay a fine of two shillings, and a like fine for each offence ever
+after." Or this of the Stratham church: "When the comety have Seatid the
+meeting-house every person that is Seatid shall set in those Seats or pay
+Five Shillings Pir Day for every day they set out of There seats in a
+Disorderly Manner to advance themselves Higher in the meeting-house." These
+two church-laws were very lenient. In many towns the punishments and fines
+were much more severe. Two men of Newbury were in 1669 fined &pound;27 4s.
+each for "disorderly going and setting in seats belonging to others." They
+were dissatisfied with the seats assigned to them by the seating committee,
+and openly and defiantly rebelled. Other and more peaceable citizens
+"entred their Decents" to the first decision of the committee and asked for
+reconsideration of their special cases and for promotion to a higher pew
+before the final orders were "Jsued."</p>
+
+<p>In all the Puritan meetings, as then and now in Quaker meetings, the men
+sat on one side of the meeting-house and the women on the other; and they
+entered by separate doors. It was a great and much-contested change when
+men and women were ordered to sit together "promiscuoslie." In front,
+on either side of the pulpit (or very rarely in the foremost row in the
+gallery), was a seat of highest dignity, known as the "foreseat," in which
+only the persons of greatest importance in the community sat.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a row of square pews was built on three sides of the ground
+floor, and each pew occupied by separate families, while the pulpit was
+on the fourth side. If any man wished such a private pew for himself and
+family, he obtained permission from the church and town, and built it at
+his own expense. Immediately in front of the pulpit was either a long seat
+or a square inclosed pew for the deacons, who sat facing the congregation.
+This was usually a foot or two above the level of the other pews, and was
+reached by two or three steep, narrow steps. On a still higher plane was a
+pew for the ruling elders, when ruling elders there were. The magistrates
+also had a pew for their special use. What we now deem the best seats,
+those in the middle of the church, were in olden times the free seats.</p>
+
+<p>Usually, on one side of the pulpit was a square pew for the minister's
+family. When there were twenty-six children in the family, as at least one
+New England parson could boast, and when ministers' families of twelve
+or fourteen children were far from unusual, it is no wonder that we find
+frequent votes to "inlarge the ministers wives pew the breadth of the
+alley," or to "take in the next pue to the ministers wives pue into her
+pue." The seats in the gallery were universally regarded in the early
+churches as the most exalted, in every sense, in the house, with the
+exception, of course, of the dignity-bearing foreseat and the few private
+pews.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to comprehend what a source of disappointed anticipation,
+heart-burning jealousy, offended dignity, unseemly pride, and bitter
+quarrelling this method of assigning scats, and ranking thereby, must have
+been in those little communities. How the goodwivcs must have hated the
+seating committee! Though it was expressly ordered, when the committee
+rendered their decision, that "the inhabitants are to rest silent and
+sett down satysfyed," who can still the tongue of an envious woman or an
+insulted man? Though they were Puritans, they were first of all men and
+women, and complaints and revolts were frequent. Judge Sewall records that
+one indignant dame "treated Captain Osgood very roughly on account of
+seating the meeting-house." To her the difference between a seat in the
+first and one in the second row was immeasurably great. It was not alone
+the Scribes and Pharisees who desired the highest seats in the synagogue.</p>
+
+<p>It was found necessary at a very early date to "dignify the meeting,"
+which was to make certain seats, though in different localities, equal in
+dignity; thus could peace and contented pride be partially restored. For
+instance, the seating committee in the Sutton church used their "best
+discresing," and voted that "the third seat below be equal in dignity with
+the foreseat in the front gallery, and the fourth seat below be equal in
+dignity with the foreseat in the side gallery," etc., thus making many
+seats of equal honor. Of course wives had to have seats of equal importance
+with those of their husbands, and each widow retained the dignity
+apportioned to her in her husband's lifetime. We can well believe that much
+"discresing" was necessary in dignifying as well as in seating. Often,
+after building a new meeting-house with all the painstaking and thoughtful
+judgment that could be shown, the dissensions over the seating lasted for
+years. The conciliatory fashion of "dignifying the seats" clung long in the
+Congregational churches of New England. In East Hartford and Windsor it was
+not abandoned until 1824.</p>
+
+<p>Many men were unwilling to serve on these seating committees, and refused
+to "medle with the seating," protesting against it on account of the odium
+that was incurred, but they were seldom "let off." Even so influential and
+upright a man as Judge Sewall felt a dread of the responsibility and of
+the personal spleen he might arouse. He also feared in one case lest his
+seat-decisions might, if disliked, work against the ministerial peace of
+his son, who had been recently ordained as pastor of the church. Sometimes
+the difficulty was settled in this way: the entire church (or rather the
+male members) voted who should occupy the foreseat, or the highest pew, and
+the voted-in occupants of this seat of honor formed a committee, who in
+turn seated the others of the congregation.</p>
+
+<p>In the town of Rowley, "age, office, and the amount paid toward building
+the meeting-house were considered when assigning seats." Other towns had
+very amusing and minute rules for seating. Each year of the age counted one
+degree. Military service counted eight degrees. The magistrate's office
+counted ten degrees. Every forty shillings paid in on the church rate
+counted one degree. We can imagine the ambitious Puritan adding up his
+degrees, and paying in forty shillings more in order to sit one seat above
+his neighbor who was a year or two older.</p>
+
+<p>In Pittsfield, as early as the year 1765, the pews were sold by "vandoo"
+to the highest bidder, in order to stop the unceasing quarrels over
+the seating. In Windham, Connecticut, in 1762, the adoption of this
+pacificatory measure only increased the dissension when it was discovered
+that some miserable "bachelors who never paid for more than one head and
+a horse" had bid in several of the best pews in the meeting-house. In New
+London, two women, sisters-in-law, were seated side by side. Each claimed
+the upper or more dignified seat, and they quarrelled so fiercely over the
+occupation of it that they had to be brought before the town meeting.</p>
+
+<p>In no way could honor and respect be shown more satisfactorily in the
+community than by the seat assigned in meeting. When Judge Sewall married
+his second wife, he writes with much pride: "Mr. Oliver in the names of the
+Overseers invites my Wife to sit in the foreseat. I thought to have brought
+her into my pue. I thankt him and the Overseers." His wife died in a few
+months, and he reproached himself for his pride in this honor, and left the
+seat which he had in the men's foreseat. "God in his holy Sovereignty put
+my wife out of the Fore Seat. I apprehended I had Cause to be ashamed of my
+Sin and loath myself for it, and retired into my Pue," which was of course
+less dignified than the foreseat.</p>
+
+<p>Often, in thriving communities, the "pues" and benches did not afford
+seating room enough for the large number who wished to attend public
+worship, and complaints were frequent that many were "obliged to sit
+squeased on the stairs." Persons were allowed to bring chairs and stools
+into the meeting-house, and place them in the "alleys." These extra seats
+became often such encumbering nuisances that in many towns laws were passed
+abolishing and excluding them, or, as in Hadley, ordering them "back of the
+women's seats." In 1759 it was ordered in that town to "clear the Alleys of
+the meeting-house of chairs and other Incumbrances." Where the chairless
+people went is not told; perhaps they sat in the doorway, or, in the summer
+time, listened outside the windows. One forward citizen of Hardwicke had
+gradually moved his chair down the church alley, step by step, Sunday after
+Sunday, from one position of dignity to another still higher, until at last
+he boldly invaded the deacons' seat. When, in the year 1700, this honored
+position was forbidden him, in his chagrin and mortification he committed
+suicide by hanging.</p>
+
+<p>The young men sat together in rows, and the young women in corresponding
+seats on the other side of the house. In 1677 the selectmen of Newbury
+gave permission to a few young women to build a pew in the gallery. It is
+impossible to understand why this should have roused the indignation of the
+bachelors of the town, but they were excited and angered to such a pitch
+that they broke a window, invaded the meeting-house, and "broke the pue in
+pessis." For this sacrilegious act they were fined &pound;10 each, and sentenced
+to be whipped or pilloried. In consideration, however, of the fact that
+many of them had been brave soldiers, the punishment was omitted when they
+confessed and asked forgiveness. This episode is very comical; it exhibits
+the Puritan youth in such an ungallant and absurd light. When, ten years
+later, liberty was given to ten young men, who had sat in the "foure backer
+seats in the gallery," to build a pew in "the hindermost seat in the
+gallery behind the pulpit," it is not recorded that the Salem young women
+made any objection. In the Woburn church, the four daughters of one of the
+most respected families in the place received permission to build a pew in
+which to sit. Here also such indignant and violent protests were made by
+the young men that the selectmen were obliged to revoke the permission.
+It would be interesting to know the bachelors' discourteous objections to
+young women being allowed to own a pew, but no record of their reasons
+is given. Bachelors were so restricted and governed in the colonies that
+perhaps they resented the thought of any independence being allowed to
+single women. Single men could not live alone, but were forced to reside
+with some family to whom the court assigned them, and to do in all respects
+just what the court ordered. Thus, in olden times, a man had to marry to
+obtain his freedom. The only clue to a knowledge of the cause of the fierce
+and resentful objection of New England young men to permitting the young
+women of the various congregations to build and own a "maids pue" is
+contained in the record of the church of the town of Scotland, Connecticut.
+"An Hurlburt, Pashants and Mary Lazelle, Younes Bingham, prudenc Hurlburt
+and Jerusha meachem" were empowered to build a pew "provided they build
+within a year and raise ye pue no higher than the seat is on the Mens
+side." "Never ye Less," saith the chronicle, "ye above said have built said
+pue much higher than ye order, and if they do not lower the same within one
+month from this time the society comitte shall take said pue away." Do you
+wonder that the bachelors resented this towering "maids pue?" that they
+would not be scornfully looked down upon every Sabbath by women-folk,
+especially by a girl named "meachem"? Pashants and Younes and prudenc had
+to quickly come down from their unlawfully high church-perch and take a
+more humble seat, as befitted them; thus did their "vaulting ambition
+o'erleap itself and fall on the other side." Perhaps the Salem maids also
+built too high and imposing a pew. In Haverhill, in 1708, young women were
+permitted to build pews, provided they did not "damnify the Stairway." This
+somewhat profane-sounding restriction they heeded, and the Haverhill maids
+occupied their undamnifying "pue" unmolested. Medford young women, however,
+in 1701, when allowed only one side gallery for seats, while the young men
+were assigned one side and all the front gallery, made such an uproar that
+the town had to call a meeting, and restore to them their "woman's rights"
+in half the front gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Infants were brought to church in their mothers' arms, and on summer days
+the young mothers often sat at the meeting-house door or in the porch,--if
+porch there were,--where, listening to the word of God, they could attend
+also to the wants of their babes. I have heard, too, of a little cage, or
+frame, which was to be seen in the early meeting-houses, for the purpose
+of holding children who were too young to sit alone,--poor Puritan babies!
+Little girls sat with their mothers or elder sisters on "crickets" within
+the pews; or if the family were over-numerous, the children and crickets
+exundated into "the alley without the pues." Often a row of little
+daughters of Zion sat on three-legged stools and low seats the entire
+length of the aisle,--weary, sleepy, young sentinels "without the gates."</p>
+
+<p>The boys, the Puritan boys, those wild animals who were regarded with such
+suspicion, such intense disfavor, by all elderly Puritan eyes, and who were
+publicly stigmatized by the Duxbury elders as "ye wretched boys on ye Lords
+Day," were herded by themselves. They usually sat on the pulpit and gallery
+stairs, and constables or tithingmen were appointed to watch over them and
+control them. In Salem, in 1676, it was ordered that "all ye boyes of ye
+towne are and shall be appointed to sitt upon ye three pair of stairs in ye
+meeting-house on ye Lords Day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look after ye
+boyes yt sitte upon ye pulpit stairs. Reuben Guppy is to look and order soe
+many of ye boyes as may be convenient, and if any are unruly, to present
+their names, as the law directs." Nowadays we should hardly seat boys in a
+group if we wished them to be orderly and decorous, and I fear the man "by
+the name of Guppy" found it no easy task to preserve order and due gravity
+among the Puritan boys in Salem meeting. In fact, the rampant boys behaved
+thus badly for the very reason that they were seated together instead of
+with their respective families; and not until the fashion was universal of
+each family sitting in a pew or group by itself did the boys in meeting
+behave like human beings rather than like mischievous and unruly monkeys.</p>
+
+<p>In Stratford, in 1668, a tithingman was "appointed to watch over the youths
+of disorderly carriage, and see that they behave themselves comelie, and
+use such raps and blows as in his discretion meet."</p>
+
+<p>I like to think of those rows of sober-faced Puritan boys seated on the
+narrow, steep pulpit stairs, clad in knee-breeches and homespun flapped
+coats, and with round, cropped heads, miniature likenesses in dress and
+countenance (if not in deportment) of their grave, stern, God-fearing
+fathers. Though they were of the sedate Puritan blood, they were boys, and
+they wriggled and twisted, and scraped their feet noisily on the sanded
+floor; and I know full well that the square-toed shoes of one in whom
+"original sin" waxed powerful, thrust many a sly dig in the ribs and back
+of the luckless wight who chanced to sit in front of and below him on the
+pulpit stairs. Many a dried kernel of Indian corn was surreptitiously
+snapped at the head of an unwary neighbor, and many a sly word was
+whispered and many a furtive but audible "snicker" elicited when the dread
+tithingman was "having an eye-out" and administering "discreet raps and
+blows" elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>One of these wicked youths in Andover was brought before the magistrate,
+and it was charged that he "Sported and played and by Indecent Gestures and
+Wry Faces caused laughter and misbehavior in the Beholders." The girls were
+not one whit better behaved. One of "ye tything men chosen of ye town of
+Norwich" reported that "Tabatha Morgus of s'd Norwich Did on ye 24th day
+February it being Sabbath on ye Lordes Day, prophane ye Lordes Day in ye
+meeting house of ye west society in ye time of ye forenoone service on s'd
+Day by her rude and Indecent Behaviour in Laughing and Playing in ye time
+of ye s'd Service which Doinges of ye s'd Tabatha is against ye peace of
+our Sovereign Lord ye King, his Crown and Dignity." Wanton Tabatha had to
+pay three shilings sixpence for her ill-timed mid-winter frolic. Perhaps
+she laughed to try to keep warm. Those who laughed at the misdemeanors of
+others were fined as well. Deborah Bangs, a young girl, in 1755 paid a fine
+of five shillings for "Larfing in the Wareham Meeting House in time of
+Public Worship," and a boy at the same time, for the same offence, paid a
+fine of ten shillings. He may have laughed louder and longer. In a law-book
+in which Jonathan Trumbull recorded the minor cases which he tried as
+justice of the peace, was found this entry: "His Majesties Tithing man
+entered complaint against Jona. and Susan Smith, that on the Lords Day
+during Divine Service, they did <i>smile</i>." They were found guilty, and
+each was fined five shillings and costs,--poor smiling Susan and Jonathan.</p>
+
+<p>Those wretched Puritan boys, those "sons of Belial," whittled, too, and cut
+the woodwork and benches of the meeting-house in those early days, just as
+their descendants have ever since hacked and cut the benches and desks in
+country schoolhouses,--though how they ever eluded the vigilant eye and ear
+of the ubiquitous tithingman long enough to whittle will ever remain an
+unsolved mystery of the past. This early forerunning evidence of what
+has become a characteristic Yankee trait and habit was so annoyingly and
+extensively exhibited in Medford, in 1729, that an order was passed to
+prosecute and punish "all who cut the seats in the meeting-house."</p>
+
+<p>Few towns were content to have one tithingman and one staff, but ordered
+that there should be a guardian set over the boys in every corner of the
+meeting-house. In Hanover it was ordered "That there be some sticks set up
+in various places in the meeting-house, and fit persons by them and <i>to
+use them</i>." I doubt not that the sticks were well used, and Hanover boys
+were well rapped in meeting.</p>
+
+<p>The Norwalk people come down through history shining with a halo of gentle
+lenity, for their tithingman was ordered to bear a short, small stick only,
+and he was "Desired to use it with clemency." However, if any boy proved
+"incoridgable," he could be "presented" before the elders; and perhaps he
+would rather have been treated as were Hartford boys by cruel Hartford
+church folk, who ordered that if "any boye shall be taken playing or
+misbehaving himself in the time of publick worship whether in the
+meeting-house or about the walls he shall be examined and punished at the
+present publickly before the assembly depart." Parson Chauncey, of Durham,
+when a boy misbehaved in meeting, and was "punched up" by the tithingman,
+often stopped in his sermon, called the godless young offender by name,
+and asked him to come to the parsonage the next day. Some very tender and
+beautiful lessons were taught to these Durham boys at these Monday morning
+interviews, and have descended to us in tradition; and the good Mr.
+Chauncey stands out a shining light of Christian patience and forbearance
+at a time when every other New England minister, from John Cotton down,
+preached and practised the stern repression and sharp correction of all
+children, and chanted together in solemn chorus, "Foolishness is bound up
+in the heart of a child."</p>
+
+<p>One vicious tithingman invented, and was allowed to exercise on the boys,
+a punishment which was the refinement of cruelty. He walked up to the
+laughing, sporting, or whittling boy, took him by the collar or the arm,
+led him ostentatiously across the meeting-house, and seated him by his
+shamefaced mother on the women's side. It was as if one grandly proud in
+kneebreeches should be forced to walk abroad in petticoats. Far rather
+would the disgraced boy have been whacked soundly with the heavy knob of
+the tithingman's staff; for bodily pain is soon forgotten, while mortifying
+abasement lingers long.</p>
+
+<p>The tithingman could also take any older youth who misbehaved or "acted
+unsivill" in meeting from his manly seat with the grown men, and force him
+to sit again with the boys; "if any over sixteen are disorderly, they shall
+be ordered to said seats." Not only could these men of authority keep the
+boys in order during meeting, but they also had full control during the
+nooning, and repressed and restrained and vigorously corrected the luckless
+boys during the midday hours. When seats in the galleries grew to be
+regarded as inferior to seats and pews on the ground floor, the boys, who
+of course must have the worst place in the house, were relegated from the
+pulpit stairs to pews in the gallery, and these square, shut-off pews grew
+to be what Dr. Porter called "the Devil's play-houses," and turbulent
+outbursts were frequent enough.</p>
+
+<p>The little boys still sat downstairs under their parents' watchful eyes.
+"No child under 10 alowed to go up Gailary." In the Sutherland church, if
+the big boys (who ought to have known better) "behaved unseemly," one of
+the tithing-men who "took turns to set in the Galary" was ordered "to bring
+Such Bois out of the Galary &amp; set them before the Deacon's Seat" with the
+small boys. In Plainfield, Connecticut, the "pestigeous" boys managed to
+invent a new form of annoyance,--they "damnified the glass;" and a church
+regulation had to be passed to prevent, or rather to try to prevent them
+from "opening the windows or in any way damnifying the glass." It was
+doubtless hot work scuffling and wrestling in the close, shut-in pews high
+up under the roof, and they naturally wished to cool down by opening or
+breaking the windows. Grown persons could not inconsiderately open the
+church windows either. "The Constables are desired to <i>take notic</i>
+of the persons that open the windows in the tyme of publick worship." No
+rheumatic-y draughts, no bronchitis-y damps, no pure air was allowed to
+enter the New England meeting-house. The church doubtless took a vote
+before it allowed a single window to be opened.</p>
+
+<p>In Westfield, Massachusetts, the boys became so abominably rampant that the
+church formally decided "that if there is not a Reformation Respecting
+the Disorders in the Pews built on the Great Beam in the time of Publick
+Worship the comite can pul it down."</p>
+
+<p>The fashion of seating the boys in pews by themselves was slow of
+abolishment in many of the churches. In Windsor, Connecticut, "boys' pews"
+were a feature of the church until 1845. As years rolled on, the tithingmen
+became restricted in their authority: they could no longer administer "raps
+and blows;" they were forced to content themselves with loud rappings on
+the floor, and pointing with a staff or with a condemning finger at the
+misdemeanant. At last the deacons usurped these functions, and if rapping
+and pointing did not answer the purpose of establishing order (if the boy
+"psisted"), led the stubborn offender out of meeting; and they had full
+authority soundly to thrash the "wretched boy" on the horse-block. Rev. Dr.
+Dakin tells the story that, hearing a terrible noise and disturbance while
+he was praying in a church in Quincy, he felt constrained to open his eyes
+to ascertain the cause thereof; and he beheld a red-haired boy firmly
+clutching the railing on the front edge of the gallery, while a venerable
+deacon as firmly clutched the boy. The young rebel held fast, and the
+correcting deacon held fast also, until at last the balustrade gave way,
+and boy, deacon, and railing fell together with a resounding crash.
+Then, rising from the wooden debris, the thoroughly subdued boy and the
+triumphant deacon left the meeting-house to finish their little affair;
+and unmistakable swishing sounds, accompanied by loud wails and whining
+protestations, were soon heard from the region of the horse-sheds. Parents
+never resented such chastisings; it was expected, and even desired,
+that boys should be whipped freely by every school-master and person of
+authority who chose so to do.</p>
+
+<p>In some old church-orders for seating, boys were classed with negroes,
+and seated with them; but in nearly all towns the negroes had seats by
+themselves. The black women were all seated on a long bench or in an
+inclosed pew labelled "B.W.," and the negro men in one labelled "B.M." One
+William Mills, a jesting soul, being asked by a pompous stranger where he
+could sit in meeting, told the visitor that he was welcome to sit in Bill
+Mills's pew, and that it was marked "B.M." The man, who chanced to be
+ignorant of the local custom of marking the negro seats, accepted the kind
+invitation, and seated himself in the black men's pew, to the delight of
+Bill Mills, the amusement of the boys, the scandal of the elders, and his
+own disgust.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a little pew or short gallery was built high up among the beams
+and joists over the staircase which led to the first gallery, and was
+called the "swallows' nest," or the "roof pue," or the "second gallery." It
+was reached by a steep, ladder-like staircase, and was often assigned to
+the negroes and Indians of the congregation.</p>
+
+<p>Often "ye seat between ye Deacons seat and ye pulpit is for persons hard of
+hearing to sett in." In nearly every meeting a bench or pew full of aged
+men might be seen near the pulpit, and this seat was called, with Puritan
+plainness of speech, the "Deaf Pew." Some very deaf church members (when
+the boys were herded elsewhere) sat on the pulpit stairs, and even in the
+pulpit, alongside the preacher, where they disconcertingly upturned their
+great tin ear-trumpets directly in his face. The persistent joining in the
+psalm-singing by these deaf old soldiers and farmers was one of the bitter
+trials which the leader of the choir had to endure.</p>
+
+<p>The singers' seats were usually in the galleries; sometimes upon the ground
+floor, in the "hind-row on either side." Occasionally the choir sat in two
+rows of seats that extended quite across the floor of the house, in front
+of the deacons' seat and the pulpit. The men singers then sat facing the
+congregation, while the women singers faced the pulpit. Between them ran a
+long rack for the psalm-books. When they sang they stood up, and bawled and
+fugued in each other's faces. Often a square pew was built for the singers,
+and in the centre of this enclosure was a table, on which were laid, when
+at rest, the psalm-books. When they sang, the choir thus formed a hollow
+square, as does any determined band, for strength.</p>
+
+<p>One other seat in the old Puritan meeting-house, a seat of gloom,
+still throws its darksome shadow down through the years,--the stool of
+repentance. "Barbarous and cruel punishments" were forbidden by the
+statutes of the new colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking,
+sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat,
+crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long
+Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled
+and godly congregation, and the cold rebuke of the pious minister's averted
+face; bearing on the poor sinful head a deep-branding paper inscribed in
+"Capitall Letters" with the name of some dark or mysterious crime, or
+wearing on the sleeve some strange and dread symbol, or on the breast a
+scarlet letter.</p>
+
+<p>Let us thank God that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures--so
+degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,--these foul,
+in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never
+frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long time. In 1681
+two women were sentenced to sit during service on a high stool in the
+middle alley of the Salem meeting-house, having on their heads a paper
+bearing the name of their crime; and a woman in Agamenticus at about the
+same date was ordered "to stand in a white sheet publicly two several
+Sabbath-Days with the mark of her offence on her forehead." These are the
+latest records of this punishment that I have chanced to see.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, from old church and town records, we plainly discover that each laic,
+deacon, elder, criminal, singer, and even the ungodly boy had his alloted
+place as absolutely assigned to him in the old meeting-house as was the
+pulpit to the parson. Much has been said in semi-ridicule of this old
+custom of "seating" and "dignifying," yet it did not in reality differ much
+from our modern way of selling the best pews to whoever will pay the most.
+Perhaps the old way was the better, since, in the early churches, age,
+education, dignity, and reputation were considered as well as wealth.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap06"></a>VI</h1>
+
+<h2>The Tithingman and the Sleepers.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The most grotesque, the most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure
+in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly
+burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of
+incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of
+monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early
+New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy,
+pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed
+with dangling foxtails,--creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the
+quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the
+drowsy sleepers; for they slept in country churches in the seventeenth
+century, notwithstanding dread of fierce correction, just as they nod
+and doze and softly puff, unawakened and unrebuked, in village churches
+throughout New England in the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>This absurd and distorted type of the English church beadle, this colonial
+sleep banisher, was equipped with a long staff, heavily knobbed at one end,
+with which he severely and pitilessly rapped the heads of the too sleepy
+men, and the too wide-awake boys. From the other end of this wand of office
+depended a long foxtail, or a hare's-foot, which he softly thrust in the
+faces of the sleeping Priscillas, Charitys, and Hopestills, and which
+gently brushed and tickled them into reverent but startled wakefulness.</p>
+
+<p>One zealous but too impetuous tithingman in his pious ardor of office
+inadvertently applied the wrong end, the end with the heavy knob, the
+masculine end, to a drowsy matron's head; and for this severely ungallant
+mistake he was cautioned by the ruling elders to thereafter use "more
+discresing and less heist."</p>
+
+<p>Another over-watchful Newbury "awakener" rapped on the head a nodding man
+who protested indignantly that he was wide-awake, and was only bowing in
+solemn assent and approval of the minister's arguments. Roger Scott, of
+Lynn, in 1643 struck the tithingman who thus roughly and suddenly wakened
+him; and poor sleepy and bewildered Roger, who is branded through all time
+as "a common sleeper at the publick exercise," was, for this most naturally
+resentful act, but also most shockingly grave offence, soundly whipped, as
+a warning both to keep awake and not to strike back in meeting.</p>
+
+<p>Obadiah Turner, of Lynn, gives in his Journal a sad, sad disclosure of
+total depravity which was exposed by one of these sudden church-awakenings,
+and the story is best told in the journalist's own vivid words:--</p>
+
+<p>"June 3, 1616.--Allen Bridges hath bin chose to wake ye sleepers in
+meeting. And being much proude of his place, must needs have a fox taile
+fixed to ye ende of a long staff wherewith he may brush ye faces of them yt
+will have napps in time of discourse, likewise a sharpe thorne whereby he
+may pricke such as be most sound. On ye last Lord his day, as hee strutted
+about ye meeting-house, he did spy Mr. Tomlins sleeping with much comfort,
+hys head kept steadie by being in ye corner, and his hand grasping ye rail.
+And soe spying, Allen did quickly thrust his staff behind Dame Ballard and
+give him a grievous prick upon ye hand. Whereupon Mr. Tomlins did spring
+vpp mch above ye floore, and with terrible force strike hys hand against
+ye wall; and also, to ye great wonder of all, prophanlie exclaim in a loud
+voice, curse ye wood-chuck, he dreaming so it seemed yt a wood-chuck had
+seized and bit his hand. But on coming to know where he was, and ye greate
+scandall he had committed, he seemed much abashed, but did not speak. And I
+think he will not soon again goe to sleepe in meeting."</p>
+
+<p>How clear the picture! Can you not see it?--the warm June sunlight
+streaming in through the narrow, dusty windows of the old meeting-house;
+the armed watcher at the door; the Puritan men and women in their
+sad-colored mantles seated sternly upright on the hard narrow benches; the
+black-gowned minister, the droning murmur of whose sleepy voice mingles
+with the out-door sounds of the rustle of leafy branches, the song of
+summer birds, the hum of buzzing insects, and the muffled stamping of
+horses' feet; the restless boys on the pulpit-stairs; the tired, sleeping
+Puritan with his head thrown back in the corner of the pew; the vain,
+strutting, tithingman with his fantastic and thorn&eacute;d staff of office; and
+then--the sudden, electric wakening, and the consternation of the whole
+staid and pious congregation at such terrible profanity in the house of
+God. Ah!--it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the
+quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all
+well, just as I saw it last summer in June.</p>
+
+<p>Another catastrophe from too fierce zeal on the part of the tithingman
+is recorded. An old farmer, worn out with a hard Saturday's work at
+sheep-washing, fell asleep ere the hour-glass had once been turned. Though
+he was a man of dignity, for he sat in his own pew, he could not escape the
+rod of the pragmatical tithingman. Being rudely disturbed, but not wholly
+wakened, the bewildered sheep-farmer sprung to his feet, seized his
+astonished and mortified wife by the shoulders and shook her violently,
+shouting at the top of his voice, "Haw back! haw back! Stand still, will
+ye?" Poor goodman and goodwife! many years elapsed ere they recovered from
+that keen disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>The ministers encouraged and urged the tithingmen to faithfully perform
+their allotted work. One early minister "did not love sleepers in ye
+meeting-house, and would stop short in ye exercise and call pleasantlie to
+wake ye sleepers, and once of a warm Summer afternoon he did take hys hat
+off from ye pegg in ye beam, and put it on, saying he would go home and
+feed his fowles and come back again, and maybe their sleepe would be ended,
+and they readie to hear ye remainder of hys discourse." Another time he
+suggested that they might like better the Church of England service of
+sitting down and standing up, and we can be sure that this "was competent
+to keepe their eyes open for a twelvemonth."</p>
+
+<p>All this was in the church of Mr. Whiting, of Lynn, a somewhat jocose
+Puritan,--if jocularity in a Puritan is not too anomalous an attribute
+to have ever existed. We can be sure that there was neither sleeping nor
+jesting allusion to such an irreverence in Mr. Mather's, Mr. Welde's, or
+Mr. Cotton's meetings. In many rigidly severe towns, as in Portsmouth in
+1662 and in Boston in 1667, it was ordered by the selectmen as a proper
+means of punishment that a "cage be made or some other means invented for
+such as sleepe on the Lord's Daie." Perhaps they woke the offender up and
+rudely and summarily dragged him out and caged him at once and kept him
+thus prisoned throughout the nooning,--a veritable jail-bird.</p>
+
+<p>A rather unconventional and eccentric preacher in Newbury awoke one sleeper
+in a most novel manner. The first name of the sleeping man was Mark, and
+the preacher in his sermon made use of these Biblical words: "I say unto
+you, mark the perfect man and behold the upright." But in the midst of his
+low, monotonous sermon-voice he roared out the word "mark" in a loud shout
+that brought the dozing Mark to his feet, bewildered but wide awake.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Moody, of York, Maine, employed a similar device to awaken and mortify
+the sleepers in meeting. He shouted "Fire, fire, fire!" and when the
+startled and blinking men jumped up, calling out "Where?" he roared back in
+turn, "In hell, for sleeping sinners." Rev. Mr. Phillips, of Andover, in
+1755, openly rebuked his congregation for "sleeping away a great part of
+the sermon;" and on the Sunday following an earthquake shock which was felt
+throughout New England, he said he hoped the "Glorious Lord of the Sabbath
+had given them such a shaking as would keep them awake through one
+sermon-time." Other and more autocratic parsons did not hesitate to call
+out their sleeping parishioners plainly by name, sternly telling them also
+to "Wake up!" A minister in Brunswick, Maine, thus pointedly wakened one of
+his sweet-sleeping church-attendants, a man of some dignity and standing
+in the community, and received the shocking and tautological answer, "Mind
+your own business, and go on with your sermon."</p>
+
+<p>The women would sometimes nap a little without being discovered. "Ye women
+may sometimes sleepe and none know by reason of their enormous bonnets. Mr.
+Whiting doth pleasantlie say from ye pulpit hee doth seeme to be preaching
+to stacks of straw with men among them."</p>
+
+<p>From this seventeenth-century comment upon the size of the women's bonnets,
+it may be seen that objections to women's overwhelming and obscuring
+headgear in public assemblies are not entirely complaining protests of
+modern growth. Other records refer to the annoyance from the exaggerated
+size of bonnets. In 1769 the church in Andover openly "put to vote whether
+the parish Disapprove of the Female sex sitting with their Hats on in the
+Meeting-house in time of Divine Service as being Indecent." The parish did
+Disapprove, with a capital D, for the vote passed in the affirmative. There
+is no record, however, to tell whether the Indecent fashion was abandoned,
+but I warrant no tithingman was powerful enough to make Andover women take
+off their proudly worn Sunday bonnets if they did not want to. Another town
+voted that it was the "Town's Mind" that the women should take off their
+bonnets and "hang them on the peggs," as did the men their headgear. But
+the Town's Mind was not a Woman's Mind; and the big-bonnet wearers, vain
+though they were Puritans, did as they pleased with their own bonnets.
+And indeed, in spite of votes and in spite of expostulations, the female
+descendants of the Puritans, through constantly recurring waves of fashion,
+have ever since been indecently wearing great obscuring hats and bonnets in
+public assemblies, even up to the present day.</p>
+
+<p>The tithingman had other duties than awakening the sleepers and looking
+after "the boyes that playes and rapping those boyes,"--in short, seeing
+that every one was attentive in meeting except himself,--and the duties
+and powers of the office varied in different communities. Several of these
+officers were appointed in each parish. In Newbury, in 1688, there were
+twenty tithingmen, and in Salem twenty-five. They were men of authority,
+not only on Sunday, but throughout the entire week. Each had several
+neighboring families (usually ten, as the word "tithing" would signify)
+under his charge to watch during the week, to enforce the learning of the
+catechism at home, especially by the children, and sometimes he heard them
+"Say their Chatachize." These families he also watched specially on the
+Sabbath, and reported whether all the members thereof attended public
+worship. Not content with mounting guard over the boys on Sundays, he also
+watched on weekdays to keep boys and "all persons from swimming in the
+water." Do you think his duties were light in July and August, when school
+was out, to watch the boys of ten families? One man watching one family
+cannot prevent such "violations of the peace" in country towns now-a-days.
+He sometimes inspected the "ordinaries" and made complaint of any disorders
+which he there discovered, and gave in the names of "idle tiplers and
+gamers," and he could warn the tavern-keeper to sell no more liquor to any
+toper whom he knew or fancied was drinking too heavily. Josselyn complained
+bitterly that during his visit to New England in 1663 at "houses of
+entertainment called ordinaries into which a stranger went, he was
+presently followed by one appointed to that office who would thrust himself
+into his company uninvited, and if he called for more drink than the
+officer thought in his judgment he could soberly bear away, he would
+presently countermand it, and appoint the proportion beyond which he could
+not get one drop." The tithingman had a "spetial eye-out" on all bachelors,
+who were also carefully spied upon by the constables, deacons, elders,
+and heads of families in general. He might, perhaps, help to collect the
+ministerial rate, though his principal duty was by no means the collecting
+of tithes. He "worned peple out of ye towne." This warning was not at all
+because the new-comers were objectionable or undesired, but was simply a
+legal form of precaution, so that the parish would never be liable for the
+keeping of the "worned" ones in case they thereafter became paupers. He
+administered the "oath of fidelity" to new inhabitants. The tithingman
+also watched to see that "no young people walked abroad on the eve of the
+Sabbath,"--that is, on a Saturday night. He also marked and reported all
+those "who lye at home," and others who "prophanely behaved, lingered
+without dores at meeting time on the Lordes Daie," all the "sons of Belial
+strutting about, setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the
+day." These last two classes of offenders were first admonished by the
+tithingman, then "Sett in stocks," and then cited before the Court. They
+were also confined in the cage on the meeting-house green, with the Lord's
+Day sleepers. The tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode at too
+fast a pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who "walked or
+rode unnecessarily on the Sabath." Great and small alike were under his
+control, as this notice from the "Columbian Centinel" of December, 1789,
+abundantly proves. It is entitled "The President and the Tything man:"--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"The President, on his return to New York from his late tour through
+    Connecticut, having missed his way on Saturday, was obliged to ride a
+    few miles on Sunday morning in order to gain the town at which he had
+    previously proposed to have attended divine service. Before he arrived
+    however he was met by a Tything man, who commanding him to stop,
+    demanded the occasion of his riding; and it was not until the President
+    had informed him of every circumstance and promised to go no further
+    than the town intended that the Tything man would permit him to proceed
+    on his journey."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Various were the subterfuges to outwit the tithingman and elude his
+vigilance on the Sabbath. We all remember the amusing incident in "Oldtown
+Folks." A similar one really happened. Two gay young sparks driving through
+the town on the Sabbath were stopped by the tithingman; one offender said
+mournfully in excuse of his Sabbath travel, "My grandmother is lying dead
+in the next town." Being allowed to drive on, he stood up in his wagon when
+at a safe distance and impudently shouted back, "And she's been lying dead
+in the graveyard there for thirty years."</p>
+
+<p>Thus it may be seen that the ancient tithingman was pre-eminently a general
+<i>snook</i>, to use an old and expressive word,--an informer, both in and
+out of meeting,--a very necessary, but somewhat odious, and certainly at
+times very absurd officer. He was in a degree a constable, a selectman, a
+teacher, a tax-collector, an inspector, a sexton, a home-watcher, and above
+all, a Puritan Bumble, whose motto was <i>Hie et ubique</i>. He was, in
+fact, a general law-enforcer and order-keeper, whose various duties,
+wherever still necessary and still performed, are now apportioned to
+several individuals. The ecclesiastical functions and authority of the
+tithingman lingered long after the civil powers had been removed or had
+gradually passed away from his office. Persons are now living who in their
+early and unruly youth were rapped at and pointed at by a New England
+tithingman when they laughed or were noisy in meeting.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap07"></a>VII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Length of the Service.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Watches were unknown in the early colonial days of New England, and for a
+long time after their introduction both watches and clocks were costly and
+rare. John Davenport of New Haven, who died in 1670, left a clock to his
+heirs; and E. Needham, who died in 1677, left a "Striking clock, a watch,
+and a Larum that dus not Strike," worth &pound;5; these are perhaps the first
+records of the ownership of clocks and watches in New England. The time of
+the day was indicated to our forefathers in their homes by "noon marks" on
+the floor or window-seats, and by picturesque sundials; and in the
+civil and religious meetings the passage of time was marked by a strong
+brass-bound hour-glass, which stood on a desk below or beside the pulpit,
+or which was raised on a slender iron rod and standard, so that all the
+members of the congregation could easily watch "the sands that ran i' the
+clock's behalf." By the side of the desk sat, on the Sabbath, a sexton,
+clerk, or tithingman, whose duty it was to turn the hour-glass as often
+as the sands ran out. This was a very ostentatious way of reminding the
+clergyman how long he had preached; but if it were a hint to bring the
+discourse to an end, it was never heeded; for contemporary historical
+registers tell of most painfully long sermons, reaching up through long
+sub-divisions and heads to "twenty-seventhly" and "twenty-eighthly."</p>
+
+<p>At the planting of the first church in Woburn, Massachusetts, the Rev.
+Mr. Symmes showed his godliness and endurance (and proved that of his
+parishioners also) by preaching between four and five hours. Sermons which
+occupied two or three hours were customary enough. One old Scotch clergyman
+in Vermont, in the early years of this century, bitterly and fiercely
+resented the "popish innovation and Sabbath profanation" of a Sunday-school
+for the children, which some daring and progressive parishioners proposed
+to hold at the "nooning." This canny Parson Whiteinch very craftily and
+somewhat maliciously prolonged his morning sermons until they each occupied
+three hours; thus he shortened the time between the two services to about
+half an hour, and victoriously crowded out the Sunday-school innovators,
+who had barely time to eat their cold lunch and care for their waiting
+horses, ere it was time for the afternoon service to begin. But one man
+cannot stop the tide, though he may keep it for a short time from one
+guarded and sheltered spot; and the rebellious Vermont congregation, after
+two or three years of tedious three-hour sermons, arose in a body and
+crowded out the purposely prolix preacher, and established the wished-for
+Sunday-school. The vanquished parson thereafter sullenly spent the noonings
+in the horse-shed, to which he ostentatiously carried the big church-Bible
+in order that it might not be at the service of the profaning teachers.</p>
+
+<p>An irreverent caricature of the colonial days represents a phenomenally
+long-preaching clergyman as turning the hour-glass by the side of his
+pulpit and addressing his congregation thus, "Come! you are all good
+fellows, we'll take another glass together!" It is recorded of Rev. Urian
+Oakes that often the hour-glass was turned four times during one of his
+sermons. The warning legend, "Be Short," which Cotton Mather inscribed over
+his study door was not written over his pulpit; for he wrote in his diary
+that at his own ordination he prayed for an hour and a quarter, and
+preached for an hour and three quarters. Added to the other ordination
+exercises these long Mather addresses must have been tiresome enough.
+Nathaniel Ward deplored at that time, "Wee have a strong weakness in New
+England that when wee are speaking, wee know not how to conclude: wee make
+many ends before wee make an end."</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Lord of Norwich always made a prayer which was one hour long; and an
+early Dutch traveller who visited New England asserted that he had heard
+there on Fast Day a prayer which was two hours long. These long prayers
+were universal and most highly esteemed,--a "poor gift in prayer" being a
+most deplored and even despised clerical short-coming. Had not the Puritans
+left the Church of England to escape "stinted prayers"? Whitefield prayed
+openly for Parson Barrett of Hopkinton, who could pray neither freely, nor
+well, that "God would open this dumb dog's mouth;" and everywhere in the
+Puritan Church, precatory eloquence as evinced in long prayers was felt to
+be the greatest glory of the minister, and the highest tribute to God.</p>
+
+<p>In nearly all the churches the assembled people stood during prayer-time
+(since kneeling and bowing the head savored of Romish idolatry) and in the
+middle of his petition the minister usually made a long pause in order that
+any who were infirm or ill might let down their slamming pew-seats and sit
+down; those who were merely weary stood patiently to the long and painfully
+deferred end. This custom of standing during prayer-time prevailed in the
+Congregational churches in New England until quite a recent date, and is
+not yet obsolete in isolated communities and in solitary cases. I have seen
+within a few years, in a country church, a feeble, white-haired old deacon
+rise tremblingly at the preacher's solemn words "Let us unite in prayer,"
+and stand with bowed head throughout the long prayer; thus pathetically
+clinging to the reverent custom of the olden time, he rendered tender
+tribute to vanished youth, gave equal tribute to eternal hope and faith,
+and formed a beautiful emblem of patient readiness for the last solemn
+summons.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes tedious expounding of the Scriptures and long "prophesying"
+lengthened out the already too long service. Judge Sewall recorded that
+once when he addressed or expounded at the Plymouth Church, "being afraid
+to look at the glass, ignorantly and unwittingly I stood two hours and a
+half," which was doing pretty well for a layman.</p>
+
+<p>The members of the early churches did not dislike these long preachings and
+prophesyings; they would have regarded a short sermon as irreligious,
+and lacking in reverence, and besides, would have felt that they had not
+received in it their full due, their full money's worth. They often fell
+asleep and were fiercely awakened by the tithingman, and often they could
+not have understood the verbose and grandiose language of the preacher.
+They were in an icy-cold atmosphere in winter, and in glaring, unshaded
+heat in summer, and upon most uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at
+all seasons; but in every record and journal which I have read, throughout
+which ministers and laymen recorded all the annoyances and opposition which
+the preachers encountered, I have never seen one entry of any complaint or
+ill-criticism of too long praying or preaching. Indeed, when Rev. Samuel
+Torrey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, prayed two hours without stopping, upon
+a public Fast Day in 1696, it is recorded that his audience only wished
+that the prayer had been much longer.</p>
+
+<p>When we consider the training and exercise in prayer that the New England
+parsons had in their pulpits on Sundays, in their own homes on Saturday
+nights, on Lecture Days and Fast Days and Training Days, and indeed upon
+all times and occasions, can we wonder at Parson Boardman's prowess in New
+Milford in 1735? He visited a "praying" Indian's home wherein lay a sick
+papoose over whom a "pow-wow" was being held by a medicine-man at the
+request of the squaw-mother, who was still a heathen. The Christian warrior
+determined to fight the Indian witch-doctor on his own grounds, and while
+the medicine-man was screaming and yelling and dancing in order to cast the
+devil out ol the child, the parson began to pray with equal vigor and power
+of lungs to cast out the devil of a medicine-man. As the prayer and
+pow-wow proceeded the neighboring Indians gathered around, and soon became
+seriously alarmed for the success of their prophet. The battle raged for
+three hours, when the pow-wow ended, and the disgusted and exhausted Indian
+ran out of the wigwam and jumped into the Housatonic River to cool his
+heated blood, leaving the Puritan minister triumphant in the belief, and
+indeed with positive proof, that he could pray down any man or devil.</p>
+
+<p>The colonists could not leave the meeting-house before the long sen ices
+were ended, even had they wished, for the tithingman allowed no deserters.
+In Salem, in 1676, it was "ordered by ye Selectmen yt the three Constables
+doe attend att ye three greate doores of ye meeting-house every Lordes Day
+att ye end of ye sermon, both forenoone and afternoone, and to keep ye
+doores fast and suffer none to goe out before ye whole exercises bee
+ended." Thus Salem people had to listen to no end of praying and
+prophesying from their ministers and elders for they "couldn't get out."</p>
+
+<p>As the years passed on, the church attendants became less referential and
+much more impatient and fearless, and soon after the Revolutionary War one
+man in Medford made a bargain with his minister--Rev. Dr. Osgood--that he
+would attend regularly the church services every Sunday morning, provided
+he could always leave at twelve o'clock. On each Sabbath thereafter, as
+the obstinate preacher would not end his sermon one minute sooner than
+his habitual time, which was long after twelve, the equally stubborn
+limited-time worshipper arose at noon, as he had stipulated, and stalked
+noisily out of meeting.</p>
+
+<p>A minister about to preach in a neighboring parish was told of a custom
+which prevailed there of persons who lived at a distance rising and leaving
+the house ere the sermon was ended. He determined to teach them a lesson,
+and announced that he would preach the first part of his sermon to the
+sinners, and the latter part to the saints, and that the sinners would of
+course all leave as soon as their portion had been delivered. Every soul
+remained until the end of the service.</p>
+
+<p>At last, when other means of entertainment and recreation than church-going
+became common, and other forms of public addresses than sermons were
+frequently given, New England church-goers became so restless and
+rebellious under the regime of hour-long prayers and indefinitely
+protracted sermons that the long services were gradually condensed and
+curtailed, to the relief of both preacher and hearers.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap08"></a>VIII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>In colonial days in New England the long and tedious services must have
+been hard to endure in the unheated churches in bitter winter weather, so
+bitter that, as Judge Sewall pathetically recorded, "The communion bread
+was frozen pretty hard and rattled sadly into the plates." Sadly down
+through the centuries is ringing in our ears the gloomy rattle of that
+frozen sacramental bread on the Church plate, telling to us the solemn
+story of the austere and comfortless church-life of our ancestors. Would
+that the sound could bring to our chilled hearts the same steadfast and
+pure Christian faith that made their gloomy, freezing services warm with
+God's loving presence!</p>
+
+<p>Again Judge Sewall wrote: "Extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow. Blows
+much more as coming home at Noon, and so holds on. Bread was frozen at
+Lord's Table. Though 't was so cold John Tuckerman was baptized. At six
+o'clock my ink freezes, so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my
+Wives chamber. Yet was very Comfortable at Meeting." In the penultimate
+sentence of this quotation may be found the clue and explanation of the
+seemingly incredible assertion in the last sentence. The reason why he was
+comfortable in church was that he was accustomed to sit in cold rooms; even
+with the great open-mouthed and open-chimneyed fireplaces full of blazing
+logs, so little heat entered the rooms of colonial dwelling-houses that one
+could not be warm unless fairly within the chimney-place; and thus, even
+while sitting by the fire, his ink froze. Another entry of Judge Sewall's
+tells of an exceeding cold day when there was "Great Coughing" in meeting,
+and yet a new-born baby was brought into the icy church to be baptized.
+Children were always carried to the meeting-house for baptism the first
+Sunday after birth, even in the most bitter weather. There are no entries
+in Judge Sewall's diary which exhibit him in so lovable and gentle a light
+as the records of the baptism of his fourteen children,--his pride when
+the child did not cry out or shrink from the water in the freezing winter
+weather, thus early showing true Puritan fortitude; and also his noble
+resolves and hopes for their future. On this especially cold day when a
+baby was baptized, the minister prayed for a mitigation of the weather,
+and on the same day in another town "Rev. Mr. Wigglesworth preached on the
+text, Who can stand before His Cold? Then by his own and people's sickness
+three Sabbaths passed without public Worship." February 20 he preached from
+these words: "He sends forth his word and thaws them." And the very next
+day a thaw set in which was regarded as a direct answer to his prayer and
+sermon. Sceptics now-a-days would suggest that he chose well the time to
+pray for milder weather.</p>
+
+<p>Many persons now living can remember the universal and noisy turning up
+of great-coat collars, the swinging of arms, and knocking together of the
+heavy-booted feet of the listeners towards the end of a long winter sermon.
+Dr. Hopkins used to say, when the noisy tintamarre began, "My hearers, have
+a little patience, and I will soon close."</p>
+
+<p>Another clergyman was irritated beyond endurance by the stamping,
+clattering feet, a <i>supplosio pedis</i> that he regarded as an irreverent
+protest and complaint against the severity of the weather, rather than as a
+hint to him to conclude his long sermon. He suddenly and noisily closed his
+sermon-book, leaned forward out of his high pulpit, and thundered out these
+Biblical words of rebuke at his freezing congregation, whose startled faces
+stared up at him through dense clouds of vapor. "Out of whose womb came the
+ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are
+hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Knowest thou the
+ordinance of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?
+Great things doth God which we cannot comprehend. He saith to the snow, Be
+thou on the earth. By the breath of God frost is given. He causeth it to
+come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. Hearken unto
+this. <i>Stand still</i>, and consider the wondrous works of God." We can
+believe that he roared out the words "stand still," and that there was no
+more noise in that meeting-house on cold Sundays during the remainder of
+that winter.</p>
+
+<p>The ministers might well argue that no one suffered more from the freezing
+atmosphere than they did. In many records I find that they were forced to
+preach and pray with their hands cased in woollen or fur mittens or heavy
+knit gloves; and they wore long camlet cloaks in the pulpit and covered
+their heads with skull caps--as did Judge Sewall--and possibly wore, as he
+did also, a <i>hood</i>. Many a wig-hating minister must, in the Arctic
+meeting-house, have longed secretly for the grateful warmth to his head and
+neck of one of those "horrid Bushes of Vanity," a full-bottomed flowing
+wig.</p>
+
+<p>On bitter winter days Dr. Stevens of Kittery used to send a servant to the
+meeting-house to find out how many of his flock had braved the piercing
+blasts. If only seven persons were present, the servant asked them to
+return with him to the parsonage to listen to the sermon; but if there were
+eight members in the meeting-house he so reported to the Doctor, who then
+donned his long worsted cloak, tied it around his waist with a great
+handkerchief, and attired thus, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears,
+and with heavy mittens on his hands, ploughed through the deep snow to
+the church, and in the same dress preached his long, knotty sermon in
+his pulpit, while fierce wintry blasts rattled the windows and shook the
+turret, and the eight godly, shivering souls wished profoundly that one of
+their number had "lain at home in a slothfull, lazey, prophane way," and
+thus permitted the seven others and the minister to have the sermon in
+comfort in the parsonage kitchen before the great blazing logs in the open
+fireplace.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, it makes one shiver even to think of those gloomy churches, growing
+colder, and more congealed through weeks of heavy frost and fierce
+northwesters until they bore the chill of death itself. One can but
+wonder whether that fell scourge of New England, that hereditary
+curse--consumption--did not have its first germs evolved and nourished in
+our Puritan ancestors by the Spartan custom of sitting through the long
+winter services in the icy, death-like meeting-houses.</p>
+
+<p>Of the insufficient clothing of the church attendants of olden times it
+is unnecessary to speak with much detail. The goodmen with their heavy
+top-boots or jack-boots, their milled or frieze stockings, their warm
+periwigs surmounted by fur caps or beaver hats or hoods; and with their
+many-caped great-coats or full round cloaks were dressed with a sufficient
+degree of comfort, though they did not possess the warm woollen and silken
+underclothing which now make a man's winter attire so comfortable. They
+carried muffs too, as the advertisements of the times show. The "Boston
+News Letter" of 1716 offers a reward for a man's muff lost on the Sabbath
+day in the street. In 1725 Dr. Prince lost his black bearskin muff, and in
+1740 a "sableskin man's muff" was advertised as having been lost.</p>
+
+<p>But the Puritan goodwives and maidens were dressed in a meagre and scanty
+fashion that when now considered seems fairly appalling. As soon as
+the colonies grew in wealth and fashion, thin silk or cotton hose were
+frequently worn in midwinter by the wives and daughters of well-to-do
+colonists; and correspondingly thin cloth or kid or silk slippers,
+high-channelled pumps, or low shoes with paper soles and "cross-cut" or
+wooden heels were the holiday and Sabbath-day covering for the feet. In wet
+weather clogs and pattens formed an extra and much needed protection
+when the fair colonists walked. Linen underclothing formed the first
+superstructure of the feminine costume and threw its penetrating chill to
+the very marrow of the bones. Often in mid-winter the scant-skirted French
+calico gowns were made with short elbow sleeves and round, low necks, and
+the throat and shoulders were lightly covered with thin lawn neckerchiefs
+or dimity tuckers. The flaunting hooped-petticoat of another decade was
+worn with a silk or brocade sacque. A thin cloth cape or mantle or spencer,
+lined with sarcenet silk, was frequently the only covering for the
+shoulders. In examining the treasured contents of old wardrobes, trunks,
+and high-chests, and in reading the descriptions of women's winter attire
+worn throughout the eighteenth and half through the nineteenth century, I
+am convinced that the only portions of Puritan female anatomy that were
+clothed with anything approaching respectable regard for health in the
+inclement New England climate were the head and the hands. The hands of
+"New English dames" were carefully protected with embroidered kid or
+leather gloves (for the early New Englanders were great glove wearers) or
+with warm knit woollen mittens, though mittens for women's wear were
+always fingerless. The well-gloved hands were moreover warmly ensconced in
+enormous stuffed muffs of bearskin which were almost as large as a
+flour barrel, or in smaller muffs of rabbit-skin or mink or beaver. The
+goodwives' heads bore, besides the close caps so universally worn, mufflers
+and veils and hoods,--hoods of all kinds and descriptions, from the hoods
+of serge and camlet and gauze and black silk that Mistress Estabrook, wife
+of the Windham parson, proudly owned and wore, from the prohibited "silk
+and tiffany hoods" of the earliest planters down through the centuries'
+inflorescence of "hoods of crimson colored persian," "wild bore and hum-hum
+long hoods," "pointed velvet capuchins," "scarlet gipsys," "pinnered
+and tasselled hoods," "shirred lustring hoods," "hoods of rich pptuna,"
+"muskmelon hoods," to the warm quilted "punkin hoods" worn within this
+century in country churches. These "punkin-hoods" were quilted with great
+rolls of woollen wadding and drawn tight between the rolls with strong
+cords. They formed a deafening and heating head-covering which always had
+to be loosened and thrust back when the wearer was within doors. It
+was only equalled in shapeless clumsiness and unique ugliness by its
+summer-sister of the same date, the green silk calash,--that funniest and
+quaintest of all New England feminine headgear,--a great sunshade that
+could not be called a bonnet, always made of bright green silk shirred on
+strong lengths of rattan or whalebone, and extendible after the fashion of
+a chaise top. It could be drawn out over the face by a little green ribbon
+or "bridle" that was fastened to the extreme front at the top; or it could
+be pushed in a close-gathered mass on the back of the head These calashes
+were frequently a foot and a half in diameter, and thus stood well up from
+the head and did not disarrange the hair nor crush the headdress or cap.
+They formed a perfect and easily-adjusted shade from the sun. Masks, too,
+the fair Puritans wore to further protect their heads and faces,--masks of
+green silk or black vehet, with silver mouthpieces to place within the lips
+and thus enable the wearer to keep the mask firmly in place. Sometimes two
+little strings with a silver bead at one end were fastened to the mask, and
+seined as mouthpieces. With a string and bead at either corner of the
+mouth the mask-wearer could talk quite freely while still retaining her
+face-covering in its protecting position. These masks were never worn
+within doors. In the list of goods ordered by George Washington from Europe
+for his fair bride Martha were several of these riding-masks, and the kind
+step-father even ordered a supply of small masks for "Miss Custis," his
+little step-daughter.</p>
+
+<p>In bitter winter weather women carried to meeting little
+foot-stoves,--metal boxes which stood on legs and were filled with hot
+coals at home, and a second time during the morning from the hearthstone of
+a neighboring farm-house or a noon-house. These foot-warmers helped to make
+endurable to the goodwives the icy chill of the meeting-house; and round
+their mother's foot-stove the shivering little children sat on their low
+crickets, warming their half-frozen fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Some of these foot-stoves were really pretentious church-furnishings. I
+have seen one "brassen foot-stove" which had the owner's cipher cut out of
+the sheet metal, and from the side was hung a wrought brass chain. By this
+chain, a century ago, the shining polished brass stove was carried into
+church in the hands of a liveried black man, who held it ostentatiously at
+arms' length, that neither ash nor scorch might touch his scarlet velvet
+breeches. And after he had tucked it under my lady's tiny feet as she sat
+in her pew, he retired to his freezing loft high up among the beams,--the
+"Nigger Pew,"--where, I am sorry to record, he more than once solaced and
+warmed himself with a bottle of "kill-devil" which he had smuggled into
+church, until he fell ignominiously asleep and his drunken snores so
+disturbed the minister and the congregation, that two tithingmen were
+forced to climb the ladder-like staircase and pull him down and out of
+the church and to the neighboring tavern to sleep off the effects of the
+liquor. For being "a man and a brother" and, above all, in spite of his
+petty idiosyncrasies, a very good and cherished servant, he could not be
+thrust out into the snow to freeze to death.</p>
+
+<p>But with the extreme Puritan contempt of comfort even foot-stoves were
+not always allowed. The First Church of Roxbury, after having one church
+edifice destroyed by fire in 1747, prohibited the use of footstoves in
+meeting, and the Roxbury matrons sat with frozen toes in their fine new
+meeting-house. The Old South Church of Boston was not so rigid, though it
+felt the same dread of fire; for we find this entry on the records of the
+church under the date of January 10, 1771: "Whereas, danger is apprehended
+from the [foot] stoves that arc frequently left in the meeting-house after
+the publick worship is over; Voted, that the Saxton make diligent search on
+the Lord's Day evening and in the evening after a lecture, to see if any
+stoves are left in the house, and that if he find any there he take them
+to his own house; and it is expected that the owners of such stoves make
+reasonable satisfaction to the Saxton for his trouble before they take them
+away."</p>
+
+<p>In Hardwicke, in 1792, it was ordered that "no stows be carried into our
+new meeting-house with fire in them." The Hardwicke women may have found
+comfort in a contrivance which is thus described in by an "old inhabitant:"</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"There to warm their feet<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Was seen an article now obsolete,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A sort of basket tub of braided straw<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Or husks, in which is placed a heated stone,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Which does half-frozen limbs superbly thaw.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And warms the marrow of the oldest bone."</blockquote>
+
+<p>In some of the early, poorly built log meeting-houses, fur bags made of
+coarse skins, such as wolf-skin, were nailed or tied to the edges of the
+benches, and into these bags the worshippers thrust their feet for warmth.
+In some communities it was the custom for each family to bring on cold days
+its "dogg" to meeting; where, lying at or on his master's feet, he proved
+a source of grateful warmth. These animal stoves became such an abounding
+nuisance, however, that dog-whippers had to be appointed to serve on
+Sundays to drive out the dogs. All through the records of the early
+churches we find such entries as this: "Whatsoever doggs come into the
+meeting-house in time of public worship, their owners shall each pay
+sixpence." Sixpence seems little, but the thrifty and poor Puritans would
+rather freeze their toes than pay sixpence for their calorific dogs.</p>
+
+<p>The church members made many rules and regulations to keep the cold out of
+the meeting-house during service-time, or perhaps we should say to keep the
+wind out. Thus in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1725 it was ordered that the
+"several doors of the meeting-house be taken care of and kept shut in very
+cold and windy seasons according to the lying of the wind from time to
+time; and that people in such windy weather come in at the leeward doors
+only, and take care that they are easily shut both to prevent the breaking
+of the doors and the making of a noise." In other churches it was ordered
+that "no doors be opened to the windward and only one door to the leeward"
+during winter weather.</p>
+
+<p>The first church of Salem built a "cattied chimney twelve feet long" in its
+meeting-house in 1662, but five years later it was removed, perhaps through
+the colonists' dread lest the building be destroyed by a conflagration
+caused by the combustible nature of the materials of which the chimney was
+composed. Felt, in his "Annals of Salem," asserts that the First Church of
+Boston was the first New England congregation to have a stove for heating
+the meeting-house at the time of public worship; this was in 1773. This
+statement is incorrect. Mr. Judd says the Hadley church had an iron stove
+in their meeting-house as early as 1734--the Hadley people were such
+sybarites and novelty-lovers in those early days! The Old South Church of
+Boston followed in the luxurious fashion in 1783, and the "Evening Post"
+of January 25, 1783, contained a poem of which these four lines show the
+criticising and deprecating spirit:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Extinct the sacred fire of love,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Our zeal grown cold and dead,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In the house of God we fix a stove<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To warm us in their stead."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Other New England congregations piously froze during service-time well into
+this century. The Longmeadow church, early in the field, had a stove in
+1810; the Salem people in 1815; and the Medford meeting in 1820. The church
+in Brimfield in 1819 refused to pay for a stove, but ordered as some
+sacrifice to the desire for comfort, two extra doors placed on the
+gallery-stairs to keep out draughts; but when in that town, a few years
+later, a subscription was made to buy a church stove, one old member
+refused to contribute, saying "good preaching kept him hot enough without
+stoves."</p>
+
+<p>As all the church edifices were built without any thought of the
+possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best
+they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually
+placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters,
+there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous
+stove-pipes that too often spread, from every leaky and ill-fastened
+joint, smoke and sooty vapors, and sometimes pyroligneous drippings on the
+congregation. Often tin pails to catch the drippings were hung under the
+stove-pipes, forming a further chaste and elegant church-decoration. Many
+serious objections were made to the stoves besides the aesthetic ones.
+It was alleged that they would be the means of starting many destructive
+conflagrations; that they caused severe headaches in the church attendants;
+and worst of all, that the <i>heat warped the ladies' tortoise-shell
+back-combs</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The church reformers contended, on the other hand, that no one could
+properly receive spiritual comfort while enduring such decided bodily
+discomfort. They hoped that with increased physical warmth, fervor in
+religion would be equally augmented,--that, as Cowper wrote,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The churches warmed, they would no longer hold<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Such frozen figures, stiff as they are cold."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Many were the quarrels and discussions that arose in New England
+communities over the purchase and use of stoves, and many were the meetings
+held and votes taken upon the important subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter Parley"--Mr. Samuel Goodrich--gave, in his "Recollections," a very
+amusing account of the sufferings endured by the wife of an anti-stove
+deacon. She came to church with a look of perfect resignation on the
+Sabbath of the stove's introduction, and swept past the unwelcome intruder
+with averted head, and into her pew. She sat there through the service,
+growing paler with the unaccustomed heat, until the minister's words about
+"heaping coals of fire" brought too keen a sense of the overwhelming and
+unhealthful stove-heat to her mind, and she fainted. She was carried out of
+church, and upon recovering said languidly that it "was the heat from the
+stove." A most complete and sudden resuscitation was effected, however,
+when she was informed of the fact that no fire had as yet been lighted in
+the new church-furnishing.</p>
+
+<p>Similar chronicles exist about other New England churches, and bear a
+striking resemblance to each other. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in an address
+delivered in New York on December 20, 1853, the anniversary of the Landing
+of the Pilgrims, referred to the opposition made to the introduction of
+stoves into the old meeting-house in Litchfield, Connecticut, during the
+ministry of his father, and gave an amusing account of the results of the
+introgression. This allusion called up many reminiscences of anti-stove
+wars, and a writer in the "New York Enquirer" told the same story of the
+fainting woman in Litchfield meeting, who began to fan herself and at
+length swooned, saying when she recovered "that the heat of the horrid
+stove had caused her to faint." A correspondent of the "Cleveland Herald"
+confirmed the fact that the fainting episode occurred in the Litchfield
+meeting-house. The editor of the "Hartford Daily Courant" thus added his
+testimony:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Violent opposition had been made to the introduction of a stove in the
+    old meeting-house, and an attempt made in vain to induce the soc
+    to purchase one. The writer was one of seven young men who finally
+    purchased a stove and requested permission to put it up in the
+    meeting-house on trial. After much difficulty the committee consented.
+    It was all arranged on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday we took our
+    seats in the Bass, rather earlier than usual, to see the fun. It was a
+    warm November Sunday, in which the sun shone cheerfully and warmly on
+    the old south steps and into the naked windows. The stove stood in the
+    middle aisle, rather in front of the Tenor Gallery. People came in and
+    stared. Good old Deacon Trowbridge, one of the most simple-hearted and
+    worthy men of that generation, had, as Mr. Beecher says, been induced
+    to give up his opposition. He shook his head, however, as he felt the
+    heat reflected from it, and gathered up the skirts of his great
+    as he passed up the broad aisle to the deacon's seat. Old Uncle Noah
+    Stone, a wealthy farmer of the West End, who sat near, scowled and
+    muttered at the effects of the heat, but waited until noon to utter his
+    maledictions over his nut-cakes and cheese at the intermission. There
+    had in fact been <i>no fire in the stove</i>, the day being too warm.
+    We were too much upon the broad grin to be very devotional, and smiled
+    rather loudly at the funny things we saw. But when the editor of the
+    village paper, Mr. Bunce, came in (who was a believer in stoves in
+    churches) and with a most satisfactory air warmed his hands by the
+    stove, keeping the skirts of his great-coat carefully between his
+    knees, we could stand it no longer but dropped invisible behind the
+    breastwork. But the climax of the whole was (as the Cleveland man says)
+    when Mrs. Peck went out in the middle of the service. It was, however,
+    the means of reconciling the whole society; for after that first day we
+    heard no more opposition to the warm stove in the meeting-house."</blockquote>
+
+<p>With all this corroborative evidence I think it is fully proved that the
+event really happened in Litchfield, and that the honor was stolen for
+other towns by unveracious chroniclers; otherwise we must believe in an
+amazing unanimity of church-joking and sham-fainting all over New England.</p>
+
+<p>The very nature, the stern, pleasure-hating and trial-glorying Puritan
+nature, which made our forefathers leave their English homes to come, for
+the love of God and the freedom of conscience, to these wild, barren, and
+unwelcoming shores, made them also endure with fortitude and almost with
+satisfaction all personal discomforts, and caused them to cling with
+persistent firmness to such outward symbols of austere contempt of
+luxury, and such narrow-minded signs of love of simplicity as the lack of
+comfortable warmth during the time of public worship. The religion which
+they had endured such bitter hardships to establish, did not, in their
+minds, need any shielding and coddling to keep it alive, but thrived far
+better on Spartan severity and simplicity; hence, it took two centuries of
+gradual and most tardy softening and modifying of character to prepare the
+Puritan mind for so advanced a reform and luxury as proper warmth in the
+meeting-houses in winter.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap09"></a>IX</h1>
+
+<h2>The Noon-House.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>There might have been seen a hundred years ago, by the side of many an old
+meeting-house in New England, a long, low, mean, stable-like building, with
+a rough stone chimney at one end. This was the "noon-house," or "Sabba-day
+house," or "horse-hows," as it was variously called. It was a place of
+refuge in the winter time, at the noon interval between the two services,
+for the half-frozen members of the pious congregation, who found there the
+grateful warmth which the house of God denied. They built in the rude stone
+fireplace a great fire of logs, and in front of the blazing wood ate their
+noon-day meal of cold pie, of doughnuts, of pork and peas, or of brown
+bread with cheese, which they had brought safely packed in their capacious
+saddlebags. The dining-place smelt to heaven of horses, for often at the
+further end of the noon-house were stabled the patient steeds that, doubly
+burdened, had borne the Puritans and their wives to meeting; but this
+stable-odor did not hinder appetite, nor did the warm equine breaths that
+helped to temper the atmosphere of the noon-house offend the senses of the
+sturdy Puritans. From the blazing fire in this "life-saving station" the
+women replenished their little foot-stoves with fresh, hot coals, and thus
+helped to make endurable the icy rigor of the long afternoon service.</p>
+
+<p>If the winter Sabbath Day were specially severe, a "hired-man," or one of
+the grown sons of the family, was sent at an early hour to the noon-house
+in advance of the other church-attendants, and he started in the rough
+fireplace a fire for their welcome after their long, cold, morning ride;
+and before its cheerful blaze they thoroughly warmed themselves before
+entering the icy meeting-house. The embers were carefully covered over
+and left to start a second blaze at the nooning, covered again during the
+afternoon service, and kindled up still a third time to warm the chilled
+worshippers ere they started for their cold ride home in the winter
+twilight. And when the horses were saddled, or were harnessed and hitched
+into the great box-sleighs or "pungs," and when the good Puritans were well
+wrapped up, the dying coals were raked out for safety and the noon-house
+was left as quiet and as cold as the deserted meeting-house until the
+following Sabbath or Lecture day.</p>
+
+<p>If the meeting-house chanced to stand in the middle of the town (as was
+the universal custom in the earliest colonial days) of course a noon-house
+would be rarely built, for it would plainly not be needed. Nor was a
+"Sabba-day house" always seen in more lonely situations, if the sanctuary
+were placed near the substantial farm-house of a hospitable farmer; for to
+that friendly shelter the whole congregation would at noon-time repair and
+absorb to the fullest degree the welcome cider and warmth.</p>
+
+<p>In Lexington for many years after the Revolutionary War, the winter
+church-goers who came from any distance spent the nooning at the Dudley
+Tavern, where a roaring fire was built in the inn-parlor, and there the
+women and children ate their midday lunch. The men gathered in the bar-room
+and drank flip, and ate the tavern gingerbread and cheese, and talked over
+the horrors and glories of the war. In Haverhill, Derby, and many other
+towns, the school-house, which was built on the village green beside the
+church, was used for a noon-house by the church members, though not by
+their horses. The house of learning was never chimneyless and fireless, as
+was the house of God.</p>
+
+<p>As churches and towns multiplied, a meeting-house was often built to
+accommodate two little settlements or villages (and thus was convenient for
+neither), and was frequently placed in an isolated or inconvenient place,
+the top of a high hill being perhaps the most inconvenient and the most
+favored site. Thus a noon-house became an absolute necessity to Puritan
+health and existence, and often two or three were built near one
+meeting-house; while in some towns, as in Bristol, a whole row of
+disfiguring little "Sabba-day houses" stood on the meeting-house green,
+and in them the farmers (as they quaintly expressed in their petitions for
+permission to erect the buildings) "kept their duds and horses."</p>
+
+<p>In Derby, after several petitions had been granted to build noon-houses, it
+was found necessary, in 1764, to place some restrictions as to the location
+of the buildings, which had hitherto evidently been placed with the
+characteristically Puritanical indifference to general convenience or
+appearance. While the town still permitted the little log-huts to be
+erected, and though they could be placed on either side of the highway, it
+was ordered that the builders must not so locate them as to "incommode any
+highways." As early as 1690 the thoughtful Stonington people built a house
+"14 foot square and seven foot posts" with a chimney at one side, for the
+express purpose of having a place where their minister, Rev. Mr. Noyes,
+could thaw out between services. The New Canaan Church built on the green
+beside their meeting-house a fine "Society House," twenty-one feet long
+and sixteen feet wide, with a big chimney and fireplace. The horses were
+plainly "not in society" in New Canaan, for they were excluded from the
+occupancy and privileges of the Society House.</p>
+
+<p>"James June &amp; all that lives at Larences" were allowed to build a
+"Sabbath-House" on the green near the New Britain meeting-house "as a
+Commodate for their conveniency of comeing to meeting on the Sabbath;" at
+the same time James Slason of the same village was given permission to "set
+yp a house for ye advantage of his having a place to go to" on the Sabbath.
+Frequently the petitions "to build a Sabbath Day House" or a "Housel for
+Shelter for Horss" were made in company by several farmers for their joint
+use and comfort, as shown by entries in the town and church records of
+Norwalk, New Milford, Durham, and Hartford.</p>
+
+<p>Noon-houses were much more frequent in Connecticut than in Massachusetts,
+and in several small towns in the former State they were used weekly
+between Sunday services until within the memory of persons now living;
+and some of the buildings still exist, though changed into granaries or
+stables. There was one also in use for many years and until recent years in
+Topsfield, in Massachusetts. We chanced upon one still standing on a lonely
+Narragansett road. A little enclosed burial-place, with moss-grown and
+weather-smoothed head-stones and neglected graves, was by the side of a
+filled-in cellar, upon which a church evidently had once stood. At a short
+distance from the church-site was a long, low, gray, weather-beaten wooden
+building, with a coarse stone-and-mortar chimney at one end, and a great
+door at the other. Two small windows, destitute of glass, permitted us
+to peer into the interior of this dilapidated old structure, and we saw
+within, a floor of beaten earth, a rough stone fireplace, and a few rude
+horse-stalls. We felt sure that this tumble-down building had been neither
+a dwelling-house nor a stable, but a noon-house; and the occupants of a
+neighboring farm-house confirmed our decision. Too worthless to destroy,
+too out of the way to be of any use to any person, that old noon-house,
+through neglect and isolation, has remained standing until to-day.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until the use of chaises and wagons became universal, and the
+new means of conveyance crowded out the old-fashioned saddle and pillion,
+and the trotting horse superseded the once fashionable but quickly despised
+pacer, that the great stretches of horse-sheds were built which now
+surround and disfigure all our country churches. These sheds protect,
+of course, both horse and carriage from wind and rain. Few churches had
+horse-sheds until after the War of the Revolution, and some not until after
+the War of 1812. In 1796 the Longmeadow Church had "liberty to erect a
+Horse House in the Meeting House Lane." This horse house was a horse-shed.</p>
+
+<p>The "wretched boys" were not permitted even in these noon-houses to talk,
+much less to "sporte and playe." In some parishes it was ordered by the
+minister and the deacons that the Bible should be read and expounded
+to them, or a sermon be read to keep them quiet during the nooning.
+Occasionally some old patriarch would explain to them the notes that he
+had taken during the morning sermon. More unbearable still, the boys were
+sometimes ordered to explain the notes which they had taken themselves. I
+would I had heard some of those explanations! Thus they literally, as was
+written in 1774, throve on the "Good Fare of Brown Bread and the Gospell."</p>
+
+<p>In Andover, Judge Phillips left in his will a silver flagon to the church
+as an expression of interest and hope that the "laudable practice of
+reading between services may be continued so long as even a small number
+shall be disposed to attend the exercise." Mr. Abbott left another silver
+flagon to the Andover Church to encourage reading between services; though
+how this piece of plate encouraged personally, since neither the deacons
+nor the boys got it as a prize, cannot be precisely understood. The
+noon-house in Andover was a large building with a great chimney and open
+fireplace at either end. It has always seemed to me a piece of gratuitous
+posthumous cruelty in Judge Phillips and Mr. Abbott to try to cheat those
+Andover boys of their noon-time rest and relaxation, and to expect them,
+wriggling and twisting with repressed vitality, to listen to a long extra
+sermon, read perhaps by some unskilled reader, or explained by some
+incapable expounder. The Sabbath-school did not then exist, and was not in
+general favor until the noon-houses had begun to disappear. The Reverend
+Jedediah Morse, father of the inventor of the electric telegraph, was
+almost the first New England clergyman who approved of Sabbath-schools and
+established them in his parish. In Salem they were opened in 1808, and the
+scholars came at half-past six on Sunday mornings. Fancy the chill and
+gloom of the unheated, ill-lighted churches at that hour on winter
+mornings. The "Salem Gazette" openly characterized Sunday-schools, when
+first suggested, as profanations of the Sabbath, and for years they were
+not allowed in many Congregational churches. When the Sabbath-schools
+were universally established, and thus the attention and interest of the
+children was gained during the noon interval (the time the schools were
+usually held in country churches), and when each family sat in its own pew,
+and thus the boys were separated, and each under his parents' guardianship,
+the "wretched boys" of the Puritan Sabbath disappeared, and well-behaved,
+quiet, orderly boys were seen instead in the New England churches.</p>
+
+<p>This fashion of sermon-reading at the nooning happily did not obtain in
+all parts of New England. In many villages the meetings in the society
+noon-houses were to the townspeople what a Sunday newspaper is to Sunday
+readers now-a-days, an advertisement and exposition of all the news of the
+past week, and also a suggestion of events to come. At noon they discussed
+and wondered at the announcements and publishings which were tacked on
+the door of the meeting-house or the notices that had been read from the
+pulpit. The men talked in loud voices of the points of the sermon, of the
+doctrines of predestination pedobaptism and antipedobaptism, of original
+sin, and that most fascinating mystery, the unpardonable sin, and in lower
+voices of wolf and bear killing, of the town-meeting, the taxes, the crops
+and cattle; and they examined with keen interest one another's horses,
+and many a sly bargain in horse-flesh or exchange of cows and pigs was
+suggested, bargained over, and clinched in the "Sabba'-day house." Many a
+piece of village electioneering was also discussed and "worked" between the
+services. The shivering women crowded around the blazing and welcome fire,
+and seated themselves on rude benches and log seats while they ate and
+exchanged doughnuts, slices of rusk, or pieces of "pumpkin and Indian mixt"
+pie, and also gave to each other receipts therefor; and they discoursed
+in low voices of their spinning and weaving, of their candle-dipping
+or candle-running, of their success or failure in that yearly trial of
+patience and skill--their soap-making, of their patterns in quilt-piecing,
+and sometimes they slyly exchanged quilt-patterns. A sentence in an old
+letter reads thus: "Anne Bradford gave to me last Sabbath in the Noon House
+a peecing of the Blazing Star; tis much Finer than the Irish Chain or the
+Twin Sisters. I want yelloe peeces for the first joins, small peeces will
+do. I will send some of my lilac flowered print for some peeces of Cicelys
+yelloe India bed vallants, new peeces not washed peeces." They gave one
+another medical advice and prescriptions of "roots and yarbs" for their
+"rheumatiz," "neuralgy," and "tissick;" and some took snuff together, while
+an ancient dame smoked a quiet pipe. And perhaps (since they were women as
+well as Puritans) they glanced with envy, admiration, or disapproval, or
+at any rate with close scrutiny, at one another's gowns and bonnets and
+cloaks, which the high-walled pews within the meeting-house had carefully
+concealed from any inquisitive, neighborly view.</p>
+
+<p>The wood for these beneficent noon-house fires was given by the farmers
+of the congregation, a load by each well-to-do land-owner, if it were a
+"society-house," and occasionally an apple-growing farmer gave a barrel of
+"cyder" to supply internal instead of external warmth. Cider sold in 1782
+for six shillings "Old Tenor" a barrel, so it was worth about the same
+as the wood both in money value and calorific qualities. A hundred years
+previously--in 1679--cider was worth ten shillings a barrel. In 1650, when
+first made in America, it was a costly luxury, selling for &pound;4 4s. a barrel.
+That this thawed-out Sunday barrel of cider would prove invariably a source
+of much refreshment, inspiration, solace, tongue-loosing, and blood-warming
+to the chilled and shivering deacons, elders, and farmers who gathered in
+the noon-house, any one who has imbibed that all-potent and intoxicating
+beverage, oft-frozen "hard" cider, can fervently testify.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a very opulent farmer having built a noon-house for his own and
+his family's exclusive use, would keep in it as part of his "duds" a few
+simple cooking utensils in which his wife or daughters would re-heat or
+partially cook his noon-day Sabbath meal, and mix for him a hot toddy or
+punch, or a mug of that "most insinuating drink"--flip. Flip was made of
+home-brewed beer, sugar, and a liberal dash of Jamaica rum, and was mixed
+with a "logger-head"--a great iron "stirring-stick" which was heated in the
+fire until red hot and then thrust into the liquid. This seething iron made
+the flip boil and bubble and imparted to it a burnt, bitter taste which was
+its most attractive attribute. I doubt not that many a "loggerhead" was
+kept in New England noon-houses and left heating and gathering insinuating
+goodness in the glowing coals, while the pious owner sat freezing in the
+meeting-house, also gathering goodness, but internally keeping warm at the
+thought of the bitter nectar he should speedily brew and gladly imbibe at
+the close of the long service.</p>
+
+<p>The comfort of a hot midday dinner on the Sabbath was not regarded with
+much favor, though perhaps with secret envy, by the neighbors of the
+luxury-loving farmer, who saw in it too close an approach to "profanation
+of the Sabbath." The heating and boiling of the flip with the red hot
+"loggerhead" hardly came under the head of "unnecessary Sabbath cooking"
+even in the minds of the most straight-laced descendants of the Puritans.</p>
+
+<p>When stoves were placed and used in the New England meeting-houses, the
+noon-day lunches were eaten within the pews inside the sanctuary, and the
+noon-houses, no longer being needed, followed the law of cause and effect,
+and like many other institutions of the olden times quickly disappeared.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap10"></a>X</h1>
+
+<h2>The Deacon's Office.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The deacons in the early New England churches had, besides their regular
+duties on the Lord's Day, and their special duties on communion Sabbaths,
+the charge of prudential concerns, and of providing for the poor of the
+church. They also "dispensed the word" on Sabbaths to the congregation
+during the absence of the ordained minister. Judge Sewall thus describes
+in his diary under the date of November, 1685, the method at that time of
+appointing or ordaining a deacon:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"In afternoon Mr. Willard ordained our Brother Theophilus Frary to the
+    office of a Deacon. Declared his acceptance January 11th first
+    now again. Propounded him to the congregation at Noon. Then in even
+    propounded him if any of the church of other had to object they might
+    speak. Then took the Church's Vote, then call'd him up to the Pulpit,
+    laid his Hand on's head, and said I ordain Thee, etc., etc., gave him
+    his charge, then Prayed &amp; sung 2nd Part of 84th Psalm."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The deacons always sat near the pulpit in a pew, which was generally
+raised a foot or two above the level of the meeting-house floor, and which
+contained, usually, several high-backed chairs and a table or a broad
+swinging-shelf for use at the communion service. These venerable men were
+a group of awe-inspiring figures, who, next to the parson, received the
+respect of the community. In Bristol, Connecticut, the deacons wore
+starched white linen caps in the meeting-house to indicate their office,--a
+singular local custom. One of their duties in many communities was
+naturally to furnish the sacramental wines, and the money for the payment
+thereof was allowed to them from the church-rates, or was raised by special
+taxation. In Farmington, Connecticut, in 1669, each male inhabitant was
+ordered to pay a peck of wheat or one shilling to the deacons of the church
+to defray the expenses of the sacrament. In Groton church, in 1759, "4
+Coppers for every Sacrament for 1 year" was demanded from each communicant.
+In Springfield the "deacon's rate" was paid in "wampam,"--sixpence in
+"wampam" or a peck of Indian corn from each family in the town. This
+special tax was somewhat modified in case a man had no wife, or if he were
+not a church-member, but in the latter case he still had to pay some dues,
+though of course he could not take part in the communion service. In 1734
+the Milton church ordered the deacons to procure "good Canary Wine for
+the Communion Table." Abuses sometimes arose,--abominably poor wines were
+furnished, though full rates were paid for the purchase of wine of
+good quality; and in Newbury the man who was appointed to furnish the
+sacramental wines, sold, under that religious cover, wine and liquors at
+retail.</p>
+
+<p>The deacons also had charge of the vessels used in the communion service.
+These vessels were frequently stored, when not in use, under the pulpit in
+a little closet which opened into "the Ministers wives pue," and which was
+fabled to be at the disposal of the tithingmen and deacons for the darksome
+incarceration of unruly and Sabbath-breaking boys. The communion vessels
+were not always of valuable metal; John Cotton's first church had wooden
+chalices; the wealthier churches owned pieces of silver which had been
+given to them, one piece at a time, by members or friends of the church;
+but communion services of pewter were often seen.</p>
+
+<p>The church in Hanover, Massachusetts, bought a pewter service in 1728, and
+the record of the purchase still exists. It runs thus:--</p>
+
+<pre>  3 Pewter Tankards marked C. T.    10 shillings.
+  5   "    Beakers    "    C. B.    6 sh. 6d. each.
+  2   "    Platters   "    C. P.    5 sh. each.
+  1   "    Basin for Baptisms.</pre>
+
+<p>This pewter service is still owned by the Hanover church, a highly prized
+relic. Until 1753 the church in Andover used a pewter communion service,
+but when a silver service was given to it, the Andover church sent the
+vessels of baser metal to a sister church in Methuen. In Haverhill the will
+of a church-member named White gave to the church absolutely the pewter
+dishes which were used at the sacrament, and which had been his personal
+property. The "ffirst church" of Hartford had "one Puter fflagon, ffower
+pewter dishes, and a bason" left to it by the bequest of one of its
+members. When the Danvers church was burned in 1805, the pewter communion
+vessels were saved while the silver ones were either burnt or stolen. As
+pewter was, in the early days of New England, far from being a despised
+metal, and as pewter dishes and plates were seen on the tables of the
+wealthiest families, were left by will as precious possessions, were
+engraved with initials and stamped with coats of arms, and polished with
+as much care as were silver vessels, a communion service of pewter was
+doubtless felt to be a thoroughly satisfactory acquisition and appointment
+to a Puritan church.</p>
+
+<p>The deacons of course took charge of the church contributions. Lechford,
+in his "Plaine Dealing," thus describes the manner of giving in the Boston
+church in 1641:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Baptism being ended, follows the contribution, one of the deacons
+    saying, 'Brethren of the Congregation, now there is time left for
+    contribution, whereof as God has prospered you so freely offer.' The
+    Magistrates and chief gentlemen first, and then the Elders and all the
+    Congregation of them, and most of them that are not of the church, all
+    single persons, widows and women in absence of their husbands, came up
+    one after another one way, and bring their offering to the deacon at
+    his seat, and put it into a box of wood for the purpose, if it be money
+    or papers. If it be any other Chattel they set or lay it down before
+    the deacons; and so pass on another way to their seats again; which
+    money and goods the Deacons dispose towards the maintenance of the
+    Minister, and the poor of the Church, and the Churches occasions
+    without making account ordinarily."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Lechford also said he saw a "faire gilt cup" given at the public
+contribution; and other gifts of value to the church and minister were
+often made. Libellous verses too were thrown into the contribution boxes,
+and warning and gloomy messages from the Quakers; and John Rogers,
+in derision of a pompous New London minister, threw in the insulting
+contribution of an old periwig. One Puritan goodwife, sternly unforgiving,
+never saw a contribution taken for proselyting the Indians without
+depositing in the contribution-box a number of leaden bullets, the only
+tokens she wished to see ever dispersed among the red men.</p>
+
+<p>Even our pious forefathers were not always quite honest in their church
+contributions, and had to be publicly warned, as the records show, that
+they must deposit "wampum without break or deforming spots," or "passable
+peage without breaches." The New Haven church was particularly tormented by
+canny Puritans who thus managed to dispose of their broken and worthless
+currency with apparent Christian generosity. In 1650 the New Haven "deacons
+informed the Court that the wampum which is putt into the Church Treasury
+is generally so bad that the Elders to whom they pay it cannot pay it
+away."</p>
+
+<p>In 1651, as the bad wampum was still paid in by the pious New Haven
+Puritans, it was ordered that "no money save silver or bills" be accepted
+by the deacons. After this order the deacons and elders found tremendous
+difficulty in getting any contributions at all, and many are the records of
+the actions and decisions of the church in regard to the perplexing matter.
+It should be said, in justice to the New Haven colonists, though they were
+the most opulent of the New England planters, save the wealthy settlers
+of Narragansett, that money of all kinds was scarce, and that the Indian
+money, wampum-peag, being made of a comparatively frail sea-shell, was more
+easily disfigured and broken than was metal coin; and that there was little
+transferable wealth in the community anyway, even in "Country Pay." The
+broken-wampum-giver of the seventeenth century, who contributed with intent
+to defraud and deceive the infant struggling church was the direct and
+lineal ancestor of the sanctimonious button-giver of nineteenth-century
+country churches.</p>
+
+<p>In Revolutionary times, after the divine service, special contributions
+were taken for the benefit of the Continental Army. In New England large
+quantities of valuable articles were thus collected. Not only money, but
+finger-rings, earrings, watches, and other jewelry, all kinds of male
+attire,--stockings, hats, coats, breeches, shoes,--produce and groceries of
+all kinds, were brought to the meeting-house to give to the soldiers. Even
+the leaden weights were taken out of the window-sashes, made into bullets,
+and brought to meeting. On one occasion Madam Faith Trumbull rose up in
+Lebanon meeting-house in Connecticut, when a collection was being made for
+the army, took from her shoulders a magnificent scarlet cloak, which had
+been a present to her from Count Rochambeau, the commander-in-chief of the
+French allied army, and advancing to the altar, gave it as her offering to
+the gallant men, who were fighting not only the British army, but terrible
+want and suffering. The fine cloak was cut into narrow strips and used as
+red trimmings for the uniforms of the soldiers. The romantic impressiveness
+of Madam Trumbull's patriotic act kindled warm enthusiasm in the
+congregation, and an enormous collection was taken, packed carefully, and
+sent to the army.</p>
+
+<p>One early duty of the deacons which was religiously and severely performed
+was to watch that no one but an accepted communicant should partake of the
+holy sacrament. One stern old Puritan, having been officially expelled from
+church-membership for some temporal rather than spiritual offence, though
+ignored by the all-powerful deacon, still refused to consider himself
+excommunicated, and calmly and doggedly attended the communion service
+bearing his own wine and bread, and in the solitude of his own pew communed
+with God, if not with his fellow-men. For nearly twenty years did this
+austere man rigidly go through this lonely and sad ceremonial, until he
+conquered by sheer obstinacy and determination, and was again admitted to
+church-fellowship.</p>
+
+<p>A very extraordinary custom prevailed in several New England churches.
+Through it the deacons were assigned a strange and serious duty which
+appeared to make them all-important and possibly self-important, and
+which must have weighed heavily upon them, were they truly godly, and
+conscientious in the performance of it. In the rocky little town of Pelham
+in the heart of Massachusetts, toward the close of the eighteenth century
+and during the pastorate of the notorious thief, counterfeiter, and forger,
+Rev. Stephen Burroughs, that remarkable rogue organized and introduced to
+his parishioners the custom of giving during the month a metal check to
+each worthy and truly virtuous church-member, on presentation of which the
+check-bearer was entitled to partake of the communion, and without which he
+was temporarily excommunicated. The duty of the deacon in this matter was
+to walk up and down the aisles of the church at the close of each service
+and deliver to the proper persons (proper in the deacon's halting human
+judgment) the significant checks. The deacon had also to see that this
+religionistic ticket was presented on the communion Sabbath. Great must
+have been the disgrace of one who found himself checkless at the end of the
+month, and greater even than the heart-burnings over seating the meeting
+must have been the jealousies and church quarrels that arose over the
+communion-checks. And yet no records of the protests or complaints of
+indignant or grieving parishioners can be found, and the existence of
+the too worldly, too business-like custom is known to us only through
+tradition.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the little chips called "Presbyterian checks" are, however, still
+in existence. They are oblong discs of pewter, about an inch and a half
+long, bearing the initials "P. P.," which stand, it is said, for "Pelham
+Presbyterian." I could not but reflect, as I looked at the simple little
+stamped slips of metal, that in a community so successful in the difficult
+work of counterfeiting coin, it would have been very easy to form a mould
+and cast from it spurious checks with which to circumvent the deacons and
+preserve due dignity in the meeting.</p>
+
+<p>The Presbyterian checks have never been attributed in Massachusetts to
+other than the Pelham church, and are usually found in towns in the
+vicinity of Pelham; and there the story of their purpose and use is
+universally and implicitly believed. A clergyman of the Pelham church gave
+to many of his friends these Presbyterian checks, which he had found among
+the disused and valueless church-properties, and the little relics of the
+old-time deacons and services have been carefully preserved.</p>
+
+<p>In New Hampshire, however, a similar custom prevailed in the churches of
+Londonderry and the neighboring towns.. The Londonderry settlers were
+Scotch-Irish Presbyterians (and the Pelham planters were an off-shoot of
+the Londonderry settlement), and they followed the custom of the Scotch
+Presbyterians in convening the churches twice a year to partake of the
+Lord's Supper. This assembly was always held in Londonderry, and ministers
+and congregations gathered from all the towns around. Preparatory services
+were held on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Long tables were placed in
+the aisles of the church on the Sabbath; and after a protracted and solemn
+address upon the deep meaning of the celebration and the duties of the
+church-members, the oldest members of the congregation were seated at the
+table and partook of the sacrament. Thin cakes of unleavened bread were
+specially prepared for this sacred service. Again and again were the tables
+refilled with communicants, for often seven hundred church-members were
+present. Thus the services were prolonged from early morning until
+nightfall. When so many were to partake of the Lord's Supper, it seemed
+necessary to take means to prevent any unworthy or improper person from
+presenting himself. Hence the tables were fenced off, and each communicant
+was obliged to present a "token." These tokens were similar to the
+"Presbyterian checks;" they were little strips of lead or pewter stamped
+with the initials "L. D.," which may have stood for "Londonderry" or
+"Lord's Day." They were presented during the year by the deacons and elders
+to worthy and pious church-members. This bi-annual celebration of the
+Lord's Supper--this gathering of old friends and neighbors from the rocky
+wilds of New Hampshire to join, in holy communion--was followed on Monday
+by cheerful thanksgiving and social intercourse, in which, as in every
+feast, our old friend, New England rum, played no unimportant part. The
+three days previous to the communion Sabbath were, however, solemnly
+devoted to the worship of God; a Londonderry man was reproved and
+prosecuted for spreading grain upon a Thursday preceding a communion
+Sunday, just as he would have been for doing similar work upon the Sabbath.
+The use of these "tokens" in the Londonderry church continued until the
+year 1830.</p>
+
+<p>In the coin collection of the American Antiquarian Society are little
+pewter communion-checks, or tokens, stamped with a heart. These were used
+in the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, and were delivered to pious
+church-members at the Friday evening prayer-meeting preceding the communion
+Sabbath. Long tables were set in the aisles, as at Londonderry. In
+practice, belief, and origin, the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania churches
+were sisters.</p>
+
+<p>The deacons had many minor duties to perform in the different parishes.
+Some of these duties they shared with the tithingman. They visited the
+homes of the church-members to hear the children say the catechism, they
+visited and prayed with the sick, and they also reported petty offences,
+though they were not accorded quite so powerful legal authority as the
+tithingmen and constables.</p>
+
+<p>It was much desired by several of the first-settled ministers that there
+should be deaconesses in the New England Puritan church, and many good
+reasons were given for making such appointments. It was believed that
+for the special duty of visiting the sick and afflicted in the community
+deaconesses would be more useful than deacons. There had been an aged
+deaconess in the Puritan church in Holland, who with a "little birchen
+rod" had kept the children in awe and order in meeting, and who had also
+exercised "her guifts" in speaking; but when she died no New England
+successor was appointed to fill her place.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap11"></a>XI</h1>
+
+<h2>The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>We read in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," of the fair Priscilla, when
+John Alden came to woo her for his friend, the warlike little captain, that</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,
+    Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together; Rough-hewn,
+    angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and
+    overhung by the running vine of the verses. Such was the book from
+    whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem."</blockquote>
+
+<p>One of these "well-worn psalm-books of Ainsworth" lies now before me,
+perhaps the very one from which the lonely Priscilla sang as she sat
+a-spinning.</p>
+
+<p>There is something especially dear to the lover and dreamer of the olden
+time, to the book-lover and antiquary as well, in an old, worn psalm or
+hymn book. It speaks quite as eloquently as does an old Bible of loving
+daily use, and adds the charm of interest in the quaint verse to reverence
+for the sacred word. A world of tender fancies springs into life as I turn
+over the pages of any old psalm-book "reading between the lines," and as
+I decipher the faded script on the titlepage. But this "psalm-book of
+Ainsworth," this book loved and used by the Pilgrims, brought over in one
+of those early ships, perhaps in the "Mayflower" itself, this book so
+symbolic of those early struggling days in New England, has a romance, a
+charm, an interest which thrills every drop of Puritan blood in my veins.</p>
+
+<p>It is pleasing, too, this "Ainsworth's Version," aside from any thought of
+its historic associations; its square pages of diversified type are well
+printed, and have a quaint unfamiliar look which is intensely attractive,
+and to which the odd, irregular notes of music, the curiously ornamented
+head and tail pieces, and the occasional Hebrew or Greek letters add their
+undefinable charm.</p>
+
+<p>It is a square quarto of three hundred and forty-eight closely printed
+pages, bound in time-stained but well-preserved parchment, and even the
+parchment itself is interesting, and lovely to the touch. The titlepage is
+missing, but I know that this is the edition printed, as was Priscilla's,
+in Amsterdam in 1612 (not "in England in 1600" as a note written in the
+last blank page states). The full title was "The Book of Psalms. Englished
+both in Prose and Metre. With annotations opening the words and sentences
+by conference with other Scriptures. Eph. v: 18,19. Bee yee filled with
+the Spirit speaking to yourselves in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual-Songs
+singing and making melodie in your hearts to the Lord." The book contains
+besides the Psalms and Annotations, on its first pages, a "Preface
+declaring the reason and use of the Book;" and at the last pages a "Table
+directing to some principal things observed in the Annotations of the
+Psalms," a list of "Hebrew phrases observed which are somewhat hard and
+figurative," and also some "General Observations touching the Psalms."</p>
+
+<p>I can well imagine what a pious delight this book was to our Pilgrim
+Fathers; and what a still greater delight it was to our Pilgrim Mothers,
+in that day and country of few books. They possessed in it, not only a
+wonderful new metrical version of the Psalms for singing, but a prose
+version for comparison as well; and the deeply learned and profoundly
+worded annotations placed at the end of each Psalm were doubtless of
+special interest to such "scripturists with all their hearts" as they were.</p>
+
+<p>There were also, "for the use and edification of the saints," printed above
+each psalm the airs of appropriate tunes. The "rough-hewn, angular notes"
+are irregularly lozenge-shaped, like the notes or "pricks" in Queen
+Elizabeth's "Virginal-Book," and are placed on the staff without bars.
+Ainsworth, in his preface, says, "Tunes for the Psalms I find none set of
+God: so that ech people is to use the most grave decent and comfortable
+manner that they know how, according to the general rule. The singing notes
+I have most taken from our Englished psalms when they will fit the mesure
+of the verse: and for the other long verses I have also taken (for the most
+part) the gravest and easiest tunes of the French and Dutch psalmes." Easy
+the tunes certainly are, to the utmost degree of simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>Great diversity too of type did the Pilgrims find in their Psalm-book:
+Roman type, Italics, black-letter, all were used; the verse was printed in
+Italics, the prose in Roman type, and the annotation in black-letter and
+small Roman text with close-spaced lines. This variety though picturesque
+makes the text rather difficult to read; for while one can decipher
+black-letter readily enough when reading whole pages of it, when it is
+interspersed with other type it makes the print somewhat confusing to the
+unaccustomed eye.</p>
+
+<p>One curious characteristic of the typography is the frequent use of the
+hyphen, compound words or rather compound phrases being formed apparently
+without English rule or reason. Such combinations as these are given as
+instances: "highly-him-preferre," "renowned-name," "repose-me-quietlie,"
+"in-mind-uplay," "turn-to-ashes," "my-alonely-soul," "beat-them-final,"
+"pouring-out-them-hard," "inveyers-mak-streight," and
+"condemn-thou-them-as-guilty,"--which certainly would make fit verses to
+be sung to the accompaniment of Master Mace's
+"excellent-large-plump-lusty-fullspeaking-organ."</p>
+
+<p>Ainsworth's Version when read proves to be a scholarly book, exhibiting far
+better grammar and punctuation and more uniformity of spelling than "The
+New England Psalm-book," which at a later date displaced Ainsworth in the
+affections and religious services of the New England Puritans and Pilgrims.
+Both versions are somewhat confused in sense, and of uncouth and grotesque
+versification; though the metre of Ainsworth is better than the rhyme. It
+is all written in "common metre," nearly all in lines of eight and six
+syllables alternately.</p>
+
+<p>The name of the author of this version was Henry Ainsworth; he was the
+greatest of all the Holland Separatists, a typical Elizabethan Puritan,
+who left the church in which he was educated and attached himself to the
+Separatists, or Brownists, as they were called. He went into exile in
+Amsterdam in 1593, and worked for some time as a porter in a book-seller's
+shop, living (as Roger Williams wrote) "upon ninepence in the weeke with
+roots boyled." He established, with the Reverend Mr. Johnson, the new
+church in Holland; and when it was divided by dissension, he became the
+pastor of the "Ainsworthian Brownists" and so remained for twelve years.
+He was a most accomplished scholar, and was called the "rabbi of his age."
+Governor Bradford, in his "Dialogue," written in 1648, says of Ainsworth,
+"He had not his better for the Hebrew tongue in the University nor scarce
+in Europe." Hence, naturally, he was constantly engaged upon some work of
+translating or commentating, and still so highly prized is some of his work
+that it has been reprinted during this century. He also, being a skilful
+disputant, wrote innumerable controversial pamphlets and books, many
+of which still exist. It is said that he once had a long and spirited
+controversy with a brother divine as to whether the ephod of Aaron were
+blue or green. I fear we of to-day have lost much that the final, decisive
+judgment from so learned scholars and students as to the correct color has
+not descended to us, and now, if we wish to know, we shall have to fight it
+all over again.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of his power of argument (or perhaps on account of it) the most
+prominent part which Ainsworth seemed to take in Amsterdam for many years
+was that of peacemaker, as many of his contemporaries testify: for they
+quarrelled fiercely among themselves in the exiled church, though they
+had such sore need of unity and good fellowship; and they had many church
+arguments and judgments and lawsuits. They quarrelled over the exercise of
+power in the church; over the true meaning of the text Matthew xviii. 17;
+whether the members of the congregation should be allowed to look on their
+Bibles during the preaching or on their Psalm-books during the singing;
+whether they should sing at all in their meetings; over the power of the
+office of ruling elder (a fruitful source of dissension and disruption in
+the New England congregations likewise) and above all, they quarrelled long
+and bitterly over the unseemly and gay dress of the parson's wife, Madam
+Johnson. These were the terrible accusations that were brought against that
+bedizened Puritan: that she wore "her bodies tied to the petticote with
+points as men do their doublets and hose; contrary to I Thess. v: 22,
+conferred with Deut. xx: 11;" that she also wore "lawn coives," and
+"busks," and "whalebones in the petticote bodies," and a "veluet hoode,"
+and a "long white brest;" and that she "stood gazing bracing and vaunting
+in the shop dores;" and that "men called her a bounceing girl" (as if
+she could help that!). And one of her worst and most bitterly condemned
+offences was that she wore "a topish hat." This her husband vehemently
+denied; and long discussions and explanations followed on the hat's
+topishness,--"Mr. Ainsworth dilating much upon a greeke worde" (as of
+course so learned a man would). For the benefit of unlearned modern
+children of the Puritans let me give the old Puritan's precise explanation
+and classification of topishness. "Though veluet in its nature were not
+topish, yet if common mariners should weare such it would be a sign of
+pride and topishness in them. Also a gilded raper and a feather are not
+topish in their nature, neither in a captain to weare them, and yet if a
+minister should weare them they would be signs of great vanity topishness
+and lightness." I wonder that topish hat had not undone the whole Puritan
+church in Holland.</p>
+
+<p>In settling all these and many other disputes, in translating,
+commentating, and versifying, did Henry Ainsworth pass his days; until,
+worn out by hard labor, and succumbing to long continued weakness, he died
+in 1623. This romantic story of his death is told by Neal. "It was sudden
+and not without suspicion of violence; for it is reported that, having
+found a diamond of very great value in the streets of Amsterdam, he
+advertised it in print; and when the owner, who was a Jew, came to demand
+it, he offered him any acknowledgment he would desire, but Ainsworth though
+poor would accept of nothing but conference with some of his rabbis upon
+the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the Messiah, which the
+other promised, but not having interest enough to obtain it he was
+poisoned." This rather ambiguous sentence means that Ainsworth was
+poisoned, not the Jew. Brooks's account of the story is that the conference
+took place, the Jews were vanquished, and in revenge poisoned the champion
+of Christianity afterwards. Dexter most unromantically throws cold water on
+this poisoning story, and adduces much circumstantial testimony to prove
+its improbability; but it could hardly have been invented in cold blood by
+the Puritan historians, and must have had some foundation in truth. And
+since he is dead, and the thought cannot harm him, I may acknowledge that I
+firmly believe and I like to believe that he died in so romantic a way.</p>
+
+<p>The Puritans were psalm-singers ever; and in Holland the Brownist division
+of the church came under strong influences from Geneva and Wittenberg, the
+birth-places of psalm-singing, that made them doubly fond of "worship in
+song." Hence the Pilgrim Fathers, Brewster, Bradford, Carver, and Standish,
+for love of music as well as in affectionate testimony to their old pastor
+and friend, brought to the New World copies of his version of the Psalms
+and sang from it with delight and profit to themselves, if not with ease
+and elegance.</p>
+
+<p>Dexter says very mildly of Ainsworth's literary work that "there are
+diversities of gifts, and it is no offence to his memory to conclude that
+he shone more as an exegete than as a poet." Poesy is a gift of the gods
+and cometh not from deep Hebrew study nor from vast learning, and we must
+accept Ainsworth's pious enthusiasm in the place of poetic fervor. Of the
+quality of his work, however, it is best to judge for one's self. Here is
+his rendition of the Nineteenth Psalm, so well known to us in verse by
+Addison's glorious "The spacious firmament on high." The prose version is
+printed in one column and the verse by its side.</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1. To the Mayster of the Musik: A Psalm of David</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2. The heavens, doo tel the glory of God: and the out-spred firmament
+    shevveth; the work of his hand. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>3. Day unto day uttereth speech: and night unto night manifesteth
+    knowledge: </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>4. No speech, and no words: not heard is their voice</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>5. Through all the earth, gone-forth is their line: and unto the
+    utmost-end of the world their speakings: he hath put a tent in them for
+    the sun. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>6. And he; as a bridegroom, going-forth out of his privy-chamber:
+    joyes as a mighty-man to run a race</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>7. From the utmost end of the heavens is his egress; and his
+    compassing-regress is unto the utmost-ends of them: and none <i>is</i>
+    hidd, from his heat. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>2. The heav'ne, doo tel the glory of God and his firmament dooth
+    preach. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>3. work of his hands. Day unto day dooth largely-utter speach and night
+    unto night dooth knowledge shew</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>4. No speach, and words are none. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>5. thier voice it-is not heard. Thier line through all the earth is
+    gone: and to the worlds end, thier speakings: in them he did dispose, </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>6. tent for the Sun. Who-bride-groom-like out of his chamber goes:
+    joyes strong-man-like, to run a race</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>7. From heav'ns end, his egress: and his regress to the end of them
+    hidd from his heat, none is:</blockquote>
+
+<p>In order to show the proportion of annotation in the book, and to indicate
+the mental traits of the author, let me state that this psalm, in both
+prose and metrical versions, occupies about one page; while the closely
+printed annotations fill over three pages; which is hardly "explaining with
+brevitie," as Ainsworth says in his preface. With this psalm the notes
+commence thus:--</p>
+
+<p>"2. (the out-spred-firmament) the whole cope of heaven, with the aier which
+though it be soft and liquid and spred over the Earth, yet it is fast and
+firm and therefore called of us according to the common Greek version a
+firmament: the holy Ghost expresseth it by another term Mid-heaven.
+This out-spred-firmament of expansion God made amidds the waters for a
+separation and named it Heaven, which of David is said to be stretched out
+as courtayn and elsewhere is said to be as firm as moulten glass. So under
+this name firmament be commised the orbs of the heav'ns and the aier and
+the whole spacious country above the earth."</p>
+
+<p>These annotations must have formed to the Pilgrims not only a dictionary
+but a perfect encyclop&aelig;dia of useful knowledge. Things spiritual and things
+temporal were explained therein. Scientific, historic, and religious
+information were dispensed impartially. Much and varied instruction was
+given in Natural History, though viewed of course from a strictly religious
+point of view. The little Pilgrims learned from their Psalm-Book that the
+"Leviathan is the great whalefish or seadragon, so called of the fast
+joyning together of his scales as he is described Job 40: 20, 41 and
+is used to resemble great tyrants." They also learned that "Lions of
+sundry-kinds have sundry-names. Tear-in-pieces like a lion. That he ravin
+not, make-a-prey; called a plueker Renter or Tearer, and elsewhere Laby
+that is, Harty and couragious; Kphir, this lurking, Couchant. The reason
+of thier names is shewed, as The renting-lion as greedy to tear, and the
+lurking-Lion as biding in covert places. Other names are also given to this
+kind as Shachal, of ramping, of fierce nature; and Lajith of subduing his
+prey. Psalm LVI Lions called here Lebain, harty, stowt couragious, Lions.
+Lions are mentioned in the Scriptures for the stowtness of thier hart,
+boldnes, and grimnes of thier countenance."</p>
+
+<p>Here are other annotations taken at hap-hazard. The lines,</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Al they that doo upon me look<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a scoff at me doe make<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;they with the lip do make-a-mow<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the head they scornful-shake,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>Ainsworth thus explains: "Make-a-mow, making-an-opening with the lip
+which may be taken both for mowing and thrusting out of the lip and for
+licentious opening thereof to speak reproach." The expression "Keep thou me
+as the black of the apple of the eye" is thus annotated: "The black, that
+is, the sight in the midds of the eye wherein appeareth the resemblance of
+a little man, and thereupon seemeth to be called in Hebrew Ishon which is a
+man. And as that part is blackish so this word is also used for other black
+things as the blackness of night. The apple so we call that which the
+Hebrew here calleth bath and babath that is the babie or little image
+appearing in the eye." Anger receives this definition: "ire, outward in
+the face, grauue, grimnes or fiercenes of countenance. The original Aph
+signifieth both the nose by which one breatheth, and Anger which appeareth
+in the snuffing or breathing of the nose."</p>
+
+<p>Before the Holland exiles had this version of Ainsworth's to sing from,
+they used the book known as "Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms." They gave it
+up gladly to show honor to the work of their loved pastor, and perhaps also
+with a sense of pleasure in not having to sing any verses which had been
+used and authorized by the Church of England. In doing this they had to
+abandon, however, such spirited lines as Sternhold's--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The earth did shake, for feare did quake<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the hills their bases shook.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Removed they were, in place most fayre<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;at God's right fearfull looks.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"He rode on hye, and did soe flye
+    Upon the cherubins
+  He came in sight and made his flight
+    Upon the winges of windes."</blockquote>
+
+<p>They sung instead,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And th' earth did shake and quake and styrred bee<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;grounds of the mount: &amp; shook for wroth was hee<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Smoke mounted, in his wrath, fyre did eat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;out of his mouth: from it burned-with heat."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Alas, poor Priscilla! how could she sing with ease or reverence such
+confused verses? The tune, too, set in the psalm-book seems absolutely
+unfitted to the metre. I fear when she sang from the pages "the old Puritan
+anthem" that she was forced to turn it into a chant, else the irregular
+lines could never have been brought within the compass of the melody; and
+yet, the metre is certainly better than the sense.</p>
+
+<p>It may be thought that these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for
+their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome
+that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the
+most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the
+reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot be hidden, even by
+the wording of the learned Puritan minister:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1. Jehovah feedeth me: I shall not lack</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2. In grassy fields, he downe dooth make me lye: he gently-leads mee,
+    quiet-Waters by. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3. He dooth return my soul: for his name-sake in paths of justice
+    leads-me-quietly. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4. Yea, though I walk in dale of deadly-shade ile fear none yll, for
+    with me thou wilt be thy rod, thy staff eke, they shall comfort mee.</blockquote>
+
+<p>But few of these psalm-books of Ainsworth are now in existence; but few
+indeed came to New England. Elder Brewster owned one, as is shown by
+the inventory of the books in his library. Not every member of the
+congregation, not every family possessed one; many were too poor, many
+"lacked skill to read," and in some communities only one psalm-book was
+owned in the entire church. Hence arose the odious custom of "deaconing" or
+"lining" the psalm, by which each line was read separately by the deacon or
+elder and then sung by the congregation. There is no doubt, however,
+that this Ainsworth's Version was used in many of the early New England
+meetings. Reverend Thomas Symmes, in his "Joco-Serious Dialogue," printed
+in 1723, wrote: "Furthermore the Church of Plymouth made use of Ainsworths
+Version of the Psalms until the year 1692. For altho' our New England
+version of the Psalms was compiled by sundry hands and completed by
+President Dunster about the year 1640; yet that church did not use it, it
+seems, 'till two and fifty years after but stuck to Ainsworth; and until
+about 1682 their excellent custom was to sing without reading the lines."</p>
+
+<p>John Cotton's account of the Salem church written in 1760, says, "On June
+19, 1692, the pastor propounded to the church that seeing many of the
+psalms in Mr. Ainsworth's translation which had hitherto been sung in the
+congregation had such difficult tunes that none in the church could set,
+they would consider of some expedient that they might sing all the psalms.
+After some time of consideration on August 7 following, the church voted
+that when the tunes were difficult in the translation then used, they
+would make use of the New England psalm-book, long before received in
+the churches of the Massachusetts colony, not one brother opposing the
+conclusion. But finding it inconvenient to use two psalm-books, they at
+length, in June 1696 agreed wholly to lay aside Ainsworth and with general
+consent introduced the other which is used to this day, 1760. And here it
+will be proper to observe that it was their practice until the beginning of
+October, 1681 to sing the psalms without reading the lines; but then, at
+the motion of a brother who otherwise could not join in the ordinance [I
+suppose because he could not read] they altered the custom, and reading
+was introduced, the elder performing that service after the pastor had
+first expounded the psalm, which were usually sung in course."</p>
+
+<p>On the blank leaf of the copy of Ainsworth now lying before me are written
+these words, "This was used in Salem half-a-century from the first
+settlement." In a record of the Salem church is this entry of a church
+meeting: "4 of 5th month, 1667. The pastor having formerly propounded
+and given reason for the use of the Bay Psalm Book in regard to the
+<i>difficulty of the tunes</i> and that we could not sing them so well
+as formerly and <i>that there was a singularity in our using Ainsworths
+tunes</i>: but especially because we had not the liberty of singing all the
+scripture Psalms according to Col. iii. 16. He did not again propound the
+same, and after several brethren had spoken, there was at last a unanimous
+consent with respect to the last reason mentioned, that the Bay Psalm Book
+should be used together with Ainsworth to supply the defects of it."</p>
+
+<p>It is significant enough of the "low state of the musik in the meetings"
+when we find that the simple tunes written in Ainsworth's Version were too
+difficult for the colonists to sing. To such a condition had church-music
+been reduced by "lining the psalm" and by the lack of musical instruments
+to guide and control the singers. It was not much better in old England;
+for we find in the preface of Rous' Psalms (which were published in
+1643 and authorized to be used in the English Church) references to the
+"difficulty of Ainsworth's tunes."</p>
+
+<p>Hood says, "There is almost a certainty that no other version than
+Ainsworth was ever used in the colonies until the New England Version was
+published. But if any one was used in one or two of the churches it was
+Sternhold and Hopkins." I cannot feel convinced of this, but believe that
+both Ravenscroft's and Sternhold and Hopkins' Versions were used at first
+in many of the Bay settlements. Salem church had a peculiar connection in
+its origin with the church of Plymouth, which would account, doubtless,
+for its protracted use of the version so loved by the Pilgrims; but the
+Puritans of the Bay, coming directly from England, must have brought with
+them the version which they had used in England, that of Sternhold and
+Hopkins; and they would hardly have wished, nor would it have been possible
+for them to acquire speedily in the new land the Ainsworth's Version used
+by the Pilgrims from Holland.</p>
+
+<p>The second edition of Ainsworth's Version was printed in 1617, a third
+in 1618; the fourth, in London in 1639, was a folio; and the sixth, in
+Amsterdam in 1644, was an octavo. A little 24mo copy is in the Essex
+Institute in Salem, and an octavo is in the Prince Library, now in the
+custody of the Public Library of the City of Boston. The latter copy has
+a note in it written by the Rev. Thomas Prince: "Plymouth, May 1, 1732. I
+have seen an edition of this version of 1618; and this version was sung
+in Plymouth Colony and I suppose in the rest of New England 'till the New
+England Version was printed."</p>
+
+<p>There is a copy of the first edition of Ainsworth in the Bodleian Library
+and one in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The American Antiquarian
+Society and the Lenox Library are the only public libraries in America that
+possess copies, so far as I know. The one in the library of the American
+Antiquarian Society was presented to it in 1815 by the Rev. William Bentley
+of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom also belonged the copy of the Bay Psalm
+Book now in the library at Worcester. He was a divine and a bibliophile and
+an antiquary, but there also ran in his veins blood of warmer flow. During
+the war of 1812, when the report came, in meeting-time, that the frigate
+"Constitution" was being chased into Marblehead harbor, the loyal parson
+Bentley locked up his church, and tucked up his gown, and sallied forth
+with his whole flock of parishioners to march to Marblehead with the
+soldiers, ready to "fight unto death" if necessary. Being short and fat,
+and the mercury standing at eighty-five degrees, the doctor's physical
+strength gave out, and he had to be hoisted up astride a cannon to ride to
+the scene of conflict,--martial in spirit though weak in the legs.</p>
+
+<p>But this association with the old book is comparatively of our own day; and
+the most pleasing fancy which the "psalm-book of Ainsworth" brings to my
+mind, the most sacred and reverenced thought, is of a far more remote, a
+more peaceful and quiet scene; though men of warlike blood and fighting
+stock were there present and took part therein. It is with that Sabbath Day
+before the Landing at Plymouth which was spent by the Pilgrims, as Mather
+says, "in the devout and pious exercises of a sacred rest." And though
+Matthew Arnold thought that the Mayflower voyagers would have been
+intolerable company for Shakespeare and Virgil, yet in that quiet day of
+devout prayer and praise they show a calm religious peace and trust that
+is, perhaps, the highest spiritual type of "sweetness and light." And from
+this quaint old book their lips found words and music to express in song
+their pure and holy faith.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap12"></a>XII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Bay Psalm-Book.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>It seems most proper that the first book printed in New England should be
+now its rarest one, and such is the case. It was also meet that the first
+book published by the Puritan theocracy should be a psalm-book. This New
+England psalm-book, being printed by the colony at Massachusetts Bay, is
+familiarly known as "The Bay Psalm-Book," and was published two hundred
+and fifty years ago with this wording on the titlepage: "The Whole Book of
+Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre. Whereunto is prefixed a
+discourse declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the
+Heavenly Ordinance of Singing Psalmes in the Churches of God.</p>
+
+<p>"Coll. III. Let the word of God dwell plenteously in you in all wisdome,
+teaching, and exhorting one another in Psalmes, Himnes, and spirituall
+Songs, singing to the Lord with grace in your hearts.</p>
+
+<p>"James V. If any be afflicted, let him pray; and if any be merry let him
+sing psalmes. Imprinted 1640."</p>
+
+<p>The words "For the Use, Edification, and Comfort of the Saints in Publick
+and Private especially in New England," though given in Thomas's "History
+of Printing," Lowndes's "Bibliographers Manual," Hood's "History of Music
+in New England," and many reliable books of reference, as part of the
+correct title, were in fact not printed upon the titlepage of this first
+edition, but appeared on subsequent ones. Mr. Thomas, at the time he wrote
+his history, knew of but one copy of the first edition; "an entire copy
+except the title-page is now in the possession of rev. mr. Bentley of
+Salem." The titlepage being missing, he probably fell into the error of
+copying the title of a later edition, and other cataloguers and manualists
+have blindly followed him.</p>
+
+<p>There were in 1638 thirty ministers in New England, all men of intelligence
+and education; and to three of them, Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John
+Eliot was entrusted the literary part of the pious work. They managed to
+produce one of the greatest literary curiosities in existence. The book
+was printed in the house of President Dunster of Harvard College upon a
+"printery," or printing-press, which had cost &pound;50, and was the gift of
+friends in Holland to the new community in 1638, the name-year of Harvard
+College. Governor Winthrop in his journal tells us that the first sheet
+printed on this press was the Freeman's Oath, certainly a characteristic
+production; the second an almanac for New England, and the third, "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." Some, who deem an almanac a book, call this psalm-book the
+second book printed in British America.</p>
+
+<p>A printer named Steeven Daye was brought over from England to do the
+printing on this new press. Now Steeven must have been given entire charge
+of the matter, and could not have been a very literate fellow (as we
+know positively he was a most reprehensible one), or the three reverend
+versifiers must have been most uncommonly careless proof-readers, for
+certainly a worse piece of printer's work than "The Bay Psalm Book" could
+hardly have been struck off. Diversity and grotesqueness of spelling were
+of course to be expected, and paper might have been coarse without reproof,
+in that new and poor country; but the type was good and clear, the paper
+strong and firm, and with ordinary care a very presentable book might have
+been issued. The punctuation was horrible. A few commas and periods and
+a larger number of colons were "pepered and salted" <i>&agrave; la</i> Timothy
+Dexter, apparently quite by chance, among the words. Periods were placed
+in the middle of sentences; words of one syllable were divided by hyphens;
+capitals and italics were used after the fashion of the time, apparently
+quite at random; and inverted letters were common enough. The pages were
+unnumbered, and on every left-hand page the word "Psalm" in the title was
+spelled correctly, while on the right-hand page it is uniformly spelled
+"Psalme." But after all, these typographical blemishes might be forgiven if
+the substance, the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification
+was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the
+sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with
+the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical
+construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct.
+Such amazing verses as these may be found:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And sayd He would not them waste: had not<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Moses stood (whom He chose)<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;'fore him i' th' breach; to turne his wrath<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;lest that he should waste those."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Cotton Mather, in his "Magnalia," gives thus the full story of the
+production of "The Bay Psalm-book":--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"About the year 1639, the New-English reformers, considering that their
+    churches enjoyed the other ordinances of Heaven in their scriptural
+    purity were willing that the 'The singing of Psalms' should be restored
+    among them unto a share of that <i>purity</i>. Though they blessed God
+    for the religious endeavours of them who translated the Psalms into the
+    <i>meetre </i>usually annexed at the end of the Bible, yet they beheld
+    in the translation so many <i>detractions </i>from, <i>additions
+    </i>to, and <i>variations </i>of, not only the text, but the very
+    <i>sense </i>of the psalmist, that it was an offense unto them.
+    Resolving then upon a new translation, the chief divines in the country
+    took each of them a portion to be translated; among whom were Mr. Welds
+    and Mr. Eliot of Eoxbury, and Mr. Mather of Dorchester. These like the
+    rest were so very different a <i>genius</i> for their poetry that Mr.
+    Shephard, of Cambridge, on the occasion addressed them to this purpose:</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You Roxb'ry poets keep clear of the crime<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of missing to give us very good rhime.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And you of Dorchester, your verses lengthen<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And with the text's own words, you will them strengthen.</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Psalms thus turned into <i>meetre</i> were printed at Cambridge, in
+    the year 1640. But afterwards it was thought that a little more of art
+    was to be employed upon them; and for that cause they were committed
+    unto Mr. Dunster, who revised and refined this translation; and (with
+    some assistance from Mr. Richard Lyon who being sent over by Sir Henry
+    Mildmay as an attendant unto his, son, then a student at Harvard
+    College, now resided in Mr. Dunster's house:) he brought it
+    the condition wherein our churches have since used it. Now though
+    I heartily join with those gentlemen who wish that the <i>poetry</i>
+    thereof were mended, yet I must confess, that the Psalms have never
+    yet seen a <i>translation</i> that I know of nearer to the Hebrew
+    original; and I am willing to receive the excuse which our translators
+    themselves do offer us when they say: 'If the verses are not always so
+    elegant as some desire or expect, let them consider that God's
+    altar needs not our pollishings; we have respected rather a plain
+    translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any
+    paraphrase. We have attended conscience rather than elegance, fidelity
+    rather than ingenuity, that so we may sing in Zion the Lord's songs of
+    praise, according unto his own will, until he bid us enter into our
+    Master's joy to sing eternal hallelujahs.'"</blockquote>
+
+<p>I have never liked Cotton Mather so well as after reading this calm
+and kindly account of the production of "The Bay-Psalm-Book." He was a
+scholarly man, and doubtless felt keenly and groaned inwardly at the
+inelegance, the appalling and unscholarly errors in the New England
+version; and yet all he mildly said was that "it was thought that a little
+more of art was to be employed upon them," and that he "wishes the poetry
+hereof was mended." Such justice, such self-repression, such fairness
+make me almost forgive him for riding around the scaffold on which his
+fellow-clergyman was being executed for witchcraft, and urging the crowd
+not to listen to the poor martyr's dying words. I can even almost overlook
+the mysterious fables, the outrageous yarns which he imposed upon us under
+the guise of history.</p>
+
+<p>The three reverend versifiers who turned out such questionable poetry are
+known to have been writers of clear, scholarly, and vigorous prose. They
+were all graduated at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the nursery of Puritans.
+Mr. Welde soon returned to England and published there two intelligent
+tracts vindicating the purity of the New England worship. Richard Mather
+was the general prose-scribe for the community; he drafted the "Cambridge
+Platform" and other important papers, and was clear and scholarly enough
+in all his work <i>except</i> the "Bay Psalm-Book." From his pen came the
+tedious, prolix preface to the work; and the first draft of it in his own
+handwriting is preserved in the Prince Library. The other co-worker was
+John Eliot, that glory of New England Puritanism, the apostle to the
+Indians. His name heads my list of the saints of the Puritan calendar; but
+I confess that when I consider his work in "The Bay Psalm-Book," I have
+sad misgivings lest the hymns which he wrote and published in the Indian
+language may not have proved to the poor Massachusetts Indians all that our
+loving and venerating fancy has painted them. It is said also that Francis
+Quarles, the Puritan author of "Divine Emblems," sent across the Atlantic
+some of his metrical versions of the psalms as a pious contribution to the
+new version of the new church in the new land.</p>
+
+<p>The "little more of art" which was bestowed by the improving President
+Dunster left the psalms still improvable, as may be seen by opening at
+random at any page of the revised editions. Mr. Lyon conferred also upon
+the New England church the inestimable boon of a number of hymns or
+"Scripture-Songs placed in order as in the Bible." They were printed in
+that order from the third until at least the sixteenth edition, but in
+subsequent editions the hymns were all placed at the end of the book after
+the psalms. I doubt not that the Puritan youth, debarred of merry catches
+and roundelays, found keen delight in these rather astonishing renditions
+of the songs of Solomon, portions of Isaiah, etc. Those Scripture-Songs
+should be read quite through to be fully appreciated, as no modern
+Christian could be full enough of grace to sing them. Here is a portion of
+the song of Deborah and Barak:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;24. Jael the Kenite Hebers wife<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;'bove women blest shall be:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Above the women in the tent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;a blessed one is she.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;25. He water ask'd: she gave him milk<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;him butter forth she fetch'd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;26. In lordly dish: then to the nail<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;she forth her left hand stretched.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;Her right the workman's hammer held<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and Sisera struck dead:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;She pierced and struck his temple through<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and then smote off his head.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;27. He at her feet bow'd, fell, lay down<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;he at her feet bow'd, where<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;He fell: ev'n where he bowed down<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;he fell destroyed there.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;28. Out of a window Sisera<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;his mother looked and said<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The lattess through in coming why<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;so long his chariot staid?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;His chariot wheels why tarry they?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;29.   her wise dames, answered<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Yea she turned answer to herself<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;30.   and what have they not sped?</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;31. The prey by poll; a maid or twain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;what parted have not they?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Have they not parted, Sisera,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;a party-colour'd prey<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A party-colour'd neildwork prey<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of neildwork on each side<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;That's party-colour'd meet for necks<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of them that spoils divide?</blockquote>
+
+<p>Our Pilgrim Fathers accepted these absurd, tautological verses gladly, and
+sang them gratefully; but we know the spirit of poesy could never have
+existed in them, else they would have fought hard against abandoning such
+majestic psalms as Sternhold's--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The Lord descended from above<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and bow'd the heavens hye<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And underneath his feete he cast<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the darkness of the skye.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"On cherubs and on cherubines<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;full royally he road<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And on the winges of all the windes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;came flying all abroad."</blockquote>
+
+<p>They gave up these lines of simple grandeur, to which they were accustomed,
+for such wretched verses as these of the New England version:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;9.  Likewise the heavens he downe-bow'd and he descended, &amp; there was
+      under his feet a gloomy cloud<br />
+  10. And he on cherub rode and flew; yea, he flew on the wings of winde.<br />
+  11. His secret place hee darkness made his covert that him round confide.</blockquote>
+
+<p>I cannot understand why they did not sing the psalms of David just as
+they were printed in the English Bible; it would certainly be quite as
+practicable as to sing this latter selection.</p>
+
+<p>President Dunster's improving hand and brain evolved this rendition:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Likewise the heavens he down-bow'd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and he descended: also there<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Was at his feet a gloomy cloud<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and he on cherubs rode apace.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Yea on the wings of wind he flew<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;he darkness made his secret place<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;His covert round about him drew."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Though the grotesque wording and droll errors of these old psalm-books can,
+after the lapse of centuries, be pointed out and must be smiled at, there
+is after all something so pathetic in the thought of those good, scholarly
+old New England saints, hampered by poverty, in dread of attack of Indians,
+burdened with hard work, harassed by "eighty-two pestilent heresies," still
+laboring faithfully and diligently in their strange new home at their
+unsuited work,--something so pathetic, so grand, so truly Christian, that
+when I point out any of the absurdities or failures in their work, I dread
+lest the shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather, of Eliot, brand me as of
+old, "in capitall letters," as "AN OPEN AND OBSTINATE CONTEMNER OF GOD'S
+HOLY ORDINANCES," or worse still, with that mysterious, that dread name, "A
+WANTON GOSPELLER."</p>
+
+<p>The second edition of the "New England Psalm-Book" was published in 1647;
+the one copy known to exist has sold for four hundred and thirty-five
+dollars. The third edition was the one revised by President Dunster and
+Mr. Lyon, and was printed in 1650. In 1691 the unfortunate book was again
+"pollished" by a committee of ministers, who thus altered the last two
+stanzas of the Song of Deborah and Barak:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;28. Out of a window Sisera<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;His mother look'd and said<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The lattess through in coming why<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;So long's chariot staid?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;His chariot-wheels why tarry they?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Her ladies wise reply'd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;29. Yea to herself the answer made,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;30.     Have they not speed? she cry'd.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;31. The prey to each a maid or twain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Divided have not they?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To Sisera have they not shar'd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A divers-colour'd prey?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of divers-colour'd needle-work<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Wrought curious on each side<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of various colours meet for necks<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of those who spoils divide?</blockquote>
+
+<p>Rev. Elias Nason wittily says of "The Bay Psalm-Book," "Welde, Eliot, and
+Mather mounted the restive steed Pegasus, Hebrew psalter in hand, and
+trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical
+psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and slashing,
+mending and patching, twisting and turning, finally produced what must ever
+remain the most unique specimen of poetical tinkering in our literature."</p>
+
+<p>Other editions quickly followed these "pollishings" until, in 1709, sixteen
+had been printed. Mr. Hood stated that at least seventy editions in all
+were brought out. Some of these were printed in England and Scotland, in
+exceedingly fine and illegible print, and were intended to be bound up with
+the Bible; and occasionally duodecimo Bibles were sent from Scotland to
+New England with "The Bay Psalm-Book" bound at the back part of the book.
+Strange as it may seem, the poor, halting New England version was used in
+some of the English dissenting congregations and Scotch kirks, instead of
+the smoother verses composed in England for the English churches.</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Thomas Prince, after two years of careful work thereon,
+published in 1758 a revised edition of the much-published book, and it was
+adopted by his church, the Old South, of Boston, the week previous to his
+death. It was used by his congregation until 1786. He clung closely to the
+form of the old editions, changing only an occasional word. In his preface
+Dr. Prince says that "The Bay Psalm-Book" "had the honor of being the
+first book printed in North America, and as far as I can find, in this
+New World." We have fuller means of information now-a-days than had the
+reverend reviser, and we know that as early as 1535 a book called "The
+Book of St. John Climacus or The Spiritual Ladder" had been printed in the
+Spanish tongue, in Mexico; and no less than one hundred and sixteen other
+Spanish works in the sixteenth century, as the "Bibliografia Mexicana"
+testifies.</p>
+
+<p>If the printing of all these various editions was poor, and the diction
+worse, the binding certainly was good and could be copied in modern times
+to much advantage. No flimsy cloth or pasteboard covers, no weak paper
+backs, no ill-pasted leaves, no sham-work of any kind was given; securely
+sewed, firmly glued, with covers of good strong leather, parchment, kid, or
+calfskin, these psalm-books endured constant <i>daily</i> (not weekly) use
+for years, for decades, for a century, and are still whole and firm.
+They were carried about in pockets, in saddle-bags, and were opened, and
+handled, and conned, as often as were the Puritan Bibles, and they bore the
+usage well. They were distinctively characteristic of the unornamental,
+sternly pious, eminently honest, and sturdily useful race that produced
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Sewall makes frequent mention in his famous diary of "the New Psalm
+Book." He bought one "bound neatly in Kids Leather" for "3 shillings &amp;
+sixpence" and gave it to a widow whom he was wooing. Rather a serious
+lover's gift, but characteristic of the giver, and not so gloomy as
+"Dr. Mathers Vials of Wrath," "Dr. Sibbs Bowels," "Dr. Preston's Church
+Carriage," and "Dr. Williard's Fountains opened," all of which he likewise
+presented to her.</p>
+
+<p>The Judge frequently gave a copy as a bridal gift, after singing from it
+"Myrrh aloes," to the gloomy tune of Windsor, at the wedding.</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;8. Myrrh Aloes and Cussias <i>smell</i><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;all of thy garments <i>had</i><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Out of the yvory pallaces<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;whereby they made thee glad:</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;9. Amongst thine honourable maids<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;kings daughters present were<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Queen is set at thy right hand<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;in fine gold of Ophir.</blockquote>
+
+<p>But his most frequent mention of the "new psalm-book" is in his "Humbell
+acknowledgement" made to God of the "great comfort and merciful kindness
+received through singing of His Psalmes;" and the pages of the diary bear
+ample testimony that whatever the book may appear to us now, it was to the
+early colonists the very Word of God.</p>
+
+<p>As years passed on, however, and singing-schools multiplied, it became much
+desired, and even imperative that there should be a better style and manner
+of singing, and open dissatisfaction arose with "The Bay Psalm-Book;" the
+younger members of the congregations wished to adopt the new and smoother
+versions of Tate and Brady, and of Watts. Petitions were frequently made in
+the churches to abolish the century-used book. Here is an opening sentence
+of one church-letter which is still in existence; it was presented to the
+ministers and elders of the Roxbury church September 11th, 1737, and was
+signed by many of the church members:--</p>
+
+<p>"The New England Version of Psalms however useful it may formerly have
+been, has now become through the natural variableness of Language, not only
+very uncouth but in many Places unintelligible; whereby the mind instead
+of being Raised and spirited in Singing The Praises of Almighty God and
+thereby being prepared to Attend to other Parts of Divine Service is Damped
+and made Spiritless in the Performance of the Duty at least such is the
+Tendency of the use of that Version," etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>Great controversy arose over the abolition of the accustomed book, and
+church-quarrels were rife; but the end of the century saw the dearly loved
+old version consigned to desuetude, uever again to be opened, alas! but by
+critical or inquisitive readers.</p>
+
+<p>There is owned by the American Antiquarian Society, and kept carefully
+locked in the iron safe in the building of that Society in Worcester, a
+copy of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm Book." It is a quarto (not
+octavo, as Thomas described it in his "History of Printing") and is in very
+good condition, save that the titlepage is missing. It is in the original
+light-colored, time-stained parchment binding, and contains the autograph
+of Stephen Sewall. It also bears on the inside of the front cover the
+book-plate of Isaiah Thomas, and at the back, in the veteran printer's
+clear and beautiful handwriting, this statement: "After advertising for
+another copy of this book and making enquiry in many places in New England
+&amp;c. I was not able to obtain or even hear of another. This copy is
+therefore invaluable and must be preserved with the greatest care. Isaiah
+Thomas, Sep. 20. 1820." His "History of Printing," was published in 1810,
+and the Society had acquired through the gift of "the rev. mr. Bentley" the
+copy which Thomas mentioned in his book.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange that Thomas should have been ignorant of the existence of
+other copies of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm-Book," for there were
+at that time six copies belonging to the Prince Library in the possession
+of the Old South Church of Boston. One would fancy that the Prince Library
+would have been one of his first objective points of search, save that a
+dense cloud of indifference had overshadowed that collection for so long
+a time. Five of those copies remained in the custody of the deacons and
+pastor of the Old South Church until 1860, and they were at one time all
+deposited in the Public Library of the City of Boston. Two still remain in
+that suitable place of deposit; they are almost complete in paging, but are
+in modern bindings. The other three copies were surrendered by Lieut-Gov.
+Samuel Armstrong (who, as one of the deacons of the Old South Church,
+had joint custody of the Prince Library), severally, to Mr. Edward
+Crowninshield of Boston, Dr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff of Boston, and Mr.
+George Livermore of Cambridge. Governor Armstrong surrendered these three
+books in consideration of certain modern books being given to the Prince
+Library, and of the modern bindings bestowed on the two other copies; which
+seems to us hardly a brilliant or judicious exchange.</p>
+
+<p>In Dr. Shurtleff "The Bay Psalm-Book" found a congenial and loving owner;
+and under his careful superintendence an exact reprint was published in
+1862 in the Riverside Press at Cambridge. He wrote for it a preface. It was
+published by subscription; one copy on India paper, fifteen on thick paper,
+and fifty on common paper. Copies on the last named paper have sold readily
+for thirty dollars each. All the typographical errors of the original were
+carefully reproduced in this reprint.</p>
+
+<p>At Dr. Shurtleffs death, his "Bay Psalm-Book" was catalogued with the rest
+of his library, which was to be sold on Dec. 2, 1875; but an injunction was
+obtained by the deacons of the Old South Church, to prevent the sale of the
+old psalm-book. They were rather late in the day however, to try to obtain
+again the too easily parted with book, and the ownership of it was adjudged
+to the estate. The book was sold Oct. 12, 1876, at the Library salesroom,
+Beacon Street, Boston, for one thousand and fifty dollars. It is now in the
+library of Mrs. John Carter Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island. Special
+interest attaches to this copy, because it was "Richard Mather, His Book"
+as several autographs in it testify; and the author's own copy is always of
+extra value. Cotton Mather, a grandson of Richard, was the close friend of
+the Reverend Thomas Prince, who founded the Prince Library, and who left it
+by will to the Old South Church in 1758. Mr. Prince's book-plate is on the
+reverse of the titlepage of this copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book," and is in
+itself a rarity. It reads thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"This Book belongs to<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The New England Library<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Begun to be collected by Thomas Prince<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;upon his ent'ring Harvard-College July 6<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;1703, and was given by said Prince, to<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;remain therein forever."</blockquote>
+
+<p>There was a sixth copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book" in the Prince Library in
+1830 when Dr. Wisner wrote his four sermons on the Old South Church of
+Boston,--a copy annotated by Dr. Prince and used by him while he was
+engaged on his revision. It has disappeared, together with many other
+important books and manuscripts belonging to the same library. The
+vicissitudes through which this most valuable collection has passed--lying
+neglected for years on shelves, in boxes, and in barrels in the
+steeple-room of the Old South Church, depleted to use for lighting fires,
+injured by British soldiery, but injured still more by the neglect and
+indifference of its custodians--are too painful to contemplate or relate.
+They contribute to the scholarly standing and honor of neither pastors nor
+congregations during those years. It is enough to state, however, that it
+is to the noble and ill-requited forethought of Dr. Prince that we owe all
+but three of the copies of the Bay Psalm-Book which are now known to be in
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>There is also a perfect copy of the first edition of the old book in the
+Lenox Library in New York, and the manner in which it was acquired (and
+also some further accounts of two of our old friends of the Prince Library,
+the acquisitions of Messrs. Crowninshield and Liverraore) is told so
+entertainingly by Henry Stevens, of Vermont, in his charming book,
+"Recollections of Mr. James Lenox" that it is best to quote his account in
+full:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"For nearly ten years Mr. Lenox had entertained a longing de
+    to possess a perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book.' He gave me to
+    understand that if an opportunity occurred of securing a copy for him I
+    might go as far as one hundred guineas. Accordingly from 1847 till his
+    death, six years later, my good friend William Pickering and I put our
+    heads and book-hunting forces together to run down this rarity. The
+    only copy we knew of on this side the Atlantic was a spotless one in
+    the Bodleian Library, which had lain there unrecognized for ages, and
+    even in the printed catalogue of 1843 its title was recorded without
+    distinction among the common herd of Psalms in verse. I had handled it
+    several times with great reverence, and noted its many peculiar points,
+    but, as agreed with Mr. Pickering, without making any sign or imparting
+    any information to our good and obliging friend Dr. Bandinel, Bodley's
+    Librarian. We thought that when we had secured a copy for oursel
+    it would be time enough to acquaint the learned Doctor that he was
+    entertaining unawares this angel of the New World. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Under these circumstances, therefore, only an experienced collector
+    can judge of my surprise and inward satisfaction, when on the 12
+    January, 1855, at Sotheby's, at one of the sales of Pickering's stock,
+    after untying parcel after parcel to see what I might chance to see,
+    and keeping ahead of the auctioneer, Mr. Wilkinson, on resolving to
+    prospect in one parcel more before he overtook me, my eye rested
+    an instant only on the long-lost Benjamin, clean and unspotted. I
+    instantly closed the parcel (which was described in the Catalogue as
+    Lot '531 Psalmes, other editions, 1630 to 1675 black letter, a parcel')
+    and tightened the string just as Alfred came to lay it on the table. A
+    cool-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing to the table behind Mr.
+    Lilly I quietly bid, in a perfectly natural tone, 'Sixpence,' and so
+    the bids went on increasing by sixpence until half a crown was reached,
+    and Mr. Lilly had loosened the string. Taking up this very volume he
+    turned to me and remarked that 'This looks a rare edition, Mr. Stevens,
+    don't you think so? I do not remember having seen it before,' and
+    raised the bid to five shillings. I replied that I had little doubt of
+    its rarity though comparatively a late edition of the Psalms,
+    at the same time gave Mr. Wilkinson a six-penny nod. Thenceforth a
+    'spirited competition' arose between Mr. Lilly and myself, until
+    finally the lot was knocked down to 'Stevens' for nineteen shillings. I
+    then called out with perhaps more energy than discretion, 'Delivered!'
+    On pocketing this volume, leaving the other seven to take the usual
+    course, Mr. Lilly and others inquired with some curiosity, 'What rarity
+    have you got now?' 'Oh, nothing,' said I, 'but the first English book
+    printed in America.' There was a pause in the sale, while all had a
+    good look at the little stranger. Some said jocularly, 'There has
+    evidently been a mistake; put up the lot again.' Mr. Stevens, with the
+    book again safely in his pocket, said, 'Nay, if Mr. Pickering, whose
+    cost mark of [3s] did not recognize the prize he had won, certainly the
+    cataloguer might be excused for throwing it away into the hands of the
+    right person to rescue, appreciate, and preserve it. I am now fully
+    rewarded for my long and silent hunt of seven years.'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"On reaching Morley's I eagerly collated the volume, and at first found
+    it right witli all the <i>usual</i> signatures correct. The leaves were
+    not paged or folioed. But on further collation I missed sundry of the
+    Psalms, enough to fill four leaves. The puzzle was finally solved when
+    it was discovered that the inexperienced printer had marked the sheet
+    with the signature w after v, which is very unusual. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"This was a very disheartening disappointment, but I held my tongue,
+    and knowing that my old friend and correspondent, George Liverm
+    of Cambridge, N. E., possessed an imperfect copy, which he and Mr.
+    Crowninshield, after the noble example of the 'Lincoln Nosegay,' had
+    won from the Committee of the 'Old South' together with another and
+    perfect copy, I proposed an advantageous exchange and obtained
+    four missing leaves. Mr. Crowninshield strongly advised Mr. Livermore
+    against parting with his four leaves, because, as he said, 'They would
+    enable Stevens to complete his copy and to place it in the library of
+    Mr. Lenox, who would then crow over us because he also had a perfect
+    copy of "The Bay-Psalm Book."'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Having thus completed my copy and had it bound by Francis Bedford in
+    his best style, I sent it to Mr. Lenox for &pound;80. Five years later I
+    bought the Crowninshield Library in Boston for $10,000, mainly to
+    obtain his perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book,' and brought the whole
+    library to London. This second copy, after being held several months,
+    was at the suggestion of Mr. Thomas Watts, offered to the British
+    Museum for &pound;150. The Keeper of the Printed Books, however, never had
+    the courage to send it before the Trustees for approval and payment; so
+    after waiting five or six years longer the volume was withdrawn, bound
+    by Bedford, taken to America in 1868, and sold to Mr. George Brinley
+    for 150 guineas. At the Brinley sale, in March, 1878, it was bought by
+    Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for $1200, or more than three times the cost
+    of my first copy to Mr. Lenox."</blockquote>
+
+<p>We hear the expression of a book being "worth its weight in gold." "The Bay
+Psalm-Book," in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society, weighs
+nine ounces, hence Mr. Vanderbilt paid at least seven times its weight in
+gold for his precious book. Lowndes's "Bibliographers' Manual" says, "This
+volume, which is extremely rare and would at an auction in America produce
+from four to six thousand dollars, is familiarly termed 'The Bay Psalm
+Book.'" This must have been intended to be printed four to six hundred
+dollars, and is about as correct as the remainder of the description in
+that manual.</p>
+
+<p>The copy which is spoken of by Mr. Stevens as being in the Bodleian Library
+at Oxford was once the property of Bishop Tanner, the famous antiquary.
+Thus it is seen that there are seven copies at least of the first edition
+of "The Bay Psalm-Book" now in existence in America, instead of "five or
+at the most six," as a recent writer in "The Magazine of American History"
+states.</p>
+
+<p>And of all the manifold later editions of the New England Psalm-Book
+comparatively few copies now remain. Occasionally one is discovered in an
+old church library or seen in the collection of an antiquary. It is usually
+found to bear on its titlepage the name of its early owner, and often,
+also, in a different handwriting, the simple record and date of his death.
+Tender little memorial postils are frequently written on the margins of
+the pages: "Sung this the day Betty was baptized"--"This Psalm was sung at
+Mothers Funeral" "Gods Grace help me to heed this word." Sometimes we see
+on the blank pages, in a fine, cramped handwriting, the record of the
+births and deaths of an entire family. More frequently still we find the
+familiar and hackneyed verses of ancient titlepage lore, such as are
+usually seen on the blank leaves of old Bibles. This script was written in
+a "Bay Psalm-Book" of the sixteenth edition, and with the characteristic
+indifference of our New England forefathers for tiresome repetition, or
+possibly with their disdain of novelty, was seen on each and every blank
+page of the book:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Israel Balch, His Book,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;God give him Grace theirin to look<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And when the Bell for him doth toal<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;May God have mearcy on his Sole."</blockquote>
+
+<p>What the diction lacked in variety is quite made up, however, in the
+spelling, which was painstakingly different on each page.</p>
+
+<p>Another Psalm-Book bore, inscribed in an elegant, minute handwriting, these
+lines, which were probably intended for verse, since the first word of each
+line commenced with a capital letter:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Abednego Prime His Book<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When he withein these pages looks<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;May he find Grace to sing therein<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Seventeen hundred and forty-seven."</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is certainly pretty bad poetry,--bad enough to be worthy a place in
+"The Bay Psalm Book,"--but is also a most noble, laudable, and necessary
+aspiration; for power of Grace was plainly needed to enable Abednego or any
+one else to sing from those pages; and our pious New England forefathers
+must have been under special covenant of grace when they persevered against
+such obstacles and under such overwhelming disadvantages in having singing
+in their meetings.</p>
+
+<p>Another copy of the old New England Psalm-Book was thus inscribed:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Elam Noyes His Book<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;You children of the name of Noyes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Make Jesus Christ your only choyse."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The early members of the Noyes family all seemed to be exceedingly and
+properly proud of this rhyming couplet; it formed a sort of patent of
+nobility. They wrote the pious injunction to their descendants in their
+Psalm-Books and their Bibles, in their wills, their letters; and they,
+with the greatest unanimity of feeling, had it cut upon their several
+tombstones. It was their own family motto,--their totem, so to speak.</p>
+
+<p>In a New England Psalm-Book in the possession of the American Antiquarian
+Society there is written in the distinct handwriting of Isaiah Thomas these
+explanatory words:--</p>
+
+<p>"This was the Pocket Psalm-book of John Symmons who died at Salem at
+100 years. He was born at North Salem went a-fishing in his youth was a
+prisoner with the Indians in Nova Scotia afterwards followed his labours in
+a Shipyard and till great old age laboured upon his lands and died
+without pain Aet 100. 31 October, 1791. He was a worthy conscientious and
+well-informed man and agreeable until the last hour of his life."</p>
+
+<p>I can think of no pleasanter tribute to be given to the character of any
+one than the simple words, "He was agreeable until the last hour of his
+life." What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and
+enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present
+influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant
+study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet
+agreeability which so characterized John Symmons.</p>
+
+<p>There lies now before me a copy of one of the early editions of "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." As I open the little dingy octavo volume, with its worn
+and torn edges, I am conscious of that distinctive, penetrating,
+<i>old-booky</i> smell,--that ancient, that fairly <i>obsolete</i> odor that
+never is exhaled save from some old, infrequently opened, leather-bound
+volume, which has once in years far past been much used and handled. A book
+which has never been familiarly used and loved cannot have quite the same
+antique perfume. The mouldering, rusty, flaky leather comes off in a
+yellow-brown powder on my fingers as I take up the book; and the cover
+nearly breaks off as I open it, though with tender, book-loving usage. The
+leather, though strong and honest, has rotted or disintegrated until it has
+almost fallen into dust. Across the yellow, ill-printed pages there runs,
+zig-zagging sideways and backwards crab-fashion on his crooked brown legs,
+one of those pigmy book-spiders,--those ugly little bibliophiles that seem
+flatter even than the close-pressed pages that form their home.</p>
+
+<p>Fair Puritan hands once held this dingy little book, honest Puritan eyes
+studied its ill-expressed words, and sweet Puritan lips sang haltingly but
+lovingly from its pages. This was "Cicely Morse Her Book" in the year 1710,
+and bears on many a page her name and the simple little couplet:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"In youth I praise<br />
+  And walk thy ways."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And pretty it were to see Cicely in her praiseful and godly-walking youth,
+as she stood primly clad in her sad-colored gown and long apron, with a
+quoif or ciffer covering her smooth hair, and a red whittle on her slender
+shoulders, a-singing in the old New England meeting-house through the
+long, tedious psalms, which were made longer and more tedious still by the
+drawling singing and the deacons' "lining." Truly that were a pretty sight
+for our eyes, and for other eyes than ours, without doubt. Staid Puritan
+youth may have glanced soberly across the old meeting-house at the fair
+girl as she sung the Song of Solomon, with its ardent wording, without any
+very deep thought of its symbolic meaning:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Let him with kisses of his mouth<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;be pleased me to kiss,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Because much better than the wine<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thy loving-kindness is.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To troops of horse in Pharoahs coach,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;my love, I thee compare,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Thy neck with chains, with jewels new,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thy cheeks full comely are.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Borders of gold with silver studs<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for thee make up we will,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Whilst that the king at's table sits<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;my spikenard yields her smell.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;Like as of myrrh a bundle is<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;my well-belov'd to be,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Through all the night betwixt my breasts<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;his lodging-place shall be;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;My love as in Engedis vines<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;like camphire-bunch to me,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;So fair, my love, thou fair thou art<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thine eyes as doves eyes be."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school--that
+safety-valve of young New England life--had not then been established or
+even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical
+love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old
+meeting-house at Cicely as she sung.</p>
+
+<p>But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book. She may
+have been stately and prosperous and seated in the dignified "foreseat;"
+she may have been feeble and infirm in her place in the "Deaf Pue;" and she
+may have been careworn and sad, tired of fighting against poverty, worn
+with dread of fierce Indians, weary of the howls of the wolves in the dense
+forests so near, and home-sick and longing for the yonderland, her "faire
+Englishe home;" but were she sad or careworn or heartsick, in her treasured
+psalm-book she found comfort,--comfort in the halting verses as well as
+in the noble thoughts of the Psalmist. And the glamour of eternal,
+sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the
+inscription in the old psalm-book,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"In youth I praise<br />
+  And walk thy ways,"--</blockquote>
+
+<p>the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole
+New World was young.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap13"></a>XIII</h1>
+
+<h2>Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The metrical translation of the Psalms known as Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was doubtless used in the public worship of God in many of the
+early New England settlements, especially those of the Connecticut River
+Valley, though the old register of the town of Ipswich is the only local
+record that gives positive proof of its use in the Puritan church. In
+1693 an edition of Sternhold and Hopkins was printed in Cambridge,
+Massachusetts. It was not a day nor a land where a whole edition of such a
+book would be printed for reference or comparison only; and to thus publish
+the work of the English psalmists in the very teeth of the popularity of
+"The Bay Psalm Book" is to me a proof that Sternhold and Hopkins' Version
+was employed far more extensively in the colonial churches and homes than
+we now have records of, and than many of our church historians now fancy.
+Certainly the familiar English psalm-books must have been brought across
+the ocean and used temporarily until the newly landed colonists could
+acquire the version of Ainsworth or of the New England divines.</p>
+
+<p>An everlasting interest attaches to this metrical arrangement of the
+Psalms, to Americans as well as to Englishmen, because it was the earliest
+to be adopted in public worship in England. According to Strype, in his
+Memorial, the singing of psalms was allowed in England as early as 1548,
+but it was not until 1562 that the versified psalms of Sternhold and
+Hopkins were appended to the Book of Common Prayer. Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was also the first to give all the psalms of David in English verse
+to the English public.</p>
+
+<p>Very little is known of the authors of this version. Sternhold was educated
+at Oxford; was Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., was a
+"bold and busy Calvinist," and died in 1549. The little of interest told
+of John Hopkins is that he was a minister and schoolmaster, and that he
+assisted the work of Sternhold.</p>
+
+<p>The full reason for Sternhold's pious work is thus given by an old English
+author, Wood: "Being a most zealous reformer and a very strict liver he
+became so scandalyzed at the loose amorous songs used in the court that he
+forsooth turned into English metre fifty-one of Davids Psalms, and caused
+musical notes to be set to them, thinking thereby that the courtiers
+would sing them instead of their sonnets; but they did not, only some few
+excepted." The preface printed in the book stated Sternhold's wish and
+intention that the verses should be sung by Englishmen, not only in church,
+but "moreover in private houses for their godly solace and comfort; laying
+apart all ungodly Songs &amp; Ballads which tend only to the nourishment of
+vice &amp; corrupting of youth."</p>
+
+<p>The first edition contained nineteen psalms only, which were all versified
+by Sternhold. It was published in 1548 or 1549, under this title, "Certayn
+Psalmes chosen out of the Psalter of Daid and drawen into English Metre by
+Thomas Sternhold Groom of ye Kynges Maiesties Roobes." I believe no copy of
+this edition is now known to exist.</p>
+
+<p>The praise which Sternhold received for his pious rhymes had the same
+effect upon him as did similar encomiums upon his predecessor, the French
+psalm-writer Marot,--it encouraged him to write more psalm-verses.</p>
+
+<p>The second edition was printed in 1549, and contained thirty-seven psalms
+by Sternhold and seven by Hopkins. It bore this title, "Al such Psalmes of
+David as Thomas Sternehold late grome of his maiesties robes did in his
+lyfe tyme drawe into English metre." It was a well-printed book and copies
+are still preserved in the British Museum and the Public Library of
+Cambridge, England. This second and enlarged edition was dedicated, in a
+four-page preface, to King Edward VI., and a pretty story is told of the
+young king's interest in the verses. The delicate and gentle boy of twelve
+heard Sternhold when "singing them to his organ" as Strype says, and
+wandered in to hear the music and listen to the words. So great was his
+awakened interest in the sacred songs that Sternhold resolved to write in
+verse for him still further of the psalms. The dedication reads: "Seeing
+that your tender and godly zeale dooth more delight in the holye songs of
+veritie than in any fayncd rymes of vanytie, I am encouraged to travayle
+further in the said booke of Psalmes." This young king restored to the
+English people the free reading of the Bible, which his wicked father,
+Henry VIII., had forbidden them, and he was of a sincerely religious
+nature. He also was a music-lover, and encouraged the art as much as his
+short life and troubled reign permitted.</p>
+
+<p>Hopkins also wrote a preface for his share of the work, in which he spoke
+with much modesty of himself and much praise of Sternhold. He said his own
+verses were not "in any parte to bee compared with his [Sternhold's] most
+exquisite dooynges." He thinks, however, that his owne are "fruitfull
+though they bee not fyne."</p>
+
+<p>The third edition, in 1556, contained fifty-one psalms; the fourth, in
+1560, had sixty-seven psalms; the fifth, in 1561, increased the number to
+eighty-seven; and in 1562 or 1563 the whole book of psalms appeared. Other
+authors had some share in this work: Norton, Whyttyngham (a Puritan divine
+who married Calvin's sister), Kethe, who wrote the 100th Psalm, "All people
+that on earth do dwell," which is still seen in some of our hymn-books. Of
+all these men, sly old Thomas Fuller truthfully and quaintly said, "They
+were men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more
+of Jordan than of Helicon."</p>
+
+<p>For over one hundred years from the first publication there was a steady
+outpour of editions of these Psalms. Before the year 1600 there were
+seventy-four editions,--a most astonishing number for the times; and from
+1600 to 1700 two hundred and thirty-five editions. In 1868 six hundred and
+one editions were known, including twenty-one in this nineteenth century
+and doubtless there were still others uncatalogued and forgotten. Among
+other editions this version had in the time of Charles II. two in
+shorthand, one printed by "Thos. Cockerill at the Three Legs and Bible in
+the Poultry." Two copies of these editions are in the British Museum. They
+are tiny little 64mos, of which half a dozen could be laid side by side on
+the palm of the hand. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version had also in 1694 the
+honor of having arranged for it a Concordance.</p>
+
+<p>Upon no production of the religious Muse in the English tongue has greater
+diversity of criticism been displayed or more extraordinary or varied
+judgment been rendered than upon Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. A world of
+testimony could be adduced to fortify any view which one chose to take
+of them. At the time of their early publication they induced a swarm of
+stinging lampoons and sneering comments, that often evince most plainly
+that a difference in religious belief or scorn for an opposing sect brought
+them forth. The poetry of that and the succeeding century abounds in
+allusions to them. Phillips wrote:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>      "Singing with woful noise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Like a crack'd saints bell jarring in the steeple,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Tom Sternhold's wretched prick-song for the people."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Another poet, a courtier, wrote:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms<br />
+When they translated David's psalms."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But I see no signs of qualmishness; they show to me rather a healthy
+sturdiness as one of their strongest characteristics.</p>
+
+<p>Pope at a later day wrote:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Not but there are who merit other palms<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The boys and girls whom charity maintains<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Implore your help in these pathetic strains.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;How could devotion touch the country pews<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Unless the gods bestowed a proper muse."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Wesley sneered at this version, saying, "When it is seasonable to sing
+praises to God we do it, not in the scandalous doggrel of Hopkins and
+Sternhold, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such
+as would provoke a <i>critic</i> to turn <i>Christian</i> rather than a
+<i>Christian</i> to turn <i>critic</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The edition of 1562 was printed with the notes of melodies that were then
+called Church Tunes. They formed the basis of all future collections of
+psalm-music for over a century. They soon were published in harmony in four
+parts, "which may be sung to all musical instrumentes set forth for the
+encrease of vertue and abolyshing of other vayne and tryfling ballads." In
+1592 a very important collection of psalm-tunes was published to use with
+Sternhold and Hopkins' words. It is called "The Whole Booke of Psalmes:
+with their wonted tunes as they are sung in Churches composed into four
+parts." This book is noteworthy because in it the tunes are for the first
+time named after places, as is still the custom. The music contained square
+or oblong notes and also lozenge-shaped notes. The square note was a
+"semy-brave," the lozenge-shaped note was a "prycke" or a "mynymme," and
+"when there is a prycke by the square note, that prycke is half as much as
+the note that goeth before."</p>
+
+<p>Music at that time was said to be pricked, not printed,--the word being
+derived from the prick or dot which formed the head of the note. Any song
+which was printed in various parts was called a prick-song, to distinguish
+it from one sung extemporaneously or by ear. The word prick-song occurs not
+only in all the musical books, but in the literature of the time, and in
+Shakespeare. "Tom Sternhold's" songs were entitled to be called prick-songs
+because they had notes of music printed with them. Many of the tunes
+in this collection were taken from the Genevan Psalter and Luther's
+Psalm-Book, or from Marot and Beza's French Book of Psalms. Hence they were
+irreverently called "Genevan Jiggs," and "Beza's Ballets."</p>
+
+<p>There is much difference shown in the wording of these various editions of
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. The earlier ones were printed as Sternhold
+wrote them; but with the Genevan editions began great and astonishing
+alterations. Warton, who was no lover of Sternhold and Hopkins' verses,
+calling them "the disgrace of sacred poetry," said of these attempted
+improvements, with vehemence, that "many stanzas already too naked and weak
+like a plain old Gothic edifice stripped of its signatures of antiquity,
+have lost that little and almost only strength and support which they
+derived from ancient phrases." Other old critics thought that Sternhold,
+could he return to life, would hardly know his own verses.</p>
+
+<p>This is Sternhold's rendering of the Psalm in the edition of 1549:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;1.  The heavens &amp; the fyrmamente<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;do wondersly declare<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The glory of God omnipotent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;his workes and what they are.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;2.  Ech daye declareth by his course<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;an other daye to come<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And By the night we know lykwise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a nightly course to run.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;3.  There is no laguage tong or speche<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;where theyr sound is not heard,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In al the earth and coastes thereof<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;theyr knowledge is conferd.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;4.  In them the lord made royally<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a settle for the sunne<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Where lyke a Gyant joyfully<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;he myght his iourney runne.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;5.  And all the skye from ende to ende<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;he compast round about<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;No man can hyde hym from his heate<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;but he wll fynd hym out</blockquote>
+
+<p>In order to show the liberties taken with the text we can compare with it
+the Genevan edition printed in 1556. The second verse of that presumptuous
+rendering reads,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The wonderous works of God appears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;by every days success<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The nyghts which likewise their race runne<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the selfe same thinges expresse."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The fourth,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"In them the lorde made for the sunne<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a place of great renoune<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Who like a bridegrome rady-trimed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;doth from his chamber come."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The expression "rady-trimed," meaning close-shaven, is often instanced as
+one of the inelegancies of Sternhold, but he surely ought not to be held
+responsible for the "improvements" of the Genevan edition published after
+his death.</p>
+
+<p>The Genevan editors also invented and inserted an extra verse:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And as a valiant champion<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;who for to get a prize<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;With joye doth hast to take in hande<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;some noble enterprise."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The fifth verse is thus altered:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And al the skye from ende to ende<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;he compasseth about,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Nothing can hyde it from his heate<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;but he wil finde it out."</blockquote>
+
+<p>I cannot express the indignation with which I read these belittling and
+weakening alterations and interpolations; they are so unjust and
+so degrading to the reputation of Sternhold. It seems worse than
+forgery--worse than piracy; for instead of stealing from the defenceless
+dead poet, it foists upon him a spurious and degrading progeny; there is no
+word to express this tinkering libellous literary crime.</p>
+
+<p>Cromwell had a prime favorite among these psalms; it was the one hundred
+and ninth and is known as the "cursing psalm." Here are a few lines from
+it:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>  "As he did cursing love, it shall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;betide unto him so,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And as he did not blessing love<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;it shall be farre him fro,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As he with cursing clad himselfe<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;so it like water shall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Into his bowels and like oyl<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Into his bones befall.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As garments let it be to him<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to cover him for aye<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And as a girdle wherewith he<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;may girded be alway."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Another authority gives the "cursing psalm" as the nineteenth of King
+James's version; but there is nothing in "The heavens declare the glory of
+God," &amp;c. to justify the nickname of "cursing."</p>
+
+<p>It is said when the tyrannical ruler Andros visited New Haven and attended
+church there that (Sternhold and Hopkins' Version being used) the fearless
+minister very inhospitably gave out the fifty-second psalm to be sung. The
+angry governor, who took it as a direct insult, had to listen to the lining
+and singing of these words, and I have no doubt they were roared out with a
+lusty will:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;1.  Why dost thou tyrant boast thyself<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thy wicked deeds to praise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Dost thou not know there is a God<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;whose mercies last alwaies?</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;2.  Why doth thy mind yet still deuise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;such wisked wiles to warp?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thy tongue untrue, in forging lies<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;is like a razer sharp.</blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;4.  Thou dost delight in fraude &amp; guilt<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;in mischief bloude and wrong:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thy lips have learned the flattering stile<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;O false deceitful tongue.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;5.  Therefore shall God for eye confounde<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and pluck thee from thy place.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thy seed and root from out the grounde<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and so shall thee deface;</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;6.  The just when they behold thy fall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;with feare will praise the Lord:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And in reproach of thee withall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;cry out with one accord.</blockquote>
+
+<p>When the unhappy King Charles fled from Oxford to a camp of troops he also
+was insulted by having the same psalm given out in his presence by the
+boorish chaplain of the troops. After the cruel words were ended the
+heartsick king rose and asked the soldiers to sing the fifty-sixth psalm.
+Whenever I read the beautiful and pathetic words, as peculiarly appropriate
+as if they had been written for that occasion only, I can see it all before
+me,--the great camp, the angry minister, the wretched but truly royal king;
+and I can hear the simple and noble song as it pours from the lips of
+hundreds of rude soldiers:</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;1.  Have mercy Lord on mee I pray<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for man would mee devour.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;He fighteth with me day by day<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and troubleth me each hour.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;2.  Mine enemies daily enterprise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to swallow mee outright<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To fight against me many rise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;O thou most high of might</blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;5.  What things I either did or spake<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;they wrest them at thier wil:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And all the councel that they take<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;is how to work me il.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;6.  They all consent themselves to hide<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;close watch for me to lay:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;They spie my pathes, and snares have layd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to take my life away.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;7.  Shall they thus scape on mischief set,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thou God on them wilt frowne:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For in his wrath he will not let<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to throw whole kingdomes downe.</blockquote>
+
+<p>It would perhaps be neither just nor conducive to proper judgment to gather
+only a florilege of noble verses from Sternhold and Hopkins' Version and
+point out none of the "weedy-trophies," the quaint and even uncouth lines
+which disfigure the work. We must, however, in considering and judging
+them, remember that many words and even phrases which at present
+seem rather ludicrous or undignified had, in the sixteenth century,
+significations which have now become obsolete, and which were then neither
+vulgar nor unpoetical. I also have been forced to take my selections from
+a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins printed in 1599, and bound up with a
+"Breeches Bible;" for I have access to no earlier edition. Sternhold
+and Hopkins themselves may not be in truth responsible for many of
+the crudities. Hopkins, in his rendition of the 12th verse of the
+seventy-fourth Psalm, thus addresses the Deity:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Why doost withdraw thy hand abacke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and hide it in thy lappe?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;O pluck it out and bee not slacke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to give thy foes a rap."</blockquote>
+
+<p>"Rap" may have meant a heavier, a mightier blow then than it does
+now-a-days.</p>
+
+<p>Here is another curious verse from the seventieth psalm,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Confounde them that apply<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and seeke to make my shame<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And at my harme doe laugh &amp; crye<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;So So there goeth the game."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The sixth verse of the fifty-eighth psalm is rendered thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"O God breake thou thier teeth at once<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;within thier mouthes throughout;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The tuskes that in thier great jawbones<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;like Lions whelpes hang out."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Another verse reads thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The earth did quake, the raine pourde down<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Heard men great claps of thunder<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And Mount Sinai shooke in such state<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As it would cleeve in sunder."</blockquote>
+
+<p>One verse of the thirty-fifth psalm reads thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The belly-gods and flattering traine<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;that all good things deride<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;At me doe grin with greate disdaine<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and pluck thier mouths aside.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Lord when wilt thou amend this geare<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;why dost thou stay &amp; pause?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;O rid my soul, my onely deare,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;out of these Lions clawes."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The word tush occurs frequently and quaintly: "Tush I an sure to fail;"
+"Tush God forgetteth this."</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And with a blast doth puff against<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;such as would him correct<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Tush Tush saith he I have no dread."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Here are some of the curious expressions used:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Though gripes of grief and pangs full sore<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;shall lodge with us all night."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"For why their hearts were nothing lent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to Him nor to His trade."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Our soul in God hath joy and game."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"They are so fed that even for fat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thier eyes oft-times out start."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"They grin they mow they nod thier heads."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"While they have war within thier hearts."<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;as butter are thier words."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Divide them Lord &amp; from them pul<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thier devilish double-tongue."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"My silly soul uptake."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And rained down Manna for them to eat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a food of mickle-wonder."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"For joy I have both gaped &amp; breathed."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But it is useless to multiply these selections, which, viewed individually,
+are certainly absurd and inelegant. They often indicate, however, the exact
+thought of the Psalmist, and are as well expressed as the desire to be
+literal as well as poetic will permit them to be. Sternhold's verses
+compare quite favorably, when looked at either as a whole or with regard to
+individual lines, with those of other poets of his day, for Chaucer was the
+only great poet who preceded him.</p>
+
+<p>I must acknowledge quite frankly in the face of critics of both this and
+the past century that I always read Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms with a
+delight, a satisfaction that I can hardly give reasons for. Many of the
+renderings, though unmelodious and uneven, have a rough vigor and a
+sweeping swing that is to me wonderfully impressive, far more so than many
+of the elegant and polished methods of modern versifiers. And they are so
+thoroughly antique, so devoid of any resemblance to modern poems, that I
+love them for their penetrating savor of the olden times; and they seem no
+more to be compared and contrasted with modern verses than should an old
+castle tower be compared with a fine new city house. We prefer the latter
+for a habitation, it is infinitely better in every way, but we can admire
+also the rough grandeur of the old ruin.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap14"></a>XIV</h1>
+
+<h2>Other Old Psalm-Books.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>There are occasionally found in New England on the shelves of old
+libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old
+farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a
+pile of dusty books in a barrel,--there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered
+psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly
+used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed
+in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some
+colonist, in affectionate remembrance of the church of his youth, and sung
+from only with tender reminiscent longing in his own home. But when groups
+of settlers who were neighbors and friends in their old homes came to
+America and formed little segregated communities by themselves, there is no
+doubt that they sung for a time from the psalm-books that they brought with
+them.</p>
+
+<p>A rare copy is sometimes seen of Marot and Beza's French Psalm-book,
+brought to America doubtless by French Huguenot settlers, and used by them
+until (and perhaps after) the owners had learned the new tongue. Some of
+the Huguenots became members of the Puritan churches in America, others
+were Episcopalians. In Boston the Fancuils, Baudoins, Boutineaus,
+Sigourneys, and Johannots were all Huguenots, and attended the little brick
+church built on School Street in 1704, which was afterwards occupied by
+the Twelfth Congregational Society of Boston, and in 1788 became a Roman
+Catholic church.</p>
+
+<p>The pocket psalm-book of Gabriel Bernon, the builder of the old French Fort
+at Oxford, is one of Marot and Beza's Version, and is still preserved and
+owned by one of his descendants; other New England families of French
+lineage cherish as precious relics the French psalm-books of their Huguenot
+ancestors. There has been in France no such incessant production of new
+metrical versions of the psalms as in England. From the time of the
+publication of the first versified psalms in 1540, through nearly three
+centuries the psalm-book of all French Protestants has been that of Marot
+and Beza. This French version of the psalms is of special interest to all
+thoughtful students of the history of Protestantism, because it was the
+first metrical translation of the psalms ever sung and used by the people;
+and it was without doubt one of the most powerful influences that assisted
+in the religious awakening of the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>Clement Marot was the "Valet of the Bed-chamber to King Francis I.," and
+was one of the greatest French poets of his time; in fact, he gave his
+name to a new school of poetry,--"Marotique." He had tried his hand at
+an immense variety of profane verse, he had written ballades, chansons,
+pastourelles, vers &eacute;quivoques, eclogues, laments, complaints, epitaphs,
+chants-royals, blasons, contreblasons, dizains, huitains, envois; he had
+been, Warton says, "the inventor of the rondeau and the restorer of the
+madrigal;" and yet, in spite of his well-known ingenuity and versatility,
+it occasioned much surprise and even amusement when it was known that the
+gay poet had written psalm-songs and proposed to substitute them for the
+love-songs of the French court. I doubt if Marot thought very deeply of the
+religious influence of his new songs, in spite of Mr. Morley's belief in
+the versifier's serious intent. He was doubtless interested and perhaps
+somewhat infected by "Lutheranisme," though perhaps he was more of a
+free-thinker than a Protestant. He himself said of his faith:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"I am not a Lutherist<br />
+Nor Zuinglian and less Anabaptist,<br />
+I am of God through his son Jesus Christ.<br />
+I am one who has many works devised<br />
+From which none could extract a single line<br />
+Opposing itself to the law divine."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And again:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Luther did not come down from heaven for me<br />
+Luther was not nailed to the cross to be<br />
+My Saviour; for my sins to suffer shame,<br />
+And I was not baptized in Luther's name.<br />
+The name I was baptized in sounds so sweet<br />
+That at the sound of it, what we entreat<br />
+The Eternal Father gives."</blockquote>
+
+<p>In the year 1540, at the instigation of King Francis, Marot presented a
+manuscript copy of his thirty new psalm-songs to Charles V., king of Spain,
+receiving therefor two hundred gold doubloons. Francis encouraged him by
+further gifts, and so praised his work that the author soon published the
+thirty in a book which he dedicated to the king; and to which he also
+prefixed a metrical address to the ladies of France, bidding these fair
+dames to place their</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"doigts sur les espinettes<br />
+Pour dire sainctes chansonnettes."</blockquote>
+
+<p>These "sainctes chansonnettes" became at once the rage; courtiers and
+princes, lords and ladies, ever ready for some new excitement, seized at
+once upon the novel psalm-songs, and having no special or serious music for
+them, cheerfully sang the sacred words to the ballad-tunes of the times,
+and to their gailliards and measures, without apparently any very deep
+thought of their religious meaning. Disraeli says that each of the royal
+family and each nobleman chose for his favorite song a psalm expressive of
+his own feeling or sentiments. The Dauphin, as became a brave huntsman,
+chose</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre," </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"As the hart panteth after the water-brook,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>and he gayly and noisily sang it when he went to the chase. The Queen chose</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Ne vueilles pas, &ocirc; sire,<br />
+  Me reprendre en ton ire."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Rebuke me not in thine indignation."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Antony, king of Navarre, sung</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Revenge moy prens la querelle,"</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Stand up, O Lord! to revenge my quarrel,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>to the air of a dance of Poitou. Diane de Poictiers chose</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Du fond de ma pens&eacute;e." </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"From the depth of my heart."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But when from interest in her psalm-song she wished to further read and
+study the Bible, she was warned from the danger with horror by the Cardinal
+of Lorraine. This religious awakening and inquiry was of course deprecated
+and dreaded by the Romish Church; to the Sorbonne all this rage for
+psalm-singing was alarming enough. What right had the people to sing God's
+word, "I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall be continually
+in my mouth"? The new psalm-songs were soon added to the list of "Heretical
+Books" forbidden by the Church, and Marot fled to Geneva in 1543. He had
+ere this been under ban of the Church, even under condemnation of death;
+had been proclaimed a heretic at all the cross-ways throughout the kingdom,
+and had been imprisoned. But he had been too good a poet and courtier to be
+lost, and the king had then interested himself and obtained the release of
+the versatile song writer. The fickle king abandoned for a second time the
+psalm versifier, who never again returned to France.</p>
+
+<p>The austere and far-seeing Calvin at once adopted Marot's version of the
+Psalms, now enlarged to the number of fifty, and added them to the Genevan
+Confession of Faith,--recommending however that they be sung with the grave
+and suitable strains written, for them by Guillaume Frane.</p>
+
+<p>The collection was completed with the assistance of Theodore Beza, the
+great theologian, and the demand for the books was so great that the
+printers could not supply them quickly enough. Ten thousand copies were
+sold at once,--a vast number for the times.</p>
+
+<p>But Marot was not happy in Geneva with Calvin and the Calvinists, as we can
+well understand. Beza, in his "History of the French Reformed Churches"
+said, "He (Marot) had always been bred up in a very bad school, and could
+not live in subjection to the reformation of the Gospel, and therefore
+went and spent the rest of his days in Piedmont, which was then in the
+possession of the king, where he lived in some security under the favor of
+the governor." He lived less than a year, however, dying in 1544.</p>
+
+<p>These psalms of Marot's passed through a great number and variety of
+editions. In addition to the Genevan publications, an immense number were
+printed in England. Nearly all the early editions were elegant books;
+carefully printed on rich paper, beautifully bound in rich moroccos and
+leathers, often emblazoned with gold on the covers, and with corners and
+clasps of precious metals,--they show the wealth and fashion of the owners.
+When, however, it came to be held an infallible sign of "Lutheranisme" to
+be a singer of psalms, simpler and cheaper bindings appear; hence the dress
+of the French Psalm-Book found in New England is often dull enough, but
+invariably firm and substantial.</p>
+
+<p>These psalms of Marot's are written in a great variety of song-measures,
+which seem scarcely as solemn and religious as the more dignified and even
+metres used by the early English writers. Some are graceful and smooth,
+however, and are canorous though never sonorous. They are pleasing to read
+with their quaint old spelling and lettering.</p>
+
+<p>In the old Sigourney psalm-book the nineteenth psalm was thus rendered:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Les cieux en chaque lieu<br />
+La puissance de Dieu<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Racourent aux humains<br />
+Ce grand entour espars<br />
+Publie en toutes parts<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;L'ouvrage de ses mains.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Iour apres iour coulant<br />
+Du Saigneur va parlant<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Par longue experience.<br />
+La nuict suivant la nuict,<br />
+Nous presche et nous instruicst<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;De sa gr&aacute;d sapience"</blockquote>
+
+<p>Another much-employed metre was this, of the hundred and thirty-third
+psalm:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Asais aux bors do ce superbe fleuve<br />
+Que de Babel les campagnes abreuve,<br />
+Nos tristes coeurs ne pensoient qu' &agrave; Sion.<br />
+Chacun, helas, dans cette affliction<br />
+Les yeux en pleurs la morte peinte au visage<br />
+Pendit sa harpe aux saules du rivage."</blockquote>
+
+<p>A third and favorite metre was this:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Mais sa montagne est un sainct lieu:<br />
+Qui viendra done au mont de Dieu?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Qui est-ce qui l&agrave; tiendra place?<br />
+Le homine de mains et coeur lav&eacute;,<br />
+En vanit&eacute; non &eacute;slev&eacute;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Et qui n'a jur&eacute; en fallace."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Marot wrote in his preface to the psalms:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Thrice happy they who shall behold<br />
+And listen in that age of gold<br />
+As by the plough the laborer strays<br />
+And carman 'mid the public ways<br />
+And tradesman in his shop shall swell<br />
+The voice in psalm and canticle,<br />
+Sing to solace toil; again<br />
+From woods shall come a sweeter strain,<br />
+Shepherd and shepherdess shall vie<br />
+In many a tender Psalmody,<br />
+And the Creator's name prolong<br />
+As rock and stream return their song."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Though these words seem prophetic, the gay and volatile Marot could never
+have foreseen what has proved one of the most curious facts in religious
+history,--that from the airy and unsubstantial seed sown by the French
+courtier in such a careless, thoughtless manner, would spring the
+great-spreading and deep-rooted tree of sacred song.</p>
+
+<p>Little volumes of the metrical rendering of the Psalms, known as "Tate and
+Brady's Version," are frequently found in New England. It was the first
+English collection of psalms containing any smoothly flowing verses. Many
+of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal
+renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were
+"tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were
+certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate.
+It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able
+to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too
+modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write
+an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel.
+Brady--equally modest--translated the Aeneid in rivalry of Dryden. "This
+translation," says Johnson, "when dragged into the world did not live long
+enough to cry."</p>
+
+<p>Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a
+stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's
+hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them
+we owe, however, these noble lines, which were written thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Be thou, O God, exalted High,<br />
+And as thy glory fills the Skie<br />
+So let it be on Earth displaid<br />
+Till thou art here as There obeyed."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The hymn commencing,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"My soul for help on God relies,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;From him alone my safety flows,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>is also of their composition.</p>
+
+<p>The first edition of these psalms was printed in 1696, and bore this
+title, "The Book of Psalms, a new version in metre fitted to the tunes used
+in Churches. By N. Tate and N. Brady." It was dedicated to King William,
+and though its use was permitted in English churches, it never supplanted
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version. In New England Tate and Brady's Psalms
+became more universally popular,--not, however, without fierce opposing
+struggles from the older church-members at giving up the venerated "Bay
+Psalm-Book."</p>
+
+<p>Another version of Psalms which is occasionally found in New England is
+known as "Patrick's Version." The title is "The Psalms of David in Metre
+Fitted to the Tunes used in Parish Churches by John Patrick, D.D. Precentor
+to the Charter House London." A curious feature of this octavo edition of
+1701, which I have, is, "An Explication of Some Words of less Common
+Use For the Benefit of the Common People." Here are a few of the
+"explications:"--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Celebrate--Make renown'd.<br />
+Climes--Countries differing in length of days.<br />
+Detracting--Lessening one's credit.<br />
+Fluid--Yielding.<br />
+Infest--Annoy.<br />
+Theam--Matter of Discourse.<br />
+Uncessant--Never ceasing.<br />
+Stupemlious--Astonishing."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Baxter said of Patrick, "His holy affection and harmony hath so far
+reconciled the Nonconformists that diverse of them use his Psalms in
+their congregation." I doubt if the version were used in New England
+Nonconformist congregations. Some of his verses read thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Lord hear the pray'rs and mournfull cries<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of mine afflicted estate,<br />
+And with thy Comforts chear my soul,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Before it is too late. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"My days consume away like Smoak<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mine anguish is so great,<br />
+My bones are not unlike a hearth<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Parched &amp; dry with heat. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Such is my grief I little else<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Can do but sigh and groan.<br />
+So wasted is my flesh I'm left<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Nothing but skin and bone. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Like th' Owl and Pelican that dwell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In desarts out of sight,<br />
+I sadly do bemoan myself,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In solitude delight. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"The wakeful bird that on Housetops<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Sits without company<br />
+And spends the night in mournful cries<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Leads such a life as I. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"The Ashes I rowl in when I eat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Are tasted with my bread,<br />
+And with my Drink are mixed the tears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I plentifully shed."</blockquote>
+
+<p>A version of the Psalms which seems to have demanded and deserved more
+attention than it received was written by Cotton Mather. He was doomed to
+disappointment in seeing his version adopted by the New England churches
+just as his ambitions and hopes were disappointed in many other ways. This
+book was published in 1718. It was called "Psalterium Americanum. A Book
+of Psalms in a translation exactly conformed unto the Original; but all
+in blank verse. Fitted unto the tunes commonly used in the Church." By a
+curious arrangement of brackets and the use of two kinds of print these
+psalms could be divided into two separate metres and could be sung to
+tunes of either long or short metre. After each psalm were introduced
+explanations written in Mather's characteristic manner,--a manner both
+scholarly and bombastic. I have read the "Psalterium Americanum" with care,
+and am impressed with its elegance, finish, and dignity. It is so popular,
+however, even now-a-days, to jibe at poor Cotton Mather, that his Psalter
+does not escape the thrusts of laughing critics. Mr. Glass, the English
+critic, holds up these lines as "one of the rich things:"--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"As the Hart makes a panting cry<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;For cooling streams of water,<br />
+So my soul makes a panting cry<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;For thee--O Mighty God."</blockquote>
+
+<p>I have read these lines over and over again, and fail to see anything very
+ludicrous in them, though they might be slightly altered to advantage.
+Still they may be very absurd and laughable from an English point of view.</p>
+
+<p>So superior was Cotton Mather's version to the miserable verses given in
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" that one wonders it was not eagerly accepted by the
+New England churches. Doubtless they preferred rhyme--even the atrocious
+rhyme of "The Bay Psalm Book." And the fact that the "Psalterium
+Americanum" contained no musical notes or directions also militated against
+its use.</p>
+
+<p>Other American clergymen prepared metrical versions of the psalms that were
+much loved and loudly sung by the respective congregations of the writers.
+The work of those worthy, painstaking saints we will neither quote nor
+criticise,--saying only of each reverend versifier, "Truly, I would
+the gods had made thee poetical." Rev. John Barnard, who preached for
+fifty-four years in Marblehead, published at the age of seventy years a
+psalm-book for his people. Though it appeared in 1752, a time when "The Bay
+Psalm Book" was being shoved out of the New England churches, Barnard's
+Version of the Psalms was never used outside of Marblehead. Rev. Abijah
+Davis published another book of psalms in which he copied whole pages from
+Watts without a word of thanks or of due credit, which was apparently
+neither Christian, clerical nor manly behavior.</p>
+
+<p>Watts's monosyllabic Hymns, which were not universally used in America
+until after the Revolution, are too well known and are still too frequently
+seen to need more than mention. Within the last century a flood of new
+books of psalms of varying merit and existence has poured out upon the New
+England churches, and filled the church libraries and church, pews, the
+second-hand book shops, the missionary boxes, and the paper-mills.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap15"></a>XV</h1>
+
+<h2>The Church Music.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>Of all the dismal accompaniments of public worship in the early days of New
+England, the music was the most hopelessly forlorn,--not alone from the
+confused versifications of the Psalms which were used, but from the
+mournful monotony of the few known tunes and the horrible manner in which
+those tunes were sung. It was not much better in old England. In 1676
+Master Mace wrote of the singing in English churches, "'T is sad to
+hear what whining, toling, yelling or shreaking there is in our country
+congregations."</p>
+
+<p>A few feeble efforts were made in America at the beginning of the
+eighteenth century to attempt to guide the singing. The edition of 1698 of
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" had "Some few Directions" regarding the singing added
+on the last pages of the book, and simple enough they were in matter if not
+in form. They commence, "<i>First</i>, observe how many note-compass the
+tune is next the place of your first note, and how many notes above and
+below that so as you may begin the tune of your first note, as the rest may
+be sung in the compass of your and the peoples voices without Squeaking
+above or Grumbling below."</p>
+
+<p>This "Squeaking above and Grumbling below" had become far too frequent in
+the churches; Judge Sewall writes often with much self-reproach of his
+failure in "setting the tune," and also records with pride when he "set the
+psalm well." Here is his pathetic record of one of his mistakes: "He spake
+to me to set the tune. I intended Windsor and fell into High Dutch, and
+then essaying to set another tune went into a Key much to high. So I pray'd
+to Mr. White to set it which he did well. Litchfield Tune. The Lord Humble
+me and Instruct me that I should be the occasion of any interruption in the
+worship of God."</p>
+
+<p>The singing at the time must have been bad beyond belief; how much of its
+atrocity was attributable to the use of "The Bay Psalm-Book," cannot now
+be known. The great length of many of the psalms in that book was a fatal
+barrier to any successful effort to have good singing. Some of them were
+one hundred and thirty lines long, and occupied, when lined and sung, a
+full half-hour, during which the patient congregation stood. It is told of
+Dr. West, who preached in Dartmouth in 1726, that he forgot one Sabbath Day
+to bring his sermon to meeting. He gave out a psalm, walked a quarter of a
+mile to his house, got his sermon, and was back in his pulpit long before
+the psalm was finished. The irregularity of the rhythm in "The Bay Psalm
+Book" must also have been a serious difficulty to overcome. Here is the
+rendering given of the 133d Psalm:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>1. How good and sweet to see<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;i'ts for bretheren to dwell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;together in unitee: </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>2. Its like choice oyle that fell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the head upon<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;that down did flow<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the beard unto<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;beard of Aron:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The skirts of his garment<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;that unto them went down: </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>3. Like Hermons dews descent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sions mountains upon<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for there to bee<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the Lords blessing<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;life aye lasting<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;commandeth hee.</blockquote>
+
+<p>How this contorted song could have been sung even to the simplest tune by
+unskilled singers who possessed no guiding notes of music is difficult
+to comprehend. Small wonder that Judge Sewall was forced to enter in his
+diary, "In the morning I set York tune and in the second going over, the
+gallery carried it irresistibly to St. Davids which discouraged me very
+much." We can fancy him stamping his foot, beating time, and roaring York
+at the top of his old lungs, and being overcome by the strong-voiced
+gallery, and at last sadly succumbing to St. David's. Again he writes: "I
+set York tune and the Congregation went out of it into St. Davids in the
+very 2nd going over. They did the same 3 weeks before. This is the 2nd
+Sign. It seems to me an intimation for me to resign the Praecentor's Place
+to a better Voice. I have through the Divine Long suffering and Favour done
+it for 24 years and now God in his Providence seems to call me off, my
+voice being enfeebled." Still a third time he "set Windsor tune;" they "ran
+over into Oxford do what I would." These unseemly "running overs" became
+so common that ere long each singer "set the tune" at his own will and the
+loudest-voiced carried the day. A writer of the time, Rev. Thomas Walter,
+says of this reign of <i>concordia discors</i>: "The tunes are now
+miserably tortured and twisted and quavered, in some Churches, into a
+horrid Medly of confused and disorderly Voices. Our tunes are left to the
+Mercy of every unskilful Throat to chop and alter, to twist and change,
+according to their infinitely divers and no less Odd Humours and Fancies.
+I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two Men in the
+Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good
+Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with
+perpetual Interfearings with one another."</p>
+
+<p>Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and
+unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they
+possessed,--a foretaste of heaven;</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"for all we know<br />
+Of what the blessed do above<br />
+Is that they sing and that they love."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous
+melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal.</p>
+
+<p>Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the
+early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering
+and holding the colonists together in love. And they reverenced their poor
+halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever
+a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a
+psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he
+doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must
+believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged,
+    I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved
+to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words.
+"The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears
+at the words, <i>bought with thy blood</i>." He also, with a vehemence of
+language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that
+he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of
+his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield,
+Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs.</p>
+
+<p>About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously
+prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing
+Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These
+thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound
+often with "The Bay Psalm-Book." They were reprinted from Playford's "Book
+of Psalms" and the notes of the staff were replaced with letters and dots,
+and the bars marking the measures were omitted. To the Puritans, this great
+number of new tunes appeared fairly monstrous, and formed the signal for
+bitter objections and fierce quarrels.</p>
+
+<p>In 1647 a tract had appeared on church-singing which had attracted much
+attention. It was written by Rev John Cotton to attempt to influence the
+adoption and universal use of "The Bay Psalm-Book." This tract thoroughly
+considered the duty of singing, the matter sung, the singers, and the
+manner of singing, and, like all the literature of the time, was full of
+Biblical allusion and quotation. It had been said that "man should sing
+onely and not the women. Because it is not permitted to a woman to speake
+in the Church, how then shall they sing? Much lesse is it permitted to them
+to prophecy in the church and singing of Psalms is a kind of Prophecying."
+Cotton fully answered and contradicted these false reasoners, who would
+have had to face a revolution had they attempted to keep the Puritan women
+from singing in meeting. The tract abounds in quaint expressions, such as,
+"they have scoffed at Puritan Ministers as calling the people to sing one
+of <i>Hopkins-Jiggs</i> and so <i>hop</i> into the pulpit." Though he wrote
+this tract to encourage good singing in meeting, his endorsement of "lining
+the Psalm" gave support to the very element that soon ruined the singing.
+His reasons, however, were temporarily good, "because many wanted books and
+skill to read." At that time, and for a century later, many congregations
+had but one or two psalm-books, one of which was often bound with the
+church Bible and from which the deacon lined the psalm.</p>
+
+<p>So villanous had church-singing at last become that the clergymen arose in
+a body and demanded better performances; while a desperate and disgusted
+party was also formed which was opposed to all singing. Still another band
+of old fogies was strong in force who wished to cling to the same way of
+singing that they were accustomed to; and they gave many objections to the
+new-fangled idea of singing by note, the chief item on the list being the
+everlasting objection of all such old fossils, that "the old way was good
+enough for our fathers," &amp;c. They also asserted that "<i>the names of
+the notes were blasphemous</i>;" that it was "popish;" that it was a
+contrivance to get money; that it would bring musical instruments into the
+churches; and that "no one could learn the tunes any way." A writer in the
+"New England Chronicle" wrote in 1723, "Truly I have a great jealousy
+that if we begin to <i>sing</i> by <i>rule</i>, the next thing will be
+to <i>pray</i> by rule and <i>preach</i> by rule and <i>then comes popery</i>."</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to overestimate the excitement, the animosity, and the
+contention which arose in the New England colonies from these discussions
+over "singing by rule" or "singing by rote." Many prominent clergymen wrote
+essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of
+Regular Singing," also a "Joco-serious Dialogue on Singing," by Reverend
+Mr. Symmes; "Cases of Conscience," compiled by several ministers; "The
+Accomplished Singer," by Cotton Mather, were the most important. "Singing
+Lectures" also were given in many parts of New England by various prominent
+ministers. So high was party feud that a "Pacificatory Letter" was
+necessary, which was probably written by Cotton Mather, and which soothed
+the troubled waters. The people who thought the "old way was the best" were
+entirely satisfied when they were convinced that the oldest way of all was,
+of course, by note and not by rote.</p>
+
+<p>This naive extract from the records of the First Church of Windsor,
+Connecticut, will show the way in which the question of "singing by rule"
+was often settled in the churches, and it also gives a very amusing glimpse
+of the colonial manner of conducting a meeting:--</p>
+
+<p>"July 2. 1736. At a Society meeting at which Capt. Pelatiah Allyn
+Moderator. The business of the meeting proceeded in the following manner
+Viz. the Moderator proposed as to the consideration of the meeting in the
+1st Place what should be done respecting that part of publick Woiship
+called Singing viz. whether in their Publick meetings as on Sabbath day,
+Lectures &amp;c they would sing the way that Deacon Marshall usually sung in
+his lifetime commonly called the 'Old Way' or whether they would sing the
+way taught by Mr. Beal commonly called 'Singing by Rule,' and when the
+Society had discoursed the matter the Moderator pioposed to vote for said
+two ways as followeth viz. that those that were for singing in publick in
+the way practiced by Deacon Marshall should hold up their hands and be
+counted, and then that those that were desirous to sing in Mr. Beals way
+called 'by Rule' would after show their minds by the same sign which method
+was proceeded upon accordingly. But when the vote was passed there being
+many voters it was difficult to take the exact number of votes in order to
+determine on which side the major vote was; whereupon the Moderator ordered
+all the voters to go out of the seats and stand in the alleys and then
+those that were for Deacon Marshalls way should go into the mens seats and
+those that were for Mr. Beals way should go into the womens seat and
+after much objections made against that way, which prevailed not with the
+Moderator, it was complied with, and then the Moderator desired that those
+that were of the mind that the way to be practiced for singing for the
+future on the Sabbath &amp;c should be the way sung by Deacon Marshall as
+aforesaid would signify the same by holding up their hands and be counted,
+and then the Moderator and myself went and counted the voters and the
+Moderator asked me how many there was. I answered 42 and he said there was
+63 or 64 and then we both counted again and agreed the number being 43.
+Then the Moderator was about to count the number of votes for Mr. Beals
+way of Singing called 'by Rule' but it was offered whether it would not be
+better to order the voters to pass out of the Meeting House door and there
+be counted who did accordingly and their number was 44 or 45. Then the
+Moderator proceeded and desired that those who were for singing in Public
+the way that Mr. Beal taught would draw out of their seats and pass out of
+the door and be counted. They replied they were ready to show their minds
+in any proper way where they were if they might be directed thereto but
+would not go out of the door to do the same and desired that they might be
+led to a vote where they were and they were ready to show their minds which
+the Moderator refused to do and thereupon declared that it was voted that
+Deacon Marshalls way of singing called the 'Old Way' should be sung in
+Publick for the future and ordered me to record the same as the vote of the
+Said Society which I refused to do under the circumstances thereof and have
+recorded the facts and proceedings."</p>
+
+<p>Good old lining, droning Deacon Marshall! though you were dead and gone,
+you and your years of psalm-singings were not forgotten. You lived, an
+idealized memory of pure and pious harmony, in the hearts of your old
+church friends. Warmly did they fight for your "way of singing;" with
+most undeniable and open partiality, with most dubious ingenuousness and
+rectitude, did your old neighbor, Captain Pelatiah Allyn, conduct that hot
+July music-meeting, counting up boldly sixty-three votes in favor of your
+way, when there were only forty-three voters on your side of the alley, and
+crowding a final decision in your favor. It is sad to read that when icy
+winter chilled the blood, warm partisanship of old friends also cooled, and
+innovative Windsor youth carried the day and the music vote, and your good
+old way was abandoned for half the Sunday services, to allow the upstart
+new fashion to take control.</p>
+
+<p>One happy result arose throughout New England from the victory of the
+ardent advocates of the "singing by rule,"--the establishment of the New
+England "singing-school,"--that outlet for the pent-up, amusement-lacking
+lives of young people in colonial times. What that innocent and
+happy gathering was in the monotonous existence of our ancestors and
+ancestresses, we of the present pleasure-filled days can hardly comprehend.</p>
+
+<p>Extracts from the records of various colonial churches will show how soon
+the respective communities yielded to the march of improvement and "seated
+the taught singers" together, thus forming choirs. In 1762 the church
+at Rowley, Massachusetts, voted "that those who have learned the art of
+Singing may have liberty to sit in the front gallery." In 1780 the same
+parish "requested Jonathan Chaplin and Lieutenant Spefford to assist the
+deacons in Raising the tune in the meeting house." In Sutton, in 1791, the
+Company of Singers were allowed to sit together, and $13 was voted to pay
+for "larning to sing by Rule." The Roxbury "First Church" voted in 1770
+"three seats in the back gallery for those inclined to sit together for
+the purpose of singing" The church in Hanover, in 1742, took a vote to
+see whether the "church will sing in the new way" and appoint a tuner. In
+Woodbury, Connecticut, in 1750 the singers "may sitt up Galery all day if
+they please but to keep to there own seat &amp; not to Infringe on the Women
+Pues." In 1763, in the Ipswich First Parish, the singers were allowed to
+sit "two back on each side of the front alley." Similar entries may be
+found in nearly every record of New England churches in the middle or
+latter part of that century.</p>
+
+<p>The musical battle was not finished, however, when the singing was at last
+taught by rule, and the singers were allowed to sit together and form a
+choir. There still existed the odious custom of "lining" or "deaconing"
+the psalm. To this fashion may be attributed the depraved condition of
+church-singing of which Walters so forcibly wrote, and while it continued
+the case seemed hopeless, in spite of singing-schools and singing-teachers.
+It would be trying to the continued uniformity of pitch of an ordinary
+church choir, even now-a-days, to have to stop for several seconds between
+each line to listen to a reading and sometimes to an explanation of the
+following line.</p>
+
+<p>The Westminster Assembly had suggested in 1664 the alternate reading and
+singing of each line of the psalm to those churches that were not well
+supplied with psalm-books. The suggestion had not been adopted without
+discussion, It was in 1680 much talked over in the church in Plymouth, and
+was adopted only after getting the opinion of each male church member.
+When once taken into general use the custom continued everywhere, through
+carelessness and obstinacy, long after the churches possessed plenty of
+psalm-books. An early complaint against it was made by Dr. Watts in the
+preface of his hymns, which were published by Benjamin Franklin in 1741. As
+Watts' Psalms and Hymns were not, however, in general use in New England
+until after the Revolution, this preface with its complaint was for a long
+time little seen and little heeded.</p>
+
+<p>It is said that the abolition came gradually; that the impetuous and
+well-trained singers at first cut off the last word only of the deacon's
+"lining;" they then encroached a word or two further, and finally sung
+boldly on without stopping at all to be "deaconed." This brought down
+a tempest of indignation from the older church-members, who protested,
+however, in vain. A vote in the church usually found the singers
+victorious, and whether the church voted for or against the "lining," the
+choir would always by stratagem vanquish the deacon. One old soldier took
+his revenge, however. Being sung down by the rampant choir, he still showed
+battle, and rose at the conclusion of the psalm and opened his psalm-book,
+saying calmly, "<i>Now</i> let the <i>people of the Lord sing</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The Rowley church tried diplomacy in their struggle against "deaconing,"
+by instituting a gradual abolishing of the custom. In 1785 the choir was
+allowed "to sing once on the Lord's Day without reading by the Deacon." In
+five years the Rowley singers were wholly victorious, and "lining out" the
+psalm was entirely discontinued.</p>
+
+<p>In 1770, dissatisfaction at the singing in the church was rife in
+Wilbraham, and a vote was taken to see whether the town would be willing
+to have singing four times at each service; and it was voted to "take into
+consideration the Broken State of this Town with regard to singing on the
+Sabbath Day." Special and bitter objection was made against the leader
+beating time so ostentatiously. A list of singers was made and a
+singing-master appointed. The deacon was allowed to lead and line and beat
+time in the forenoon, while the new school was to have control in the
+afternoon; and "whoever leads the singing shall be at liberty to use the
+motion of his hand while singing for the space of three months only." It is
+needless to state who came off victorious in the end. The deacon left as a
+parting shot a request to "make Inquiry into the conduct of those who call
+themselves the Singers in this town."</p>
+
+<p>In Worcester, in 1779, a resolution adopted at the town meeting was "that
+the mode of singing in the congregation here be without reading the psalms
+line by line." "The Sabbath succeeding the adoption of this resolution,
+after the hymn had been read by the minister, the aged and venerable Deacon
+Chamberlain, unwilling to abandon the custom of his fathers and his own
+honorable prerogative, rose and read the first line according to his usual
+practice. The singers, previously prepared to carry the desired alteration
+into effect, proceeded in their singing without pausing at the conclusion
+of the line. The white-haired officer of the church with the full power
+of his voice read on through the second line, until the loud notes of the
+collected body of singers overpowered his attempt to resist the progress
+of improvement. The deacon, deeply mortified at the triumph of the musical
+reformation, then seized his hat and retired from the meeting-house in
+tears." His conduct was censured by the church, and he was for a time
+deprived of partaking in the communion, for "absenting himself from the
+public services of the Sabbath;" but in a few weeks the unhouselled deacon
+was forgiven, and never attempted to "line" again.</p>
+
+<p>Though the opponents of "lining" were victorious in the larger villages and
+towns, in smaller parishes, where there were few hymn-books, the lining
+of the psalms continued for many years. Mr. Hood wrote, in 1846, the
+astonishing statement that "the habit of lining prevails to this day over
+three-fourths of the United States." This I can hardly believe, though I
+know that at present the practice obtains in out of the way towns with poor
+and ignorant congregations. The separation of the lines often gives a very
+strange meaning to the words of a psalm; and one wonders what the Puritan
+children thought when they heard this lino of contradictions that Hood
+points out:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"The Lord will come and He will not,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>and after singing that line through heard the second line,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Keep silence, but speak out."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Many new psalm-books appeared about the time of the Revolutionary War, and
+many church petitions have been preserved asking permission to use the
+new and more melodious psalm and hymn books. Books of instruction also
+abounded,--books in which the notes were not printed on the staff, and
+books in which there were staffs but no notes, only letters or other
+characters (these were called "dunce notes"); books, too, in which the
+notes were printed so thickly that they could scarcely be distinguished one
+from the other.</p>
+
+<blockquote>"A dotted tribe with ebon heads<br />
+That climb the slender fence along,<br />
+As black as ink, as thick as weeds,<br />
+Ye little Africans of song."</blockquote>
+
+<p>One book--perhaps the worst, since it was the most pretentious--was "The
+Compleat Melody or Harmony of Sion," by William Tansur,--"Ingenious
+Tans'ur Skilled in Musicks Art." It was a most superficial, pedantic, and
+bewildering composition. The musical instruction was given in the form of a
+series of ill-spelled dialogues between a teacher and pupil, interspersed
+with occasional miserable rhymes. It was ill-expressed at best, and
+such musical terms as "Rations of Concords," "Trilloes," "Trifdiapasons,"
+"Leaps," "Binding cadences," "Disallowances," "Canons," "Prime Flower
+of Florid," "Consecutions of Perfects," and "Figurates," make the book
+exceedingly difficult of comprehension to the average reader, though
+possibly not to a student of obsolete musical phraseology.</p>
+
+<p>A side skirmish on the music field was at this time fought between the
+treble and the tenor parts. Ravenscroft's Psalms and Walter's book had
+given the melody, or plain-song, to the tenor. This had, of course, thrown
+additional difficulties in the way of good singing; but when once the
+trebles obtained the leading part, after the customary bitter opposition,
+the improved singing approved the victory.</p>
+
+<p>Many objections, too, were made to the introduction of "triple-time" tunes.
+It gave great offence to the older Puritans, who wished to drawl out all
+the notes of uniform length; and some persons thought that marking and
+accenting the measure was a step toward the "Scarlet Woman." The time was
+called derisively, "a long leg and a short one."</p>
+
+<p>These old bigots must have been paralyzed at the new style of psalm-singing
+which was invented and introduced by a Massachusetts tanner and
+singing-master named Billings, and which was suggested, doubtless, by the
+English anthems. It spread through the choirs of colonial villages and
+towns like wild-fire, and was called "fuguing." Mr. Billings' "Fuguing
+Psalm Singer" was published in 1770. It is a dingy, ill-printed book with
+a comically illustrated frontispiece, long pages of instruction, and this
+motto:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"O, praise the Lord with one consent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And in this grand design<br />
+Let Britain and the Colonies<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Unanimously join."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The succeeding hymn-books, and the patriotic hymns of Billings in
+post-Revolutionary years have no hint of "Britain" in them. The names
+"Federal Harmony," "Columbian Harmony," "Continental Harmony," "Columbian
+Repository," and "United States Sacred Harmony" show the new nation.
+Billings also published the "Psalm Singer's Amusement," and other
+singing-books. The shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather must have groaned
+aloud at the suggestions, instructions, and actions of this unregenerate,
+daring, and "amusing" leader of church-singing.</p>
+
+<p>It seems astonishing that New England communities in those times of anxious
+and depressing warfare should have so delightedly seized and adopted this
+unusual and comparatively joyous style of singing, but perhaps the new
+spirit of liberty demanded more animated and spirited expression; and
+Billings' psalm-tunes were played with drum and fife on the battlefield to
+inspire the American soldiers. Billings wrote of his fuguing invention, "It
+has more than twenty times the power of the old slow tunes. Now the solemn
+bass demands their attention, next the manly tenor, now the lofty counter,
+now the volatile treble. Now here! Now there! Now here again! Oh ecstatic,
+push on, ye sons of harmony!" Dr. Mather Byles wrote thus of fuguing:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>  "Down starts the Bass with Grave Majestic Air,<br />
+And up the Treble mounts with shrill Career,<br />
+With softer Sounds in mild melodious Maze<br />
+Warbling between, the Tenor gently plays<br />
+And, if th' inspiring Altos joins the Force<br />
+See! like the Lark it Wings its towering Course<br />
+Thro' Harmony's sublimest Sphere it flies<br />
+And to Angelic Accents seems to rise."</blockquote>
+
+<p>A more modern poet in affectionate remembrance thus sings the fugue:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"A fugue let loose cheers up the place,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;With bass and tenor, alto, air,<br />
+The parts strike in with measured grace,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And something sweet is everywhere. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"As if some warbling brood should build<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of bits of tunes a singing nest;<br />
+Each bringing that with which it thrilled<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And weaving it with all the rest."</blockquote>
+
+<p>All public worshippers in the meetings one hundred years ago did not,
+however, regard fuguing as "something sweet everywhere," nor did they agree
+with Billings and Byles as to its angelic and ecstatic properties. Some
+thought it "heartless, tasteless, trivial, and irreverent jargon." Others
+thought the tunes were written more for the absurd inflation of the singers
+than for the glory of God; and many fully sympathized with the man who
+hung two cats over Billings's door to indicate his opinion of Billings's
+caterwauling. An old inhabitant of Roxbury remembered that when fuguing
+tunes were introduced into his church "they produced a literally fuguing
+effect on the older people, who went out of the church as soon as the first
+verse was sung." One scandalized and belligerent old clergyman, upon the
+Sabbath following the introduction of fuguing into his church, preached
+upon the prophecy of Amos, "The songs of the temple shall be turned
+into howling," while another took for his text the sixth verse of the
+seventeenth chapter of Acts, "Those that have turned the world upside down,
+are come hither also." One indignant and disgusted church attendant thus
+profanely recorded in church his views:--</p>
+
+<p>"Written out of temper on a Pannel in one of the Pues in Salem Church:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Could poor King David but for once<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To Salem Church repair;<br />
+And hear his Psalms thus warbled out,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Good Lord, how he would swear</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"But could St Paul but just pop in,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;From higher scenes abstracted,<br />
+And hear his Gospel now explained,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;By Heavens, he'd run distracted."</blockquote>
+
+<p>These lines were reprinted in the "American Apollo" in 1792.</p>
+
+<p>The repetition of a word or syllable in fuguing often lead to some
+ridiculous variations in the meanings of the lines. Thus the words--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"With reverence let the saints appear<br />
+  And bow before the Lord,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>were forced to be sung, "And bow-wow-wow, And bow-ow-ow," and so on until
+bass, treble, alto, counter, and tenor had bow-wowed for about twenty
+seconds; yet I doubt if the simple hearts that sung ever saw the absurdity.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible while speaking of fuguing to pass over an extraordinary
+element of the choir called "singing counter." The counter-tenor parts in
+European church-music were originally written for boys' voices. From
+thence followed the falsetto singing of the part by men; such was also
+the "counter" of New England. It was my fortune to hear once in a country
+church an aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and
+respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start
+of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and
+apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir,
+but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however
+chosen, would fail in attempting to describe the grotesque and uncanny
+sound.</p>
+
+<p>It is very evident, when once choirs of singers were established and
+attempts made for congregations to sing the same tune, and to keep
+together, and upon the same key, that in some way a decided pitch must be
+given to them to start upon. To this end pitch-pipes were brought into the
+singers' gallery, and the pitch was given sneakingly and shamefacedly to
+the singers. From these pitch-pipes the steps were gradual, but they led,
+as the Puritan divines foresaw, to the general introduction of musical
+instruments into the meetings.</p>
+
+<p>This seemed to be attacking the very foundations of their church; for the
+Puritans in England had, in 1557, expressly declared "concerning singing of
+psalms we allow of the people joining with one voice in a plain tune, but
+not in tossing the psalms from one side to the other with mingling of
+organs." The Round-heads had, in 1664, gone through England destroying the
+noble organs in the churches and cathedrals. They tore the pipes from the
+organ in Westminster Abbey, shouting, "Hark! how the organs go!" and, "Mark
+what musick that is, that is lawful for a Puritan to dance," and they sold
+the metal for pots of ale. Only four or five organs were left uninjured in
+all England. 'Twas not likely, then, that New England Puritans would take
+kindly to any musical instruments. Cotton Mather declared that there was
+not a word in the New Testament that authorized the use of such aids to
+devotion. The ministers preached often and long on the text from the
+prophecy of Amos, "I will not hear the melody of thy viols;" while,
+Puritan-fashion, they ignored the other half of the verse, "Take thou away
+from me the noise of thy songs." Disparaging comparisons were made with
+Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut,
+and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical
+knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players."</p>
+
+<p>Some of the first pitch-pipes were comical little apple-wood instruments
+that looked like mouse-traps, and great pains was taken to conceal them as
+they were passed surreptitiously from hand to hand in the choir. I have
+seen one which was carefully concealed in a box that had a leather binding
+like a book, and which was ostentatiously labelled in large gilt letters
+"Holy Bible;" a piece of barefaced and unnecessary deception on the part of
+some pious New England deacon or chorister.</p>
+
+<p>Little wooden fifes were also used, and then metal tuning-forks. A canny
+Scotchman, who abhorred the thought of all musical instruments anywhere,
+managed to have one fling at the pitch-pipe. The pitch had been given but
+was much too high, and before the first verse was ended the choir had to
+cease singing. The Scotchman stood up and pointed his long finger to the
+leader, saying in broad accents of scorn, "Ah, Johnny Smuth, now ye can
+have a chance to blaw yer braw whustle agaen." At a similar catastrophe
+owing to the mistake of the leader in Medford, old General Brooks rose in
+his pew and roared in an irritated voice of command, "Halt! Take another
+pitch, Bailey, take another pitch."</p>
+
+<p>In 1713 there was sent to America an English organ, "a pair of organs" it
+was called, which had chanced, by being at the manufacturers instead of in
+a church, to have escaped the general destruction by the Round-heads. It
+was given by Thomas Brattle to the Brattle Street Church in Boston. The
+congregation voted to refuse the gift, and it was then sent to King's
+Chapel, where it remained unpacked for several months for fear of hostile
+demonstrations, but was finally set up and used. In 1740 a Bostonian named
+Bromfield made an organ, and it was placed in a meeting-house and used
+weekly. In 1794 the church in Newbury obtained an organ, and many
+unpleasant and disparaging references were made by clergymen of other
+parishes to "our neighbor's box of whistles," "the tooting tub."</p>
+
+<p>Violoncellos, or bass-viols, as they were universally called, were almost
+the first musical instruments that were allowed in the New England
+churches. They were called, without intentional irreverence, "Lord's
+fiddles." Violins were widely opposed, they savored too much of low, tavern
+dance-music. After much consultation a satisfactory compromise was agreed
+upon by which violins were allowed in many meetings, if the performers
+"would play the fiddle wrong end up." Thus did our sanctimonious
+grandfathers cajole and persuade themselves that an inverted fiddle was
+not a fiddle at all, but a small bass-viol. An old lady, eighty years old,
+wrote thus in the middle of this century, of the church of her youth:
+"After awhile there was a bass-viol Introduced and brought into meeting and
+did not suit the Old people; one Old Gentleman got up, took his hat off
+the peg and marched off. Said they had begun fiddling and there would be
+dancing soon." Another church-member, in derisive opposition to a clarinet
+which had been "voted into the choir," brought into meeting a fish-horn,
+which he blew loud and long to the complete rout of the clarinet-player and
+the singers. When reproved for this astounding behavior he answered stoutly
+that "if one man could blow a horn in the Lord's House on the Sabbath day
+he guessed he could too," and he had to be bound over to keep the peace
+before the following Sunday. A venerable and hitherto decorous old deacon
+of Roxbury not only left the church when the hated bass-viol began its
+accompanying notes, but he stood for a long time outside the church door
+stridently "caterwauling" at the top of his lungs. When expostulated with
+for this unseemly and unchristianlike annoyance he explained that he was
+"only mocking the banjo." To such depths of rebellion were stirred the
+Puritan instincts of these religious souls.</p>
+
+<p>Many a minister said openly that he would like to walk out of his pulpit
+when the obnoxious and hated flutes, violins, bass-viols, and bassoons were
+played upon in the singing gallery. One clergyman contemptuously announced
+"We will now sing and fiddle the forty-fifth Psalm." Another complained of
+the indecorous dress of the fiddle-player. This had reference to the almost
+universal custom, in country churches in the summer time, of the bass-viol
+player removing his coat and playing "in his shirt sleeves." Others hated
+the noisy tuning of the bass-viol while the psalm was being read. Mr.
+Brown, of Westerly, sadly deplored that "now we have only catgut and resin
+religion."</p>
+
+<p>In 1804 the church in Quincy, being "advanced," granted the singers the
+sum of twenty-five dollars to buy a bass-viol to use in meeting, and a few
+other churches followed their lead. From the year 1794 till 1829 the
+church in Wareham, Massachusetts, was deeply agitated over the question of
+"Bass-Viol, or No Bass-Viol." They voted that a bass-viol was "expedient,"
+then they voted to expel the hated abomination; then was obtained "Leave
+for the Bass Viol to be brought into ye meeting house to be Played On every
+other Sabbath &amp; to Play if chosen every Sabbath in the Intermission between
+meetings &amp; not to Pitch the Tunes on the Sabbaths that it don't Play" Then,
+they tried to bribe the choir for fifty dollars not to use the "bars-vile,"
+but being unsuccessful, many members in open rebellion stayed away from
+church and were disciplined therefor. Then they voted that the bass-viol
+could not be used unless Capt. Gibbs were previously notified (so he and
+his family need not come to hear the hated sounds); but at last, after
+thirty years, the choir and the "fiddle-player" were triumphant in Wareham
+as they were in other towns.</p>
+
+<p>We were well into the present century before any cheerful and also simple
+music was heard in our churches; fuguing was more varied and surprising
+than cheerful. Of course, it was difficult as well as inappropriate to
+suggest pleasing tunes for such words as these:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Far in the deep where darkness dwells,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The land of horror and despair,<br />
+Justice hath built a dismal hell,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And laid her stores of vengeance there: </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Eternal plagues and heavy chains,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Tormenting racks and fiery coals,<br />
+And darts to inflict immortal pains,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Dyed in the blood of damned souls."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But many of the words of the old hymns were smooth, lively, and
+encouraging; and the young singers and perhaps the singing-masters craved
+new and less sober tunes. Old dance tunes were at first adapted; "Sweet
+Anne Page," "Babbling Echo," "Little Pickle" were set to sacred words. The
+music of "Few Happy Matches" was sung to the hymn "Lo, on a narrow neck
+of land;" and that of "When I was brisk and young" was disguised with
+the sacred words of "Let sinners take their course." The jolly old tune,
+"Begone dull care," which began,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"My wife shall dance, and I will sing,<br />
+And merrily pass the day."</blockquote>
+
+<p>was strangely appropriated to the solemn words,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"If this be death, I soon shall be<br />
+From every pain and sorrow free,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>and did not seem ill-fitted either.</p>
+
+<p>"Sacred arrangements," "spiritual songs," "sacred airs," soon followed, and
+of course demanded singers of capacity and education to sing them. From
+this was but a step to a paid quartette, and the struggle over this last
+means of improvement and pleasure in church music is of too recent a date
+to be more than referred to.</p>
+
+<p>I attended a church service not many years ago in Worcester, where an old
+clergyman, the venerable "Father" Allen, of Shrewsbury, then too aged
+and feeble to preach, was seated in the front pew of the church. When a
+quartette of singers began to render a rather operatic arrangement of a
+sacred song he rose, erect and stately, to his full gaunt height, turned
+slowly around and glanced reproachfully over the frivolous, backsliding
+congregation, wrapped around his spare, lean figure his full cloak
+of quilted black silk, took his shovel hat and his cane, and stalked
+indignantly and sadly the whole length of the broad central aisle, out
+of the church, thus making a last but futile protest against modern
+innovations in church music. Many, in whom the Puritan instincts and blood
+are still strong, sympathize internally with him in this feeling; and all
+novelty-lovers must acknowledge that the sublime simplicity and deep piety
+in which the old Puritan psalm-tunes abound, has seldom been attained in
+the modern church-songs. Even persons of neither musical knowledge, taste,
+nor love, feel the power of such a tune as Old Hundred; and more modern and
+more difficult melodies, though they charm with their harmony and novelty,
+can never equal it in impressiveness nor in true religious influence.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap16"></a>XVI</h1>
+
+<h2>The Interruptions of the Services.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>Though the Puritans were such a decorous, orderly people, their religious
+meetings were not always quiet and uninterrupted. We know the torment they
+endured from the "wretched boys," and they were harassed by other
+annoying interruptions. For the preservation of peace and order they made
+characteristic laws, with characteristic punishments. "If any interrupt
+or oppose a preacher in season of worship, they shall be reproved by the
+Magistrate, and on repetition, shall pay &pound;5, or stand two hours on a block
+four feet high, with this inscription in Capitalls, 'A WANTON GOSPELLER.'"
+As with other of their severe laws the rigid punishment provoked the crime,
+for Wanton Gospellers abounded. The Baptists did not hesitate to state
+their characteristic belief in the Puritan meetings, and the Quakers or
+"Foxians," as they were often called, interrupted and plagued them sorely.
+Judge Sewall wrote, in 1677, "A female quaker, Margaret Brewster, in
+sermon-time came in, in a canvass frock, her hair dishevelled loose like a
+Periwig, her face as black as ink, led by two other quakers, and two other
+quakers followed. It occasioned the greatest and most amazing uproar that I
+ever saw." More grievous irruptions still of scantily clad and even naked
+Quaker women were made into other Puritan meetings; and Quaker men shouted
+gloomily in through the church windows, "Woe! Woe! Woe to the people!"
+and, "The Lord will destroy thee!" and they broke glass bottles before
+the minister's very face, crying out, "Thus the Lord will break thee in
+pieces!" and they came into the meeting-house, in spite of the fierce
+tithingman, and sat down in other people's seats with their hats on their
+heads, in ash-covered coats, rocking to and fro and groaning dismally, as
+if in a mournful obsession. Quaker women managed to obtain admission to the
+churches, and they jumped up in the quiet Puritan assemblies screaming out,
+"Parson! thou art an old fool," and, "Parson! thy sermon is too long," and,
+"Parson! sit down! thee has already said more than thee knows how to say
+well," and other unpleasant, though perhaps truthful personalities. It is
+hard to believe that the poor, excited, screaming visionaries of those
+early days belonged to the same religious sect as do the serene,
+low-voiced, sweet-faced, and retiring Quakeresses of to-day. And there is
+no doubt that the astounding and meaningless freaks of these half-crazed
+fanatics were provoked by the cruel persecutions which they endured from
+our much loved and revered, but alas, intolerant and far from perfect
+Puritan Fathers. These poor Quakers were arrested, fined, robbed, stripped
+naked, imprisoned, laid neck and heels, chained to logs of wood, branded,
+maimed, whipped, pilloried, caged, set in the stocks, exiled, sold
+into slavery and hanged by our stern and cruel ancestors. Perhaps some
+gentle-hearted but timid Puritan souls may have inwardly felt that the
+Indian wars, and the destructive fires, and the earthquakes, and the dead
+cattle, blasted wheat, and wormy peas, were not judgments of God for small
+ministerial pay and periwig-wearing, but punishments for the heartrending
+woes of the persecuted Quakers.
+
+Others than the poor Quakers spoke out in colonial meetings. In Salem
+village and in other witch-hunting towns the crafty "victims" of the
+witches were frequently visited with their mock pains and sham fits in the
+meeting-houses, and they called out and interrupted the ministers most
+vexingly. Ann Putnam, the best and boldest actress among those cunning
+young Puritan witch-accusers, the protagonist of that New England tragedy
+known as the Salem Witchcraft, shouted out most embarrassingly, "There is
+a yellow-bird sitting on the minister's hat, as it hangs on the pin in the
+pulpit." Mr. Lawson, the minister, wrote with much simplicity that "these
+things occurring in the time of public worship did something interrupt me
+in my first prayer, being so unusual." But he braced himself up in spite
+of Ann and the demoniacal yellow-bird, and finished the service. These
+disorderly interruptions occurred on every Lord's Day, growing weekly
+more constant and more universal, and must have been unbearable. Some few
+disgusted members withdrew from the church, giving as reason that "the
+distracting and disturbing tumults and noises made by persons under
+diabolical power and delusions, preventing sometimes our hearing and
+understanding and profiting of the word preached; we having after many
+trials and experiences found no redress in this case, accounted ourselves
+under a necessity to go where we might hear the word in quiet." These
+withdrawing church-members were all of families that contained at least
+one person that had been accused of practising witchcraft. They were thus
+severely intolerant of the sacrilegious and lawless interruptions of the
+shy young "victims," who received in general only sympathy, pity, and even
+stimulating encouragement from their deluded and excited neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>One very pleasing interruption,--no, I cannot call it by so severe a
+name,--one very pleasing diversion of the attention of the congregation
+from the parson was caused by an innocent custom that prevailed in many a
+country community. Just fancy the flurry on a June Sabbath in Killingly, in
+1785, when Joseph Gay, clad in velvet coat, lace-frilled shirt, and white
+broadcloth knee-breeches, with his fair bride of a few days, gorgeous in a
+peach-colored silk gown and a bonnet trimmed "with sixteen yards of white
+ribbon," rose, in the middle of the sermon, from their front seat in the
+gallery and stood for several minutes, slowly turning around in order to
+show from every point of view their bridal finery to the eagerly gazing
+congregation of friends and neighbors. Such was the really delightful and
+thoughtful custom, in those fashion-plateless days, among persons of
+wealth in that and other churches; it was, in fact, part of the wedding
+celebration. Even in midwinter, in the icy church, the blushing bride would
+throw aside her broadcloth cape or camblet roquelo and stand up clad in a
+sprigged India muslin gown with only a thin lace tucker over her neck, warm
+with pride in her pretty gown, her white bonnet with ostrich feathers and
+embroidered veil, and in her new husband.</p>
+
+<p>The services in the meeting-house on the Sabbath and on Lecture days
+were sometimes painfully varied, though scarcely interrupted, by a very
+distressing and harrowing custom of public abasement and self-abnegation,
+which prevailed for many years in the nervously religious colonies. It was
+not an enforced punishment, but a voluntary one. Men and women who had
+committed crimes or misdemeanors, and who had sincerely repented of their
+sins, or who were filled with remorse for some violation of conscience, or
+even with regret for some neglect of religious ethics, rose in the Sabbath
+meeting before the assembled congregation and confessed their sins, and
+humbly asked forgiveness of God, and charity from their fellows. At
+other times they stood with downcast heads while the minister read their
+confession of guilt and plea for forgiveness. A most graphic account of one
+of those painful scenes is thus given by Governor Winthrop in his "History
+of New England:"--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Captain Underhill being brought by the blessing of God in this
+    church's censure of excommunication, to remorse for his foul sins,
+    obtained, by means of the elders, and others of the church of Boston, a
+    safe conduct under the hand of the governor and one of the council to
+    repair to the church. He came at the time of the court of assistants,
+    and upon the lecture day, after sermon, the pastor called him forth and
+    declared the occasion, and then gave him leave to speak: and in
+    it was a spectacle winch caused many weeping eyes, though it afforded
+    matter of much rejoicing to behold the power of the Lord Jesus in his
+    ordinances, when they are dispensed in his own way, holding forth the
+    authority of his regal sceptre in the simplicity of the gospel
+    came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his
+    bravery and neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close
+    to his eyes; and standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs
+    and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his
+    hypocrisy, his persecution of God's people here, and especially his
+    pride (as the root of all which caused God to give him over to his
+    other sinful courses) and contempt of the magistrates.... He spake
+    well save that his blubbering &amp;c interrupted him, and all along he
+    discovered a broken and melting heart and gave good exhortations to
+    take heed of such vanities and beginnings of evil as had occasioned his
+    fall; and in the end he earnestly and humbly besought the church to
+    have compassion of him and to deliver him out of the hands of Satan."</blockquote>
+
+<p>What a picture! what a story! "Of all tales 'tis the saddest--and more sad
+because it makes us smile."</p>
+
+<p>Captain John Underhill was a brave though somewhat bumptious soldier, who
+had fought under the Prince of Orange in the War of the Netherlands, and
+had been employed as temporal drill-master in the church-militant in New
+England. He did good service for the colonists in the war with the Pequot
+Indians, and indeed wherever there was any fighting to be done. "He thrust
+about and justled into fame" He also managed to have apparently a very good
+time in the new land, both in sinning and repenting. When he stood up on
+the church-seat before the horrified, yet wide-open eyes of pious Boston
+folk, in his studiously and theatrically disarranged garments, and
+blubbered out his whining yet vain-glorious repentance, he doubtless acted
+his part well, for he had twice before been through the same performance,
+supplementing his second rehearsal by kneeling down before an injured
+husband in the congregation, and asking earthly forgiveness. I wish I
+could believe that this final repentance of the resilient captain were
+sincere--but I cannot. Nor did Boston people believe it either, though that
+noble and generous-minded man, Winthrop, thought he saw at the time of
+confession evidences of a truly contrite heart. The Puritans sternly and
+eagerly cast out the gay captain to the Dutch when he became an Antinomian,
+and he came to live and fight and gallant in a town on the western end of
+Long Island, where he perhaps found a church-home with members less severe
+and less sharp-eyed than those of his Boston place of martyrdom, and a
+people less inclined to resent and punish his frailties and his ways of
+amusing himself.</p>
+
+<p>In justice to Underhill (or perhaps to show his double-dealing) I will say
+that he left behind him a letter to Hanserd Knollys, complaining of the
+ill-treatment he had received; and in it he gives a very different account
+of this little affair with the Boston Church from that given us by Governor
+Winthrop. The offender says nothing about his hypocrisy, his public and
+self-abasing confession, nor of his sanctimonious blubbering and wishes for
+death. He explains that his offence was mild and purely mental, that in an
+infaust moment he glanced (doubtless stared soldier-fashion) at "Mistris
+Miriam Wildbore" as she sat in her "pue" at meeting. The elders, noting his
+admiring and amorous glances, thereupon accused him of sin in his heart,
+and severely asked him why he did not look instead at Mistress Newell or
+Mistress Upham. He replied very spiritedly and pertinently that these dames
+were "not desiryable women as to temporal graces," which was certainly
+sufficient and proper reason for any man to give, were he Puritan or
+Cavalier. Then acerb old John Cotton and some other Boston ascetics
+(perhaps Goodman Newell and Goodman Upham, resenting for their wives the
+<i>spret&aelig; injuria form&aelig;</i>) at once hunted up some plainly applicable
+verses from the Bible that clearly proved him guilty of the alleged
+sin--and summarily excommunicated him. He also wrote that the pious church
+complained that the attractive, the temporally graced Mistress Wildbore
+came vainly and over-bravely clad to meeting, with "wanton open-worked
+gloves slitt at the thumbs and fingers for the purpose of taking snuff,"
+and he resented this complaint against the fair one, saying no harm could
+surely come from indulging in the "good creature called tobacco." He would
+naturally feel that snuff-taking was a proper and suitable church-custom,
+since his own conversion,--dubious though it was,--his religious belief had
+come to him, "the spirit fell home upon his heart" while he was indulging
+in a quiet smoke.</p>
+
+<p>The story of his offences as told b his contemporaries does not assign to
+him so innocuous a diversion as staring across the meeting-house, but the
+account is quite as amusing as his own plaintive and deeply injured version
+of his arraignment.</p>
+
+<p>Other letters of his have been preserved to us,--letters blustering as
+was Ancient Pistol, and equally sanctimonious, letters fearfully and
+phonetically spelt. Here is the opening of a letter written while he
+was under sentence of excommunication from the Boston Church, and of
+banishment. It is to Governor Winthrop, his friend and fellow-emigrant:--</p>
+
+<p>"Honnored in the Lord,--</p>
+
+<p>"Your silenc one more admirse me. I Youse chrischan playnnes. I know you
+love it.... Silene can not reduce the hart of youer lovd brother: I would
+the rightchous would smite me espechah youerslfe &amp; the honnered Depoti to
+whom I also dereckt this letter.... I would to God you would tender me
+soule so as to youse playnnes with me. I wrot to you both but now answer: &amp;
+here I am dayli abused by malishous tongue. John Baker I here hath wrot to
+the honnored depoti how as I was drouck &amp; like to be cild &amp; both falc, upon
+okachon I delt with Wannerton for intrushon &amp; finddmg them resolutli bent
+to rout all gud a mong us &amp; advanc there superstischous ways &amp; by boystrous
+words indeferd to fritten men to accomplish his end. &amp; he abusing me to
+my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent &amp; dastardli
+sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with
+intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered
+him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too
+month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let
+justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to soggest youer will to this
+barrer you will find him tracktabel."</p>
+
+<p>My sense of drollery is always most keenly tickled when I read Underhill's
+epistles, with their amazing and highly-varied letter concoctions, and
+remember that he also--wrote a book. What that seventeenth-century printer
+and proof-reader endured ere they presented his "edited" volume to the
+public must have been beyond expression by words. It was a pretty good book
+though, and in it, like many another man of his ilk, he tendered to his
+much-injured wife loud and diffuse praise, ending with these sententious
+words, "Let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife--though she be a
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>And yet, upon careful examination we find a method, a system, in
+Underhill's orthography, or rather in his cacography. He thinks a final
+tion should be spelt chon--and why not? "proposichon," "satisfackchon,"
+"oblegachon," "persekuchon," "dereckchon," "himelyachon"--thus he spells
+such words. And his plurals are plain when once you grasp his laws:
+"poseschouse" and "considderachonse," "facktse," and "respecktse." And
+his ly is alwajs li, "exacktli," "thorroli," "fidelliti," "charriti,"
+"falsciti." And why is not "indiered," as good as 'endeared,' "pregedic,"
+as 'prejudice,' "obstrucktter" as 'obstructer,' "pascheges," and
+"prouydentt," and "antyentt," just as clear as our own way of spelling
+these words? A "painful" speller you surely were, my gay Don Juan
+Underbill, as your pedantic "writtingse" all show, and the most dramatic
+and comic figure among all the early Puritans as well, though you scarcely
+deserve to be called a Puritan; we might rather say of you, as of Malvolio,
+"The devil a Puritan that he was, or anything constantly but a
+time-pleaser ... his ground of faith that all who looked on him loved him."</p>
+
+<p>In keen contrast to this sentimental excitement is the presence of noble
+Judge Sewall, white-haired and benignant, standing up calmly in Boston
+meeting, with dignified face and demeanor, but an aching and contrite
+heart, to ask through the voice of his minister humble forgiveness of God
+and man for his sad share as a judge in the unjust and awful condemnation
+and cruel sentencing to death of the poor murdered victims of that terrible
+delusion the Salem Witchcraft. Years of calm and unshrinking reflection, of
+pleading and constant communion with God had brought to him an overwhelming
+sense of his mistaken and over-influenced judgment, and a horror and
+remorse for the fatal results of his error. Then, like the steadfast and
+upright old Puritan that he was, he publicly acknowledged his terrible
+mistake. It is one of the finest instances of true nobility of soul and of
+absolute self-renunciation that the world affords. And the deep strain, the
+sharp wrench of the step is made more apparent still by the fact of the
+disapproval of his fellow-judges of his public confession and recantation.
+The yearly entries in his diary, simply expressed yet deeply speaking,
+entries of the prayerful fasts which he spent alone in his chamber when
+the anniversary of the fatal judgment-day returned, show that no half-vain
+bigotry, no emotional excitement filled and moved him to the open words of
+remorse. The lesson of his repentance is farther reaching than he
+dreamed, when the story of his confession can so move and affect this
+nineteenth-century generation, and fill more than one soul with a nobler
+idea of the Puritan nature, and with a higher and fuller conception of the
+absolute truth of the Puritan Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>Some very prosaic and earthly interruptions to the church services are
+recorded as being made, and possibly by the church-members themselves. In
+one church, in 1661, a fine of five shillings was imposed on any one "who
+shot off a gun or led a horse into the meeting-house." These seem to me
+quite as unseemly, irreverent, and disagreeable disturbances as shouting
+out, Quaker-fashion, "Parson, your sermon is too long;" but possibly the
+house of God was turned into a stable on week-days, not on the Sabbath.</p>
+
+<p>In many parishes church-attendants were fined who brought their "doggs"
+into the meeting-house. Dogs swarmed in the colony, for they had been
+imported from England, "sufficient mastive dogs, hounds and beagles," and
+also Irish wolf-hounds; and they caused an interruption in one afternoon
+service by chasing into the meeting-house one of those pungently offensive,
+though harmless, animals that abounded even in the earliest colonial
+days, and whose mephitic odor, in this case, had power to scatter the
+congregation as effectively as would have a score of armed Indian braves.
+Officially appointed "Dogg-whippers" and the never idle tithingman expelled
+the intruding and unwelcome canine attendants from the meeting-house with
+fierce blows and fiercer yelps. The swarming dogs, though they were trained
+to hunt the Indians and wolves and tear them in pieces, were much fonder of
+hunting and tearing the peaceful sheep, and thus became such unmitigated
+nuisances, out of meeting as well as in, that they had to be muzzled and
+hobbled, and killed, and land was granted (as in Newbury in 1703) on
+condition that no dog was ever kept thereon. As late as the year 1820, it
+was ordered in the town of Brewster that any dog that came into meeting
+should be killed unless the owner promised to thenceforth keep the intruder
+out.</p>
+
+<p>Alarms of fire in the neighborhood frequently disturbed the quiet of
+the early colonial services; for the combustible catted chimneys were
+a constant source of conflagration, especially on Sundays, when the
+fireplaces with their roaring fires were left unwatched; and all the men
+rushed out of the meeting at sound of the alarm to aid in quenching the
+flames, which could however be ill-fought with the scanty supply of
+water that could be brought in a few leathern fire-buckets and
+milk-pails,--though at a very early date as an aid in extinguishing
+fires each New England family was ordered by law to own a fire-ladder.
+Occasionally the town's ladder and poles and hooks and cedar-buckets were
+kept in the meeting-house, and thus were handy for Sunday fires.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes armed men, bearing rumors of wars and of hostile attacks, rode
+clattering up to the church-door, and strode with jingling spurs and
+rattling swords into the excited assembly with appeal for more soldiers to
+bear arms, or for more help for those already in the army, and the whole
+congregation felt it no interruption but a high religious privilege and
+duty, to which they responded in word and deed. On some happy Sabbaths the
+armed riders bore good news of great victories, and great was the rejoicing
+thereat in prayer and praise in the old meeting-house.</p>
+
+<p>But usually through the Sabbath services, though the quiet was not that
+of our modern carpeted, cushioned, orderly churches, but few interrupting
+sounds were heard. The cry of a waking infant, the scraping of restless
+feet on the sanded floor, the lumbering noise of the motions of a cramped
+farmer as he stood up to lean over the pew-door or gallery-rail, the
+clatter of an overturned cricket, the twittering of swallows in the
+rafters, and in the summer-time the bumping and buzzing of an invading
+bumble-bee as he soared through the air and against the walls, were
+the only sounds within the meeting-house that broke the monotonous
+"thirteenthly" and "fourteenthly" of the minister's sermon.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap17"></a>XVII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Observances of the Day.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The so-called "False Blue Laws" of Connecticut, which were foisted upon the
+public by the Reverend Samuel Peter, have caused much indignation among all
+thoughtful descendants and all lovers of New England Puritans. Three of
+his most bitterly resented false laws which refer to the observance of the
+Sabbath read thus:--</p>
+
+<p>"No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or
+shave on the Sabbath Day.</p>
+
+<p>"No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.</p>
+
+<p>"No one shall ride on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere
+except reverently to and from meeting."</p>
+
+<p>Though these laws were worded by Dr. Peters, and though we are disgusted to
+hear them so often quoted as historical facts, still we must acknowledge
+that though in detail not correct, they are in spirit true records of the
+old Puritan laws which were enacted to enforce the strict and decorous
+observance of the Sabbath, and which were valid not only in Connecticut and
+Massachusetts, but in other New England States. Even a careless glance at
+the historical record of any old town or church will give plenty of details
+to prove this.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in New London we find in the latter part of the seventeenth century a
+wicked fisherman presented before the Court and fined for catching eels on
+Sunday; another "fined twenty shillings for sailing a boat on the Lord's
+Day;" while in 1670 two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused
+of and tried for "sitting together on the Lord's Day under an apple tree in
+Goodman Chapman's Orchard,"--so harmless and so natural an act. In Plymouth
+a man was "sharply whipped" for shooting fowl on Sunday; another was fined
+for carrying a grist of corn home on the Lord's Day, and the miller who
+allowed him to take it was also fined. Elizabeth Eddy of the same town was
+fined, in 1652, "ten shillings for wringing and hanging out clothes." A
+Plymouth man, for attending to his tar-pits on the Sabbath, was set in the
+stocks. James Watt, in 1658, was publicly reproved "for writing a note
+about common business on the Lord's Day, <i>at least in the evening
+somewhat too soon.</i>" A Plymouth man who drove a yoke of oxen was
+"presented" before the Court, as was also another offender, who drove some
+cows a short distance "without need" on the Sabbath.</p>
+
+<p>In Newbury, in 1646, Aquila Chase and his wife were presented and fined for
+gathering peas from their garden on the Sabbath, but upon investigation the
+fines were remitted, and the offenders were only admonished. In Wareham,
+in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the
+Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham
+citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five
+shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put
+in his shoe" to protect his foot--for doing this piece of heavy work on the
+Lord's Day, was fined, and paid forty shillings.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Kemble of Boston was in 1656 set for two hours in the public stocks
+for his "lewd and unseemly behavior," which, consisted in his kissing his
+wife "publicquely" on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, when
+he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years. The lewd
+offender was a man of wealth and influence, the father of Madam Sarah
+Knights, the "fearfull female travailler" whose diary of a journey from
+Boston to New York and return, written in 1704, rivals in quality if not in
+quantity Judge Sewall's much-quoted diary. A traveller named Burnaby tells
+of a similar offence of an English sea-captain who was soundly whipped for
+kissing his wife on the street of a New England town on Sunday, and of his
+retaliation in kind, by a clever trick upon his chastisers; but Burnaby's
+narrative always seemed to me of dubious credibility.</p>
+
+<p>Abundant proof can be given that the act of the legislature in 1649 was not
+a dead letter which ordered that "whosoever shall prophane the Lords daye
+by doeing any seruill worke or such like abusses shall forfeite for euery
+such default ten shillings or be whipt."</p>
+
+<p>The Vermont "Blue Book" contained equally sharp "Sunday laws." Whoever was
+guilty of any rude, profane, or unlawful conduct on the Lord's Day, in
+words or action, by clamorous discourses, shouting, hallooing, screaming,
+running, riding, dancing, jumping, was to be fined forty shillings and
+whipped upon the naked back not to exceed ten stripes. The New Haven code
+of laws, more severe still, ordered that "Profanation of the Lord's Day
+shall be punished by fine, imprisonment, or corporeal punishment; and
+if proudly, and with a high hand against the authority of God--<i>with
+death</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Lists of arrests and fines for walking and travelling unnecessarily on the
+Sabbath might be given in great numbers, and it was specially ordered
+that none should "ride violently to and from meeting." Many a pious New
+Englander, in olden days, was fined for his ungodly pride, and his desire
+to "show off" his "new colt" as he "rode violently" up to the meeting-house
+green on Sabbath morn. One offender explained in excuse of his unnecessary
+driving on the Sabbath that he had been to visit a sick relative, but
+his excuse was not accepted. A Maine man who was rebuked and fined for
+"unseemly walking" on the Lord's Day protested that he ran to save a man
+from drowning. The Court made him pay his fine, but ordered that the money
+should be returned to him when he could prove by witnesses that he had
+been on that errand of mercy and duty. As late as the year 1831, in
+Lebanon, Connecticut, a lady journeying to her father's home was arrested
+within sight of her father's house for unnecessary travelling on the
+Sabbath; and a long and fiercely contested lawsuit was the result, and
+damages were finally given for false imprisonment. In 1720 Samuel Sabin
+complained of himself before a justice in Norwich that he visited on
+Sabbath night some relatives at a neighbor's house. His morbidly tender
+conscience smote him and made him "fear he had transgressed the law,"
+though he felt sure no harm had been done thereby. In 1659 Sam Clarke, for
+"Hankering about on men's gates on Sabbath evening to draw company out
+to him," was reproved and warned not to "harden his neck" and be "wholly
+destrojed." Poor stiff-necked, lonely, "hankering" Sam! to be so harshly
+reproved for his harmlessly sociable intents. Perhaps he "hankered" after
+the Puritan maids, and if so, deserved his reproof and the threat of
+annihilation.</p>
+
+<p>Sabbath-breaking by visiting abounded in staid Worcester town to a most
+base extent, but was severely punished, as local records show. In Belfast,
+Maine, in 1776, a meeting was held to get the "Towns Mind" with regard to
+a plan to restrain visiting on the Sabbath. The time had passed when such
+offences could be punished either by fine or imprisonment, so it was voted
+"that if any person makes unnecessary Vizits on the Sabeth, They shall be
+Look't on with Contempt." This was the universal expression throughout the
+Puritan colonies; and looked on with contempt are Sabbath-breakers and
+Sabbath-slighters in New England to the present day. Even if they committed
+no active offence, the colonists could not passively neglect the Church
+and its duties. As late as 1774 the First Church of Roxbury fined
+non-attendance at public worship. In 1651 Thomas Scott "was fyned ten
+shillings unless he have learned Mr. Norton's 'Chatacise' by the next
+court" In 1760 the legislature of Massachusetts passed the law that "any
+person able of Body who shall absent themselves from publick worship of God
+on the Lord's Day shall pay ten shillings fine." By the Connecticut code
+ten shillings was the fine, and the law was not suspended until the year
+1770. By the New Haven code five shillings was the fine for non-attendance
+at church, and the offender was often punished as well. Captain Dennison,
+one of New Haven's most popular and respected citizens, was fined fifteen
+shillings for absence from church. William Blagden, who lived in New Haven
+in 1647, was "brought up" for absence from meeting. He pleaded that he had
+fallen into the water late on Saturday, could light no fire on Sunday to
+dry his clothes, and so had lain in bed to keep warm while his only suit of
+garments was drying. In spite of this seemingly fair excuse, Blagden was
+found guilty of "sloathefuluess" and sentenced to be "publiquely whipped."
+Of course the Quakers contributed liberally to the support of the Court,
+and were fined in great numbers for refusing to attend the church which
+they hated, and which also warmly abhorred them; and they were zealously
+set in the stocks, and whipped and caged and pilloried as well,--whipped
+if they came and expressed any dissatisfaction, and whipped if they stayed
+away.</p>
+
+<p>Severe and explicit were the orders with regard to the use of the "Creature
+called Tobacko" on the Sabbath. In the very earliest days of the colony
+means had been taken to present the planting of the pernicious weed
+except in very small quantities "for meere necessitie, for phisick, for
+preseruaceon of health, and that the same be taken privatly by auncient
+men." In Connecticut a man could by permission of the law smoke once if
+he went on a journey of ten miles (as some slight solace for the arduous
+trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house.
+Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the
+law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a
+long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor
+buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men
+love it now, they somehow invoked or spirited it into their pipes, though
+they never could smoke it in public unfined and unpunished. The shrewd and
+thrifty New Haven people permitted the raising of it for purposes of trade,
+though not for use, thus supplying the "devil's weed" to others, chiefly
+the godless Dutch, but piously spurning it themselves--in public. Its use
+was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on the Sabbath within two
+miles of the meeting-house, which (since at that date all the homes were
+clustered around the church-green) was equivalent to not smoking it at all
+on the Lord's Day, if the lav were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed,
+poor slaves of habit, who were in Duxbury fined ten shillings for each
+offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it
+told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston
+the fine for "drinking tobacco in the meeting-house" was five shillings for
+each drink, which I take to mean chewing tobacco rather than smoking it;
+many men were fined for thus drinking, and solacing the weary hours, though
+doubtless they were as sly and kept themselves as unobserved as possible.
+Four Yarmouth men--old sea-dogs, perhaps, who loved their pipe--were, in
+1687, fined four shillings each for smoking tobacco around the end of the
+meeting-house. Silly, ostrich-brained Yarmouth men! to fancy to escape
+detection by hiding around the corner of the church; and to think that the
+tithingman had no nose when he was so Argus-eyed. Some few of the ministers
+used the "tobacco weed." Mr. Baily wrote with distress of mind and
+abasement of soul in his diary of his "exceeding in tobacco." The hatred of
+the public use of tobacco lingered long in New England, even in large towns
+such as Providence, though chiefly on account of universal dread lest
+sparks from the burning weed should start conflagrations in the towns.
+Until within a few years, in small towns in western Massachusetts,
+Easthampton and neighboring villages, tobacco-smoking on the street was not
+permitted either on weekdays or Sundays.</p>
+
+<p>Not content with strict observance of the Sabbathday alone, the Puritans
+included Saturday evening in their holy day, and in the first colonial
+years these instructions were given to Governor Endicott by the New England
+Plantation Company: "And to the end that the Sabeth may be celebrated in
+a religious man ner wee appoint that all may surcease their labor every
+Satterday throughout the yeare at three of the clock in the afternoone, and
+that they spend the rest of the day in chatechizing and preparacoon for
+the Sabeth as the ministers shall direct." Cotton Mather wrote thus of his
+grandfather, old John Cotton: "The Sabbath he begun the evening before, for
+which keeping from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming
+to New England, and I suppose 't was from his reason and practice that the
+Christians of New England have generally done so too." He then tells of the
+protracted religious services held in the Cotton household every Saturday
+night,--services so long that the Sabbath-day exercises must have seemed in
+comparison like a light interlude.</p>
+
+<p>John Norton described these Cotton Sabbaths more briefly thus: "He [John
+Cotton] began the Sabbath at evening; therefore then performed family-duty
+after supper, being longer than ordinary in Exposition. After which he
+catechized his children and servants and then returned unto his study. The
+morning following, family-worship being ended, he retired into his study
+until the bell called him away. Upon his return from meeting he returned
+again into his study (the place of his labor and prayer) unto his private
+devotion; where, having a small repast carried him up for his dinner, he
+continued until the tolling of the bell. The public service being over, he
+withdrew for a space to his pre-mentioned oratory for his sacred addresses
+to God, as in the forenoon, then came down, <i>repeated the sermon in the
+family</i>, prayed, after supper sang a Psalm, and towards bedtime betaking
+himself again to his study he closed the day with prayer. Thus he spent the
+Sabbath continually." Just fancy the Cotton children and servants listening
+to his long afternoon sermon a second time!</p>
+
+<p>All the New England clergymen were rigid in the prolonged observance of
+Sunday. From sunset on Saturday until Sunday night they would not shave,
+have rooms swept, nor beds made, have food prepared, nor cooking utensils
+and table-ware washed. As soon as their Sabbath began they gathered their
+families and servants around them, as did Cotton, and read the Bible and
+exhorted and prayed and recited the catechism until nine o'clock, usually
+by the light of one small "dip candle" only; on long winter Saturdays it
+must have been gloomy and tedious indeed. Small wonder that one minister
+wrote back to England that he found it difficult in the new colony to get a
+servant who "<i>enjoyed catechizing and family duties</i>." Many clergymen
+deplored sadly the custom which grew in later years of driving, and even
+transacting business, on Saturday night. Mr. Bushnell used to call it
+"stealing the time of the Sabbath," and refused to countenance it in any
+way.</p>
+
+<p>It was very generally believed in the early days of New England that
+special judgments befell those who worked on the eve of the Sabbath.
+Winthrop gives the case of a man who, having hired help to repair a
+milldam, worked an hour on Saturday after sunset to finish what he had
+intended for the day's labor. The next day his little child, being left
+alone for some hours, was drowned in an uncovered well in the cellar of his
+house. "The father freely, in open congregation, did acknowledge it the
+righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day."</p>
+
+<p>Visitors and travellers from other countries were forced to obey the rigid
+laws with regard to Saturday-night observance. Archibald Henderson, the
+master of a vessel which entered the port of Boston, complained to the
+Council for Foreign Plantations in London that while he was in sober Boston
+town, being ignorant of the laws of the land, and having walked half an
+hour after sunset on Saturday night, as punishment for this unintentional
+and trivial offence, a constable entered his lodgings, seized him by the
+hair of his head, and dragged him to prison. Henderson claimed &pound;800 damages
+for the detention of his vessel during his prosecution. I have always
+suspected that the gay captain may have misbehaved himself in Boston
+on that Saturday night in some other way than simply by walking in
+the streets, and that the Puritan law-enforcers took advantage of the
+Sabbath-day laws in order to prosecute and punish him. We know of
+Bradford's complaint of the times; that while sailors brought "a greate
+deale" of money from foreign parts to New England to spend, they also
+brought evil ways of spending it--"more sine I feare than money."</p>
+
+<p>The Puritans found in Scripture support for this observance of Saturday
+night, in these words, "The evening and the morning were the first day,"
+and they had many followers in their belief. In New England country towns
+to this day, descendants of the Puritans regard Saturday night, though in
+a modified way, as almost Sunday, and that evening is never chosen for any
+kind of gay gathering or visiting. As late as 1855 the shops in Hartford
+were never open for customers upon Saturday night.</p>
+
+<p>Much satire was directed against this Saturday night observance both by
+English and by American authors. In the "American Museum" for February,
+1787, appeared a poem entitled, "The Connecticut Sabbath." After saying at
+some length that God had thought one day in seven sufficient for rest, but
+New England Christians had improved his law by setting apart a day and a
+half, the poet thus runs on derisively:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"And let it be enacted further still<br />
+That all our people strict observe our will;<br />
+Five days and a half shall men, and women, too,<br />
+Attend their bus'ness and their mirth pursue,<br />
+But after that no man without a fine<br />
+Shall walk the streets or at a tavern dine.<br />
+One day and half 'tis requisite to rest<br />
+From toilsome labor and a tempting feast.<br />
+Henceforth let none on peril of their lives<br />
+Attempt a journey or embrace their wives;<br />
+No barber, foreign or domestic bred,<br />
+Shall e'er presume to dress a lady's head;<br />
+No shop shall spare (half the preceding day)<br />
+A yard of riband or an ounce of tea."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And many similar rhymes might be given.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday night, being shut out of the Sabbath hours, became in the eighteenth
+century a time of general cheerfulness and often merry-making. This sudden
+transition from the religious calm and quiet of the afternoon to the noisy
+gayety of the evening was very trying to many of the clergymen, especially
+to Jonathan Edwards, who preached often and sadly against "Sabbath evening
+dissipations and mirth-making." In some communities singing-schools were
+held on Sunday nights, which afforded a comparatively decorous and orderly
+manner of spending the close of the day.</p>
+
+<p>Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm
+Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath,--sign and token to them,
+not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal
+rest to come. The universal quiet and peace of the community showed the
+primitive instinct of a pure, simple devotion, the sincere religion which
+knew no compromise in spiritual things, no half-way obedience to God's
+Word, but rested absolutely on the Lord's Day--as was commanded. No work,
+no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was
+seen except the necessary care of the patient cattle and other dumb beasts,
+the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the nooning,
+a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead. This
+absolute obedience to the letter as well as to the spirit of God's Word
+was one of the most typical traits of the character of the Puritans, and
+appeared to them to be one of the most vital points of their religion.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap18"></a>XVIII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Authority of the Church and the Ministers.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>Severely were the early colonists punished if they ventured to criticise
+or disparage either the ministers or their teachings, or indeed any of the
+religious exercises of the church. In Sandwich a man was publicly whipped
+for speaking deridingly of God's words and ordinances as taught by the
+Sandwich minister. Mistress Oliver was forced to stand in public with a
+cleft stick on her tongue for "reproaching the elders." A New Haven man was
+severely whipped and fined for declaring that he received no profit from
+the minister's sermons. We also know the terrible shock given the Windham
+church in 1729 by the "vile and slanderous expressions" of one unregenerate
+Windhamite who said, "I had rather hear my dog bark than Mr. Bellamy
+preach." He was warned that he would be "shakenoff and givenup," and
+terrified at the prospect of so dire a fate he read a confession of his
+sorrow and repentance, and promised to "keep a guard over his tongue," and
+also to listen to Mr. Bellamy's preaching, which may have been a still more
+difficult task. Mr. Edward Tomlins, of Boston, upon retracting his opinion
+which he had expressed openly against the singing in the churches, was
+discharged without a fine. William Howes and his son were in 1744 fined
+fifty shillings "apeece for deriding such as sing in the congregation,
+tearming them fooles." The church music was as sacred to the Puritans as
+were the prayers, but it must have been a sore trial to many to keep still
+about the vile manner and method of singing. In 1631 Phillip Ratcliffe,
+for "speaking against the churches," had his ears cut off, was whipped and
+banished. We know also the consternation caused in New Haven in 1646 by
+Madam Brewster's saying that the custom of carrying contributions to
+the Deacons' table was popish--was "like going to the High Alter,"
+and "savored of the Mass." She answered her accusers in such a bold,
+highhanded, and defiant manner that her heinous offence was considered
+worthy of trial in a higher court, whose decision is now lost.</p>
+
+<p>The colonists could not let their affection and zeal for an individual
+minister cause them to show any disrespect or indifference to the Puritan
+Church in general. When the question of the settlement of the Reverend Mr.
+Lenthal in the church of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was under discussion, the
+tyranny of the Puritan Church over any who dared oppose or question it was
+shown in a marked manner, and may be cited as a typical case. Mr. Lenthal
+was suspected of being poisoned with the Anne Hutchinson heresies, and he
+also "opposed the way of gathering churches." Hence his ordination over the
+church in the new settlement was bitterly opposed by the Boston divines,
+though apparently desired by the Weymouth congregation. One Britton, who
+was friendly towards Lenthal and who spoke "reproachfully" and slurringly
+of a book which defended the course of the Boston churches, was whipped
+with eleven stripes, as he had no money to pay the imposed fine. John
+Smythe, who "got hands to a blank" (which was either canvassing for
+signatures to a proxy vote in favor of Lenthal or obtaining signatures
+to an instrument declaring against the design of the churches), for thus
+"combining to hinder the orderly gathering" of the Weymouth church at this
+time, was fined &pound;2. Edward Sylvester for the same offence was fined and
+disfranchised. Ambrose Martin, another friend of Lenthal's, for calling
+the church covenant of the Boston divines "a stinking carrion and a human
+invention," was fined &pound;10, while Thomas Makepeace, another Weymouth
+malcontent, was informed by those in power that "they were weary of him,"
+or, in modern slang, that "he made them tired." Parson Lenthal himself,
+being sent for by the convention, weakened at once in a way his church
+followers must have bitterly despised; he was "quickly convinced of his
+error and evil." His conviction was followed with his confession, and in
+open court he gave under his hand a laudable retraction, which retraction
+he was ordered also to "utter in the assembly at Weymouth, and so no
+further censure was passed on him." Thus the chief offender got the
+lightest punishment, and thus did the omnipotent Church rule the whole
+community.</p>
+
+<p>The names of loquacious, babbling Quakers and Baptists who spoke
+disrespectfully of some or all of the ordinances of the Puritan church
+might be given, and would swell the list indefinitely; they were fined and
+punished without mercy or even toleration.</p>
+
+<p>All profanity or blaspheming against God was severely punished. One very
+wicked man in Hartford for his "fillthy and prophane expressions," namely,
+that "hee hoped to meet some of the members of the Church in Hell before
+long, and he did not question but hee should," was "committed to prison,
+there to be kept in safe custody till the sermon, and then to stand the
+time thereof in the pillory, and after sermon to be severely whipped." What
+a severe punishment for so purely verbal an offence! New England ideas of
+profanity were very rigid, and New England men had reason to guard well
+their temper and tongue, else that latter member might be bored with a
+hot iron; for such was the penalty for profanity. We know what horror Mr.
+Tomlins's wicked profanity, "Curse ye woodchuck!" caused in Lynn meeting,
+and Mr. Dexter was "putt in ye billboes ffor prophane saying dam ye cowe."
+The Newbury doctor was sharply fined also for wickedly cursing. When
+drinking at the tavern he raised his glass and said,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"I'll pledge my friends, and for my foes<br />
+  A plague for their heels, and a poxe for their toes."</blockquote>
+
+<p>He acknowledged his wickedness and foolishness in using the "olde proverb,"
+and penitently promised to curse no more.</p>
+
+<p>Sad to tell, Puritan women sometimes lost their temper and their
+good-breeding and their godliness. Two wicked Wells women were punished in
+1669 "for using profane speeches in their common talk; as in making answer
+to several questions their answer is, The Devil a bit." In 1640, in
+Springfield, Goody Gregory, being grievously angered, profanely abused an
+annoying neighbor, saying, "Before God I coulde breake thy heade!" But she
+acknowledged her "great sine and faulte" like a woman, and paid her fine
+and sat in the stocks like a man, since she swore like the members of that
+profane sex.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the sins of the fathers were visited on the children in a most
+extraordinary manner. One man, "for abusing N. Parker at the tavern," was
+deprived of the privilege of bringing his children to be baptized, and was
+thus spiritually punished for a very worldly offence. For some offences,
+such as "speaking deridingly of the minister's powers," as was done in
+Plymouth, "casting uncharitable reflexions on the minister," as did an
+Andover man; and also for absenting one's self from church services; for
+"sloathefulness," for "walking prophanely," for spoiling hides when tanning
+and refusing explanation thereof; for selling short weight in grain,
+for being "given too much to Jearings," for "Slanndering," for being a
+"Makebayte," for "ronging naibors," for "being too Proude," for "suspitions
+of stealing pinnes," for "pnishouse Squerilouse Odyouse wordes," and for
+"lyeing," church-members were not only fined and punished but were deprived
+of partaking of the sacrament. In the matter of lying great distinction was
+made as to the character and effect of the offence. George Crispe's wife,
+who "told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly," was simply
+admonished and remonstrated with. Will Randall, who told a "plain lie," was
+fined ten shillings. While Ralph Smith, who "lied about seeing a whale,"
+was fined twenty shillings and excommunicated.</p>
+
+<p>In some communities, of which Lechford tells us New Haven was one, these
+unhouselled Puritans were allowed, if they so desired, to stand outside the
+meeting-house door at the time of public worship and catch what few words
+of the service they could. This humble waiting for crumbs of God's word was
+doubtless regarded as a sign of repentance for past deeds, for it was often
+followed by full forgiveness. As excommunicated persons were regarded with
+high disfavor and even abhorrence by the entire pious and godly walking
+community, this apparently spiritual punishment was more severe in its
+temporal effects than at first sight appears. From the Cambridge Platform,
+which was drawn up and adopted by the New England Synod in 1648, we learn
+that "while the offender remains excommunicated the church is to refrain
+from all communion with him in civil things," and the members were
+specially "to forbear to eat and drink with him;" so his daily and even his
+family life was made wretched. And as it was not necessary to wait for the
+action of the church to pronounce excommunication, but the "pastor of a
+church might by himself and authoritatively suspend from the Lord's table
+a brother <i>suspected</i> of scandal" until there was time for full
+examination, we can see what an absolute power the church and even the
+minister had over church-members in a New England community.</p>
+
+<p>Nor could the poor excommunicate go to neighboring towns and settlements to
+start afresh. No one wished him or would tolerate him. Lancaster, in 1653,
+voted not to receive into its plantation "any excommunicat or notoriously
+erring agt the Docktrin &amp; Discipline of churches of this Commonwealth."
+Other towns passed similar votes. Fortunately, Rhode Island--the island of
+"Aquidnay" and the Providence Plantations--opened wide its arms as a place
+of refuge for outcast Puritans. Universal freedom and religious toleration
+were in Rhode Island the foundations of the State. Josiah Quincy said that
+liberty of conscience would have produced anarchy if it had been permitted
+in the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century, but the
+flourishing Narragansett, Providence, and Newport plantations seem to prove
+the absurdity of that statement. Liberty of conscience was there allowed,
+as Dr. MacSparran, the first clergyman of the Narragansett Church,
+complained in his "America Dissected," "to the extent of no religion at
+all." The Gortonians, the Foxians, and Hutchinsonians, the Anabaptists, the
+Six Principle Baptists, the Church of England, apparently all the followers
+of the eighty-two "pestilent heresies" so sadly enumerated and so bitterly
+hated and "cast out to Satan" by the Massachusetts Puritan divines,--all
+the excommunicants and exiles found in Rhode Island a home and
+friends--other friends than the Devil to whom they had been consigned.</p>
+
+<p>Though the early Puritan ministers had such powerful influence in every
+other respect, they were not permitted to perform the marriage-service
+nor to raise their voices in prayer or exhortation at a funeral. Sewall
+jealously notes when the English burial-service began to be read at
+burials, saying, "the office for Burial is a Lying very bad office makes no
+difference between the precious and the vile." The office of marriage was
+denied the parson, and was generally relegated to the magistrate. In this,
+Governor Bradford states, they followed "ye laudable custome of ye Low
+Countries." Not rulers and magistrates only were empowered to perform the
+marriage ceremony; squires, tavern-keepers, captains, various authorized
+persons might wed Puritan lovers; any man of dignity or prominence in the
+community could apparently receive authority to perform that office except
+the otherwise all-powerful parson.</p>
+
+<p>As years rolled on, though the New Englanders still felt great reverence
+and pride for their church and its ordinances, the minister was no longer
+the just man made perfect, the oracle of divine will. The church-members
+escaped somewhat from ecclesiastical power, and some of them found fault
+with and openly disparaged their ministers in a way that would in early
+days have caused them to be pilloried, whipped, caged, or fined; and often
+the derogatory comments were elicited by the most trivial offences. One
+parson was bitterly condemned because he managed to amass eight hundred
+dollars by selling the produce of his farm. Another shocking and severely
+criticised offence was a game of bowls which one minister played and
+enjoyed. Still another minister, in Hanover, Massachusetts, was reproved
+for his lack of dignity, which was shown in his wearing stockings "footed
+up with another color;" that is, knit stockings in which the feet were
+colored differently from the legs. He also was found guilty of having
+jumped over the fence instead of decorously and clerically walking through
+the gate when going to call on one of his parishioners. Rev. Joseph Metcalf
+of the Old Colony was complained of in 1720 for wearing too worldly a wig.
+He mildly reproved and shamed the meddlesome women of his church by asking
+them to come to him and each cut off a lock of hair from the obnoxious
+wig until all the complainers were satisfied that it had been rendered
+sufficiently unworldly. Some Newbury church-members, in 1742, asserted that
+their minister unclerically wore a colored kerchief instead of a band. This
+he indignantly denied, saying that he "had never buried a babe even in most
+tempestuous weather," when he rode several miles, but he always wore a
+band, and he complained in turn that members of his congregation turned
+away from him on the street, and "glowered" at him and "sneered at him."
+Still more unseemly demonstrations of dislike were sometimes shown, as in
+South Hadley, in 1741, when a committee of disaffected parishioners
+pulled the Rev. Mr Rawsom out of the pulpit and marched him out of the
+meeting-house because they did not fancy his preaching. But all such
+actions were as offensive to the general community then as open expressions
+of dissatisfaction and contempt are now.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap19"></a>XIX</h1>
+
+<h2>The Ordination of the Minister.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The minister's ordination was, of course, an important social as well as
+spiritual event in such a religious community as was a New England colonial
+town. It was always celebrated by a great gathering of people from far and
+near, including all the ministers from every town for many miles around;
+and though a deeply serious service, was also an excuse for much
+merriment. In Connecticut, and by tradition also in Massachusetts, an
+"ordination-ball" was frequently given. It is popularly supposed that at
+this ball the ministers did not dance, nor even appear, nor to it in any
+way give their countenance; that it was only a ball given at the time of
+the ordination because so many people would then be in the town to take
+part in the festivity. That this was not always the case is proved by
+a letter of invitation still in existence written by Reverend Timothy
+Edwards, who was ordained in Windsor in 1694; it was written to Mr. and
+Mrs. Stoughton, asking them to attend the ordination-ball which was to be
+given in his, the minister's house. But whether the parsons approved and
+attended, or whether they strongly discountenanced it, the ordination-ball
+was always a great success. It is recorded that at one in Danvers a young
+man danced so vigorously and long on the sanded floor that he entirely wore
+out a new pair of shoes. The fashion of giving ordination-balls did not die
+out with colonial times. In Federal days it still continued, a specially
+gay ball being given in the town of Wolcott at an ordination in 1811.</p>
+
+<p>There was always given an ordination supper,--a plentiful feast, at which
+visiting ministers and the new pastor were always present and partook with
+true clerical appetite. This ordination feast consisted of all kinds of New
+England fare, all the mysterious compounds and concoctions of Indian corn
+and "pompions," all sorts of roast meats, "turces" cooked in various ways,
+gingerbread and "cacks," and--an inevitable feature at the time of every
+gathering of people, from a corn-husking or apple-bee to a funeral--a
+liberal amount of cider, punch, and grog was also supplied, which latter
+compound beverages were often mixed on the meeting-house green or even in
+punch-bowls on the very door-steps of the church. Beer, too, was specially
+brewed to honor the feast. Rev. Mr. Thatcher, of Boston, wrote in his diary
+on the twentieth of May, 1681, "This daye the Ordination Beare was brewed."
+Portable bars were sometimes established at the church-door, and strong
+drinks were distributed free of charge to the entire assemblage. As late
+as 1825, at the installation of Dr. Leonard Bacon over the First
+Congregational Church in New Haven, free drinks were furnished at an
+adjacent bar to all who chose to order them, and were "settled for" by the
+generous and hospitable society. In considering the extravagant amount of
+moneys often recorded as having been paid out for liquor at ordinations,
+one must not fail to remember that the seemingly large sums were often
+spent in Revolutionary times during the great depreciation of Continental
+money. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars were disbursed for the
+entertainment of the council at the ordination of Mr. Kilbourn, of
+Chesterfield; but the items were really few and the total amount of liquor
+was not great,--thirty-eight mugs of flip at twelve dollars per mug; eleven
+gills of rum bitters at six dollars per gill, and two mugs of sling at
+twenty-four dollars per mug. The church in one town sent the Continental
+money in payment for the drinks of the church-council in a wheelbarrow to
+the tavern-keeper, and he was not very well paid either.</p>
+
+<p>It gives one a strange sense of the customs and habits of the olden times
+to read an "ordination-bill" from a tavern-keeper which is thus endorsed,
+"This all Paid for exsept the Minister's Rum." To give some idea of the
+expense of "keeping the ministers" at an ordination in Hartford in 1784,
+let me give the items of the bill:--</p>
+
+<pre>                          &pound;  s. d.
+  To keeping Ministers    0  2  4
+  2 Mugs tody             0  5 10
+  5 Segars                0  3  0
+  1 Pint wine             0  0  9
+  3 lodgings              0  9  0
+  3 bitters               0  0  9
+  3 breakfasts            0  3  6
+  15 boles Punch          1 10  0
+  24 dinners              1 16  0
+  11 bottles wine         0  3  6
+  5 mugs flip             0  5 10
+  3 boles punch           0  6  0
+  3 boles tody            0  3  6</pre>
+
+<p>One might say with Falstaff, "O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread
+to this intolerable deal of sack!" I sadly fear me that at that Hartford
+ordination our parson ancestors got grievsously "gilded," to use a choice
+"red-lattice phrase."</p>
+
+<p>Many accounts of gay ordination parties have been preserved in diaries for
+us. Reverend Mr. Smith, who was settled in Portland in the early part of
+the eighteenth century, wrote thus in his journal of an ordination which
+he attended: "Mr. Foxcroft ordained at New Gloucester. We had a pleasant
+journey home. Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry. A <i>jolly ordination</i>.
+We lost all sight of decorum." The Mr. L. referred to was Mr. Stephen
+Longfellow, greatgrandfather of the poet.</p>
+
+<p>Bills for ordination-expenses abound in items of barrels of rum and cider
+and metheglin, of bowls of flip and punch and toddy, of boxes of lemons and
+loaves of sugar, in punches, and sometimes broken punchbowls, and in one
+case a large amount of Malaga and Canary wine, spices and "ross water,"
+from which was brewed doubtless an appetizing ordination-cup which may have
+rivalled Josselyn's New England nectar of "cyder, Maligo raisins, spices,
+and sirup of clove-gillyflowers."</p>
+
+<p>In Massachusetts, in January, 1759, the subject of the frequent disorders
+and irregularities in connection with ordination-services, especially in
+country towns, came before the council of the province, who referred
+its consideration to a convention of ministers. The ministers at that
+convention were recommended to each give instruction, exhortation, and
+advice against excesses to the members of his congregation whenever an
+ordination was about to take place in the vicinity of his church. In this
+way it was hoped that the reformation would be aided, and temperance,
+order, and decorum established. The newspapers were free in their
+condemnation of the feasting and roistering at ordination-services. When
+Dr. Cummings was ordained over the Old South Church of Boston in February,
+1761, a feast took place at the Rev. Dr. Sewall's house which occasioned
+much comment. A four-column letter of criticism appeared in the Boston
+Gazette of March 9, 1761, over the signature of "Countryman," which
+provoked several answers and much newspaper controversy. As Dr. Sewall had
+been moderator of the meeting of ministers held only two years previously
+with the hope, and for the purpose of abolishing ordination revelries, it
+is not strange that the circumstance of the feast being given in his house
+should cause public comment and criticism.</p>
+
+<p>"Countryman" complained that "the price of provisions was raised a quarter
+cart in Boston for several days before the instalment by reason of the
+great preparations therefor, and the readiness of the ecclesiastical
+caterers to give almost any price that was demanded. Many Boston people
+complained the town had, by this means, in a few days lost a large sum of
+money; which was, as it were, levied on and extorted from them. If the
+poor were the <i>better for what remained of so plentiful and splendid a
+feast</i> I am very glad but yet think it is a pity the charity were not
+better timed." He reprovingly enumerates, "There were six tables that held
+one with another eighteen persons each, upon each table a good rich plumb
+pudding, a dish of boil'd pork and fowls, and a corn'd leg of pork with
+sauce proper for it, a leg of bacon, a piece of alamode beef, a leg of
+mutton with caper sauce, a roast line of veal, a roast turkey, a venison
+pastee, besides chess cakes and tarts, cheese and butter. Half a dozen
+cooks were employed upon this occasion, upwards of twenty tenders to wait
+upon the tables; they had the best of old cyder, one barrel of Lisbon wine,
+punch in plenty before and after dinner, made of old Barbados spirit. The
+cost of this moderate dinner was upwards of fifty pounds lawful money."
+This special ordination-feast, even as detailed by the complaining
+"Countryman," does not seem to me very reprehensible. The standing of the
+church, the wealth of the congregation, the character of the guests (among
+whom were the Governor and the judges of the Superior Court) all make
+this repast appear neither ostentatious nor extravagant. Fifty pounds was
+certainly not an enormous sum to spend for a dinner with wine for over one
+hundred persons, and such a good dinner too. Nor is it probable that a city
+as large as was Boston at that date could through that dinner have been
+swept of provisions to such an extent that prices would be raised a quarter
+part. I suspect some personal malice caused "Countryman's" attacks, for he
+certainly could have found in other towns more flagrant cases to complain
+of and condemn.</p>
+
+<p>Though no record exists to prove that "the poor were the better for
+what remained" after this Boston feast, in other towns letters
+and church-entries show that any fragments remaining after the
+ordination-dinner were well disposed of. Sometimes they furnished forth the
+new minister's table. In one case they were given to "a widowed family"
+("widowed" here being used in the old tender sense of bereaved). In
+Killingly "the overplush of provisions" was sold to help pay the arrearages
+of the salary of the outgoing minister, thus showing a laudable desire to
+"settle up and start square."</p>
+
+<p>If the church were dedicated at the time of the ordination, that would
+naturally be cause for additional gayety. A very interesting and graphic
+account of the feast at the dedication of the Old Tunnel Meeting-House of
+Lynn in the year 1682 has been preserved. It thus describes the scene:--</p>
+
+<p>"Ye Deddication Dinner was had in ye greate barne of Mr. Hoode which by
+reason of its goodly size was deemed ye most fit place. It was neatly
+adorned with green bows and other hangings and made very faire to look
+upon, ye wreaths being mostly wrought by ye young folk, they meeting
+together, both maides and young men, and having a merry time in doing ye
+work. Ye rough stalls and unbowed posts being gaily begirt and all ye
+corners and cubbies being clean swept and well aired, it truly did appear
+a meet banquetting hall. Ye scaffolds too from which ye provinder had been
+removed were swept cleane as broome could make them. Some seats were put up
+on ye scaffoldes whereon might sitt such of ye antient women as would see &amp;
+ye maides and children. Ye greate floor was all held for ye company which
+was to partake of ye feast of fat things, none others being admitted there
+save them that were to wait upon ye same. Ye kine that were wont to be
+there were forced to keep holiday in the field."</p>
+
+<p>Then follows a minute account of how the fowls persisted in flying in
+and roosting over the table, scattering feathers and hay on the parsons
+beneath.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Shepard's face did turn very red and he catched up an apple and hurled
+it at ye birds. But he thereby made a bad matter worse for ye fruit being
+well aimed it hit ye legs of a fowl and brought him floundering and
+flopping down on ye table, scattering gravy, sauce and divers things upon
+our garments and in our faces. But this did not well please some, yet with
+most it was a happening that made great merryment. Dainty meats were on ye
+table in great plenty, bear-stake, deer-meat, rabbit, and fowle, both wild
+and from ye barnyard. Luscious puddings we likewise had in abundance,
+mostly apple and berry, but some of corn meal with small bits of sewet
+baked therein; also pyes and tarts. We had some pleasant fruits, as apples,
+nuts and wild grapes, and to crown all, we had plenty of good cider and ye
+inspiring Barbadoes drink. Mr. Shepard and most of ye ministers were
+grave and prudent at table, discoursing much upon ye great points of ye
+deddication sermon and in silence laboring upon ye food before them. But I
+will not risque to say on which they dwelt with most relish, ye discourse
+or ye dinner. Most of ye young members of ye Council would fain make a
+jolly time of it. Mr. Gerrish, ye Wenham minister, tho prudent in his
+meat and drinks, was yet in right merry mood. And he did once grievously
+scandalize Mr. Shepard, who on suddenly looking up from his dish did spy
+him, as he thot, winking in an unbecoming way to one of ye pretty damsels
+on ye scaffold. And thereupon bidding ye godly Mr. Rogers to labor with him
+aside for his misbehavior, it turned out that ye winking was occasioned by
+some of ye hay seeds that were blowing about, lodging in his eye; whereat
+Mr. Shepard felt greatly releaved.</p>
+
+<p>"Ye new Meeting house was much discoursed upon at ye table. And most thot
+it as comely a house of worship as can be found in the whole Collony save
+only three or four. Mr. Gerrish was in such merry mood that he kept ye end
+of ye table whereby he sat in right jovial humour. Some did loudly laugh
+and clap their hands. But in ye middest of ye merryment a strange disaster
+did happen unto him. Not having his thots about him he endeavored ye
+dangerous performance of gaping and laughing at the same time which he must
+now feel is not so easy or safe a thing. In doing this he set his jaws open
+in such wise that it was beyond all his power to bring them together again.
+His agonie was very great, and his joyful laugh soon turned to grievous
+gioaning. Ye women in ye scaffolds became much distressed for him. We did
+our utmost to stay ye anguish of Mr. Gerrish, but could make out little
+till Mr. Rogers who knoweth somewhat of anatomy did bid ye sufferer to sit
+down on ye floor, which being done Mr. Rogers took ye head atween his legs,
+turning ye face as much upward as possible and then gave a powerful blow
+and then sudden press which brot ye jaws into working order. But Mr.
+Geirish did not gape or laugh much more on that occasion, neither did he
+talk much for that matter.</p>
+
+<p>"No other weighty mishap occurred save that one of ye Salem delegates, in
+boastfully essaying to crack a walnut atween his teeth did crack, instead
+of ye nut, a most usefull double tooth and was thereby forced to appear at
+ye evening with a bandaged face."</p>
+
+<p>This ended this most amusing chapter of disasters to the ministers, though
+the banquet was diversified by interrupting crows from invading roosters,
+fierce and undignified counter-attacks with nuts and apples by the
+clergymen, a few mortifyingly "mawdlin songs and much roistering laughter,"
+and the account ends, "so noble and savoury a banquet was never before
+spread in this noble town, God be praised." What a picture of the good old
+times! Different times make different manners; the early Puritan ministers
+did not, as a rule, drink to excess, any more than do our modern clergymen;
+but it is not strange that though they were of Puritan blood and belief,
+they should have fallen into the universal custom of the day, and should
+have "gone to their graves full of years, honor, simplicity, and rum." The
+only wonder is, when the ministers had the best places at every table, at
+every feast, at every merry-making in New England, that stories of their
+roistering excesses should not have come down to us as there have of the
+intemperate clergy of Virginia.</p>
+
+<p>The ordination services within the meeting-houses were not always decorous
+and quiet scenes. In spite of the reverence which our forefathers had for
+their church and their ministers, it did not prevent them from bitterly
+opposing the settlement of an unwished-for clergyman over them, and many
+towns were racked and divided, then as now, over the important question.
+As years passed on the church members grew bold enough to dare to offer
+personal and bodily opposition. At the ordination of the Rev. Peter
+Thatcher in the New North Church in Boston, in 1720, there were two
+parties. The members who did not wish him to be settled over the church
+went into the meeting-house and made a great disorder and clamor. They
+forbade the proceedings, and went into the gallery, and threw from thence
+water and missiles on the friends of the clergymen who were gathered around
+him at the altar. Perhaps they obtained courage for these sacrilegious acts
+from the barrels of rum and the bowls of strong punch. And this was in
+Puritanical Boston, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of the landing
+of the Mayflower. Thus had one century changed the absolute reverence and
+affectionate regard of the Pilgrims for their church, their ministers,
+and their meeting-houses, to irreverent and obstinate desire for personal
+satisfaction. No wonder that the ministers at that date preached and
+believed that Satan was making fresh and increasing efforts to destroy the
+Puritan church. The hour was ready for Whitefield, for Edwards, for any
+new awakening; and was above all fast approaching for the sadly needed
+temperance reform.</p>
+
+<p>In the seventeenth century a minister was ordained and re-ordained at
+each church over which he had charge; but after some years the name of
+installation was given to each appointment after the first ordination, and
+the ceremony was correspondingly changed.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap20"></a>XX</h1>
+
+<h2>The Ministers.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The picture which Colonel Higginson has drawn of the Puritan minister is so
+well known and so graphic that any attempt to add to it would be futile.
+All the succeeding New England parsons, as years rolled by, were not,
+however, like the black-gowned, black-gloved, stately, and solemn man whom
+he has so clearly shown us. Men of rigid decorum, and grave ceremony there
+were, such as Dr. Emmons and Jonathan Edwards; but there were parsons also
+of another type,--eccentric, unconventional, and undignified in demeanor
+and dress. Parson Robinson, of Duxbury, persisted in wearing in the pulpit,
+as part of his clerical attire, a round jacket instead of the suitable
+gown or Geneva cloak, and he was known thereby as "Master Jack." With
+astonishing inconsistency this Master Jack objected to the village
+blacksmith's wearing his leathern apron into the church, and he assailed
+the offender again and again with words and hints from his pulpit. He was
+at last worsted by the grimaces of the victorious smith (where was the
+Duxbury tithingman?), and indignantly left the pulpit, ejaculating, "I'll
+not preach while that man sits before me." A remonstrating parishioner
+said afterward to Master Jack, "I'd not have left if the Devil sat there."
+"Neither would I" was the quick answer.</p>
+
+<p>Another singular article of attire was worn in the pulpit by Father Mills,
+of Torrington, though neither in irreverence nor indifference. When his
+dearly loved wife died he pondered how he, who always wore black, could
+express to the world that he was wearing mourning; and his simple heart hit
+upon this grotesque device: he left off his full-flowing wig, and tied
+up his head in a black silk handkerchief, which he wore thereafter as a
+trapping of woe.</p>
+
+<p>Parson Judson, of Taunton, was so lazy that he used to preach while sitting
+down in the pulpit; and was so contemptibly fond of comfort that he would
+on summer Sundays give out to the sweltering members of his congregation
+the longest psalm in the psalm-book, and then desert them--piously
+perspiring and fuguing--and lie under a tree enjoying the cool outdoor
+breezes until the long psalm was ended, escaping thus not only the heat but
+the singing; and when we consider the quantity and quality of both, and
+that he condemned his good people to an extra amount of each, it seems
+a piece of clerical inhumanity that would be hard to equal. Surely this
+selfish Taunton sybarite was the prosaic ideal of Hamlet's words:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Some ungracious pastors do<br />
+Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven,<br />
+Whilst like a puff'd and reckless libertine<br />
+Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,<br />
+And recks not his own rede."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But lazy and slothful ministers were fortunately rare in New England. No
+primrose path of dalliance was theirs; industrious and hard-working were
+nearly all the early parsons, preaching and praying twice on the Sabbath,
+and preaching again on Lecture days; visiting the sick and often giving
+medical and "chyrurgycal" advice; called upon for legal counsel and
+adjudication; occupied in spare moments in teaching and preparing young
+men for college; working on their farms; hearing the children say their
+catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,--truly
+they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded
+on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan
+vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John
+Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher,"
+while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a
+contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious
+epithets and descriptions were applied to the parsons; they were called
+"holy-heavenly," "sweet-affecting," "soul-ravishing," "heaven-piercing,"
+"angel-rivalling," "subtil," "irrefragable," "angelical," "septemfluous,"
+"holy-savoured," "princely," "soul-appetizing," "full of antic tastes"
+(meaning having the tastes of an antiquary), "God-bearing." Of two of the
+New England saints it was written:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Thier Temper far from Injucundity,<br />
+Thier tongues and pens from Infecundity."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Many other fulsome, turgid, and even whimsical expressious of praise might
+be named, for the Puritans were rich in classic sesquipedalian adjectives,
+and their active linguistic consciences made them equally fertile in
+producing new ones.</p>
+
+<p>Ready and unexpected were the solemn Puritans in repartee. A party of gay
+young sparks, meeting austere old John Cotton, determined to guy him. One
+of the young reprobates sent up to him and whispered in his ear, "Cotton,
+thou art an old fool." "I am, I am," was the unexpected answer; "the Lord
+make both thee and me wiser than we are." Two young men of like intent met
+Mr. Haynes, of Vermont, and said with mock sad faces, "Have you heard the
+news? the Devil is dead." Quick came the answer, "Oh, poor, fatherless
+children! what will become of you?"</p>
+
+<p>Gloomy and depressed of spirits they were often. The good Warham, who could
+take faithful and brave charge of his flock in the uncivilized wilds
+of Connecticut among ferocious savages, was tortured by doubts and
+"blasphemous suggestions," and overwhelmed by unbelief, enduring specially
+agonizing scruples about administering and partaking of the Lord's Supper,
+and was thus perplexed and buffeted until the hour of his sad death. The
+ministers went through various stages of uncertainty and gloom, from the
+physical terror of Dr. Cogswell in a thunderstorm, through vacillating and
+harassing convictions about the Half Way Covenant, through doubt of God,
+of salvation, of heaven, of eternite, particularly distressing suspicions
+about the reality of hell and the personality of the Devil, to the stage
+of deep melancholy which was shown in its highest type in "Handkerchief
+Moody," who preached and prayed and always appeared in public with a
+handkerchief over his face, and gave to Hawthorne the inspiration for his
+story of "The Black Veil." Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of
+Charlestown, was so hypochondriacal that he was afraid to preach in the
+pulpit, feeling sure that he would die if he entered therein; so he always
+delivered his sermons to his patient congregation from the deacons' pew.
+Mr. Bradstreet was unconventional in many other respects, and was far from
+being a typical Puritan minister. He seldom wore a coat, but generally
+appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth,--a
+most disreputable addition to the clerical toilet at that date, or, in
+truth, at any date. He was a learned and pious man, however, and was thus
+introduced to a fellow clergyman, "Here is a man who can whistle Greek."</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely one of the early Puritan ministers was free from the sad shadow of
+doubt and fear. No "rose-pink or dirty-drab views of humanity" were theirs;
+all was inky-black. And it is impossible to express the gloom and the
+depression of spirit which fall on one now, after these centuries of
+prosperous and cheerful years, when one considers thoughtfully the deep and
+despairing agony of mind endured by these good, brave, steadfast, godly
+Puritan ministers. Read, for instance, the sentences from the diary of the
+Rev. John Baily, or of Nathaniel Mather, as given by Cotton Mather in his
+"Magnalia." Mather says that poor, sad, heart-sick Baily was filled with
+"desponding jealousies," "disconsolate uneasinesses," gloomy fears, and
+thinks the words from his diary "may be profitable to some discouraged
+minds." Profitable! Ah, no; far from it! The overwhelming blackness
+of despair, the woful doubts and fears about destruction and utter
+annihilation which he felt so deeply and so continually, fall in a heavy,
+impenetrable cloud upon us as we read, until we feel that we too are in the
+"Suburbs of hell" and are "eternally damned."</p>
+
+<p>But in succeeding years they were not always gloomy and not always staid,
+as we know from the stories of the cheerful parties at ordination-times;
+and I doubt not the reverend Assembly of Elders at Cambridge enjoyed to the
+full degree the twelve gallons of sack and six gallons of white wine sent
+to them by the Court as a testimony of deep respect. And the group of
+clergymen who were painted over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of
+Newbury, must have been far from gloom, as the punch-bowl and drinking-cups
+and tobacco and pipes would testify, and their cheerful motto likewise: "In
+essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." And
+the Rev. Mr. ---- no, I will not tell his name--kept an account with
+one Jerome Ripley, a storekeeper, and on one page of this account-book,
+containing thirty-nine entries, twenty-one were for New England rum.
+It somewhat lessens in our notions the personal responsibility, or the
+personal potatory capability of the parson, to discover that there was
+an ordination in town during that rum-paged week, and that the visiting
+ministers probably drank the greater portion of Jerome Ripley's liquor.
+But I wish the store-keeper had--to save this parson's reputation among
+succeeding generations--called and entered the rum as hay, or tea, or
+nails, or anything innocent and virtuous and clerical. When we read of all
+these doings and drinkings of the old New England ministers,--"if ancient
+tales say true, nor wrong these ancient men"--we feel that we cannot so
+fiercely resent nor wonder at the degrading coupling in Byron's sneering
+lines:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms,<br />
+As rum and true religion."</blockquote>
+
+<p>All the cider made by the New England elders did not tend to gloom,
+and they were celebrated for their fine cider. The best cider in
+Massachusetts--that which brought the highest price--was known as the
+Arminian cider, because the minister who furnished it to the market was
+suspected of having Arminian tendencies. A very telling compliment to the
+cider of one of the first New England ministers is thus recorded: "Mr.
+Whiting had a score of appill-trees from which he made delicious cyder.
+And it hath been said yt an Indyan once coming to hys house and Mistress
+Whiting giving him a drink of ye cyder, he did sett down ye pot and smaking
+his lips say yt Adam and Eve were rightlie damned for eating ye appills in
+ye garden of Eden, they should have made them into cyder." This perverse
+application of good John Eliot's teaching would have vexed the apostle
+sorely. Of so much account were the barrels of cider, and so highly were
+they prized by the ministers, that one honest soul did not hesitate to
+thank the Lord in the pulpit for the "many barrels of cider vouchsafed to
+us this year."</p>
+
+<p>Stronger liquors than cider were also manufactured by the ministers,--and
+by God-fearing, pious ministers also. They did not hesitate to own and
+operate distilleries. Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church of
+Hartford and author of the hymn "Swell the anthem, raise the song," was
+engaged in the distilling business and did not make a success of it either.
+Having become bankrupt, he did not dare show his head anywhere in public
+for some time, except on Sunday, for fear of arrest. This disreputable and
+most unclerical affair did not operate against him in the minds of the
+contemporaneous public, for ten years later he received the degree of
+Doctor of Divinity from Princeton College; and he did not hesitate to joke
+about his liquor manufacturing, saying to two of his brother-clergymen,
+"Oh, we are all three in the same boat together,--Brother Prime raises the
+grain, I distil it, and Brother Flint drinks it."</p>
+
+<p>Impostors there were--false parsons--in the early struggling days of New
+England (since "the devil was never weary and never ceasing in disturbing
+the peace of the new English church"), and they plagued the colonists
+sorely. The very first shepherd of the wandering flock--Mr. Lyford, who
+preached to the planters in 1624--was, as Bradford says, "most unsavory
+salt," a most agonizing and unbearable thorn in the flesh and spirit of the
+poor homesick Pilgrims; and he was finally banished to Virginia, where it
+was supposed that he would find congenial and un-Puritanlike companions.
+Another bold-faced cheat preached to the colonists a most impressive sermon
+on the text, "Let him that stole steal no more," while his own pockets were
+stuffed out with stolen money. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth
+speaketh."</p>
+
+<p>Dicky Swayn, "after a thousand rogueries," set up as a parson in Boston.
+But, unfortunately for him, he prayed too loud and too long on one
+occasion, and his prayer attracted the attention of a woman whose servant
+he had formerly been. She promptly exposed his false pretensions and past
+villanies, and he left Boston and an army of cheated creditors. In 1699
+two other attractive and plausible scamps--Kingsbury and May--garbed and
+curried themselves as ministers, and went through a course of unchecked
+villany, building only on their agreeable presence. Cotton Mather wrote
+pertinently of one of these charmers, "Fascination is a thing whereof
+mankind has more Experience than Comprehension;" and he also wrote very
+despitefully of the adventurer's scholarly attainments saying there were
+"eighteen horrid false spells and not one point in one very short note I
+received from him." As the population increased, so also did the list of
+dishonest impostors, who made a cloak of religion most effectively to
+aid them in deceiving the religious community; and sometimes, alas! the
+ordained clergymen became sad backsliders.</p>
+
+<p>Nor were the pious and godly Puritan divines above the follies and
+frailties of other men in other places and in other times. It can be said
+of them, as of the Jew, had they not "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions,
+senses, affections, passions?"--were they not as other men? It is recorded
+of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, that "once coming among a gay partie of
+yong people he kist all ye maides and said yt he felt all ye better for
+it." And who can doubt it? Even that extreme type, that highest pinnacle
+of American Puritanical bigotry,--solemn and learned Cotton Mather,--had,
+when he was a mourning widower, a most amusing amorous episode with a
+rather doubtful, a decidedly shady, young Boston woman, whom he styled an
+"Ingenious Child," but who was far from being an ingenuous child. "She," as
+he proudly stated, "became charmed with my person to such a degree that she
+could not but break in upon me with her most importunate requests." And a
+very handsome and thoroughly attractive person does his portrait show
+even to modern eyes. Poor Cotton resisted the wiles of the devil in this
+alluring form, though he had to fast and pray three consecutive nights ere
+the strong Puritan spirit conquered the weak flesh, and he could consent
+and resolve to give up the thought of marrying the siren. His self-denial
+and firmness deserved a better reward than the very trying matrimonial
+"venture" that he afterwards made.</p>
+
+<p>Many another Puritan parson has left record of his wooings that are warm
+to read. And well did the parsons' wives deserve their ardent wooings and
+their tender love-letters. Hard as was the minister's life, over-filled as
+was his time, highly taxed as were his resources, all these hardships were
+felt in double proportion by the minister's wife. The old Hebrew standard
+of praise quoted by Cotton Mather, "A woman worthy to be the wife of a
+priest," was keenly epigrammatic; and ample proof of the wise insight
+of the standard of comparison may be found in the lives of "the pious,
+prudent, and prayerful" wives of New England ministers. What wonder that
+their praises were sung in many loving though halting threnodies, in
+long-winded but tender eulogies, in labored anagrams, in quaintly spelled
+epitaphs?--for the ministers' wives were the saints of the Puritan
+calendar.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap21"></a>XXI</h1>
+
+<h2>The Ministers' Pay.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The salaries of New England clergymen were not large in early days, but the
+&pound;60 or &pound;70 which they each were yearly voted was quite enough to suitably
+support them in that new country of plain ways and plain living, if they
+only received it, which was, alas! not always the case. The First Court of
+Massachusetts, in 1630, set the amount of the minister's annual stipend
+to be &pound;20 or &pound;30 according to the wealth of the community, and made it a
+public charge. In 1659 the highest salary paid in Suffolk County was &pound;100
+to Mr. Thatcher, and the lowest was &pound;40 to the clergyman at Hull. The
+minister of the Andover church was voted a salary of &pound;60, and "when he
+shall have occacion to marry, &pound;10 more." He was very glad, however, to take
+&pound;42 in hard cash instead of &pound;60 in corn and labor, which were at that time
+the most popular forms of ministerial remuneration; even though the "hard
+cash" were in the form of wampum, beaver-skins, or leaden bullets.</p>
+
+<p>Many congregations, though the members were so pious and godly, were pretty
+sharp in bargaining with their preachers; for instance, the church in New
+London made its new parson sign a contract that "in case he remove before
+the year is out, he returneth the &pound;80 paid him." Often clergymen would
+"supply" (or "Sipploye," or "syploy" or "sipply," or "sciploy," as various
+records have it) from month to mouth without "settling." As they got the
+"keepe of a hors," and their own board for Saturday and Sunday, and on
+Monday morning a cash payment for preaching (though often the amount was
+only twelve shillings), they were richer than with a small yearly salary
+that was irregularly and inconveniently paid. Often too they entered by
+preference into a yearly contract with a church, without any wish for
+regular settlement or ordination.</p>
+
+<p>A large portion of the stipends in early parishes being paid in corn and
+labor, the amounts were established by fixed rate upon the inhabitants;
+and the amount of land owned and cultivated by each church-member was
+considered in reckoning his assessment. These amounts were called voluntary
+contributions. If, however, any citizen refused to "contribute," he
+was taxed; and if he refused to pay his church-tax he could be fined,
+imprisoned, or pilloried. For one hundred years the ministers' salaries
+in Boston were paid by these so-called "voluntary contributions." In one
+church it was voted that "the Deacons have liberty for a quarter of a yeare
+to git in every mans sume either in a Church way or in a Christian way."
+I would the process employed in the "Church way" were recorded, since it
+differed so from the Christian way.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the Puritan paradoxes that abounded in New England, that the
+community of New Haven, a "State whose Desire was Religion," and religion
+alone, was particularly backward in paying the minister who had spiritual
+charge there. After much trouble in deciding about the form and quality
+of the currency which should be used in pay, since so much bad wampum was
+thrust upon the deacons at the public contributions, it was in 1651 enacted
+that "whereas it is taken notice of that Divers give not into the Treasury
+at all on the Lords Day, it is decreed that all such if they give not
+freely, of themselves be rated according to the Jurisdiction order for the
+Ministers Maintaynance." The delinquents were ordered to bring their "rate"
+to the Deacon's house at once. A presuming young man ventured to suggest
+that the recreant members who would not pay in the face of the whole
+congregation would hardly rush to the Deacon's door to give in their
+"rate." He was severely ordered to keep silence in the company of wiser and
+elder people; but time proved his simply wise supposition to be correct;
+and many and various were the devices and forces which the deacons were
+obliged to use to obtain the minister's rate in New Haven.</p>
+
+<p>Some few bold Puritan souls dared to protest against being forced to pay
+the church rate whether they wished to or not. Lieutenant Fuller, of
+Barnstable, was fined fifty shillings for "prophanely" saying "that the law
+enacted about the ministers maintenance was a wicked and devilish one, and
+that the devil sat at the helm when the law was made." Such courageous
+though profane expressions of revolt but little availed; for not only
+were members and attendants of the Puritan churches taxed, but Quakers,
+Baptists, and Church-of-England men were also "rated," and if they refused
+to pay to help support the church that they abhorred, they were fined and
+imprisoned. One man, of Watertown, named Briscoe, dared to write a book
+against the violent enforcement of "voluntary" subscriptions. He was fined
+&pound;10 for his wickedness; and the printer of the book was also punished. A
+virago in New London, more openly courageous, threw scalding water on the
+head of the tithingman who came to collect the minister's rate. Old John
+Cotton preached long and earnestly upon the necessity and propriety of
+raising the money for the minister's salary, and for other expenses of the
+church, wholly by voluntary and eagerly given contributions,--the "Lord
+having directed him to make it clear by Scripture." He believed that tithes
+and church-taxes were productive of "pride, contention and sloth," and
+indicated a declining spiritual condition of the church. But it was a
+strange voluntary gift he wished, that was forced by dread of the pillory
+and cage!</p>
+
+<p>Since, as Higginson said, "New England was a plantation of Religion, not a
+plantation of Trade," the church and its support were of course the first
+thought in laying out a new town-settlement, and some of the best town-lots
+were always set aside for the "yuse of the minister." Sometimes these lots
+were a gift outright to the first settled preacher, in other townships they
+were set aside as glebes, or "ministry land" as it was called. It was a
+universal custom to build at once a house for the minister, and some very
+queer contracts and stipulations for the size, shape, and quality of the
+parson's home-edifice may be read in church-records. To the construction
+of this house all the town contributed, as also to the building of the
+meeting-house; some gave work; some, the use of a horse or ox-team; some,
+boards; some, stones or brick; some, logs; others, nails; and a few, a very
+few, money. At the house-raising a good dinner was provided, and of course,
+plenty of liquor. Some malcontents rebelled against being forced to work on
+the minister's house. Entries of fines are common enough for "refusing
+to dig on the Minister's Selor," for neglecting to send "the Minister's
+Nayles," for refusing to "contribute clay-boards," etc. As with the
+town-lot, the house sometimes was a gift outright to the clergyman, and
+ofttimes the ownership was retained by the church, and the free use only
+was given to each minister.</p>
+
+<p>It was a universal custom to allow free pasturage for the minister's
+horse, for which the village burial-ground was assigned as a favorite
+feeding-ground. Sometimes this privilege of free pasturage was abused. In
+Plymouth, in 1789, Rev. Chandler Robbins was requested "not to have more
+horses than shall be necessary, for his many horses that had been pastured
+on 'Burial Hill'" had sadly damaged and defaced the gravestones,--perhaps
+the very headstones placed over the bones of our Pilgrim Fathers.</p>
+
+<p>The "strangers' money," which was the money contributed by visitors who
+chanced to attend the services, and which was sometimes specified as "all
+the silver and black dogs given by strangers," was usually given to the
+minister. A "black dog" was a "dog dollar."</p>
+
+<p>Often a settlement or a sum of money was given outright to the clergyman
+when he was first ordained or settled in the parish. At a town meeting in
+Sharon, January 8, 1755, which was held with regard to procuring a new
+minister, it was voted "that a committe confer with Mr. Smith, and know
+which will be more acceptable to him, to have a larger settlement and a
+smaller salary, or a larger salary and a smaller settlement, and make
+report to this meeting." On Jan. 15th it was voted "that we give to said
+Mr. Smith 420 ounces of silver or equivalent in old Tenor bills, for a
+settlement, to be paid in three years after settlement. That we give to
+said Mr. Smith 220 Spanish dollars or an equivalent in old Tenor bills for
+his yearly salary." Mr. Smith was very generous to his new parish, for his
+acceptance of its call contains this clause: "As it will come heavy upon
+some perhaps to pay salary and settlement together I have thought of
+releasing part of the payment of the salary for a time to be paid to me
+again. The first year I shall allow you out of the salary you have voted me
+40 dollars, the 2nd 30 dollars, the 3rd 15, the 4th year 20 to be repaid
+to me again, the 5th year 20 more, the 6th year 20 more and the 25 dollars
+that remain, I am willing that the town should keep 'em for its own use."
+He was apparently "willing to live very low," as Parson Eliot humbly and
+pathetically wrote in a petition to his church.</p>
+
+<p>The Puritan ministers in New England in the eighteenth century were all
+good Whigs; they hated the English kings, fully believing that those stupid
+rulers, who really cared little for the Church of England, were burning
+with pious zeal to make Episcopacy the established church of the colonies,
+and knowing that were that deed accomplished they themselves would probably
+lose their homes and means of livelihood. They were the most eager of
+Republicans and patriots, and many of them were good and brave soldiers in
+the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>When the minister acquired the independence he so longed and fought for,
+it was not all his fancy painted it. He found himself poor
+indeed,--practically penniless. He complained sadly that he was paid his
+salary in the worthless continental paper money, and he refused to take it.
+Often he cannily took merchandise of all kinds instead of the low-valued
+paper money, and he became a good and sharp trader, exchanging his various
+goods for whatever he needed--and could get. Merchandise was, indeed, far
+preferable to money. The petition of Rev. Mr. Barnes to his Willsborough
+people has been preserved, and he thus speaks of his salary: "In 1775 the
+war comenced &amp; Paper money was emitted which soon began to depreciate and
+the depreciation was so rappid that in may 1777 your Pastor gave the whole
+of his years Salary for one sucking Calf, the next year he gave the whole
+for a small store pig. Your Pastor has not asked for any consideration
+being willing to try to Scrabble along with the people while they are in
+low circumstances." His neighbor, Rev. Mr. Sprague, of Dublin, formally
+petitioned his church not to increase his salary, "as I am plagued to death
+to get what is owing to me now," or to buy anything with it when he got it.
+The minister in Scarborough had to be paid &pound;5,400 in paper money to make
+good his salary of &pound;60 in gold which had been voted him.</p>
+
+<p>"Living low" and "scrabbling along" seems to have been the normal and
+universal condition of the New England minister for some time after the War
+of Independence. He was obliged to go without his pay, or to take it in
+whatever shape it might chance to be tendered. Indeed, from the earliest
+colonial days it was true that of whatever they had, the church-members
+gave; meal, maize, beans, cider, lumber, merchantable pork, apples,
+"English grains," pumpkins,--all were paid to the parson. Part of the
+stipend of a minister on Cape Cod was two hundred fish yearly from each
+parishioner, with which to fertilize his sandy corn-land. In Plymouth,
+in 1662, the following method of increasing the minister's income was
+suggested: "The Court Proposeth it as a thing that they judge would be very
+commendable and beneficiall to the townes where God's providence shall cast
+any whales, if they should agree to set aparte some p'te of every such fish
+or oyle for the Incouragement of an able and godly minister among them." In
+Sandwich, also, the parson had a part of every whale that came ashore.</p>
+
+<p>Various gifts, too, came to the preachers. In Newbury the first salmon
+caught each year in the weir was left by will to the parson. Judge Sewall
+records that he visited the minister and "carried him a Bushel of
+Turnips, cost me five shillings, and a Cabbage cost half a Crown." Such a
+high-priced cabbage!</p>
+
+<p>That New England country institution--the "donation party" to the
+minister--was evolved at a later date. At these donation parties the
+unfortunate shepherd of the flock often received much that neither he
+nor the wily donors could use, while more valuable and useful gifts were
+lacking.</p>
+
+<p>A very material plenishing of the minister's house was often furnished in
+the latter part of the eighteenth century by the annual "Spinning Bee." On
+a given day the women of the parish, each bearing her own spinning-wheel
+and flax, assembled at the minister's house and spun for his wife great
+"runs" of linen thread, which were afterward woven into linen for the use
+of the parson and his family. In Newbury, April 20,1768, "Young ladies met
+at the house of the Rev. Mr. Parsons, who preached to them a sermon from
+Proverbs 31-19. They spun and presented to Mrs. Parsons two hundred and
+seventy skeins of good yarn." They drank "liberty tea." This makeshift of
+a beverage was made of the four-leaved loosestrife. The herb was pulled
+up like flax, its stalks were stripped of the leaves and were boiled. The
+leaves were put in a kettle and basted with the liquor distilled from the
+stalks. After this the leaves were dried in an oven to use in the same
+manner as tea-leaves. Liberty tea sold readily for sixpence a pound. In
+1787 these same Newbury women spun two hundred and thirty-six skeins
+of thread and yarn for the wife of the Rev. Mr. Murray. Some were busy
+spinning, some reeling and carding, and some combing the flax, while the
+minister preached to them on the text from Exodus xxxv. 25: "And all
+the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands." These
+spinning-bees were everywhere in vogue, and formed a source of much profit
+to the parson, and of pleasure to the spinners, in spite of the sermons.</p>
+
+<p>Pieced patchwork bed-quilts for the minister's family were also given by
+the women of the congregation. Sometimes each woman furnished a neatly
+pieced square, and all met at the parsonage and joined and quilted the
+coverlet. At other times the minister's wife made the patchwork herself,
+but the women assembled and transformed it into quilts for her. The parson
+was helped also in his individual work. When the rye or wheat or grain on
+the minister's land was full grown and ready for reaping and mowing, the
+men in his parish gave him gladly a day's work in harvesting, and in turn
+he furnished them plenty of good rum to drink, else there were "great
+uneasyness." The New England men were not forced to drink liberty tea.</p>
+
+<p>One universal contribution to the support of the minister all over New
+England was cord-wood; and the "minister's wood" is an institution up to
+the present day in the few thickly wooded districts that remain. A load of
+wood was usually given by each male church-member, and he was expected to
+deliver the gift at the door of the parsonage. Sixty loads a year were a
+fair allowance, but the number sometimes ran up to one hundred, as was
+furnished to Parson Chauncey, of Durham. Rev. Mr. Parsons, of East Hadley,
+was the greatest wood-consumer among the old ministers of whom I have
+chanced to read. Good, cheerful, roaring fires must the Parsons family have
+kept; for in 1774 he had eighty loads of wood supplied to him; in 1751 he
+was furnished with one hundred loads; in 1763 the amount had increased to
+one hundred and twenty loads, when the parish was glad to make a compromise
+with their extravagant shepherd and pay him instead &pound;13 6s 8d annually
+in addition to his regular salary, and let him buy or cut his own wood.
+Firewood at that time in that town was worth only the expense of cutting
+and hauling to the house. A "load" of wood contained about three quarters
+of a cord, and until after the Revolutionary War was worth in the vicinity
+of Hadley only three shillings a load. The minister's loads were expected
+to be always of good "hard-wood." One thrifty parson, while watching a
+farmer unload his yearly contribution, remarked, "Isn't that pretty soft
+wood?" "And don't we sometimes have pretty soft preaching?" was the answer.
+It was well that the witty retort was not made a century earlier; for the
+speaker would have been punished by a fine, since they fined so sharply
+anything that savored of "speaking against the minister." In some towns a
+day was appointed which was called a "wood-spell," when it was ordered that
+all the wood be delivered at the parson's door; and thus the farmers formed
+a cheerful gathering, at which the minister furnished plentiful flip, or
+grog, to the wood-givers. Rev. Stephen Williams, of Longmeadow, never
+failed to make a note of the "wood-sleddings" in his diary. He wrote on
+Jan. 25, 1757, "Neighbors sledded wood for me and shewed a Good Humour.
+I rejoice at it. The Lord bless them that are out of humour and brot no
+wood." In other towns the wood did not always come in when it was wanted or
+needed, and winter found the parsonage woodshed empty. Rev. Mr. French, of
+Andover, gave out this notice in his pulpit one Sunday in November: "I will
+write two discourses and deliver them in this meeting-house on Thanksgiving
+Day, <i>provided I can manage to write them without a fire</i>." We can be
+sure that Monday morning saw several loads of good hard wood deposited at
+the parson's door.</p>
+
+<p>Other ministers did not hesitate to demand their cord-wood most openly,
+while still others became adepts in hinting and begging, not only for wood,
+but for other supplies. It is told of a Newbury parson that he rode from
+house to house one winter afternoon, saying in each that he "wished he had
+a slice of their good cheese, for his wife expected company." On his way
+home his sleigh, unfortunately, upset, and the gathering darkness could not
+conceal from the eyes of the astonished townspeople, who ran to "right the
+minister," the nine great cheeses that rolled out into the snow.</p>
+
+<p>Another source of income to New England preachers was the sale of the
+gloves and rings which were given to them (and indeed to all persons of
+any importance) at weddings, funerals, and christenings. In reading Judge
+Sewall's diary one is amazed at the extraordinary number of gloves he thus
+received, and can but wonder what became of them all, since, had he had
+as many hands as Briareus, he could hardly have worn them. The manuscript
+account-book of the Rev. Mr. Elliot, who was ordained pastor of the New
+North Church of Boston in 1742, shows that he, having a frugal mind, sold
+both gloves and rings. He kept a full list of the gloves he received, the
+kid gloves, the lambswool gloves, and the long gloves,--which were for his
+wife. It seems incredible, but in thirty-two years he received two thousand
+and nine hundred and forty pairs of gloves. Of these, though dead men's
+gloves did not have a very good market, he sold through various salesmen
+and dealers about six hundred and forty dollars worth. One wonders that he
+did not "combine" with the undertaker or sexton who furnished the gloves to
+mourners, and thus do a very thrifty business.</p>
+
+<p>The parson, especially in a low-salaried, rural district, had to practise a
+thousand petty and great economies to eke out his income. He and his family
+wore homespun and patched clothing, which his wife had spun and wove and
+cut and made. She knitted woollen mittens and stockings by the score. She
+unfortunately could not make shoes, and to keep the large family shod was a
+serious drain on the clerical purse, one minister declaring vehemently
+that he should have died a rich man if he and his family could have gone
+barefoot. The pastors of seaboard and riverside parishes set nets, like the
+Apostles of old, and caught fish with which they fed their families until
+the over-phosphorized brains and stomachs rebelled. They set snares and
+traps and caught birds and squirrels and hare, to replenish their tables,
+and from the skins of the rabbits and woodchucks and squirrels, the
+parsons' wives made fur caps for the husbands and for the children.</p>
+
+<p>The whole family gathered in large quantities from roadsides and pastures
+the oily bayberries, and from them the thrifty and capable wife made scores
+of candles for winter use, patiently filling and refilling her few moulds,
+or "dipping" the candles again and again until large enough to use. These
+pale-green bayberry tallow candles, when lighted in the early winter
+evening, sent forth a faint spicy fragrance--a true New England
+incense--that fairly perfumed and Orientalized the atmosphere of the
+parsonage kitchen. They were very saving, however, even of these home-made
+candles, blowing them out during the long family prayers.</p>
+
+<p>Some parsons could not afford always to use candles. In the home of one
+well-known minister the wife always knitted, the children ciphered and
+studied, and the husband wrote his sermon by the flickering fire-light (for
+they always had wood in plenty), with his scraps of sermon paper placed on
+the side of the great leathern bellows as it lay in his lap; a pretty home
+scene that was more picturesque to behold than comfortable to take part in.</p>
+
+<p>Country ministers could scarcely afford paper to write on, as it was taxed
+and was high priced. They bought their sermon paper by the pound; but they
+made the first drafts of their addresses, in a fine, closely written hand,
+on wrapping-paper, on the backs of letters, on the margins of their few
+newspapers, and copied them when finished in their sermon-books with a
+keen regard for economy of space and paper. The manuscript sermons of New
+England divines are models of careful penmanship, and may be examined with
+interest by a student of chirography. The letters are cramped and crabbed,
+like the lives of many of the writers, but the penmanship is methodical,
+clear, and distinct, without wavering lines or uncertain touch.</p>
+
+<p>As every parsonage had some glebe land, the parson could raise at least a
+few vegetables to supply his table. One minister, prevented by illness from
+planting his garden, complained with bitterness that, save for a few rare
+gifts of vegetables from his parishioners, his family had no green thing
+all summer save "messes of dandelion greens" which he had dug by the
+roadside, and the summer's succession of wild berries and mushrooms. The
+children had gathered the berries and had sold them when they could, but of
+course no one would buy the mushrooms, hence they had been forced to eat
+them at the parsonage; and he spoke despitefully and disdainfully of the
+mean, unnourishing, and doubtfully healthful food.</p>
+
+<p>In winter the parson's family fared worse; one minister declared that he
+had had nothing but mush and milk with occasional "cracker johnny-cakes"
+all winter, and that he had not once tasted meat in that space of time,
+save at a funeral or ordination-supper, where I doubt not he gorged with
+the composure and capacity of a Sioux brave at a war feast.</p>
+
+<p>Often the low state of the parsonage larder was quite unknown to the
+unthinking members of the congregation, who were not very luxuriously fed
+themselves; and in the profession of preaching as in all other walks of
+life much depended on the way the parson's money was spent,--economy and
+good judgment in housekeeping worked wonders with the small salary. Dr.
+Dwight, in eulogizing Abijah Weld, pastor at Attleborough, declared that
+on a salary of two hundred and twenty dollars a year Mr. Weld brought up
+eleven children, kept a hospitable house, and gave liberally in charity to
+the poor. I fear if we were to ask some carnal-minded person, who knew not
+the probity of Dr. Dwight, how Mr. Weld could possibly manage to accomplish
+such wonderful results with so little money, that we should meet with
+scepticism as to the correctness of the facts alleged. Such cases were,
+however, too common to be doubted. My answer to the puzzling financial
+question would be this: examine and study the story of the home life, the
+work of <i>Mrs</i>. Weld, that unsalaried helper in clerical labor; therein
+the secret lies.</p>
+
+<p>In many cases, in spite of the never failing and never ceasing economy,
+care, and assistance of the hard-working, thrifty wife, in spite of
+tributes, tithes and windfalls--in country parishes especially--the
+minister, unless he fortunately had some private wealth, felt it incumbent
+upon him to follow some money-making vocation on week-days. Many were
+farmers on week-days. Many took into their families young men who wished
+to be taught, or fitted for college. Rev. Mr. Halleck in the course of his
+useful and laborious life educated over three hundred young Puritans in his
+own household. It is not recorded how Mrs. Halleck enjoyed the never ending
+cooking for this regiment of hungry young men. Some parsons learned to draw
+up wills and other legal documents, and thus became on a small scale the
+lawyers of the town. Others studied the mystery of medicine, and bought a
+small stock of the nauseous drugs of the times, which they retailed
+with accompanying advice to their parishioners. Some were coopers, some
+carpenters, rope-makers, millers, or cobblers. One cobbler clergyman in
+Andover, Vermont, worked at his shoe-mending all the week with his Bible
+open on his bench before him, and he marked the page containing any text
+which bore on the subject of his coming sermon, with a marker of waxed
+shoe-thread. Often the Bible, in his pulpit on Sunday, had thirty or forty
+of these shoe-thread guides hanging down from it.</p>
+
+<p>One minister, having been reproved for his worldliness in amassing a large
+enough fortune to buy a good farm, answered his complaining congregation
+thus: "I have obtained the money to buy this farm by neglecting to follow
+the maxim to 'mind my own business.' My business was to study the word of
+God and attend to my parish duties and preach good sermons. All this I
+acknowledge I have not done, for I have been meddling with your business.
+<i>That</i> was to support me and my family; that <i>you</i> have not done.
+But remember this: while I have performed your duties, you have not done
+mine, so I think you cannot complain."</p>
+
+<p>Some of the early ministers, in addition to preaching in the meeting-house,
+did not disdain to take care of the edifice. Parson Everitt of Sandwich was
+paid three dollars a year for sweeping out the meeting-house in which he
+preached; and after he resigned this position of profit, the duties were
+performed by the town physician "as often as there shalbe ocation to keepe
+it deesent." The thrifty Mr. Everitt had a pleasing variety of occupations;
+he was also a successful farmer, a good fence-builder, and he ran a
+fulling-mill.</p>
+
+<p>So, altogether, as they were wholly exempt from taxation, the New England
+parsons did not fare ill, though Mr. Cotton said that "ministers and milk
+were the only cheap things in New England," and he deemed various ills,
+such as attacks by fierce Indians, loss of cattle, earthquakes, and failure
+of crops, to be divine judgments for the small ministerial pay; while
+Cotton Mather, in one of his pompous and depressing jokes, called the
+minister's stipend "Synecdotical Pay." A search in a treatise on rhetoric
+or in a dictionary will discover the point of this witticism--if it be
+worth searching for.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap22"></a>XXII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>One thing which always interests and can but amuse every reader of the
+old Puritan sermons is the astonishingly familiar way in which these New
+England divines publicly shared their domestic joys and sorrows with
+the members of their congregations; and we are equally surprised at the
+ingenuity which they displayed in finding texts that were suitable for
+the various occasions and events. The Reverend Mr. Turell was specially
+ingenious. Of him Dr. Holmes wrote,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"You've heard, no doubt, of Parson Turell;<br />
+Over at Medford he used to dwell,--<br />
+Married one of the Mathers' folks."</blockquote>
+
+<p>His wife, Jane Coleman, was a handsome brunette. The bridegroom preached
+his first sermon after his wedding on this text, "I am black but comely, O
+ye daughters of Jerusalem." When he married a second time he chose as his
+text, "He is altogether lovely, this is my beloved, and this my friend, O
+daughters of Jerusalem!" It is possible that each of Parson Turell's brides
+may have chosen the text from which he preached her honeymoon sermon. It
+was the universal custom for many years thoughout New England to allow a
+bride the privilege of selecting for the parson who had solemnized her
+marriage, or at whose church she first appeared after the wedding, the text
+from which he should preach on the bridal Sabbath. Thus when John Physick
+and Mary Prescott were married in Portland, on July 4, 1770, the bride gave
+to Rev. Mr. Deane this text: "Mary hath chosen that good part;" and from it
+Parson Deane preached the "wedding sermon." When Abby Smith, daughter of
+Parson Smith, married 'Squire John Adams, whom her father disliked and
+would not invite home to dinner, she chose this text for her wedding
+sermon: "John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he
+hath a devil." The high-spirited bride had the honor of living to be the
+wife of one President of the United States, and mother of another.</p>
+
+<p>Another ingenious clergyman gave out one morning as his text, "Unto us a
+son is born;" and thus notified the surprised congregation of an event
+which they had been awaiting for some weeks. Another preached on the text,
+"My servant lieth at home sick," which was literally true. Another, a
+bachelor, dared to announce this abbreviated text: "A wonder was seen in
+heaven--a woman." Dr. Mather Byles, of Boston, being disappointed through
+the non-appearance of a minister named Prince, who had been expected to
+deliver the sermon, preached himself upon the text, "Put not your trust
+in princes." But Dr. Byles was one who would always "court a grin when he
+should win a soul."</p>
+
+<p>One minister felt it necessary to reprove a money-making parishioner who
+had stored and was holding in reserve (with the hope of higher prices) a
+large quantity of corn which was sadly needed for consumption in the town.
+The parson preached from this appropriate text, Proverbs xi. 26. "He that
+withholdeth his corn, the people shall curse him; but blessings shall be
+upon the head of him that selleth it." As the minister grew warmer in his
+explanation and application of the text, the money-seeking corn-storer
+defiantly and unregenerately sat up stiff and unmoved, until at last the
+preacher, provoked out of prudence and patience, roared out, "Colonel
+Ingraham, Colonel Ingraham! you know I mean you; why don't you hang down
+your head?" In a similar case another stern parson employed the text,
+"Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone;" though the personalities
+of the sermon made unnecessary the open reference in the text to the
+offender's name.</p>
+
+<p>The ministers were such autocrats in the Puritan community that they never
+hesitated to show their authority in any manner in the pulpit. Judge Sewall
+records with much bitterness a libel which his pastor, Mr. Pemberton,
+launched at him in the meeting through the medium of the psalm which
+he gave out to be sung. They had differed over the adjustment of some
+church-matter and on the following Sunday the clergyman assigned to be sung
+the libellous and significant psalm. Such lines as these must have been
+hard indeed for Judge Sewall to endure:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Speak, oh ye Judges of the Earth<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;if just your Sentence be<br />
+Or must not Innocence appeal<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;to Heav'n from your decree</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Your Wicked Hearts and Judgments are<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;alike by Malice sway'd<br />
+Your griping Hands by mighty Bribes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;to violence betrayed. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"No Serpent of parch'd Afric's breed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;doth Ranker poison bear<br />
+The drowsy Adder will as soon<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;unlock his Sullen Ear</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Unmov'd by good Advice, and dead<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As Adders they remain<br />
+From whom the skilful Charmer's voice<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;can no attention gain."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Small wonder that Judge Sewall writhed under the infliction of these lines
+as they were doubly thrust upon him by the deacon's "lining" and the
+singing of the congregation; and the words, "The drowsy Adder will as soon
+unlock his Sullen Ear" seemed to particularly irritate him; doubtless he
+felt sure that no one could doubt his integrity, but feared that some might
+think him stupid and obstinate.</p>
+
+<p>Another arbitrary clergyman, having had an altercation with some unruly
+singers in the choir, gave out with much vehemence on the following Sunday
+the hymn beginning,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"And are you wretches yet alive<br />
+And do you yet rebel?"</blockquote>
+
+<p>with a very significant glower towards the singers' gallery. In a similar
+situation another minister gave out to the rebellious choir the hymn
+commencing,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Let those refuse to sing<br />
+Who never knew our God."</blockquote>
+
+<p>A visiting clergyman, preaching in a small and shabby church built in a
+parish of barren and stony farm-land, very spitefully and sneeringly read
+out to be sung the hymn of Watts' beginning,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Lord, what a wretched land is this,<br />
+That yields us no supplies!"</blockquote>
+
+<p>But his malicious intent was frustrated and the tables were adroitly turned
+by the quick-witted choir-master, who bawled out in a loud voice as if
+in answer, "Northfield,"--the name of the minister's own home and
+parish,--while he was really giving out to the choir, as was his wont, the
+name of the tune to which the hymn was to be sung.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did the parsons hesitate to be personal even in their prayers. Rev. Mr.
+Moody, who was ordained pastor at York in the year 1700, reproved in an
+extraordinary manner a young man who had called attention to some fine new
+clothing which he wore by coming in during prayer time and thus attracting
+the notice of the congregation. Mr. Moody, in an elevated tone of voice,
+at once exclaimed, "And O Lord! we pray Thee, cure Ned Ingraham of that
+ungodly strut," etc. Another time he prayed for a young lady in the
+congregation and ended his invocation thus, "She asked me not to pray for
+her in public, but I told her I would, and so I have, Amen."</p>
+
+<p>Rev. Mr. Miles, while praying for rain, is said to have used this
+extraordinary phraseology: "O Lord, Thou knowest we do not want Thee to
+send us a rain which shall pour down in fury and swell our streams and
+carry away our hay-cocks, fences, and bridges; but, Lord, we want it to
+come drizzle-drozzle, drizzle-drozzle, for about a week, Amen."</p>
+
+<p>They did not think it necessary always to give their congregations novel
+thoughts and ideas nor fresh sermons. One minister, after being newly
+ordained in his parish, preached the same sermon three Sundays in
+succession; and a deacon was sent to him mildly to suggest a change. "Why,
+no," he answered, "I can see no evidence yet that this one has produced any
+effect."</p>
+
+<p>Rev. Mr. Daggett, of Yale College, had an entire system of sermons which
+took him four years to preach throughout. And for three successive years he
+delivered once a year a sermon on the text, "Is Thy servant a dog that he
+should do this thing?" And the fourth year he varied it with, "And the dog
+did it."</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Coggswell, of Canterbury, Connecticut, had a sermon which he thrust
+upon his people every spring for many years as being suitable to the time
+when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. In it he soberly
+reproved the young church attendants for gazing so much at each other in
+the meeting. This annual anti-amatory advice never failed to raise a smile
+on the face of each father and son in the congregation as he listened to
+the familiar and oft-repeated words.</p>
+
+<p>The Puritan ministers gave advice in their sermons upon most personal and
+worldly matters. Roger Williams instructed the women of his parish to wear
+veils when they appeared in public; but John Cotton preached to them
+one Sunday morning and proved to them that veils were a sign of undue
+subjection to their husbands; and in the afternoon the fair Puritans
+appeared with bare faces and showed that women had even at that early day
+"rights."</p>
+
+<p>How the varieties of headgear did torment the parsons! They denounced
+from many a pulpit the wearing of wigs. Mr. Noyes preached long and often
+against the fashion. Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the
+Indians, found time even in the midst of his arduous and incessant duties
+to deliver many a blast against "prolix locks,"--"with boiling zeal," as
+Cotton Mather said,--and he labelled them a "luxurious feminine protexity;"
+but lamented late in life that "the lust for wigs is become insuperable."
+He thought the horrors in King Philip's War were a direct punishment from
+God for wig-wearing. Increase Mather preached warmly against wigs, saying
+that "such Apparel is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture," and that "Monstrous Perriwigs such as some of our church
+members indulge in make them resemble ye locusts that came out of ye
+Bottomless Pit." To learn how these "Horrid Bushes of Vanity" were
+despised by a real live Puritan wig-hater one needs only to read the
+many disparaging, regretful, and bitter references to wig-wearing and
+wig-wearers in Judge Sewall's diary, which reached a culmination when a
+widow whom he was courting suggested most warmly that he ought to wear,
+what his very soul abominated, a periwig.</p>
+
+<p>Eliot had also a strong aversion to tobacco, and denounced its use in
+severe terms; but his opposition in this case was as ineffectual as it was
+against wigs. Allen said, "In contempt of all his admonitions the head
+would be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and the pipe would send up
+volumes of smoke."</p>
+
+<p>Rev. Mr. Rogers preached against long natural hair,--the "disguisement of
+long ruffianly hair,"--as did also President Chauncey of Harvard College;
+while Mr. Wigglesworth's sermon on the subject has often been reprinted,
+and is full of logical arguments. This offence was named on the list of
+existing evils which was made by the General Court: that "the men wore long
+hair like women's hair," while the women were complained of for "cutting
+and curling and laying out of hair, especially among the younger sort."
+Still, the Puritan magistrates, omnipotent as they were, did not dare to
+force the be-curled citizens to cut their long love-locks, though they
+instructed and bribed them to do so. A Salem man was, in 1687, fined ten
+shillings for a misdemeanor, but "in case he shall cutt off his long har of
+his head into a sevill (civil?) frame in the mean time shall have abated
+five shillings of his fine." John Eliot hated long natural hair as well
+as false hair. Cotton Mather said of him, in a very unpleasant figure of
+speech, "The hair of them that professed religion grew too long for him to
+swallow." Other fashions and habits brought forth denunciations from the
+pulpit,--hooped petticoats, gold-laced coats (unless worn by gentlemen),
+pointed shoes, chaise-owning, health-drinking, tavern-visiting, gossiping,
+meddling, tale-bearing, and lying.</p>
+
+<p>Political and business and even medical and sanitary subjects were popular
+in the early New England pulpit. Mr. Peters preached many a long sermon
+to urge the formation of a stock company for fishing, and canvassed all
+through the commonwealth for the same purpose. Cotton Mather said plainly
+that ministers ought to instruct themselves and their congregations in
+politics; and in Connecticut it was ordered by law that each minister
+should give sound and orthodox advice to his congregation at the time of
+civil elections.</p>
+
+<p>Every natural phenomenon, every unusual event called forth a sermon, and
+the minister could find even in the common events of every-day life plain
+manifestations of Divine wrath and judgment. He preached with solemn
+delight upon comets, and earthquakes, and northern lights, and great storms
+and droughts, on deaths and diseases, and wonders and scandals (for there
+were scandals even in puritanical New England), on wars both at home and
+abroad, on shipwrecks, on safe voyages, on distinguished visitors, on noted
+criminals and crimes,--in fact, upon every subject that was of spiritual or
+temporal interest to his congregation or himself. And his people looked
+for his religious comment upon passing events just as now-a-days we read
+articles upon like subjects in the newspaper. Thus was the Puritan minister
+not only a preacher, but a teacher, adviser, and friend, and a pretty
+plain-spoken one too.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1><a id="chap23"></a>XXIII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Early Congregations.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>On Sunday morning in New England in the olden time, the country
+church-members whose homes were near the meeting-house walked reverently
+and slowly across the green meadows or the snowy fields to meeting.
+Townspeople, at the sound of the bell or drum or horn, walked decorously
+and soberly along the irregular streets to the house of God. Farmers who
+lived at a greater distance were up betimes to leave their homes and ride
+across the fields and through the narrow bridle-paths, which were then the
+universal and almost the only country roads. These staid Puritan planters
+were mounted on sturdy farmhorses, and a pillion was strapped on behind
+each saddle, and on it was seated wife, daughter, or perhaps a young
+child--I should like to have seen the church-going dames perched up proudly
+in all their Sunday finery, masked in black velvet, a sober Puritan
+travesty of a gay carnival fashion. Riding-habits were hardly known until
+a century ago, and even after their introduction were never worn
+a-pillion-riding, so the Puritan women rode in their best attire.
+Sometimes, in unusually muddy or dusty weather, a very daintily dressed
+"nugiperous" dame would don a linen "weather skirt" to protect her fine
+silken petticoats.</p>
+
+<p>The wealthier Puritans were mounted on fine pacing horses, "once so highly
+prized, now so odious deemed;" for trotting horses were not in much demand
+or repute in America until after the Revolutionary War. There were, until
+that date, professional horse-trainers, whose duties were to teach horses
+to pace; though by far the best saddle-horses were the natural-gaited
+"Narragansett Pacers," the first distinctively American race of horses.
+These remarkably easy-paced animals were in such demand in the West Indies
+for the use of the wives and daughters of the wealthy sugar-planters, and
+in Philadelphia and New York for rich Dutch and Quaker colonists, that
+comparatively few of them were allowed to remain in New England, and they
+were, indeed too high-priced for poor New England colonists. The natural
+and singular pace of these Narragansett horses, which did not incline the
+rider from side to side, nor jolt him up and down, and their remarkable
+sureness of foot and their great endurance, rendered them of much value
+in those days of travel in the saddle. They were also phenomenally
+broad-backed,--shaped by nature for saddle and pillion.</p>
+
+<p>When trotting-horses became fashionable, the trainers placed logs of wood
+at regular intervals across the road, and by exercising the animals
+over this obstructed path forced them to raise their feet at the proper
+intervals, and thus learn to trot.</p>
+
+<p>Long distances did many of the pre-revolutionary farmers of New England
+have to ride to reach their churches, and long indeed must have been the
+time occupied in these Sunday trips, for a horse was too well-burdened with
+saddle and pillion and two riders to travel fast. The worshippers must
+often have started at daybreak. When we see now an ancient pillion--a relic
+of olden times--brought out in jest or curiosity, and strapped behind a
+saddle on a horse's back, and when we see the poor steed mounted by two
+riders, it seems impossible for the over-burdened animal to endure a long
+journey, and certainly impossible for him to make a rapid one.</p>
+
+<p>Horse-flesh, and human endurance also, was economized in early days by what
+was called the "ride and tie" system. A man and his wife would mount saddle
+and pillion, ride a couple of miles, dismount, tie the steed, and walk
+on. A second couple, who had walked the first two miles, soon mounted the
+rested horse, rode on past the riders for two or three miles, dismounted,
+and tied the animal again. In that way four persons could ride very
+comfortably and sociably half-way to meeting, though they must have had
+to make an early start to allow for the slow gait and long halts. At the
+church the disburdened horses were tied during the long services to palings
+and to trees near the meeting-house (except the favored animals that found
+shelter in the noon-houses) and the scene must have resembled the outskirts
+of a gypsy camp or an English horse-fair. Such obedience did the Puritans
+pay to the letter of the law that when the Newbury people were forbidden,
+in tying their horses outside the church paling, to leave them near enough
+to the footpath to be in the way of church pedestrians, it did not prevent
+the stupid or obstinate Newburyites from painstakingly bringing their
+steeds within the gates and tying them to the gate-posts where they were
+much more seriously and annoyingly in the way.</p>
+
+<p>It is usual to describe and to think of the Puritan congregations as like
+assemblies of Quakers, solemn, staid, and uniform and dull of dress; but
+I can discover in historical records nothing to indicate simplicity,
+soberness, or even uniformity of apparel, except the uniformity of fashion,
+which was powerful then as now. The forbidding rules and regulations
+relating to the varied and elaborate forms of women's dress--and of men's
+attire as well--would never have been issued unless such prohibited apparel
+had been common and universally longed-for, and unless much diversity and
+elegance of dress had abounded.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed the daughters of the Pilgrims were true "daughters of Zion, walking
+with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, and mincing as they go." Save
+for the "nose jewels," the complaining and exhaustive list of the prophet
+Isaiah might serve as well for New England as for Judah and Jerusalem:
+"their cauls and their round tires like moons; the chains and the bracelets
+and the mufflers; the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the head
+bands, and the tablets, and the ear-rings; the rings and nose jewels; the
+changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the
+crisping pins; the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods and the
+veils." Nor has the day yet come to pass in the nineteenth century when the
+bravery of the daughters has been taken away.</p>
+
+<p>Pleasant it is to think of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and
+goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have
+been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote,"
+a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with
+"Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and
+a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or
+ciffer" (New England French for coiffure) with "long wings" at the side,
+and a silk or tiffany hood on her drooping head,--Priscilla in this attire
+were pretty indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did sober John Alden and doughty Miles Standish lack for variety in
+their dress; besides their soldier's garb, their sentinel's armor, they
+had a vast variety of other attire to choose from; they could select their
+head-wear from "redd knitt capps" or "monmouth capps" or "black hats lyned
+at the browes with leather." They could have a "sute" of "dublett and hose
+of leather lyned with oyled-skin-leather," fastened with hooks and eyes
+instead of buttons; or one of "hampshire kerseys lyned." They could have
+"mandillions" (whatever they may have been) "lyned with cotton," and
+"wast-coats of greene cotton bound about with red tape," and breeches of
+oiled leather and leathern drawers (I do not know whether these leathern
+drawers were under-garments or leathern draw-strings at the knees of the
+breeches). They could wear "gloves of sheeps or calfs leather" or of kid,
+and fine gold belts, and "points" at the knees. In fact, the invoices of
+goods to the earliest settlers show that they had a choice of various
+materials for garments, including "gilford and gedleyman, holland and
+lockerum and buckerum, fustian, canvass, linsey-woolsey, red ppetuna,
+cursey, cambrick, calico-stuff, loom-work, Dutch serges, and English
+jeans"--enough for diversity, surely. Sad-colored mantles the goodmen wore,
+but their doublets were scarlet, and with their green waistcoats and red
+caps, surely the Puritan men were sufficiently gayly dressed to suit any
+fancy save that of a cavalier. Later in the history of the colony, when
+hooped petticoats and laced hoods and mantles, and long, embroidered gloves
+fastened with horsehair "glove tightens," and when velvet coats and satin
+breeches and embroidered waistcoats, gold lace, sparkling buckles, and
+cocked hats with full bottomed wigs were worn, the gray, sombre old
+meeting-house blossomed like a tropical forest, and vied with the worldly
+Church of England in gay-garbed church attendants.</p>
+
+<p>Stern and severe of face were many of the members of these early New
+England congregations, else they had not been true Puritans in heart, and
+above all, they had not been Pilgrims. Long and thin of feature were they,
+rarely smiling, yet not devoid of humor. Some handsome countenances
+were seen,--austere, bigoted Cotton Mather being, strangely enough, the
+handsomest and most worldly looking of them all. What those brave, stern
+men and women were, as well as what they looked, is known to us all, and
+cannot be dwelt upon here, any more than can here be shown and explained
+the details of their religious faith and creed. Patient, frugal,
+God-fearing, and industrious, cruel and intolerant sometimes, but never
+cowardly, sternly obeying the word of God in the spirit and the letter, but
+erring sometimes in the interpretation thereof,--surely they had no traits
+to shame us, to keep us from thrilling with pride at the drop of their
+blood which runs in our backsliding veins. Nothing can more plainly show
+their distinguishing characteristics, nothing is so fully typical of the
+motive, the spirit of their lives, as their reverent observance of the
+Lord's day.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sabbath in Puritan New England, by 
+Alice Morse Earle
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+</pre>
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's Sabbath in Puritan New England, by Alice Morse Earle
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sabbath in Puritan New England
+
+Author: Alice Morse Earle
+
+Posting Date: April 8, 2014 [EBook #8659]
+Release Date: August, 2005
+First Posted: July 30, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar and
+spelling from that old time, the word "their" is spelled as "thier" 17 times.
+It has been left there as "thier".
+
+
+
+
+THE SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND
+
+by
+
+Alice Morse Earle
+
+Seventh Edition
+
+
+
+
+To the Memory of my Mother.
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+     I.  The New England Meeting-House
+    II.  The Church Militant
+   III.  By Drum and Horn and Shell
+    IV.  The Old-Fashioned Pews
+     V.  Seating the Meeting
+    VI.  The Tithingman and the Sleepers
+   VII.  The Length of the Service
+  VIII.  The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House
+    IX.  The Noon-House
+     X.  The Deacon's Office
+    XI.  The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims
+   XII.  The Bay Psalm-Book
+  XIII.  Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms
+   XIV.  Other Old Psalm-Books
+    XV.  The Church Music
+   XVI.  The Interruptions of the Services
+  XVII.  The Observance of the Day
+ XVIII.  The Authority of the Church and the Ministers
+   XIX.  The Ordination of the Minister
+    XX.  The Ministers
+   XXI.  The Ministers' Pay
+  XXII.  The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit
+ XXIII.  The Early Congregations
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Sabbath in Puritan New England.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The New England Meeting-House.
+
+
+
+When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord's
+Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong
+and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every
+Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they
+worshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.
+
+As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,
+the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein for
+the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton
+Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply
+such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the
+Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as
+bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the
+Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.
+
+The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these
+houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that
+theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England
+to create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slow
+or indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 that
+a meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if the
+people failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,
+and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of members
+necessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in the
+Platform of Church Discipline: "A church ought not to be of greater number
+than can ordinarilie meet convenientlie in one place, nor ordinarilie
+fewer than may convenientlie carry on church-work." Each church was quite
+independent in its work and government, and had absolute power to admit,
+expel, control, and censure its members.
+
+These first meeting-houses were simple buildings enough,--square log-houses
+with clay-filled chinks, surmounted by steep roofs thatched with long
+straw or grass, and often with only the beaten earth for a floor. It was
+considered a great advance and a matter of proper pride when the settlers
+had the meeting-house "lathed on the inside, and so daubed and whitened
+over workmanlike." The dimensions of many of these first essays at church
+architecture are known to us, and lowly little structures they were. One,
+indeed, is preserved for us under cover at Salem. The first meeting-house
+in Dedham was thirty-six feet long, twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high
+"in the stud;" the one in Medford was smaller still; and the Haverhill
+edifice was only twenty-six feet long and twenty wide, yet "none other than
+the house of God."
+
+As the colonists grew in wealth and numbers, they desired and built better
+sanctuaries, "good roomthy meeting-houses" they were called by Judge
+Sewall, the most valued and most interesting journal-keeper of the times.
+The rude early buildings were then converted into granaries or storehouses,
+or, as was the Pentucket meeting-house, into a "house of shelter or a house
+to sett horses in." As these meeting-houses had not been consecrated, and
+as they were town-halls, forts, or court-houses as well as meeting-houses,
+the humbler uses to which they were finally put were not regarded as
+profanations of holy places.
+
+The second form or type of American church architecture was a square wooden
+building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which
+was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or
+turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which
+was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this
+second style of architecture. These square meeting-houses, so much alike,
+soon abounded in New England; for a new church, in its contract for
+building, would often specify that the structure should be "like in every
+detaile to the Lynn meeting-house," or like the Hadley, Milford, Boston,
+Danvers, or New Haven meeting-house. This form of edifice was the prototype
+of the fine great First Church of Boston, a large square brick building,
+with three rows of windows and two galleries, which stood from the year
+1713 to 1808, and of which many pictures exist.
+
+The third form of the Puritan meeting-house, of which the Old South Church
+of Boston is a typical model, has too many representatives throughout New
+England to need any description, as have also the succeeding forms of New
+England church architecture.
+
+The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow
+lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the
+colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile
+of the meeting-house. Soon, however, the houses became too closely crowded
+for the most convenient uses of a farming community; pasturage for the
+cattle had to be obtained at too great a distance from the farmhouse;
+firewood had to be brought from too distant woods; nearness to water
+also had to be considered. Thus the law became a dead letter, and each
+new-coming settler built on outlying and remote land, since the Indians
+were no longer so deeply to be dreaded. Then the meeting-houses, having
+usually to accommodate a whole township of scattered farms, were placed on
+remote and often highly elevated locations; sometimes at the very top of a
+long, steep hill,--so long and so steep in some cases, especially in one
+Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down on horseback
+from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading
+their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The
+second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly
+pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England
+Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his
+dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he
+leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and
+surrounding): "This is very like the way to heaven; 'tis uphill. The Lord
+by His grace fetch us up."
+
+The location on a hilltop was chosen and favored for various reasons. The
+meeting-house was at first a watch-house, from which to keep vigilant
+lookout for any possible approach of hostile or sneaking Indians; it was
+also a landmark, whose high bell-turret, or steeple, though pointing to
+heaven, was likewise a guide on earth, for, thus stationed on a high
+elevation, it could be seen for miles around by travellers journeying
+through the woods, or in the narrow, tree-obscured bridle-paths which were
+then almost the only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for
+sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan
+ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb
+uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of
+having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of
+envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously
+remote and painfully inaccessible locations chosen for the site of many
+fine, roomy churches must astonish any observing traveller on the byroads
+of New England. Too often, alas! these churches are deserted, falling down,
+unopened from year to year, destitute alike of minister and congregation.
+Sometimes, too, on high hilltops, or on lonesome roads leading through a
+tall second growth of woods, deserted and neglected old graveyards--the
+most lonely and forlorn of all sad places--by their broken and fallen
+headstones, which surround a half-filled-in and uncovered cellar, show
+that once a meeting-house for New England Christians had stood there. Tall
+grass, and a tangle of blackberry brambles cover the forgotten graves,
+and perhaps a spire of orange tiger-lilies, a shrub of southernwood or of
+winter-killed and dying box, may struggle feebly for life under the shadow
+of the "plumed ranks of tall wild cherry," and prove that once these lonely
+graves were cared for and loved for the sake of those who lie buried in
+this now waste spot. No traces remain of the old meeting-house save the
+cellar and the narrow stone steps, sadly leading nowhere, which once were
+pressed by the feet of the children of the Pilgrims, but now are trodden
+only by the curious and infrequent passer-by, or the epitaph-seeking
+antiquary.
+
+It is difficult often to understand the details in the descriptions of
+these early meeting-houses, the colonial spelling is so widely varied,
+and so cleverly ingenious. Uniformity of spelling is a strictly modern
+accomplishment, a hampering innovation. "A square roofe without Dormans,
+with two Lucoms on each side," means, I think, without dormer windows, and
+with luthern windows. Another church paid a bill for the meeting-house roof
+and the "Suppolidge." They had "turritts" and "turetts" and "turits" and
+"turyts" and "feriats" and "tyrryts" and "toryttes" and "turiotts" and
+"chyrits," which were one and the same thing; and one church had orders
+for "juyces and rayles and nayles and bymes and tymber and gaybels and a
+pulpyt, and three payr of stayrs," in its meeting-house,--a liberal supply
+of the now fashionable _y_'s. We read of "pinakles" and "pyks" and
+"shuthers" and "scaffills" and "bimes" and "lynters" and "bathyns" and
+"chymbers" and "bellfers;" and often in one entry the same word will be
+spelt in three or four different ways. Here is a portion of a contract in
+the records of the Roxbury church: "Sayd John is to fence in the Buring
+Plas with a Fesy ston wall, sefighiattly don for Strenk and workmanship
+as also to mark a Doball gatt 6 or 8 fote wid and to hing it."
+_Sefighiattly_ is "sufficiently;" but who can translate "Fesy"? can it
+mean "facy" or faced smoothly?
+
+The church-raising was always a great event in the town. Each citizen was
+forced by law to take part in or contribute to "raring the Meeting hows."
+In early days nails were scarce,--so scarce that unprincipled persons set
+fire to any buildings which chanced to be temporarily empty, for the sake
+of obtaining the nails from the ruins; so each male inhabitant supplied
+to the new church a certain "amount of nayles." Not only were logs, and
+lumber, and the use of horses' and men's labor given, but a contribution
+was also levied for the inevitable barrel of rum and its unintoxicating
+accompaniments. "Rhum and Cacks" are frequent entries in the account books
+of early churches. No wonder that accidents were frequent, and that men
+fell from the scaffolding and were killed, as at the raising of the
+Dunstable meeting-house. When the Medford people built their second
+meeting-house, they provided for the workmen and bystanders, five barrels
+of rum, one barrel of good brown sugar, a box of fine lemons, and two
+loaves of sugar. As a natural consequence, two thirds of the frame fell,
+and many were injured. In Northampton, in 1738, ten gallons of rum were
+bought for L8 "to raise the meeting-house"--and the village doctor got "L3
+for setting his bone Jonathan Strong, and L3 10s. for setting Ebenezer
+Burt's thy" which had somehow through the rum or the raising, both gotten
+broken. Sometimes, as in Pittsfield in 1671, the sum of four shillings was
+raised on every acre of land in the town, and three shillings a day were
+paid to every man who came early to work, while one shilling a day was
+apportioned to each worker for his rum and sugar. At last no liquor was
+allowed to the workmen until after the day's work was over, and thus fatal
+accidents were prevented.
+
+The earliest meeting-houses had oiled paper in the windows to admit the
+light. A Pilgrim colonist wrote to an English friend about to emigrate,
+"Bring oiled paper for your windows." Higginson, however, writing in 1629,
+asks for "glasse for windowes." When glass was used it was not set in the
+windows as now. We find frequent entries of "glasse and nayles for it," and
+in Newbury, in 1665, the church ordered that the "Glasse in the windows
+be ... look't to if any should happen to be loosed with winde to be nailed
+close again." The glass was in lozenge-shaped panes, set in lead in the
+form of two long narrow sashes opening in the middle from top to bottom,
+and it was many years before oblong or square panes came into common use.
+
+These early churches were destitute of shade, for the trees in the
+immediate vicinity were always cut down on account of dread of the fierce
+fires which swept often through the forests and overwhelmed and destroyed
+the towns. The heat and blazing light in summer were as hard to bear in
+these unscreened meeting-houses as was the cold in winter.
+
+  "Old house of Puritanic wood,
+  Through whose unpainted windows streamed,
+  On seats as primitive and rude
+  As Jacob's pillow when he dreamed,
+  The white and undiluted day."
+
+We have all heard the theory advanced that it is impossible there should be
+any true religious feeling, any sense of sanctity, in a garish and bright
+light,--"the white and undiluted day,"--but I think no one can doubt that
+to the Puritans these seething, glaring, pine-smelling hothouses were truly
+God's dwelling-place, though there was no "dim, religious light" within.
+
+Curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and the sunlight streamed in with
+unobstructed and unbroken rays. Heavy shutters for protection were often
+used, but to close them at time of service would have been to plunge
+the church into utter darkness. Permission was sometimes given, as in
+Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of
+the sun there,"--a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As
+years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches
+became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and
+fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which
+was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked
+live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed
+abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great
+hemlock-tree back of the pulpit window." Another minister, Dr. Storrs,
+having struggled to read his sermon in an ill-lighted, gloomy church, said
+he would never speak in that building again while it was so overshadowed
+with trees. A few years later he was invited to preach to the same
+congregation; but when he approached the church, and saw the great
+umbrageous tree still standing, he rode away, and left the people
+sermonless in their darkness. The chill of these sunless, unheated
+buildings in winter can well be imagined.
+
+Strange and grotesque decorations did the outside of the earliest
+meeting-houses bear,--grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and
+by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped
+from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his
+destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear,
+which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough.
+The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September,
+twenty bears were killed within two miles of Boston. This bear story
+requires unlimited faith in Puritan probity, and confidence in Puritan
+records to credit it, but believe it, ye who can, as I do! In Salem and in
+Ipswich, in 1640, any man who brought a living wolf to the meeting-house
+was paid fifteen shillings by the town; if the wolf were dead, ten
+shillings. In 1664, if the wolf-killer wished to obtain the reward, he was
+ordered to bring the wolf's head and "nayle it to the meeting-house and
+give notis thereof." In Hampton, the inhabitants were ordered to "nayle the
+same to a little red oake tree at northeast end of the meeting-house." One
+man in Newbury, in 1665, killed seven wolves, and was paid the reward
+for so doing. This was a great number, for the wary wolf was not easily
+destroyed either by musket or wolf-hook. In 1723 wolves were so abundant
+in Ipswich that parents would not suffer their children to go to and from
+church and school without the attendance of some grown person. As late as
+1746 wolves made sad havoc in Woodbury, Connecticut; and a reward of five
+dollars for each wolf's head was offered by law in that township in 1853.
+
+In 1718 the last public reward was paid in Salem for a wolf's head, but
+so late as the year 1779 the howls of wolves were heard every night in
+Newbury, though trophies of shrivelled wolves' heads no longer graced the
+walls of the meeting-house.
+
+All kinds of notices and orders and regulations and "bills" were posted on
+the meeting-house, often on the door, where they would greet the eye of
+all who entered: prohibitions from selling guns and powder to the Indians,
+notices of town meetings, intentions of marriage, copies of the laws
+against Sabbath-breaking, messages from the Quakers, warnings of "vandoos"
+and sales, lists of the town officers, and sometimes scandalous and
+insulting libels, and libels in verse, which is worse, for our forefathers
+dearly loved to rhyme on all occasions. On the meeting-house green stood
+those Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, whipping-post,
+pillory, and cage; and on lecture days the stocks and pillory were
+often occupied by wicked or careless colonists, or those everlasting
+pillory-replenishers, the Quakers. It is one of the unintentionally comic
+features of absurd colonial laws and punishments in which the early legal
+records so delightfully abound, that the first man who was sentenced to and
+occupied the stocks in Boston was the carpenter who made them. He was thus
+fitly punished for his extortionate charge to the town for the lumber
+he used in their manufacture. This was rather better than "making the
+punishment fit the crime," since the Boston magistrates managed to force
+the criminal to furnish his own punishment. In Shrewsbury, also, the
+unhappy man who first tested the wearisome capacity and endured the public
+mortication of the town's stocks was the man who made them. He "builded
+better than he knew." Pillories were used as a means of punishment until
+a comparatively recent date,--in Salem until the year 1801, and in Boston
+till 1803.
+
+Great horse-blocks, rows of stepping-stones, or hewn logs further graced
+the meeting-house green; and occasionally one fine horse-block, such as the
+Concord women proudly erected, and paid for by a contribution of a pound of
+butter from each house-wife.
+
+The meeting-house not only was employed for the worship of God and for town
+meetings, but it was a storehouse as well. Until after the Revolutionary
+War it was universally used as a powder magazine; and indeed, as no fire in
+stove or fireplace was ever allowed within, it was a safe enough place for
+the explosive material. In Hanover, the powder room was in the steeple,
+while in Quincy the "powder-closite" was in the beams of the roof. Whenever
+there chanced to be a thunderstorm during the time of public worship, the
+people of Beverly ran out under the trees, and in other towns they left
+the meeting-house if the storm seemed severe or near; still they built no
+powder houses. Grain, too, was stored in the loft of the meeting-house for
+safety; hatches were built, and often the corn paid to the minister was
+placed there. "Leantos," or "linters," were sometimes built by the side of
+the building for use for storage. In Springfield, Mr. Pyncheon was allowed
+to place his corn in the roof chamber of the meeting-house; but as the
+people were afraid that the great weight might burst the floor, he was
+forbidden to store more than four hundred bushels at a time, unless he
+"underpropped the floor."
+
+In one church in the Connecticut valley, in a township where it was
+forbidden that tobacco be smoked upon the public streets, the church
+loft was used to dry and store the freshly cut tobacco-leaves which the
+inhabitants sold to the "ungodly Dutch." Thus did greed for gain lead even
+blue Connecticut Christians to profane the house of God.
+
+The early meeting-houses in country parishes were seldom painted, such
+outward show being thought vain and extravagant. In the middle of the
+eighteenth century paint became cheaper and more plentiful, and a gay
+rivalry in church-decoration sprang up. One meeting-house had to be as fine
+as its neighbor. Votes were taken, "rates were levied," gifts were asked
+in every town to buy "colour" for the meeting-house. For instance, the new
+meeting-house in Pomfret, Connecticut, was painted bright yellow; it proved
+a veritable golden apple of discord throughout the county. Windham town
+quickly voted that its meeting-house be "coloured something like the
+Pomfret meeting-house." Killingly soon ordered that the "cullering of the
+body of our meeting-house should be like the Pomfret meeting-house, and the
+Roff shal be cullered Read." Brooklyn church then, in 1762, ordered that
+the outside of its meeting-house be "culered" in the approved fashion.
+The body of the house was painted a bright orange; the doors and "bottom
+boards" a warm chocolate color; the "window-jets," corner-boards, and
+weather-boards white. What a bright nosegay of color! As a crowning glory
+Brooklyn people put up an "Eleclarick Rod" on the gorgeous edifice, and
+proudly boasted that--Brooklyn meeting-house was the "newest biggest and
+yallowest" in the county. One old writer, however, spoke scornfully of the
+spirit of envious emulation, extravagance, and bad taste that spread and
+prevailed from the example of the foolish and useless "colouring" of the
+Pomfret meeting-house.
+
+Within the meeting-house all was simple enough: raftered walls, sanded
+floors, rows of benches, a few pews, and the pulpit, or the "scaffold,"
+as John Cotton called it. The bare rafters were often profusely hung with
+dusty spiders' webs, and were the home also of countless swallows, that
+flew in and out of the open bell-turret. Sometimes, too, mischievous
+squirrels, attracted by the corn in the meeting-house loft, made their
+homes in the sanctuary; and they were so prolific and so omnivorous that
+the Bible and the pulpit cushions were not safe from their nibbling
+attacks. On every Sunday afternoon the Word of God and its sustaining
+cushion had to be removed to the safe shelter of a neighboring farmhouse or
+tavern, to prevent total annihilation by these Puritanical, Bible-loving
+squirrels.
+
+The pulpits were often pretentious, even in the plain and undecorated
+meeting-houses, and were usually high desks, to which a narrow flight of
+stairs led. In the churches of the third stage of architecture, these
+stairs were often inclosed in a towering hexagonal mahogany structure,
+which was ornamented with pillars and panels. Into this the minister
+walked, closed the door behind him, and invisibly ascended the stairs;
+while the children counted the seconds from the time he closed the door
+until his head appeared through the trap-door at the top of the pulpit. The
+form known as a tub-pulpit was very popular in the larger churches. The
+pulpit of one old, unpainted church retained until the middle of this
+century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring
+eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the
+great, all-seeing eye of God.
+
+As the ceiling and rafters were so open and reverberating, it was generally
+thought imperative to hang above the pulpit a great sounding-board, which
+threatened the minister like a giant extinguisher, and was really as devoid
+of utility as it was curious in ornamentation, "reflecting most part an
+empty ineffectual sound." This great sound-killer was decorated with carved
+and painted rosettes, as in the Shrewsbury meeting-house; with carved ivy
+leaves, as in Farmington; with a carved bunch of grapes or pomegranates, as
+in the Leicester church; with letters indicating a date, as, "M. R. H." for
+March, in the Hadley church; with appropriate mottoes and texts, such as
+the words, "Holiness is the Lords," in the Windham church; with cords and
+tassels, with hanging fringes, with panels and balls; and thus formed a
+great ornament to the church, and a source of honest pride to the church
+members. The clumsy sounding-board was usually hung by a slight iron rod,
+which looked smaller still as it stretched up to the high, raftered roof,
+and always appeared to be entirely insufficient to sustain the great weight
+of the heavy machine. In Danvers, one of these useless though ornamental
+structures hung within eighteen inches of the preacher's nose, on a slender
+bar thirty feet in length; and every Sunday the children gazed with
+fascinated anticipation at the slight rod and the great hexagonal
+extinguisher, thinking and hoping that on this day the sounding-board would
+surely drop, and "put out" the minister. In fact, it was regarded by many
+a child, though this idea was hardly formulated in the little brain, as
+a visible means of possible punishment for any false doctrine that might
+issue from the mouth of the preacher.
+
+Another pastime and source of interest to the children in many old churches
+was the study of the knots and veins in the unpainted wood of which the
+pews and galleries were made. Age had developed and darkened and rendered
+visible all the natural irregularities in the wood, just as it had brought
+out and strengthened the dry-woody, close, unaired, penetrating scent which
+permeated the meeting-house and gave it the distinctive "church smell." The
+children, and perhaps a few of the grown people, found in these clusters
+of knots queer similitudes of faces, strange figures and constellations,
+which, though conned Sunday after Sunday until known by heart, still seemed
+ever to show in their irregular groupings a puzzling possibility of the
+discovery of new configurations and monstrosities.
+
+The dangling, dusty spiders' webs afforded, too, an interesting sight and
+diversion for the sermon-hearing, but not sermon-listening, young Puritans,
+who watched the cobwebs swaying, trembling, forming strange maps of
+imaginary rivers with their many tributaries, or outlines of intersecting
+roads and lanes. And if little Yet-Once, Hate-Evil, or Shearjashub chanced,
+by good fortune, to be seated near a window where a crafty spider and a
+foolish buzzing fly could be watched through the dreary exposition and
+attempted reconciliation of predestination and free will, that indeed were
+a happy way of passing the weary hours.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The Church Militant.
+
+
+
+For many years after the settlement of New England the Puritans, even in
+outwardly tranquil times, went armed to meeting; and to sanctify the Sunday
+gun-loading they were expressly forbidden to fire off their charges at
+any object on that day save an Indian or a wolf, their two "greatest
+inconveniencies." Trumbull, in his "Mac Fingal," Avrites thus in jest of
+this custom of Sunday arm-bearing:--
+
+  "So once, for fear of Indian beating,
+  Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting,--
+  Each man equipped on Sunday morn
+  With psalm-book, shot, and powder-horn,
+  And looked in form, as all must grant,
+  Like the ancient true church militant."
+
+In 1640 it was ordered in Massachusetts that in every township the
+attendants at church should carry a "competent number of peeces, fixed
+and compleat with powder and shot and swords every Lords-day to the
+meeting-house;" one armed man from each household was then thought
+advisable and necessary for public safety. In 1642 six men with muskets and
+powder and shot were thought sufficient for protection for each church. In
+Connecticut similar mandates were issued, and as the orders were neglected
+"by divers persones," a law was passed in 1643 that each offender should
+forfeit twelve pence for each offence. In 1644 a fourth part of the
+"trayned hand" was obliged to come armed each Sabbath, and the sentinels
+were ordered to keep their matches constantly lighted for use in their
+match-locks. They were also commanded to wear armor, which consisted of
+"coats basted with cotton-wool, and thus made defensive against Indian
+arrows." In 1650 so much dread and fear were felt of Sunday attacks from
+the red men that the Sabbath-Day guard was doubled in number. In 1692, the
+Connecticut Legislature ordered one fifth of the soldiers in each town to
+come armed to each meeting, and that nowhere should be present as a guard
+at time of public worship fewer than eight soldiers and a sergeant. In
+Hadley the guard was allowed annually from the public treasury a pound of
+lead and a pound of powder to each soldier.
+
+No details that could add to safety on the Sabbath were forgotten or
+overlooked by the New Haven church; bullets were made common currency at
+the value of a farthing, in order that they might be plentiful and in every
+one's possession; the colonists were enjoined to determine in advance what
+to do with the women and children in case of attack, "that they do not hang
+about them and hinder them;" the men were ordered to bring at least six
+charges of powder and shot to meeting; the farmers were forbidden to "leave
+more arms at home than men to use them;" the half-pikes were to be headed
+and the whole ones mended, and the swords "and all piercing weapons
+furbished up and dressed;" wood was to be placed in the watch-house; it was
+ordered that the "door of the meeting-house next the soldiers' seat be kept
+clear from women and children sitting there, that if there be occasion
+for the soldiers to go suddenly forth, they may have free passage." The
+soldiers sat on either side of the main door, a sentinel was stationed
+in the meeting-house turret, and armed watchers paced the streets; three
+cannon were mounted by the side of this "church militant," which must
+strongly have resembled a garrison.
+
+Military duty and military discipline and regard for the Sabbath, and for
+the House of God as well, did not always make the well-equipped occupants
+of these soldiers' seats in New Haven behave with the dignity and decorum
+befitting such guardians of the peace and protectors in war. Serious
+disorders and disturbances among the guard were reported at the General
+Court on June 16, 1662. One belligerent son of Mars, as he sat in the
+meeting-house, threw lumps of lime--perhaps from the plastered chinks in
+the log wall--at a fellow-warrior, who in turn, very naturally, kicked his
+tormentor with much agility and force. There must have ensued quite a free
+fight all around in the meeting-house, for "Mrs. Goodyear's boy had his
+head broke that day in meeting, on account of which a woman said she
+doubted not the wrath of God was upon us." And well might she think so, for
+divers other unseemly incidents which occurred in the meeting-house at the
+same time were narrated in Court, examined into, and punished.
+
+In spite of these events in the New Haven church (which were certainly
+exceptional), the seemingly incongruous union of church and army was
+suitable enough in a community that always began and ended the military
+exercises on "training day" with solemn prayer and psalm-singing; and that
+used the army and encouraged a true soldier-like spirit not chiefly as aids
+in war, but to help to conquer and destroy the adversaries of truth, and to
+"achieve greater matters by this little handful of men than the world is
+aware of."
+
+The Salem sentinels wore doubtless some of the good English armor owned by
+the town,--corselets to cover the body; gorgets to guard the throat;
+tasses to protect the thighs; all varnished black, and costing each suit
+"twenty-four shillings a peece." The sentry also wore a bandileer, a large
+"neat's leather" belt thrown over the right shoulder, and hanging down
+under the left arm. This bandileer sustained twelve boxes of cartridges,
+and a well-filled bullet-bag. Each man bore either a "bastard musket with
+a snaphance," a "long fowling-piece with musket bore," a "full musket," a
+"barrell with a match-cock," or perhaps (for they were purchased by the
+town) a leather gun (though these leather guns may have been cannon).
+Other weapons there were to choose from, mysterious in name, "sakers,
+minions, ffaulcons, rabinets, murthers (or murderers, as they were
+sometimes appropriately called) chambers, harque-busses, carbins,"--all
+these and many other death-dealing machines did our forefathers bring and
+import from their war-loving fatherland to assist them in establishing
+God's Word, and exterminating the Indians, but not always, alas! to aid
+them in converting those poor heathen.
+
+The armed Salem watcher, besides his firearms and ammunition, had attached
+to his wrist by a cord a gun-rest, or gun-fork, which he placed upon
+the ground when he wished to fire his musket, and upon which that
+constitutional kicker rested when touched off. He also carried a sword and
+sometimes a pike, and thus heavily burdened with multitudinous arms and
+cumbersome armor, could never have run after or from an Indian with much
+agility or celerity; though he could stand at the church-door with his
+leather gun,--an awe-inspiring figure,--and he could shoot with his
+"harquebuss," or "carbin," as we well know.
+
+These armed "sentinells" are always regarded as a most picturesque
+accompaniment of Puritan religious worship, and the Salem and Plymouth
+armed men were imposing, though clumsy. But the New Haven soldiers, with
+their bulky garments wadded and stuffed out with thick layers of cotton
+wool, must have been more safety-assuring and comforting than they were
+romantic or heroic; but perhaps they too wore painted tin armor, "corselets
+and gorgets and tasses."
+
+In Concord, New Hampshire, the men, who all came armed to meeting, stacked
+their muskets around a post in the middle of the church, while the honored
+pastor, who was a good shot and owned the best gun in the settlement,
+preached with his treasured weapon in the pulpit by his side, ready from
+his post of vantage to blaze away at any red man whom he saw sneaking
+without, or to lead, if necessary, his congregation to battle. The church
+in York, Maine, until the year 1746, felt it necessary to retain the custom
+of carrying arms to the meeting-house, so plentiful and so aggressive were
+Maine Indians.
+
+Not only in the time of Indian wars were armed men seen in the
+meeting-house, but on June 17, 1775, the Provincial Congress recommended
+that the men "within twenty miles of the sea-coast carry their arms and
+ammunition with them to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they
+meet for public worship." And on many a Sabbath and Lecture Day, during the
+years of war that followed, were proved the wisdom and foresight of that
+suggestion.
+
+The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant
+dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and
+left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe
+exit of the latter. This custom prevailed from habit until a late date in
+many churches in New England, all the men, after the benediction and the
+exit of the parson, walking out in advance of the women. So also the custom
+of the men always sitting at the "head" or door of the pew arose from the
+early necessity of their always being ready to seize their arms and rush
+unobstructed to fight. In some New England village churches to this day,
+the man who would move down from his end of the pew and let a woman sit
+at the door, even if it were a more desirable seat from which to see the
+clergyman, would be thought a poor sort of a creature.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+By Drum and Horn and Shell.
+
+
+
+At about nine o'clock on the Sabbath morning the Puritan colonists
+assembled for the first public service of the holy day; they were gathered
+together by various warning sounds. The Haverhill settlers listened for the
+ringing toot of Abraham Tyler's horn. The Montague and South Hadley people
+were notified that the hour of assembling had arrived by the loud blowing
+of a conch-shell. John Lane, a resident of the latter town, was engaged
+in 1750 to "blow the Cunk" on the Sabbath as "a sign for meeting." In
+Stockbridge a strong-lunged "praying" Indian blew the enormous shell, which
+was safely preserved until modern times, and which, when relieved from
+Sunday use, was for many years sounded as a week-day signal in the
+hay-field. Even a conch-shell was enough of an expense to the poor colonial
+churches. The Montague people in 1759 paid L1 10s. for their "conk," and
+also on the purchase year gave Joseph Root 20 shillings for blowing the new
+shell. In 1785 the Whately church voted that "we will not improve anybody
+to blow the conch," and so the church-attendants straggled to Whately
+meeting each at his own time and pleasure.
+
+In East Hadley the inhabitant who "blew the kunk" (as phonetic East
+Hadleyites spelt it) and swept out the meeting-house was paid annually the
+munificent sum of three dollars for his services. Conch-blowing was not
+so difficult and consequently not so highly-paid an accomplishment as
+drum-beating. A verse of a simple old-fashioned hymn tells thus of the
+gathering of the Puritan saints:--
+
+  "New England's Sabbath day
+  Is heaven-like still and pure,
+  When Israel walks the way
+  Up to the temple's door.
+  The time we tell
+  When there to come
+  By beat of drum
+  Or sounding shell."
+
+The drum, as highly suitable for such a military people, was often used as
+a signal for gathering for public worship, and was plainly the favorite
+means of notification. In 1678 Robert Stuard, of Norwalk, "ingages yt his
+son James shall beate the Drumb, on the Sabbath and other ocations," and in
+Norwalk the "drumb," the "drumne," the "drumme," and at last the drum was
+beaten until 1704, when the Church got a bell. And the "Drumber" was paid,
+and well paid too for his "Cervices," fourteen shillings a year of the
+town's money, and he was furnished a "new strong drumme;" and the town
+supplied to him also the flax for the drum-cords which he wore out in the
+service of God. Johnson, in his "Wonder Working Providence," tells of the
+Cambridge Church: "Hearing the sound of a drum he was directed toward it by
+a broade beaten way; following this rode he demands of the next man he met
+what the signall of the drum ment; the reply was made they had as yet no
+Bell to call men to meeting and therefore made use of the drum." In 1638
+a platform was made upon the top of the Windsor meeting-house "from the
+Lanthornc to the ridge to walk conveniently to sound a trumpet or a drum to
+give warning to meeting."
+
+Sometimes three guns were fired as a signal for "church-time." The signal
+for religious gathering, and the signal for battle were always markedly
+different, in order to avoid unnecessary fright.
+
+In 1647 Robert Basset was appointed in New Haven to drum "twice upon Lordes
+Dayes and Lecture Dayes upon the meeting house that soe those who live farr
+off may heare the more distinkly." Robert may have been a good drummer, but
+he proved to be a most reprehensible and disreputable citizen; in the local
+Court Records of August 1, 1648, we find a full report of an astounding
+occurrence in which he played an important part. Ten men, who Avere nearly
+all sea-faring men,--gay, rollicking sailors,--went to Bassctt's house and
+asked for strong drink. The magistrates had endeavored zealously, and in
+the main successfully, to prevent all intoxication in the community,
+and had forbidden the sale of liquor save in very small quantities. The
+church-drummer, however, wickedly unmindful of his honored calling,
+furnished to the sailors six quarts of strong liquor, with which they all,
+host and visitors, got prodigiously drunk and correspondingly noisy. The
+Court Record says: "The miscarriage continued till betwixt tenn and eleven
+of the clock, to the great provocation of God, disturbance of the peace,
+and to such a height of disorder that strangers wondered at it." In the
+midst of the carousal the master of the pinnace called the boatswain
+"Brother Loggerheads." This must have been a particularly insulting
+epithet, which no respectable boatswain could have been expected quietly to
+endure, for "at once the two men fell fast to wrestling, then to blowes and
+theirin grew to that feircnes that the master of the pinnace thought the
+boatswain would have puled out his eies; and they toumbled on the ground
+down the hill into the creeke and mire shamefully wallowing theirin."
+In his pain and terror the master called out, "Hoe, the Watch! Hoe, the
+Watch!" "The Watch made hast and for the present stopped the disorder, but
+in his rage and distemper the boatswaine fell a-swearinge Wounds and Hart
+as if he were not only angry with men but would provoke the high
+and blessed God." The master of the pinnace, being freed from his
+fellow-combatant, returned to Basset's house--perhaps to tell his tale
+of woe, perhaps to get more liquor--and was assailed by the drummer with
+amazing words of "anger and distemper used by drunken companions;" in
+short, he was "verey offensive, his noyes and oathes being hearde to
+the other side of the creeke." For aiding and abetting this noisy and
+disgraceful spree, and also for partaking in it, Drummer Basset was fined
+L5, which must have been more than his yearly salary, and in disgrace, and
+possibly in disgust, quitted drumming the New Haven good people to meeting
+and moved his residence to Stamford, doubtless to the relief and delight of
+both magistrates and people of the former town.
+
+Another means of notification of the hour for religious service was by the
+use of a flag, often in addition to the sound of the drum or bell. Thus in
+Plymouth, in 1697, the selectmen were ordered to "procure a flagg to be put
+out at the ringing of the first bell, and taken in when the last bell was
+rung." In Sutherland also a flag was used as a means of announcement of
+"meeting-time," and an old goody was paid ten shillings a year for "tending
+the flagg."
+
+Mr. Gosse, in his "Early Bells of Massachusetts," gives a full and
+interesting account of the church-bells of the first colonial towns in that
+State. Lechford, in his "Plaine Dealing," wrote in 1641 that they came
+together in Boston on the Lord's Day by "the wringing of a bell," and it is
+thought that that bell was a hand-bell. The first bells, for the lack
+of bell-towers, were sometimes hung on trees by the side of the
+meeting-houses, to the great amazement and distress of the Indians, who
+regarded them with superstitious dread, thinking--to paraphrase Herbert's
+beautiful line--"when the bell did chime 't was devils' music;" but more
+frequently the bells were hung in a belfry or bell-turret or "bellcony,"
+and from this belfry depended a long bell-rope quite to the floor; and thus
+in the very centre of the church the sexton stood when he rung the summons
+for lire or for meeting. This rope was of course directly in front of the
+pulpit; and Jonathan Edwards, who was devoid of gestures and looked always
+straight before him when preaching, was jokingly said to have "looked-off"
+the bell-rope, when it fell with a crash in the middle of his church.
+
+At the first sound of the drum or horn or bell the town inhabitants issued
+from their houses in "desent order," man and wife walking first, and the
+children in quiet procession after them. Often a man-servant and a maid
+walked on either side of the heads of the family. In some communities the
+congregation waited outside the church door until the minister and his wife
+arrived and passed into the house; then the church-attendants followed, the
+loitering boys always contriving to scuffle noisily in from the horse-sheds
+at the last moment, making much scraping and clatter with their heavy boots
+on the sanded floor, and tumbling clumsily up the uucarpeted, creaking
+stairs.
+
+In other churches the members of the congregation seated themselves in
+their pews upon their arrival, but rose reverently when the parson, dressed
+in black skull-cap and Geneva cloak, entered the door; and they stood, in
+token of respect, until after he entered the pulpit and was seated.
+
+It was also the honor-giving and deferential custom in many New England
+churches, in the eighteenth century, for the entire congregation to remain
+respectfully standing within the pews at the end of the serice until the
+minister had descended from his lofty pulpit, opened the door of his wife's
+pew, and led her with stately dignity to the church-porch, where, were he
+and she genial and neighborly minded souls, they in turn stood and greeted
+with carefully adjusted degrees of warmth, interest, respect, or patronage,
+the different members of the congregation as they slowly passed out.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The Old-Fashioned Pews.
+
+
+
+In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow,
+uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks
+placed on legs like milking-stools. They were without any support or rest
+for the back; and perhaps the stiff-backed Pilgrims and Puritans required
+or wished no support. Quickly, as the colonies grew in wealth and the
+colonists in ambition and importance, "Spots for Pues" were sold (or
+"pitts" as they were sometimes called), at first to some few rich or
+influential men who wished to sit in a group together, and finally each
+family of dignity or wealth sat in its own family-pew. Often it was
+stipulated in the permission to build a pew that a separate entrance-door
+should be cut into it through the outside wall of the meeting-house, thus
+detracting grievously from the external symmetry of the edifice, but
+obviating the necessity of a space-occupying entrance aisle within the
+church, where there was little enough sitting-room for the quickly
+increasing and universally church-going population. As these pews were
+either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted,
+and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the
+kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style
+of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted. A man who had
+a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by
+the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were
+individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house
+destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was
+being razed, the old building materials to use in the construction of her
+new home. She was not allowed, however, to remove the wood which formed the
+pews, as they were adjudged to be the property of the members who had built
+them, and those owners only could sell or remove the materials of which
+they were built.
+
+Many of the pews in the old meeting-houses had towering partition walls,
+which extended up so high that only the tops of the tallest heads could be
+seen when the occupants were seated. Permissions to build were often given
+with modifying restrictions to the aspiring pew-builders, as for instance
+is recorded of the Haverhill church, "provided they would not build so high
+as to damnify and hinder the light of them windows," or of the Waterbury
+church, "if the pues will not progodish the hous." Often the floor of the
+pews was several inches and occasionally a foot higher than the floor of
+the "alleys," thus forming at the entrance-door of the pew one or two
+steps, which were great stumbling-blocks to clumsy and to childish feet,
+that tripped again when within the pew over the "crickets" and foot-benches
+which were, if the family were large, the accepted and lowly church-seats
+of the little children. Occasionally one long, low foot-rest stretched
+quite across one side of the pew-floor. I have seen these long benches
+with a tier of three shelves; the lower and broader shelf was used as a
+foot-rest, the second one was to hold the hats of the men, and the third
+and narrower shelf was for the hymn-books and Bibles. Such comfortable and
+luxurious pew-furnishings could never have been found in many churches.
+
+An old New Englander relates a funny story of his youth, in which one of
+these triple-tiered foot-benches played an important part. When he was
+a boy a travelling show visited his native town, and though he was not
+permitted to go within the mystic and alluring tent, he stood longingly at
+the gate, and was prodigiously diverted and astonished by an exhibition of
+tight-rope walking, which was given outside the tent-door as a bait to
+lure pleasure-loving and frivolous townspeople within, and also as a
+tantalization to the children of the saints who were not allowed to enter
+the tent of the wicked. Fired by that bewildering and amazing performance,
+he daily, after the wonderful sight, practised walking on rails, on fences,
+on fallen trees, and on every narrow foothold which he could find, as a
+careful preparation for a final feat and triumph of skill on his mother's
+clothes-line. In an evil hour, as he sat one Sunday in the corner of his
+father's pew, his eyes rested on the narrow ledge which formed the top of
+the long foot-bench. Satan can find mischief for idle boys within church as
+well as without, and the desire grew stronger to try to walk on that
+narrow foothold. He looked at his father and mother, they were peacefully
+sleeping; so also were the grown-up occupants of the neighboring pews;
+the pew walls were high, the minister seldom glanced to right or left; a
+thousand good reasons were whispered in his ear by the mischief-finder,
+and at last he willingly yielded, pulled off his heavy shoes, and softly
+mounted the foot-bench. He walked forward and back with great success
+twice, thrice, but when turning for a fourth tour he suddenly lost his
+balance, and over he went with a resounding crash--hats, psalm-books,
+heavy bench, and all. He crushed into hopeless shapelessness his father's
+gray beaver meeting-hat, a long-treasured and much-loved antique; he nearly
+smashed his mother's kid-slippered foot to jelly, and the fall elicited
+from her, in the surprise of the sudden awakening and intense pain, an
+ear-piercing shriek, which, with the noisy crash, electrified the entire
+meeting. All the grown people stood up to investigate, the children climbed
+on the seats to look at the guilty offender and his deeply mortified
+parents; while the minister paused in his sermon and said with cutting
+severity, "I have always regretted that the office of tithingman has been
+abolished in this community, as his presence and his watchful care
+are sadly needed by both the grown persons and the children in this
+congregation." The wretched boy who had caused all the commotion and
+disgrace was of course uninjured by his fall, but a final settlement at
+home between father and son on account of this sacrilegious piece of church
+disturbance made the unhappy would-be tight-rope walker wish that he had at
+least broken his arm instead of his father's hat and his mother's pride and
+the peace of the congregation.
+
+The seats were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three
+sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the
+minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian
+benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite
+justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in
+one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay,
+"What! must I be shut up in a closet and sit on a shelf?" Often elderly
+people petitioned to build separate small pens of pews with a single wider
+seat as "through the seats being so very narrow" they could not sit in
+comfort.
+
+The seats were, until well into this century, almost universally hung on
+hinges, and could be turned up against the walls of the pew, thus enabling
+the standing congregation to lean for support against the sides of the pews
+during the psalm-singing and the long, long prayers.
+
+  "And when at last the loud Amen
+  Fell from aloft, how quickly then
+  The seats came down with heavy rattle,
+  Like musketry in fiercest battle."
+
+This noise of slamming pew-seats could easily be heard over half a mile
+away from the meeting-house in the summer time, for the perverse boys
+contrived always in their salute of welcome to the Amen to give vent in
+a most tremendous bang to a little of their pent up and ill-repressed
+energies. In old church-orders such entries as this (of the Haverhill
+church) are frequently seen: "The people are to Let their Seats down
+without Such Nois." "The boyes are not to wickedly noise down there
+pew-seats." A gentleman attending the old church in Leicester heard at
+the beginning of the prayer, for the first time in his life, the noise of
+slamming pew-seats, as the seats were thrust up against the pew-walls. He
+jumped into the aisle at the first clatter, thinking instinctively that the
+gallery was cracking and falling. Another stranger, a Southerner, entering
+rather late at a morning service in an old church in New England, was
+greeted with the rattle of falling seats, and exclaimed in amazement, "Do
+you Northern people applaud in church?"
+
+In many meeting-houses the tops of the pews and of the high gallery
+railings were ornamented with little balustrades of turned wood, which were
+often worn quite bare of paint by childish fingers that had tried them all
+"to find which ones would turn," and which, alas! would also squeak. This
+fascinating occupation whiled away many a tedious hour in the dreary
+church, and in spite of weekly forbidding frowns and whispered reproofs for
+the shrill, ear-piercing squeaks elicited by turning the spindle-shaped
+balusters, was entirely too alluring a time-killer to be abandoned, and
+consequently descended, an hereditary church pastime, from generation to
+generation of the children of the Puritans; and indeed it remained so
+strong an instinct that many a grown person, visiting in after life a
+church whose pews bore balustrades like the ones of his childhood, could
+scarce keep his itching fingers from trying them each in succession "to see
+which ones would turn."
+
+These open balustrades also afforded fine peep-holes through which, by
+standing or kneeling upon "the shelf," a child might gaze at his neighbor;
+and also through which sly missiles--little balls of twisted paper--could
+be snapped, to the annoyance of some meek girl or retaliating boy, until
+the young marksman was ignominiously pulled down by his mother from his
+post of attack. And through these balustrades the same boy a few years
+later could thrust sly missives, also of twisted paper, to the girl whom he
+had once assailed and bombarded with his annoying paper bullets.
+
+Through the pillared top-rail a restless child in olden days often
+received, on a hot summer Sabbath from a farmer's wife or daughter in an
+adjoining pew, friendly and quieting gifts of sprigs of dill, or fennel,
+or caraway, famous anti-soporifics; and on this herbivorous food he would
+contentedly browse as long as it lasted. An uneasy, sermon-tired little
+girl was once given through the pew-rail several stalks of caraway, and
+with them a large bunch of aromatic southernwood, or "lad's-love" which had
+been brought to meeting by the matron in the next pew, with a crudely and
+unconsciously aesthetic sense that where eye and ear found so little to
+delight them, there the pungent and spicy fragrance of the southernwood
+would be doubly grateful to the nostrils. Little Missy sat down delightedly
+to nibble the caraway-seed, and her mother seeing her so quietly and
+absorbingly occupied, at once fell contentedly and placidly asleep in her
+corner of the pew. But five heads of caraway, though each contain many
+score of seeds, and the whole number be slowly nibbled and eaten one seed
+at a time, will not last through the child's eternity of a long doctrinal
+sermon; and when the umbels were all devoured, the young experimentalist
+began upon the stalks and stems, and they, too, slowly disappeared. She
+then attacked the sprays of southernwood, and in spite of its bitter,
+wormwoody flavor, having nothing else to do, she finished it, all but the
+tough stems, just as the long sermon was brought to a close. Her waking
+mother, discovering no signs of green verdure in the pew, quickly drew
+forth a whispered confession of the time-killing Nebuchadnezzar-like feast,
+and frightened and horrified, at once bore the leaf-gorged child from
+the church, signalling in her retreat to the village doctor, who quickly
+followed and administered to the omnivorous young New Englander a bolus
+which made her loathe to her dying day, through a sympathetic association
+and memory, the taste of caraway, and the scent of southernwood.
+
+An old gentleman, lamenting the razing of the church of his childhood,
+told the story of his youthful Sabbaths in rhyme, and thus refers with
+affectionate enthusiasm to the old custom of bringing bunches of esculent
+"sallet" herbs to meeting:--
+
+  "And when I tired and restless grew,
+  Our next pew neighbor, Mrs. True,
+  Reached her kind hand the top rail through
+  To hand me dill, and fennel too,
+  And sprigs of caraway.
+
+  "And as I munched the spicy seeds,
+  I dimly felt that kindly deeds
+  That thus supply our present needs,
+  Though only gifts of pungent weeds,
+  Show true religion.
+
+  "And often now through sermon trite
+  And operatic singer's flight,
+  I long for that old friendly sight,
+  The hand with herbs of value light,
+  To help to pass the time."
+
+Were the dill and "sweetest fennel" chosen Sabbath favorites for their
+old-time virtues and powers?
+
+  "Vervain and dill
+  Hinder witches of their ill."
+
+And of the charmed fennel Longfellow wrote:--
+
+  "The fennel with its yellow flowers
+  That, in an earlier age than ours,
+  Was gifted with the wondrous powers,
+      Lost vision to restore."
+
+And traditions of mysterious powers, dream-influencing, spirit-exorcising,
+virtue-awakening, health-giving properties, hung vaguely around the
+southernwood and made it specially fit to be a Sabbath-day posy. These
+traditions are softened by the influence of years into simply idealizing,
+in the mind of every country-bred New Englander, the peculiar refreshing
+scent of the southernwood as a typical Sabbath-day fragrance. Half a
+century ago, the pretty feathery pale-green shrub grew in every country
+door-yard, humble or great, throughout New England; and every church-going
+woman picked a branch or spray of it when she left her home on Sabbath
+morn. To this day, on hot summer Sundays, many a staid old daughter of
+the Puritans may be seen entering the village meeting-house, clad in
+a lilac-sprigged lawn or a green-striped barege,--a scanty-skirted,
+surplice-waisted relic of past summers,--with a lace-bordered silk cape
+or a delicate, time-yellowed, purple and white cashmere scarf on her bent
+shoulders, wearing on her gray head a shirred-silk or leghorn bonnet, and
+carrying in her lace-mitted hand a fresh handkerchief, her spectacle-case
+and well-worn Bible, and a great sprig of the sweet, old-fashioned
+"lad's-love." A rose, a bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy
+for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was
+ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing
+things,--southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is
+half so fresh, so countrified, so memory-sweet.
+
+The benches and the pew-seats in the old churches were never cushioned.
+Occasionally very old or feeble women brought cushions to meeting to sit
+upon. It is a matter of recent tradition that Colonel Greenleaf caused a
+nine days' talk in Newbury town at the beginning of this century when
+he cushioned his pew. The widow of Sir William Pepperell, who lived in
+imposing style, had her pew cushioned and lined and curtained with
+worsted stuff, and carpeted with a heavy bear-skin. This worn, faded, and
+moth-eaten furniture remained in the Kittery church until the year 1840,
+just as when Lady Pepperell furnished and occupied the pew. Nor were even
+the seats of the pulpit cushioned. The "cooshoons" of velvet or leather,
+which were given by will to the church, and which were kept in the pulpit,
+and were nibbled by the squirrels, were for the Bible, not the minister, to
+rest upon.
+
+In many churches--in Durham, Concord and Sandwich--the pews had
+swing-shelves, "leaning shelves," upon which a church attendant could rest
+his paper and his arm when taking notes from the sermon, as was at one time
+the universal custom, and in which even school-boys of a century ago had
+to take part. Funny stories are told of the ostentatious notes taken by
+pompous parishioners who could neither write nor read, but who could
+scribble, and thus cut a learned figure.
+
+The doors of the pews were usually cut down somewhat lower than the
+pew-walls, and frequently had no top-rails. They sometimes bore the name of
+the pew-owner painted in large white letters. They were secured when
+closed by clumsy wooden buttons. In many country congregations the elderly
+men--stiff old farmers--had a fashion of standing up in the middle of the
+sermon to stretch their cramped limbs, and they would lean against and hang
+over the pew door and stare up and down the aisle. In Andover, Vermont,
+old Deacon Puffer never let a summer Sunday pass without thus resting and
+diverting himself. One day, having ill-secured the wooden button at the
+door of his pew, the leaning-place gave way under his weight, and out he
+sprawled on all-fours, with a loud clatter, into the middle of the aisle,
+to the amusement of the children, and the mortification of his wife.
+
+Thus it may be seen, as an old autobiography phrases it, "diversions was
+frequent in meeting, and the more duller the sermon, the more likely it was
+that some accident or mischief would be done to help to pass the time."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Seating the Meeting.
+
+
+
+Perhaps no duty was more important and more difficult of satisfactory
+performance in the church work in early New England than "seating the
+meeting-house." Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all
+forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was
+the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the
+seat in which each person should sit during public worship. A committee of
+dignified and influential men was appointed to assign irrevocably to each
+person his or her place, according to rank and importance. Whittier wrote
+of this custom:--
+
+  "In the goodly house of worship, where in order due and fit,
+  As by public vote directed, classed and ranked the people sit;
+  Mistress first and goodwife after, clerkly squire before the clown,
+  From the brave coat, lace embroidered: to the gray frock shading down."
+
+In many cases the members of the committee were changed each year or at
+each fresh seating, in order to obviate any of the effects of partiality
+through kinship, friendship, personal esteem, or debt. A second committee
+was also appointed to seat the members of committee number one, in order
+that, as Haverhill people phrased it, "there may be no Grumbling at them
+for picking and placing themselves."
+
+This seating committee sent to the church the list of all the attendants
+and the seats assigned to them, and when the list had been twice or thrice
+read to the congregation, and nailed on the meeting-house door, it became a
+law. Then some such order as this of the church at Watertown, Connecticut,
+was passed: "It is ordered that the next Sabbath Day every person shall
+take his or her seat appointed to them, and not go to any other seat where
+others are placed: And if any one of the inhabitants shall act contrary, he
+shall for the first offence be reproved by the deacons, and for a second
+pay a fine of two shillings, and a like fine for each offence ever
+after." Or this of the Stratham church: "When the comety have Seatid the
+meeting-house every person that is Seatid shall set in those Seats or pay
+Five Shillings Pir Day for every day they set out of There seats in a
+Disorderly Manner to advance themselves Higher in the meeting-house." These
+two church-laws were very lenient. In many towns the punishments and fines
+were much more severe. Two men of Newbury were in 1669 fined L27 4s.
+each for "disorderly going and setting in seats belonging to others." They
+were dissatisfied with the seats assigned to them by the seating committee,
+and openly and defiantly rebelled. Other and more peaceable citizens
+"entred their Decents" to the first decision of the committee and asked for
+reconsideration of their special cases and for promotion to a higher pew
+before the final orders were "Jsued."
+
+In all the Puritan meetings, as then and now in Quaker meetings, the men
+sat on one side of the meeting-house and the women on the other; and they
+entered by separate doors. It was a great and much-contested change when
+men and women were ordered to sit together "promiscuoslie." In front,
+on either side of the pulpit (or very rarely in the foremost row in the
+gallery), was a seat of highest dignity, known as the "foreseat," in which
+only the persons of greatest importance in the community sat.
+
+Sometimes a row of square pews was built on three sides of the ground
+floor, and each pew occupied by separate families, while the pulpit was
+on the fourth side. If any man wished such a private pew for himself and
+family, he obtained permission from the church and town, and built it at
+his own expense. Immediately in front of the pulpit was either a long seat
+or a square inclosed pew for the deacons, who sat facing the congregation.
+This was usually a foot or two above the level of the other pews, and was
+reached by two or three steep, narrow steps. On a still higher plane was a
+pew for the ruling elders, when ruling elders there were. The magistrates
+also had a pew for their special use. What we now deem the best seats,
+those in the middle of the church, were in olden times the free seats.
+
+Usually, on one side of the pulpit was a square pew for the minister's
+family. When there were twenty-six children in the family, as at least one
+New England parson could boast, and when ministers' families of twelve
+or fourteen children were far from unusual, it is no wonder that we find
+frequent votes to "inlarge the ministers wives pew the breadth of the
+alley," or to "take in the next pue to the ministers wives pue into her
+pue." The seats in the gallery were universally regarded in the early
+churches as the most exalted, in every sense, in the house, with the
+exception, of course, of the dignity-bearing foreseat and the few private
+pews.
+
+It is easy to comprehend what a source of disappointed anticipation,
+heart-burning jealousy, offended dignity, unseemly pride, and bitter
+quarrelling this method of assigning scats, and ranking thereby, must have
+been in those little communities. How the goodwivcs must have hated the
+seating committee! Though it was expressly ordered, when the committee
+rendered their decision, that "the inhabitants are to rest silent and
+sett down satysfyed," who can still the tongue of an envious woman or an
+insulted man? Though they were Puritans, they were first of all men and
+women, and complaints and revolts were frequent. Judge Sewall records that
+one indignant dame "treated Captain Osgood very roughly on account of
+seating the meeting-house." To her the difference between a seat in the
+first and one in the second row was immeasurably great. It was not alone
+the Scribes and Pharisees who desired the highest seats in the synagogue.
+
+It was found necessary at a very early date to "dignify the meeting,"
+which was to make certain seats, though in different localities, equal in
+dignity; thus could peace and contented pride be partially restored. For
+instance, the seating committee in the Sutton church used their "best
+discresing," and voted that "the third seat below be equal in dignity with
+the foreseat in the front gallery, and the fourth seat below be equal in
+dignity with the foreseat in the side gallery," etc., thus making many
+seats of equal honor. Of course wives had to have seats of equal importance
+with those of their husbands, and each widow retained the dignity
+apportioned to her in her husband's lifetime. We can well believe that much
+"discresing" was necessary in dignifying as well as in seating. Often,
+after building a new meeting-house with all the painstaking and thoughtful
+judgment that could be shown, the dissensions over the seating lasted for
+years. The conciliatory fashion of "dignifying the seats" clung long in the
+Congregational churches of New England. In East Hartford and Windsor it was
+not abandoned until 1824.
+
+Many men were unwilling to serve on these seating committees, and refused
+to "medle with the seating," protesting against it on account of the odium
+that was incurred, but they were seldom "let off." Even so influential and
+upright a man as Judge Sewall felt a dread of the responsibility and of
+the personal spleen he might arouse. He also feared in one case lest his
+seat-decisions might, if disliked, work against the ministerial peace of
+his son, who had been recently ordained as pastor of the church. Sometimes
+the difficulty was settled in this way: the entire church (or rather the
+male members) voted who should occupy the foreseat, or the highest pew, and
+the voted-in occupants of this seat of honor formed a committee, who in
+turn seated the others of the congregation.
+
+In the town of Rowley, "age, office, and the amount paid toward building
+the meeting-house were considered when assigning seats." Other towns had
+very amusing and minute rules for seating. Each year of the age counted one
+degree. Military service counted eight degrees. The magistrate's office
+counted ten degrees. Every forty shillings paid in on the church rate
+counted one degree. We can imagine the ambitious Puritan adding up his
+degrees, and paying in forty shillings more in order to sit one seat above
+his neighbor who was a year or two older.
+
+In Pittsfield, as early as the year 1765, the pews were sold by "vandoo"
+to the highest bidder, in order to stop the unceasing quarrels over
+the seating. In Windham, Connecticut, in 1762, the adoption of this
+pacificatory measure only increased the dissension when it was discovered
+that some miserable "bachelors who never paid for more than one head and
+a horse" had bid in several of the best pews in the meeting-house. In New
+London, two women, sisters-in-law, were seated side by side. Each claimed
+the upper or more dignified seat, and they quarrelled so fiercely over the
+occupation of it that they had to be brought before the town meeting.
+
+In no way could honor and respect be shown more satisfactorily in the
+community than by the seat assigned in meeting. When Judge Sewall married
+his second wife, he writes with much pride: "Mr. Oliver in the names of the
+Overseers invites my Wife to sit in the foreseat. I thought to have brought
+her into my pue. I thankt him and the Overseers." His wife died in a few
+months, and he reproached himself for his pride in this honor, and left the
+seat which he had in the men's foreseat. "God in his holy Sovereignty put
+my wife out of the Fore Seat. I apprehended I had Cause to be ashamed of my
+Sin and loath myself for it, and retired into my Pue," which was of course
+less dignified than the foreseat.
+
+Often, in thriving communities, the "pues" and benches did not afford
+seating room enough for the large number who wished to attend public
+worship, and complaints were frequent that many were "obliged to sit
+squeased on the stairs." Persons were allowed to bring chairs and stools
+into the meeting-house, and place them in the "alleys." These extra seats
+became often such encumbering nuisances that in many towns laws were passed
+abolishing and excluding them, or, as in Hadley, ordering them "back of the
+women's seats." In 1759 it was ordered in that town to "clear the Alleys of
+the meeting-house of chairs and other Incumbrances." Where the chairless
+people went is not told; perhaps they sat in the doorway, or, in the summer
+time, listened outside the windows. One forward citizen of Hardwicke had
+gradually moved his chair down the church alley, step by step, Sunday after
+Sunday, from one position of dignity to another still higher, until at last
+he boldly invaded the deacons' seat. When, in the year 1700, this honored
+position was forbidden him, in his chagrin and mortification he committed
+suicide by hanging.
+
+The young men sat together in rows, and the young women in corresponding
+seats on the other side of the house. In 1677 the selectmen of Newbury
+gave permission to a few young women to build a pew in the gallery. It is
+impossible to understand why this should have roused the indignation of the
+bachelors of the town, but they were excited and angered to such a pitch
+that they broke a window, invaded the meeting-house, and "broke the pue in
+pessis." For this sacrilegious act they were fined L10 each, and sentenced
+to be whipped or pilloried. In consideration, however, of the fact that
+many of them had been brave soldiers, the punishment was omitted when they
+confessed and asked forgiveness. This episode is very comical; it exhibits
+the Puritan youth in such an ungallant and absurd light. When, ten years
+later, liberty was given to ten young men, who had sat in the "foure backer
+seats in the gallery," to build a pew in "the hindermost seat in the
+gallery behind the pulpit," it is not recorded that the Salem young women
+made any objection. In the Woburn church, the four daughters of one of the
+most respected families in the place received permission to build a pew in
+which to sit. Here also such indignant and violent protests were made by
+the young men that the selectmen were obliged to revoke the permission.
+It would be interesting to know the bachelors' discourteous objections to
+young women being allowed to own a pew, but no record of their reasons
+is given. Bachelors were so restricted and governed in the colonies that
+perhaps they resented the thought of any independence being allowed to
+single women. Single men could not live alone, but were forced to reside
+with some family to whom the court assigned them, and to do in all respects
+just what the court ordered. Thus, in olden times, a man had to marry to
+obtain his freedom. The only clue to a knowledge of the cause of the fierce
+and resentful objection of New England young men to permitting the young
+women of the various congregations to build and own a "maids pue" is
+contained in the record of the church of the town of Scotland, Connecticut.
+"An Hurlburt, Pashants and Mary Lazelle, Younes Bingham, prudenc Hurlburt
+and Jerusha meachem" were empowered to build a pew "provided they build
+within a year and raise ye pue no higher than the seat is on the Mens
+side." "Never ye Less," saith the chronicle, "ye above said have built said
+pue much higher than ye order, and if they do not lower the same within one
+month from this time the society comitte shall take said pue away." Do you
+wonder that the bachelors resented this towering "maids pue?" that they
+would not be scornfully looked down upon every Sabbath by women-folk,
+especially by a girl named "meachem"? Pashants and Younes and prudenc had
+to quickly come down from their unlawfully high church-perch and take a
+more humble seat, as befitted them; thus did their "vaulting ambition
+o'erleap itself and fall on the other side." Perhaps the Salem maids also
+built too high and imposing a pew. In Haverhill, in 1708, young women were
+permitted to build pews, provided they did not "damnify the Stairway." This
+somewhat profane-sounding restriction they heeded, and the Haverhill maids
+occupied their undamnifying "pue" unmolested. Medford young women, however,
+in 1701, when allowed only one side gallery for seats, while the young men
+were assigned one side and all the front gallery, made such an uproar that
+the town had to call a meeting, and restore to them their "woman's rights"
+in half the front gallery.
+
+Infants were brought to church in their mothers' arms, and on summer days
+the young mothers often sat at the meeting-house door or in the porch,--if
+porch there were,--where, listening to the word of God, they could attend
+also to the wants of their babes. I have heard, too, of a little cage, or
+frame, which was to be seen in the early meeting-houses, for the purpose
+of holding children who were too young to sit alone,--poor Puritan babies!
+Little girls sat with their mothers or elder sisters on "crickets" within
+the pews; or if the family were over-numerous, the children and crickets
+exundated into "the alley without the pues." Often a row of little
+daughters of Zion sat on three-legged stools and low seats the entire
+length of the aisle,--weary, sleepy, young sentinels "without the gates."
+
+The boys, the Puritan boys, those wild animals who were regarded with such
+suspicion, such intense disfavor, by all elderly Puritan eyes, and who were
+publicly stigmatized by the Duxbury elders as "ye wretched boys on ye Lords
+Day," were herded by themselves. They usually sat on the pulpit and gallery
+stairs, and constables or tithingmen were appointed to watch over them and
+control them. In Salem, in 1676, it was ordered that "all ye boyes of ye
+towne are and shall be appointed to sitt upon ye three pair of stairs in ye
+meeting-house on ye Lords Day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look after ye
+boyes yt sitte upon ye pulpit stairs. Reuben Guppy is to look and order soe
+many of ye boyes as may be convenient, and if any are unruly, to present
+their names, as the law directs." Nowadays we should hardly seat boys in a
+group if we wished them to be orderly and decorous, and I fear the man "by
+the name of Guppy" found it no easy task to preserve order and due gravity
+among the Puritan boys in Salem meeting. In fact, the rampant boys behaved
+thus badly for the very reason that they were seated together instead of
+with their respective families; and not until the fashion was universal of
+each family sitting in a pew or group by itself did the boys in meeting
+behave like human beings rather than like mischievous and unruly monkeys.
+
+In Stratford, in 1668, a tithingman was "appointed to watch over the youths
+of disorderly carriage, and see that they behave themselves comelie, and
+use such raps and blows as in his discretion meet."
+
+I like to think of those rows of sober-faced Puritan boys seated on the
+narrow, steep pulpit stairs, clad in knee-breeches and homespun flapped
+coats, and with round, cropped heads, miniature likenesses in dress and
+countenance (if not in deportment) of their grave, stern, God-fearing
+fathers. Though they were of the sedate Puritan blood, they were boys, and
+they wriggled and twisted, and scraped their feet noisily on the sanded
+floor; and I know full well that the square-toed shoes of one in whom
+"original sin" waxed powerful, thrust many a sly dig in the ribs and back
+of the luckless wight who chanced to sit in front of and below him on the
+pulpit stairs. Many a dried kernel of Indian corn was surreptitiously
+snapped at the head of an unwary neighbor, and many a sly word was
+whispered and many a furtive but audible "snicker" elicited when the dread
+tithingman was "having an eye-out" and administering "discreet raps and
+blows" elsewhere.
+
+One of these wicked youths in Andover was brought before the magistrate,
+and it was charged that he "Sported and played and by Indecent Gestures and
+Wry Faces caused laughter and misbehavior in the Beholders." The girls were
+not one whit better behaved. One of "ye tything men chosen of ye town of
+Norwich" reported that "Tabatha Morgus of s'd Norwich Did on ye 24th day
+February it being Sabbath on ye Lordes Day, prophane ye Lordes Day in ye
+meeting house of ye west society in ye time of ye forenoone service on s'd
+Day by her rude and Indecent Behaviour in Laughing and Playing in ye time
+of ye s'd Service which Doinges of ye s'd Tabatha is against ye peace of
+our Sovereign Lord ye King, his Crown and Dignity." Wanton Tabatha had to
+pay three shilings sixpence for her ill-timed mid-winter frolic. Perhaps
+she laughed to try to keep warm. Those who laughed at the misdemeanors of
+others were fined as well. Deborah Bangs, a young girl, in 1755 paid a fine
+of five shillings for "Larfing in the Wareham Meeting House in time of
+Public Worship," and a boy at the same time, for the same offence, paid a
+fine of ten shillings. He may have laughed louder and longer. In a law-book
+in which Jonathan Trumbull recorded the minor cases which he tried as
+justice of the peace, was found this entry: "His Majesties Tithing man
+entered complaint against Jona. and Susan Smith, that on the Lords Day
+during Divine Service, they did _smile_." They were found guilty, and
+each was fined five shillings and costs,--poor smiling Susan and Jonathan.
+
+Those wretched Puritan boys, those "sons of Belial," whittled, too, and cut
+the woodwork and benches of the meeting-house in those early days, just as
+their descendants have ever since hacked and cut the benches and desks in
+country schoolhouses,--though how they ever eluded the vigilant eye and ear
+of the ubiquitous tithingman long enough to whittle will ever remain an
+unsolved mystery of the past. This early forerunning evidence of what
+has become a characteristic Yankee trait and habit was so annoyingly and
+extensively exhibited in Medford, in 1729, that an order was passed to
+prosecute and punish "all who cut the seats in the meeting-house."
+
+Few towns were content to have one tithingman and one staff, but ordered
+that there should be a guardian set over the boys in every corner of the
+meeting-house. In Hanover it was ordered "That there be some sticks set up
+in various places in the meeting-house, and fit persons by them and _to
+use them_." I doubt not that the sticks were well used, and Hanover boys
+were well rapped in meeting.
+
+The Norwalk people come down through history shining with a halo of gentle
+lenity, for their tithingman was ordered to bear a short, small stick only,
+and he was "Desired to use it with clemency." However, if any boy proved
+"incoridgable," he could be "presented" before the elders; and perhaps he
+would rather have been treated as were Hartford boys by cruel Hartford
+church folk, who ordered that if "any boye shall be taken playing or
+misbehaving himself in the time of publick worship whether in the
+meeting-house or about the walls he shall be examined and punished at the
+present publickly before the assembly depart." Parson Chauncey, of Durham,
+when a boy misbehaved in meeting, and was "punched up" by the tithingman,
+often stopped in his sermon, called the godless young offender by name,
+and asked him to come to the parsonage the next day. Some very tender and
+beautiful lessons were taught to these Durham boys at these Monday morning
+interviews, and have descended to us in tradition; and the good Mr.
+Chauncey stands out a shining light of Christian patience and forbearance
+at a time when every other New England minister, from John Cotton down,
+preached and practised the stern repression and sharp correction of all
+children, and chanted together in solemn chorus, "Foolishness is bound up
+in the heart of a child."
+
+One vicious tithingman invented, and was allowed to exercise on the boys,
+a punishment which was the refinement of cruelty. He walked up to the
+laughing, sporting, or whittling boy, took him by the collar or the arm,
+led him ostentatiously across the meeting-house, and seated him by his
+shamefaced mother on the women's side. It was as if one grandly proud in
+kneebreeches should be forced to walk abroad in petticoats. Far rather
+would the disgraced boy have been whacked soundly with the heavy knob of
+the tithingman's staff; for bodily pain is soon forgotten, while mortifying
+abasement lingers long.
+
+The tithingman could also take any older youth who misbehaved or "acted
+unsivill" in meeting from his manly seat with the grown men, and force him
+to sit again with the boys; "if any over sixteen are disorderly, they shall
+be ordered to said seats." Not only could these men of authority keep the
+boys in order during meeting, but they also had full control during the
+nooning, and repressed and restrained and vigorously corrected the luckless
+boys during the midday hours. When seats in the galleries grew to be
+regarded as inferior to seats and pews on the ground floor, the boys, who
+of course must have the worst place in the house, were relegated from the
+pulpit stairs to pews in the gallery, and these square, shut-off pews grew
+to be what Dr. Porter called "the Devil's play-houses," and turbulent
+outbursts were frequent enough.
+
+The little boys still sat downstairs under their parents' watchful eyes.
+"No child under 10 alowed to go up Gailary." In the Sutherland church, if
+the big boys (who ought to have known better) "behaved unseemly," one of
+the tithing-men who "took turns to set in the Galary" was ordered "to bring
+Such Bois out of the Galary & set them before the Deacon's Seat" with the
+small boys. In Plainfield, Connecticut, the "pestigeous" boys managed to
+invent a new form of annoyance,--they "damnified the glass;" and a church
+regulation had to be passed to prevent, or rather to try to prevent them
+from "opening the windows or in any way damnifying the glass." It was
+doubtless hot work scuffling and wrestling in the close, shut-in pews high
+up under the roof, and they naturally wished to cool down by opening or
+breaking the windows. Grown persons could not inconsiderately open the
+church windows either. "The Constables are desired to _take notic_
+of the persons that open the windows in the tyme of publick worship." No
+rheumatic-y draughts, no bronchitis-y damps, no pure air was allowed to
+enter the New England meeting-house. The church doubtless took a vote
+before it allowed a single window to be opened.
+
+In Westfield, Massachusetts, the boys became so abominably rampant that the
+church formally decided "that if there is not a Reformation Respecting
+the Disorders in the Pews built on the Great Beam in the time of Publick
+Worship the comite can pul it down."
+
+The fashion of seating the boys in pews by themselves was slow of
+abolishment in many of the churches. In Windsor, Connecticut, "boys' pews"
+were a feature of the church until 1845. As years rolled on, the tithingmen
+became restricted in their authority: they could no longer administer "raps
+and blows;" they were forced to content themselves with loud rappings on
+the floor, and pointing with a staff or with a condemning finger at the
+misdemeanant. At last the deacons usurped these functions, and if rapping
+and pointing did not answer the purpose of establishing order (if the boy
+"psisted"), led the stubborn offender out of meeting; and they had full
+authority soundly to thrash the "wretched boy" on the horse-block. Rev. Dr.
+Dakin tells the story that, hearing a terrible noise and disturbance while
+he was praying in a church in Quincy, he felt constrained to open his eyes
+to ascertain the cause thereof; and he beheld a red-haired boy firmly
+clutching the railing on the front edge of the gallery, while a venerable
+deacon as firmly clutched the boy. The young rebel held fast, and the
+correcting deacon held fast also, until at last the balustrade gave way,
+and boy, deacon, and railing fell together with a resounding crash.
+Then, rising from the wooden debris, the thoroughly subdued boy and the
+triumphant deacon left the meeting-house to finish their little affair;
+and unmistakable swishing sounds, accompanied by loud wails and whining
+protestations, were soon heard from the region of the horse-sheds. Parents
+never resented such chastisings; it was expected, and even desired,
+that boys should be whipped freely by every school-master and person of
+authority who chose so to do.
+
+In some old church-orders for seating, boys were classed with negroes,
+and seated with them; but in nearly all towns the negroes had seats by
+themselves. The black women were all seated on a long bench or in an
+inclosed pew labelled "B.W.," and the negro men in one labelled "B.M." One
+William Mills, a jesting soul, being asked by a pompous stranger where he
+could sit in meeting, told the visitor that he was welcome to sit in Bill
+Mills's pew, and that it was marked "B.M." The man, who chanced to be
+ignorant of the local custom of marking the negro seats, accepted the kind
+invitation, and seated himself in the black men's pew, to the delight of
+Bill Mills, the amusement of the boys, the scandal of the elders, and his
+own disgust.
+
+Sometimes a little pew or short gallery was built high up among the beams
+and joists over the staircase which led to the first gallery, and was
+called the "swallows' nest," or the "roof pue," or the "second gallery." It
+was reached by a steep, ladder-like staircase, and was often assigned to
+the negroes and Indians of the congregation.
+
+Often "ye seat between ye Deacons seat and ye pulpit is for persons hard of
+hearing to sett in." In nearly every meeting a bench or pew full of aged
+men might be seen near the pulpit, and this seat was called, with Puritan
+plainness of speech, the "Deaf Pew." Some very deaf church members (when
+the boys were herded elsewhere) sat on the pulpit stairs, and even in the
+pulpit, alongside the preacher, where they disconcertingly upturned their
+great tin ear-trumpets directly in his face. The persistent joining in the
+psalm-singing by these deaf old soldiers and farmers was one of the bitter
+trials which the leader of the choir had to endure.
+
+The singers' seats were usually in the galleries; sometimes upon the ground
+floor, in the "hind-row on either side." Occasionally the choir sat in two
+rows of seats that extended quite across the floor of the house, in front
+of the deacons' seat and the pulpit. The men singers then sat facing the
+congregation, while the women singers faced the pulpit. Between them ran a
+long rack for the psalm-books. When they sang they stood up, and bawled and
+fugued in each other's faces. Often a square pew was built for the singers,
+and in the centre of this enclosure was a table, on which were laid, when
+at rest, the psalm-books. When they sang, the choir thus formed a hollow
+square, as does any determined band, for strength.
+
+One other seat in the old Puritan meeting-house, a seat of gloom,
+still throws its darksome shadow down through the years,--the stool of
+repentance. "Barbarous and cruel punishments" were forbidden by the
+statutes of the new colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking,
+sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat,
+crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long
+Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled
+and godly congregation, and the cold rebuke of the pious minister's averted
+face; bearing on the poor sinful head a deep-branding paper inscribed in
+"Capitall Letters" with the name of some dark or mysterious crime, or
+wearing on the sleeve some strange and dread symbol, or on the breast a
+scarlet letter.
+
+Let us thank God that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures--so
+degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,--these foul,
+in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never
+frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long time. In 1681
+two women were sentenced to sit during service on a high stool in the
+middle alley of the Salem meeting-house, having on their heads a paper
+bearing the name of their crime; and a woman in Agamenticus at about the
+same date was ordered "to stand in a white sheet publicly two several
+Sabbath-Days with the mark of her offence on her forehead." These are the
+latest records of this punishment that I have chanced to see.
+
+Thus, from old church and town records, we plainly discover that each laic,
+deacon, elder, criminal, singer, and even the ungodly boy had his alloted
+place as absolutely assigned to him in the old meeting-house as was the
+pulpit to the parson. Much has been said in semi-ridicule of this old
+custom of "seating" and "dignifying," yet it did not in reality differ much
+from our modern way of selling the best pews to whoever will pay the most.
+Perhaps the old way was the better, since, in the early churches, age,
+education, dignity, and reputation were considered as well as wealth.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The Tithingman and the Sleepers.
+
+
+
+The most grotesque, the most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure
+in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly
+burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of
+incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of
+monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early
+New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy,
+pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed
+with dangling foxtails,--creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the
+quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the
+drowsy sleepers; for they slept in country churches in the seventeenth
+century, notwithstanding dread of fierce correction, just as they nod
+and doze and softly puff, unawakened and unrebuked, in village churches
+throughout New England in the nineteenth century.
+
+This absurd and distorted type of the English church beadle, this colonial
+sleep banisher, was equipped with a long staff, heavily knobbed at one end,
+with which he severely and pitilessly rapped the heads of the too sleepy
+men, and the too wide-awake boys. From the other end of this wand of office
+depended a long foxtail, or a hare's-foot, which he softly thrust in the
+faces of the sleeping Priscillas, Charitys, and Hopestills, and which
+gently brushed and tickled them into reverent but startled wakefulness.
+
+One zealous but too impetuous tithingman in his pious ardor of office
+inadvertently applied the wrong end, the end with the heavy knob, the
+masculine end, to a drowsy matron's head; and for this severely ungallant
+mistake he was cautioned by the ruling elders to thereafter use "more
+discresing and less heist."
+
+Another over-watchful Newbury "awakener" rapped on the head a nodding man
+who protested indignantly that he was wide-awake, and was only bowing in
+solemn assent and approval of the minister's arguments. Roger Scott, of
+Lynn, in 1643 struck the tithingman who thus roughly and suddenly wakened
+him; and poor sleepy and bewildered Roger, who is branded through all time
+as "a common sleeper at the publick exercise," was, for this most naturally
+resentful act, but also most shockingly grave offence, soundly whipped, as
+a warning both to keep awake and not to strike back in meeting.
+
+Obadiah Turner, of Lynn, gives in his Journal a sad, sad disclosure of
+total depravity which was exposed by one of these sudden church-awakenings,
+and the story is best told in the journalist's own vivid words:--
+
+"June 3, 1616.--Allen Bridges hath bin chose to wake ye sleepers in
+meeting. And being much proude of his place, must needs have a fox taile
+fixed to ye ende of a long staff wherewith he may brush ye faces of them yt
+will have napps in time of discourse, likewise a sharpe thorne whereby he
+may pricke such as be most sound. On ye last Lord his day, as hee strutted
+about ye meeting-house, he did spy Mr. Tomlins sleeping with much comfort,
+hys head kept steadie by being in ye corner, and his hand grasping ye rail.
+And soe spying, Allen did quickly thrust his staff behind Dame Ballard and
+give him a grievous prick upon ye hand. Whereupon Mr. Tomlins did spring
+vpp mch above ye floore, and with terrible force strike hys hand against
+ye wall; and also, to ye great wonder of all, prophanlie exclaim in a loud
+voice, curse ye wood-chuck, he dreaming so it seemed yt a wood-chuck had
+seized and bit his hand. But on coming to know where he was, and ye greate
+scandall he had committed, he seemed much abashed, but did not speak. And I
+think he will not soon again goe to sleepe in meeting."
+
+How clear the picture! Can you not see it?--the warm June sunlight
+streaming in through the narrow, dusty windows of the old meeting-house;
+the armed watcher at the door; the Puritan men and women in their
+sad-colored mantles seated sternly upright on the hard narrow benches; the
+black-gowned minister, the droning murmur of whose sleepy voice mingles
+with the out-door sounds of the rustle of leafy branches, the song of
+summer birds, the hum of buzzing insects, and the muffled stamping of
+horses' feet; the restless boys on the pulpit-stairs; the tired, sleeping
+Puritan with his head thrown back in the corner of the pew; the vain,
+strutting, tithingman with his fantastic and thorned staff of office; and
+then--the sudden, electric wakening, and the consternation of the whole
+staid and pious congregation at such terrible profanity in the house of
+God. Ah!--it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the
+quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all
+well, just as I saw it last summer in June.
+
+Another catastrophe from too fierce zeal on the part of the tithingman
+is recorded. An old farmer, worn out with a hard Saturday's work at
+sheep-washing, fell asleep ere the hour-glass had once been turned. Though
+he was a man of dignity, for he sat in his own pew, he could not escape the
+rod of the pragmatical tithingman. Being rudely disturbed, but not wholly
+wakened, the bewildered sheep-farmer sprung to his feet, seized his
+astonished and mortified wife by the shoulders and shook her violently,
+shouting at the top of his voice, "Haw back! haw back! Stand still, will
+ye?" Poor goodman and goodwife! many years elapsed ere they recovered from
+that keen disgrace.
+
+The ministers encouraged and urged the tithingmen to faithfully perform
+their allotted work. One early minister "did not love sleepers in ye
+meeting-house, and would stop short in ye exercise and call pleasantlie to
+wake ye sleepers, and once of a warm Summer afternoon he did take hys hat
+off from ye pegg in ye beam, and put it on, saying he would go home and
+feed his fowles and come back again, and maybe their sleepe would be ended,
+and they readie to hear ye remainder of hys discourse." Another time he
+suggested that they might like better the Church of England service of
+sitting down and standing up, and we can be sure that this "was competent
+to keepe their eyes open for a twelvemonth."
+
+All this was in the church of Mr. Whiting, of Lynn, a somewhat jocose
+Puritan,--if jocularity in a Puritan is not too anomalous an attribute
+to have ever existed. We can be sure that there was neither sleeping nor
+jesting allusion to such an irreverence in Mr. Mather's, Mr. Welde's, or
+Mr. Cotton's meetings. In many rigidly severe towns, as in Portsmouth in
+1662 and in Boston in 1667, it was ordered by the selectmen as a proper
+means of punishment that a "cage be made or some other means invented for
+such as sleepe on the Lord's Daie." Perhaps they woke the offender up and
+rudely and summarily dragged him out and caged him at once and kept him
+thus prisoned throughout the nooning,--a veritable jail-bird.
+
+A rather unconventional and eccentric preacher in Newbury awoke one sleeper
+in a most novel manner. The first name of the sleeping man was Mark, and
+the preacher in his sermon made use of these Biblical words: "I say unto
+you, mark the perfect man and behold the upright." But in the midst of his
+low, monotonous sermon-voice he roared out the word "mark" in a loud shout
+that brought the dozing Mark to his feet, bewildered but wide awake.
+
+Mr. Moody, of York, Maine, employed a similar device to awaken and mortify
+the sleepers in meeting. He shouted "Fire, fire, fire!" and when the
+startled and blinking men jumped up, calling out "Where?" he roared back in
+turn, "In hell, for sleeping sinners." Rev. Mr. Phillips, of Andover, in
+1755, openly rebuked his congregation for "sleeping away a great part of
+the sermon;" and on the Sunday following an earthquake shock which was felt
+throughout New England, he said he hoped the "Glorious Lord of the Sabbath
+had given them such a shaking as would keep them awake through one
+sermon-time." Other and more autocratic parsons did not hesitate to call
+out their sleeping parishioners plainly by name, sternly telling them also
+to "Wake up!" A minister in Brunswick, Maine, thus pointedly wakened one of
+his sweet-sleeping church-attendants, a man of some dignity and standing
+in the community, and received the shocking and tautological answer, "Mind
+your own business, and go on with your sermon."
+
+The women would sometimes nap a little without being discovered. "Ye women
+may sometimes sleepe and none know by reason of their enormous bonnets. Mr.
+Whiting doth pleasantlie say from ye pulpit hee doth seeme to be preaching
+to stacks of straw with men among them."
+
+From this seventeenth-century comment upon the size of the women's bonnets,
+it may be seen that objections to women's overwhelming and obscuring
+headgear in public assemblies are not entirely complaining protests of
+modern growth. Other records refer to the annoyance from the exaggerated
+size of bonnets. In 1769 the church in Andover openly "put to vote whether
+the parish Disapprove of the Female sex sitting with their Hats on in the
+Meeting-house in time of Divine Service as being Indecent." The parish did
+Disapprove, with a capital D, for the vote passed in the affirmative. There
+is no record, however, to tell whether the Indecent fashion was abandoned,
+but I warrant no tithingman was powerful enough to make Andover women take
+off their proudly worn Sunday bonnets if they did not want to. Another town
+voted that it was the "Town's Mind" that the women should take off their
+bonnets and "hang them on the peggs," as did the men their headgear. But
+the Town's Mind was not a Woman's Mind; and the big-bonnet wearers, vain
+though they were Puritans, did as they pleased with their own bonnets.
+And indeed, in spite of votes and in spite of expostulations, the female
+descendants of the Puritans, through constantly recurring waves of fashion,
+have ever since been indecently wearing great obscuring hats and bonnets in
+public assemblies, even up to the present day.
+
+The tithingman had other duties than awakening the sleepers and looking
+after "the boyes that playes and rapping those boyes,"--in short, seeing
+that every one was attentive in meeting except himself,--and the duties
+and powers of the office varied in different communities. Several of these
+officers were appointed in each parish. In Newbury, in 1688, there were
+twenty tithingmen, and in Salem twenty-five. They were men of authority,
+not only on Sunday, but throughout the entire week. Each had several
+neighboring families (usually ten, as the word "tithing" would signify)
+under his charge to watch during the week, to enforce the learning of the
+catechism at home, especially by the children, and sometimes he heard them
+"Say their Chatachize." These families he also watched specially on the
+Sabbath, and reported whether all the members thereof attended public
+worship. Not content with mounting guard over the boys on Sundays, he also
+watched on weekdays to keep boys and "all persons from swimming in the
+water." Do you think his duties were light in July and August, when school
+was out, to watch the boys of ten families? One man watching one family
+cannot prevent such "violations of the peace" in country towns now-a-days.
+He sometimes inspected the "ordinaries" and made complaint of any disorders
+which he there discovered, and gave in the names of "idle tiplers and
+gamers," and he could warn the tavern-keeper to sell no more liquor to any
+toper whom he knew or fancied was drinking too heavily. Josselyn complained
+bitterly that during his visit to New England in 1663 at "houses of
+entertainment called ordinaries into which a stranger went, he was
+presently followed by one appointed to that office who would thrust himself
+into his company uninvited, and if he called for more drink than the
+officer thought in his judgment he could soberly bear away, he would
+presently countermand it, and appoint the proportion beyond which he could
+not get one drop." The tithingman had a "spetial eye-out" on all bachelors,
+who were also carefully spied upon by the constables, deacons, elders,
+and heads of families in general. He might, perhaps, help to collect the
+ministerial rate, though his principal duty was by no means the collecting
+of tithes. He "worned peple out of ye towne." This warning was not at all
+because the new-comers were objectionable or undesired, but was simply a
+legal form of precaution, so that the parish would never be liable for the
+keeping of the "worned" ones in case they thereafter became paupers. He
+administered the "oath of fidelity" to new inhabitants. The tithingman
+also watched to see that "no young people walked abroad on the eve of the
+Sabbath,"--that is, on a Saturday night. He also marked and reported all
+those "who lye at home," and others who "prophanely behaved, lingered
+without dores at meeting time on the Lordes Daie," all the "sons of Belial
+strutting about, setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the
+day." These last two classes of offenders were first admonished by the
+tithingman, then "Sett in stocks," and then cited before the Court. They
+were also confined in the cage on the meeting-house green, with the Lord's
+Day sleepers. The tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode at too
+fast a pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who "walked or
+rode unnecessarily on the Sabath." Great and small alike were under his
+control, as this notice from the "Columbian Centinel" of December, 1789,
+abundantly proves. It is entitled "The President and the Tything man:"--
+
+    "The President, on his return to New York from his late tour through
+    Connecticut, having missed his way on Saturday, was obliged to ride a
+    few miles on Sunday morning in order to gain the town at which he had
+    previously proposed to have attended divine service. Before he arrived
+    however he was met by a Tything man, who commanding him to stop,
+    demanded the occasion of his riding; and it was not until the President
+    had informed him of every circumstance and promised to go no further
+    than the town intended that the Tything man would permit him to proceed
+    on his journey."
+
+Various were the subterfuges to outwit the tithingman and elude his
+vigilance on the Sabbath. We all remember the amusing incident in "Oldtown
+Folks." A similar one really happened. Two gay young sparks driving through
+the town on the Sabbath were stopped by the tithingman; one offender said
+mournfully in excuse of his Sabbath travel, "My grandmother is lying dead
+in the next town." Being allowed to drive on, he stood up in his wagon when
+at a safe distance and impudently shouted back, "And she's been lying dead
+in the graveyard there for thirty years."
+
+Thus it may be seen that the ancient tithingman was pre-eminently a general
+_snook_, to use an old and expressive word,--an informer, both in and
+out of meeting,--a very necessary, but somewhat odious, and certainly at
+times very absurd officer. He was in a degree a constable, a selectman, a
+teacher, a tax-collector, an inspector, a sexton, a home-watcher, and above
+all, a Puritan Bumble, whose motto was _Hie et ubique_. He was, in
+fact, a general law-enforcer and order-keeper, whose various duties,
+wherever still necessary and still performed, are now apportioned to
+several individuals. The ecclesiastical functions and authority of the
+tithingman lingered long after the civil powers had been removed or had
+gradually passed away from his office. Persons are now living who in their
+early and unruly youth were rapped at and pointed at by a New England
+tithingman when they laughed or were noisy in meeting.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Length of the Service.
+
+
+Watches were unknown in the early colonial days of New England, and for a
+long time after their introduction both watches and clocks were costly and
+rare. John Davenport of New Haven, who died in 1670, left a clock to his
+heirs; and E. Needham, who died in 1677, left a "Striking clock, a watch,
+and a Larum that dus not Strike," worth L5; these are perhaps the first
+records of the ownership of clocks and watches in New England. The time of
+the day was indicated to our forefathers in their homes by "noon marks" on
+the floor or window-seats, and by picturesque sundials; and in the
+civil and religious meetings the passage of time was marked by a strong
+brass-bound hour-glass, which stood on a desk below or beside the pulpit,
+or which was raised on a slender iron rod and standard, so that all the
+members of the congregation could easily watch "the sands that ran i' the
+clock's behalf." By the side of the desk sat, on the Sabbath, a sexton,
+clerk, or tithingman, whose duty it was to turn the hour-glass as often
+as the sands ran out. This was a very ostentatious way of reminding the
+clergyman how long he had preached; but if it were a hint to bring the
+discourse to an end, it was never heeded; for contemporary historical
+registers tell of most painfully long sermons, reaching up through long
+sub-divisions and heads to "twenty-seventhly" and "twenty-eighthly."
+
+At the planting of the first church in Woburn, Massachusetts, the Rev.
+Mr. Symmes showed his godliness and endurance (and proved that of his
+parishioners also) by preaching between four and five hours. Sermons which
+occupied two or three hours were customary enough. One old Scotch clergyman
+in Vermont, in the early years of this century, bitterly and fiercely
+resented the "popish innovation and Sabbath profanation" of a Sunday-school
+for the children, which some daring and progressive parishioners proposed
+to hold at the "nooning." This canny Parson Whiteinch very craftily and
+somewhat maliciously prolonged his morning sermons until they each occupied
+three hours; thus he shortened the time between the two services to about
+half an hour, and victoriously crowded out the Sunday-school innovators,
+who had barely time to eat their cold lunch and care for their waiting
+horses, ere it was time for the afternoon service to begin. But one man
+cannot stop the tide, though he may keep it for a short time from one
+guarded and sheltered spot; and the rebellious Vermont congregation, after
+two or three years of tedious three-hour sermons, arose in a body and
+crowded out the purposely prolix preacher, and established the wished-for
+Sunday-school. The vanquished parson thereafter sullenly spent the noonings
+in the horse-shed, to which he ostentatiously carried the big church-Bible
+in order that it might not be at the service of the profaning teachers.
+
+An irreverent caricature of the colonial days represents a phenomenally
+long-preaching clergyman as turning the hour-glass by the side of his
+pulpit and addressing his congregation thus, "Come! you are all good
+fellows, we'll take another glass together!" It is recorded of Rev. Urian
+Oakes that often the hour-glass was turned four times during one of his
+sermons. The warning legend, "Be Short," which Cotton Mather inscribed over
+his study door was not written over his pulpit; for he wrote in his diary
+that at his own ordination he prayed for an hour and a quarter, and
+preached for an hour and three quarters. Added to the other ordination
+exercises these long Mather addresses must have been tiresome enough.
+Nathaniel Ward deplored at that time, "Wee have a strong weakness in New
+England that when wee are speaking, wee know not how to conclude: wee make
+many ends before wee make an end."
+
+Dr. Lord of Norwich always made a prayer which was one hour long; and an
+early Dutch traveller who visited New England asserted that he had heard
+there on Fast Day a prayer which was two hours long. These long prayers
+were universal and most highly esteemed,--a "poor gift in prayer" being a
+most deplored and even despised clerical short-coming. Had not the Puritans
+left the Church of England to escape "stinted prayers"? Whitefield prayed
+openly for Parson Barrett of Hopkinton, who could pray neither freely, nor
+well, that "God would open this dumb dog's mouth;" and everywhere in the
+Puritan Church, precatory eloquence as evinced in long prayers was felt to
+be the greatest glory of the minister, and the highest tribute to God.
+
+In nearly all the churches the assembled people stood during prayer-time
+(since kneeling and bowing the head savored of Romish idolatry) and in the
+middle of his petition the minister usually made a long pause in order that
+any who were infirm or ill might let down their slamming pew-seats and sit
+down; those who were merely weary stood patiently to the long and painfully
+deferred end. This custom of standing during prayer-time prevailed in the
+Congregational churches in New England until quite a recent date, and is
+not yet obsolete in isolated communities and in solitary cases. I have seen
+within a few years, in a country church, a feeble, white-haired old deacon
+rise tremblingly at the preacher's solemn words "Let us unite in prayer,"
+and stand with bowed head throughout the long prayer; thus pathetically
+clinging to the reverent custom of the olden time, he rendered tender
+tribute to vanished youth, gave equal tribute to eternal hope and faith,
+and formed a beautiful emblem of patient readiness for the last solemn
+summons.
+
+Sometimes tedious expounding of the Scriptures and long "prophesying"
+lengthened out the already too long service. Judge Sewall recorded that
+once when he addressed or expounded at the Plymouth Church, "being afraid
+to look at the glass, ignorantly and unwittingly I stood two hours and a
+half," which was doing pretty well for a layman.
+
+The members of the early churches did not dislike these long preachings and
+prophesyings; they would have regarded a short sermon as irreligious,
+and lacking in reverence, and besides, would have felt that they had not
+received in it their full due, their full money's worth. They often fell
+asleep and were fiercely awakened by the tithingman, and often they could
+not have understood the verbose and grandiose language of the preacher.
+They were in an icy-cold atmosphere in winter, and in glaring, unshaded
+heat in summer, and upon most uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at
+all seasons; but in every record and journal which I have read, throughout
+which ministers and laymen recorded all the annoyances and opposition which
+the preachers encountered, I have never seen one entry of any complaint or
+ill-criticism of too long praying or preaching. Indeed, when Rev. Samuel
+Torrey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, prayed two hours without stopping, upon
+a public Fast Day in 1696, it is recorded that his audience only wished
+that the prayer had been much longer.
+
+When we consider the training and exercise in prayer that the New England
+parsons had in their pulpits on Sundays, in their own homes on Saturday
+nights, on Lecture Days and Fast Days and Training Days, and indeed upon
+all times and occasions, can we wonder at Parson Boardman's prowess in New
+Milford in 1735? He visited a "praying" Indian's home wherein lay a sick
+papoose over whom a "pow-wow" was being held by a medicine-man at the
+request of the squaw-mother, who was still a heathen. The Christian warrior
+determined to fight the Indian witch-doctor on his own grounds, and while
+the medicine-man was screaming and yelling and dancing in order to cast the
+devil out ol the child, the parson began to pray with equal vigor and power
+of lungs to cast out the devil of a medicine-man. As the prayer and
+pow-wow proceeded the neighboring Indians gathered around, and soon became
+seriously alarmed for the success of their prophet. The battle raged for
+three hours, when the pow-wow ended, and the disgusted and exhausted Indian
+ran out of the wigwam and jumped into the Housatonic River to cool his
+heated blood, leaving the Puritan minister triumphant in the belief, and
+indeed with positive proof, that he could pray down any man or devil.
+
+The colonists could not leave the meeting-house before the long sen ices
+were ended, even had they wished, for the tithingman allowed no deserters.
+In Salem, in 1676, it was "ordered by ye Selectmen yt the three Constables
+doe attend att ye three greate doores of ye meeting-house every Lordes Day
+att ye end of ye sermon, both forenoone and afternoone, and to keep ye
+doores fast and suffer none to goe out before ye whole exercises bee
+ended." Thus Salem people had to listen to no end of praying and
+prophesying from their ministers and elders for they "couldn't get out."
+
+As the years passed on, the church attendants became less referential and
+much more impatient and fearless, and soon after the Revolutionary War one
+man in Medford made a bargain with his minister--Rev. Dr. Osgood--that he
+would attend regularly the church services every Sunday morning, provided
+he could always leave at twelve o'clock. On each Sabbath thereafter, as
+the obstinate preacher would not end his sermon one minute sooner than
+his habitual time, which was long after twelve, the equally stubborn
+limited-time worshipper arose at noon, as he had stipulated, and stalked
+noisily out of meeting.
+
+A minister about to preach in a neighboring parish was told of a custom
+which prevailed there of persons who lived at a distance rising and leaving
+the house ere the sermon was ended. He determined to teach them a lesson,
+and announced that he would preach the first part of his sermon to the
+sinners, and the latter part to the saints, and that the sinners would of
+course all leave as soon as their portion had been delivered. Every soul
+remained until the end of the service.
+
+At last, when other means of entertainment and recreation than church-going
+became common, and other forms of public addresses than sermons were
+frequently given, New England church-goers became so restless and
+rebellious under the regime of hour-long prayers and indefinitely
+protracted sermons that the long services were gradually condensed and
+curtailed, to the relief of both preacher and hearers.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House.
+
+
+
+In colonial days in New England the long and tedious services must have
+been hard to endure in the unheated churches in bitter winter weather, so
+bitter that, as Judge Sewall pathetically recorded, "The communion bread
+was frozen pretty hard and rattled sadly into the plates." Sadly down
+through the centuries is ringing in our ears the gloomy rattle of that
+frozen sacramental bread on the Church plate, telling to us the solemn
+story of the austere and comfortless church-life of our ancestors. Would
+that the sound could bring to our chilled hearts the same steadfast and
+pure Christian faith that made their gloomy, freezing services warm with
+God's loving presence!
+
+Again Judge Sewall wrote: "Extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow. Blows
+much more as coming home at Noon, and so holds on. Bread was frozen at
+Lord's Table. Though 't was so cold John Tuckerman was baptized. At six
+o'clock my ink freezes, so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my
+Wives chamber. Yet was very Comfortable at Meeting." In the penultimate
+sentence of this quotation may be found the clue and explanation of the
+seemingly incredible assertion in the last sentence. The reason why he was
+comfortable in church was that he was accustomed to sit in cold rooms; even
+with the great open-mouthed and open-chimneyed fireplaces full of blazing
+logs, so little heat entered the rooms of colonial dwelling-houses that one
+could not be warm unless fairly within the chimney-place; and thus, even
+while sitting by the fire, his ink froze. Another entry of Judge Sewall's
+tells of an exceeding cold day when there was "Great Coughing" in meeting,
+and yet a new-born baby was brought into the icy church to be baptized.
+Children were always carried to the meeting-house for baptism the first
+Sunday after birth, even in the most bitter weather. There are no entries
+in Judge Sewall's diary which exhibit him in so lovable and gentle a light
+as the records of the baptism of his fourteen children,--his pride when
+the child did not cry out or shrink from the water in the freezing winter
+weather, thus early showing true Puritan fortitude; and also his noble
+resolves and hopes for their future. On this especially cold day when a
+baby was baptized, the minister prayed for a mitigation of the weather,
+and on the same day in another town "Rev. Mr. Wigglesworth preached on the
+text, Who can stand before His Cold? Then by his own and people's sickness
+three Sabbaths passed without public Worship." February 20 he preached from
+these words: "He sends forth his word and thaws them." And the very next
+day a thaw set in which was regarded as a direct answer to his prayer and
+sermon. Sceptics now-a-days would suggest that he chose well the time to
+pray for milder weather.
+
+Many persons now living can remember the universal and noisy turning up
+of great-coat collars, the swinging of arms, and knocking together of the
+heavy-booted feet of the listeners towards the end of a long winter sermon.
+Dr. Hopkins used to say, when the noisy tintamarre began, "My hearers, have
+a little patience, and I will soon close."
+
+Another clergyman was irritated beyond endurance by the stamping,
+clattering feet, a _supplosio pedis_ that he regarded as an irreverent
+protest and complaint against the severity of the weather, rather than as a
+hint to him to conclude his long sermon. He suddenly and noisily closed his
+sermon-book, leaned forward out of his high pulpit, and thundered out these
+Biblical words of rebuke at his freezing congregation, whose startled faces
+stared up at him through dense clouds of vapor. "Out of whose womb came the
+ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are
+hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Knowest thou the
+ordinance of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?
+Great things doth God which we cannot comprehend. He saith to the snow, Be
+thou on the earth. By the breath of God frost is given. He causeth it to
+come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. Hearken unto
+this. _Stand still_, and consider the wondrous works of God." We can
+believe that he roared out the words "stand still," and that there was no
+more noise in that meeting-house on cold Sundays during the remainder of
+that winter.
+
+The ministers might well argue that no one suffered more from the freezing
+atmosphere than they did. In many records I find that they were forced to
+preach and pray with their hands cased in woollen or fur mittens or heavy
+knit gloves; and they wore long camlet cloaks in the pulpit and covered
+their heads with skull caps--as did Judge Sewall--and possibly wore, as he
+did also, a _hood_. Many a wig-hating minister must, in the Arctic
+meeting-house, have longed secretly for the grateful warmth to his head and
+neck of one of those "horrid Bushes of Vanity," a full-bottomed flowing
+wig.
+
+On bitter winter days Dr. Stevens of Kittery used to send a servant to the
+meeting-house to find out how many of his flock had braved the piercing
+blasts. If only seven persons were present, the servant asked them to
+return with him to the parsonage to listen to the sermon; but if there were
+eight members in the meeting-house he so reported to the Doctor, who then
+donned his long worsted cloak, tied it around his waist with a great
+handkerchief, and attired thus, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears,
+and with heavy mittens on his hands, ploughed through the deep snow to
+the church, and in the same dress preached his long, knotty sermon in
+his pulpit, while fierce wintry blasts rattled the windows and shook the
+turret, and the eight godly, shivering souls wished profoundly that one of
+their number had "lain at home in a slothfull, lazey, prophane way," and
+thus permitted the seven others and the minister to have the sermon in
+comfort in the parsonage kitchen before the great blazing logs in the open
+fireplace.
+
+Ah, it makes one shiver even to think of those gloomy churches, growing
+colder, and more congealed through weeks of heavy frost and fierce
+northwesters until they bore the chill of death itself. One can but
+wonder whether that fell scourge of New England, that hereditary
+curse--consumption--did not have its first germs evolved and nourished in
+our Puritan ancestors by the Spartan custom of sitting through the long
+winter services in the icy, death-like meeting-houses.
+
+Of the insufficient clothing of the church attendants of olden times it
+is unnecessary to speak with much detail. The goodmen with their heavy
+top-boots or jack-boots, their milled or frieze stockings, their warm
+periwigs surmounted by fur caps or beaver hats or hoods; and with their
+many-caped great-coats or full round cloaks were dressed with a sufficient
+degree of comfort, though they did not possess the warm woollen and silken
+underclothing which now make a man's winter attire so comfortable. They
+carried muffs too, as the advertisements of the times show. The "Boston
+News Letter" of 1716 offers a reward for a man's muff lost on the Sabbath
+day in the street. In 1725 Dr. Prince lost his black bearskin muff, and in
+1740 a "sableskin man's muff" was advertised as having been lost.
+
+But the Puritan goodwives and maidens were dressed in a meagre and scanty
+fashion that when now considered seems fairly appalling. As soon as
+the colonies grew in wealth and fashion, thin silk or cotton hose were
+frequently worn in midwinter by the wives and daughters of well-to-do
+colonists; and correspondingly thin cloth or kid or silk slippers,
+high-channelled pumps, or low shoes with paper soles and "cross-cut" or
+wooden heels were the holiday and Sabbath-day covering for the feet. In wet
+weather clogs and pattens formed an extra and much needed protection
+when the fair colonists walked. Linen underclothing formed the first
+superstructure of the feminine costume and threw its penetrating chill to
+the very marrow of the bones. Often in mid-winter the scant-skirted French
+calico gowns were made with short elbow sleeves and round, low necks, and
+the throat and shoulders were lightly covered with thin lawn neckerchiefs
+or dimity tuckers. The flaunting hooped-petticoat of another decade was
+worn with a silk or brocade sacque. A thin cloth cape or mantle or spencer,
+lined with sarcenet silk, was frequently the only covering for the
+shoulders. In examining the treasured contents of old wardrobes, trunks,
+and high-chests, and in reading the descriptions of women's winter attire
+worn throughout the eighteenth and half through the nineteenth century, I
+am convinced that the only portions of Puritan female anatomy that were
+clothed with anything approaching respectable regard for health in the
+inclement New England climate were the head and the hands. The hands of
+"New English dames" were carefully protected with embroidered kid or
+leather gloves (for the early New Englanders were great glove wearers) or
+with warm knit woollen mittens, though mittens for women's wear were
+always fingerless. The well-gloved hands were moreover warmly ensconced in
+enormous stuffed muffs of bearskin which were almost as large as a
+flour barrel, or in smaller muffs of rabbit-skin or mink or beaver. The
+goodwives' heads bore, besides the close caps so universally worn, mufflers
+and veils and hoods,--hoods of all kinds and descriptions, from the hoods
+of serge and camlet and gauze and black silk that Mistress Estabrook, wife
+of the Windham parson, proudly owned and wore, from the prohibited "silk
+and tiffany hoods" of the earliest planters down through the centuries'
+inflorescence of "hoods of crimson colored persian," "wild bore and hum-hum
+long hoods," "pointed velvet capuchins," "scarlet gipsys," "pinnered
+and tasselled hoods," "shirred lustring hoods," "hoods of rich pptuna,"
+"muskmelon hoods," to the warm quilted "punkin hoods" worn within this
+century in country churches. These "punkin-hoods" were quilted with great
+rolls of woollen wadding and drawn tight between the rolls with strong
+cords. They formed a deafening and heating head-covering which always had
+to be loosened and thrust back when the wearer was within doors. It
+was only equalled in shapeless clumsiness and unique ugliness by its
+summer-sister of the same date, the green silk calash,--that funniest and
+quaintest of all New England feminine headgear,--a great sunshade that
+could not be called a bonnet, always made of bright green silk shirred on
+strong lengths of rattan or whalebone, and extendible after the fashion of
+a chaise top. It could be drawn out over the face by a little green ribbon
+or "bridle" that was fastened to the extreme front at the top; or it could
+be pushed in a close-gathered mass on the back of the head These calashes
+were frequently a foot and a half in diameter, and thus stood well up from
+the head and did not disarrange the hair nor crush the headdress or cap.
+They formed a perfect and easily-adjusted shade from the sun. Masks, too,
+the fair Puritans wore to further protect their heads and faces,--masks of
+green silk or black vehet, with silver mouthpieces to place within the lips
+and thus enable the wearer to keep the mask firmly in place. Sometimes two
+little strings with a silver bead at one end were fastened to the mask, and
+seined as mouthpieces. With a string and bead at either corner of the
+mouth the mask-wearer could talk quite freely while still retaining her
+face-covering in its protecting position. These masks were never worn
+within doors. In the list of goods ordered by George Washington from Europe
+for his fair bride Martha were several of these riding-masks, and the kind
+step-father even ordered a supply of small masks for "Miss Custis," his
+little step-daughter.
+
+In bitter winter weather women carried to meeting little
+foot-stoves,--metal boxes which stood on legs and were filled with hot
+coals at home, and a second time during the morning from the hearthstone of
+a neighboring farm-house or a noon-house. These foot-warmers helped to make
+endurable to the goodwives the icy chill of the meeting-house; and round
+their mother's foot-stove the shivering little children sat on their low
+crickets, warming their half-frozen fingers.
+
+Some of these foot-stoves were really pretentious church-furnishings. I
+have seen one "brassen foot-stove" which had the owner's cipher cut out of
+the sheet metal, and from the side was hung a wrought brass chain. By this
+chain, a century ago, the shining polished brass stove was carried into
+church in the hands of a liveried black man, who held it ostentatiously at
+arms' length, that neither ash nor scorch might touch his scarlet velvet
+breeches. And after he had tucked it under my lady's tiny feet as she sat
+in her pew, he retired to his freezing loft high up among the beams,--the
+"Nigger Pew,"--where, I am sorry to record, he more than once solaced and
+warmed himself with a bottle of "kill-devil" which he had smuggled into
+church, until he fell ignominiously asleep and his drunken snores so
+disturbed the minister and the congregation, that two tithingmen were
+forced to climb the ladder-like staircase and pull him down and out of
+the church and to the neighboring tavern to sleep off the effects of the
+liquor. For being "a man and a brother" and, above all, in spite of his
+petty idiosyncrasies, a very good and cherished servant, he could not be
+thrust out into the snow to freeze to death.
+
+But with the extreme Puritan contempt of comfort even foot-stoves were
+not always allowed. The First Church of Roxbury, after having one church
+edifice destroyed by fire in 1747, prohibited the use of footstoves in
+meeting, and the Roxbury matrons sat with frozen toes in their fine new
+meeting-house. The Old South Church of Boston was not so rigid, though it
+felt the same dread of fire; for we find this entry on the records of the
+church under the date of January 10, 1771: "Whereas, danger is apprehended
+from the [foot] stoves that arc frequently left in the meeting-house after
+the publick worship is over; Voted, that the Saxton make diligent search on
+the Lord's Day evening and in the evening after a lecture, to see if any
+stoves are left in the house, and that if he find any there he take them
+to his own house; and it is expected that the owners of such stoves make
+reasonable satisfaction to the Saxton for his trouble before they take them
+away."
+
+In Hardwicke, in 1792, it was ordered that "no stows be carried into our
+new meeting-house with fire in them." The Hardwicke women may have found
+comfort in a contrivance which is thus described in by an "old inhabitant:"
+
+      "There to warm their feet
+  Was seen an article now obsolete,
+  A sort of basket tub of braided straw
+  Or husks, in which is placed a heated stone,
+  Which does half-frozen limbs superbly thaw.
+  And warms the marrow of the oldest bone."
+
+In some of the early, poorly built log meeting-houses, fur bags made of
+coarse skins, such as wolf-skin, were nailed or tied to the edges of the
+benches, and into these bags the worshippers thrust their feet for warmth.
+In some communities it was the custom for each family to bring on cold days
+its "dogg" to meeting; where, lying at or on his master's feet, he proved
+a source of grateful warmth. These animal stoves became such an abounding
+nuisance, however, that dog-whippers had to be appointed to serve on
+Sundays to drive out the dogs. All through the records of the early
+churches we find such entries as this: "Whatsoever doggs come into the
+meeting-house in time of public worship, their owners shall each pay
+sixpence." Sixpence seems little, but the thrifty and poor Puritans would
+rather freeze their toes than pay sixpence for their calorific dogs.
+
+The church members made many rules and regulations to keep the cold out of
+the meeting-house during service-time, or perhaps we should say to keep the
+wind out. Thus in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1725 it was ordered that the
+"several doors of the meeting-house be taken care of and kept shut in very
+cold and windy seasons according to the lying of the wind from time to
+time; and that people in such windy weather come in at the leeward doors
+only, and take care that they are easily shut both to prevent the breaking
+of the doors and the making of a noise." In other churches it was ordered
+that "no doors be opened to the windward and only one door to the leeward"
+during winter weather.
+
+The first church of Salem built a "cattied chimney twelve feet long" in its
+meeting-house in 1662, but five years later it was removed, perhaps through
+the colonists' dread lest the building be destroyed by a conflagration
+caused by the combustible nature of the materials of which the chimney was
+composed. Felt, in his "Annals of Salem," asserts that the First Church of
+Boston was the first New England congregation to have a stove for heating
+the meeting-house at the time of public worship; this was in 1773. This
+statement is incorrect. Mr. Judd says the Hadley church had an iron stove
+in their meeting-house as early as 1734--the Hadley people were such
+sybarites and novelty-lovers in those early days! The Old South Church of
+Boston followed in the luxurious fashion in 1783, and the "Evening Post"
+of January 25, 1783, contained a poem of which these four lines show the
+criticising and deprecating spirit:--
+
+  "Extinct the sacred fire of love,
+    Our zeal grown cold and dead,
+  In the house of God we fix a stove
+    To warm us in their stead."
+
+Other New England congregations piously froze during service-time well into
+this century. The Longmeadow church, early in the field, had a stove in
+1810; the Salem people in 1815; and the Medford meeting in 1820. The church
+in Brimfield in 1819 refused to pay for a stove, but ordered as some
+sacrifice to the desire for comfort, two extra doors placed on the
+gallery-stairs to keep out draughts; but when in that town, a few years
+later, a subscription was made to buy a church stove, one old member
+refused to contribute, saying "good preaching kept him hot enough without
+stoves."
+
+As all the church edifices were built without any thought of the
+possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best
+they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually
+placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters,
+there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous
+stove-pipes that too often spread, from every leaky and ill-fastened
+joint, smoke and sooty vapors, and sometimes pyroligneous drippings on the
+congregation. Often tin pails to catch the drippings were hung under the
+stove-pipes, forming a further chaste and elegant church-decoration. Many
+serious objections were made to the stoves besides the aesthetic ones.
+It was alleged that they would be the means of starting many destructive
+conflagrations; that they caused severe headaches in the church attendants;
+and worst of all, that the _heat warped the ladies' tortoise-shell
+back-combs_.
+
+The church reformers contended, on the other hand, that no one could
+properly receive spiritual comfort while enduring such decided bodily
+discomfort. They hoped that with increased physical warmth, fervor in
+religion would be equally augmented,--that, as Cowper wrote,--
+
+  "The churches warmed, they would no longer hold
+  Such frozen figures, stiff as they are cold."
+
+Many were the quarrels and discussions that arose in New England
+communities over the purchase and use of stoves, and many were the meetings
+held and votes taken upon the important subject.
+
+"Peter Parley"--Mr. Samuel Goodrich--gave, in his "Recollections," a very
+amusing account of the sufferings endured by the wife of an anti-stove
+deacon. She came to church with a look of perfect resignation on the
+Sabbath of the stove's introduction, and swept past the unwelcome intruder
+with averted head, and into her pew. She sat there through the service,
+growing paler with the unaccustomed heat, until the minister's words about
+"heaping coals of fire" brought too keen a sense of the overwhelming and
+unhealthful stove-heat to her mind, and she fainted. She was carried out of
+church, and upon recovering said languidly that it "was the heat from the
+stove." A most complete and sudden resuscitation was effected, however,
+when she was informed of the fact that no fire had as yet been lighted in
+the new church-furnishing.
+
+Similar chronicles exist about other New England churches, and bear a
+striking resemblance to each other. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in an address
+delivered in New York on December 20, 1853, the anniversary of the Landing
+of the Pilgrims, referred to the opposition made to the introduction of
+stoves into the old meeting-house in Litchfield, Connecticut, during the
+ministry of his father, and gave an amusing account of the results of the
+introgression. This allusion called up many reminiscences of anti-stove
+wars, and a writer in the "New York Enquirer" told the same story of the
+fainting woman in Litchfield meeting, who began to fan herself and at
+length swooned, saying when she recovered "that the heat of the horrid
+stove had caused her to faint." A correspondent of the "Cleveland Herald"
+confirmed the fact that the fainting episode occurred in the Litchfield
+meeting-house. The editor of the "Hartford Daily Courant" thus added his
+testimony:--
+
+    "Violent opposition had been made to the introduction of a stove in the
+    old meeting-house, and an attempt made in vain to induce the soc
+    to purchase one. The writer was one of seven young men who finally
+    purchased a stove and requested permission to put it up in the
+    meeting-house on trial. After much difficulty the committee consented.
+    It was all arranged on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday we took our
+    seats in the Bass, rather earlier than usual, to see the fun. It was a
+    warm November Sunday, in which the sun shone cheerfully and warmly on
+    the old south steps and into the naked windows. The stove stood in the
+    middle aisle, rather in front of the Tenor Gallery. People came in and
+    stared. Good old Deacon Trowbridge, one of the most simple-hearted and
+    worthy men of that generation, had, as Mr. Beecher says, been induced
+    to give up his opposition. He shook his head, however, as he felt the
+    heat reflected from it, and gathered up the skirts of his great
+    as he passed up the broad aisle to the deacon's seat. Old Uncle Noah
+    Stone, a wealthy farmer of the West End, who sat near, scowled and
+    muttered at the effects of the heat, but waited until noon to utter his
+    maledictions over his nut-cakes and cheese at the intermission. There
+    had in fact been _no fire in the stove_, the day being too warm.
+    We were too much upon the broad grin to be very devotional, and smiled
+    rather loudly at the funny things we saw. But when the editor of the
+    village paper, Mr. Bunce, came in (who was a believer in stoves in
+    churches) and with a most satisfactory air warmed his hands by the
+    stove, keeping the skirts of his great-coat carefully between his
+    knees, we could stand it no longer but dropped invisible behind the
+    breastwork. But the climax of the whole was (as the Cleveland man says)
+    when Mrs. Peck went out in the middle of the service. It was, however,
+    the means of reconciling the whole society; for after that first day we
+    heard no more opposition to the warm stove in the meeting-house."
+
+With all this corroborative evidence I think it is fully proved that the
+event really happened in Litchfield, and that the honor was stolen for
+other towns by unveracious chroniclers; otherwise we must believe in an
+amazing unanimity of church-joking and sham-fainting all over New England.
+
+The very nature, the stern, pleasure-hating and trial-glorying Puritan
+nature, which made our forefathers leave their English homes to come, for
+the love of God and the freedom of conscience, to these wild, barren, and
+unwelcoming shores, made them also endure with fortitude and almost with
+satisfaction all personal discomforts, and caused them to cling with
+persistent firmness to such outward symbols of austere contempt of
+luxury, and such narrow-minded signs of love of simplicity as the lack of
+comfortable warmth during the time of public worship. The religion which
+they had endured such bitter hardships to establish, did not, in their
+minds, need any shielding and coddling to keep it alive, but thrived far
+better on Spartan severity and simplicity; hence, it took two centuries of
+gradual and most tardy softening and modifying of character to prepare the
+Puritan mind for so advanced a reform and luxury as proper warmth in the
+meeting-houses in winter.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Noon-House.
+
+
+
+There might have been seen a hundred years ago, by the side of many an old
+meeting-house in New England, a long, low, mean, stable-like building, with
+a rough stone chimney at one end. This was the "noon-house," or "Sabba-day
+house," or "horse-hows," as it was variously called. It was a place of
+refuge in the winter time, at the noon interval between the two services,
+for the half-frozen members of the pious congregation, who found there the
+grateful warmth which the house of God denied. They built in the rude stone
+fireplace a great fire of logs, and in front of the blazing wood ate their
+noon-day meal of cold pie, of doughnuts, of pork and peas, or of brown
+bread with cheese, which they had brought safely packed in their capacious
+saddlebags. The dining-place smelt to heaven of horses, for often at the
+further end of the noon-house were stabled the patient steeds that, doubly
+burdened, had borne the Puritans and their wives to meeting; but this
+stable-odor did not hinder appetite, nor did the warm equine breaths that
+helped to temper the atmosphere of the noon-house offend the senses of the
+sturdy Puritans. From the blazing fire in this "life-saving station" the
+women replenished their little foot-stoves with fresh, hot coals, and thus
+helped to make endurable the icy rigor of the long afternoon service.
+
+If the winter Sabbath Day were specially severe, a "hired-man," or one of
+the grown sons of the family, was sent at an early hour to the noon-house
+in advance of the other church-attendants, and he started in the rough
+fireplace a fire for their welcome after their long, cold, morning ride;
+and before its cheerful blaze they thoroughly warmed themselves before
+entering the icy meeting-house. The embers were carefully covered over
+and left to start a second blaze at the nooning, covered again during the
+afternoon service, and kindled up still a third time to warm the chilled
+worshippers ere they started for their cold ride home in the winter
+twilight. And when the horses were saddled, or were harnessed and hitched
+into the great box-sleighs or "pungs," and when the good Puritans were well
+wrapped up, the dying coals were raked out for safety and the noon-house
+was left as quiet and as cold as the deserted meeting-house until the
+following Sabbath or Lecture day.
+
+If the meeting-house chanced to stand in the middle of the town (as was
+the universal custom in the earliest colonial days) of course a noon-house
+would be rarely built, for it would plainly not be needed. Nor was a
+"Sabba-day house" always seen in more lonely situations, if the sanctuary
+were placed near the substantial farm-house of a hospitable farmer; for to
+that friendly shelter the whole congregation would at noon-time repair and
+absorb to the fullest degree the welcome cider and warmth.
+
+In Lexington for many years after the Revolutionary War, the winter
+church-goers who came from any distance spent the nooning at the Dudley
+Tavern, where a roaring fire was built in the inn-parlor, and there the
+women and children ate their midday lunch. The men gathered in the bar-room
+and drank flip, and ate the tavern gingerbread and cheese, and talked over
+the horrors and glories of the war. In Haverhill, Derby, and many other
+towns, the school-house, which was built on the village green beside the
+church, was used for a noon-house by the church members, though not by
+their horses. The house of learning was never chimneyless and fireless, as
+was the house of God.
+
+As churches and towns multiplied, a meeting-house was often built to
+accommodate two little settlements or villages (and thus was convenient for
+neither), and was frequently placed in an isolated or inconvenient place,
+the top of a high hill being perhaps the most inconvenient and the most
+favored site. Thus a noon-house became an absolute necessity to Puritan
+health and existence, and often two or three were built near one
+meeting-house; while in some towns, as in Bristol, a whole row of
+disfiguring little "Sabba-day houses" stood on the meeting-house green,
+and in them the farmers (as they quaintly expressed in their petitions for
+permission to erect the buildings) "kept their duds and horses."
+
+In Derby, after several petitions had been granted to build noon-houses, it
+was found necessary, in 1764, to place some restrictions as to the location
+of the buildings, which had hitherto evidently been placed with the
+characteristically Puritanical indifference to general convenience or
+appearance. While the town still permitted the little log-huts to be
+erected, and though they could be placed on either side of the highway, it
+was ordered that the builders must not so locate them as to "incommode any
+highways." As early as 1690 the thoughtful Stonington people built a house
+"14 foot square and seven foot posts" with a chimney at one side, for the
+express purpose of having a place where their minister, Rev. Mr. Noyes,
+could thaw out between services. The New Canaan Church built on the green
+beside their meeting-house a fine "Society House," twenty-one feet long
+and sixteen feet wide, with a big chimney and fireplace. The horses were
+plainly "not in society" in New Canaan, for they were excluded from the
+occupancy and privileges of the Society House.
+
+"James June & all that lives at Larences" were allowed to build a
+"Sabbath-House" on the green near the New Britain meeting-house "as a
+Commodate for their conveniency of comeing to meeting on the Sabbath;" at
+the same time James Slason of the same village was given permission to "set
+yp a house for ye advantage of his having a place to go to" on the Sabbath.
+Frequently the petitions "to build a Sabbath Day House" or a "Housel for
+Shelter for Horss" were made in company by several farmers for their joint
+use and comfort, as shown by entries in the town and church records of
+Norwalk, New Milford, Durham, and Hartford.
+
+Noon-houses were much more frequent in Connecticut than in Massachusetts,
+and in several small towns in the former State they were used weekly
+between Sunday services until within the memory of persons now living;
+and some of the buildings still exist, though changed into granaries or
+stables. There was one also in use for many years and until recent years in
+Topsfield, in Massachusetts. We chanced upon one still standing on a lonely
+Narragansett road. A little enclosed burial-place, with moss-grown and
+weather-smoothed head-stones and neglected graves, was by the side of a
+filled-in cellar, upon which a church evidently had once stood. At a short
+distance from the church-site was a long, low, gray, weather-beaten wooden
+building, with a coarse stone-and-mortar chimney at one end, and a great
+door at the other. Two small windows, destitute of glass, permitted us
+to peer into the interior of this dilapidated old structure, and we saw
+within, a floor of beaten earth, a rough stone fireplace, and a few rude
+horse-stalls. We felt sure that this tumble-down building had been neither
+a dwelling-house nor a stable, but a noon-house; and the occupants of a
+neighboring farm-house confirmed our decision. Too worthless to destroy,
+too out of the way to be of any use to any person, that old noon-house,
+through neglect and isolation, has remained standing until to-day.
+
+It was not until the use of chaises and wagons became universal, and the
+new means of conveyance crowded out the old-fashioned saddle and pillion,
+and the trotting horse superseded the once fashionable but quickly despised
+pacer, that the great stretches of horse-sheds were built which now
+surround and disfigure all our country churches. These sheds protect,
+of course, both horse and carriage from wind and rain. Few churches had
+horse-sheds until after the War of the Revolution, and some not until after
+the War of 1812. In 1796 the Longmeadow Church had "liberty to erect a
+Horse House in the Meeting House Lane." This horse house was a horse-shed.
+
+The "wretched boys" were not permitted even in these noon-houses to talk,
+much less to "sporte and playe." In some parishes it was ordered by the
+minister and the deacons that the Bible should be read and expounded
+to them, or a sermon be read to keep them quiet during the nooning.
+Occasionally some old patriarch would explain to them the notes that he
+had taken during the morning sermon. More unbearable still, the boys were
+sometimes ordered to explain the notes which they had taken themselves. I
+would I had heard some of those explanations! Thus they literally, as was
+written in 1774, throve on the "Good Fare of Brown Bread and the Gospell."
+
+In Andover, Judge Phillips left in his will a silver flagon to the church
+as an expression of interest and hope that the "laudable practice of
+reading between services may be continued so long as even a small number
+shall be disposed to attend the exercise." Mr. Abbott left another silver
+flagon to the Andover Church to encourage reading between services; though
+how this piece of plate encouraged personally, since neither the deacons
+nor the boys got it as a prize, cannot be precisely understood. The
+noon-house in Andover was a large building with a great chimney and open
+fireplace at either end. It has always seemed to me a piece of gratuitous
+posthumous cruelty in Judge Phillips and Mr. Abbott to try to cheat those
+Andover boys of their noon-time rest and relaxation, and to expect them,
+wriggling and twisting with repressed vitality, to listen to a long extra
+sermon, read perhaps by some unskilled reader, or explained by some
+incapable expounder. The Sabbath-school did not then exist, and was not in
+general favor until the noon-houses had begun to disappear. The Reverend
+Jedediah Morse, father of the inventor of the electric telegraph, was
+almost the first New England clergyman who approved of Sabbath-schools and
+established them in his parish. In Salem they were opened in 1808, and the
+scholars came at half-past six on Sunday mornings. Fancy the chill and
+gloom of the unheated, ill-lighted churches at that hour on winter
+mornings. The "Salem Gazette" openly characterized Sunday-schools, when
+first suggested, as profanations of the Sabbath, and for years they were
+not allowed in many Congregational churches. When the Sabbath-schools
+were universally established, and thus the attention and interest of the
+children was gained during the noon interval (the time the schools were
+usually held in country churches), and when each family sat in its own pew,
+and thus the boys were separated, and each under his parents' guardianship,
+the "wretched boys" of the Puritan Sabbath disappeared, and well-behaved,
+quiet, orderly boys were seen instead in the New England churches.
+
+This fashion of sermon-reading at the nooning happily did not obtain in
+all parts of New England. In many villages the meetings in the society
+noon-houses were to the townspeople what a Sunday newspaper is to Sunday
+readers now-a-days, an advertisement and exposition of all the news of the
+past week, and also a suggestion of events to come. At noon they discussed
+and wondered at the announcements and publishings which were tacked on
+the door of the meeting-house or the notices that had been read from the
+pulpit. The men talked in loud voices of the points of the sermon, of the
+doctrines of predestination pedobaptism and antipedobaptism, of original
+sin, and that most fascinating mystery, the unpardonable sin, and in lower
+voices of wolf and bear killing, of the town-meeting, the taxes, the crops
+and cattle; and they examined with keen interest one another's horses,
+and many a sly bargain in horse-flesh or exchange of cows and pigs was
+suggested, bargained over, and clinched in the "Sabba'-day house." Many a
+piece of village electioneering was also discussed and "worked" between the
+services. The shivering women crowded around the blazing and welcome fire,
+and seated themselves on rude benches and log seats while they ate and
+exchanged doughnuts, slices of rusk, or pieces of "pumpkin and Indian mixt"
+pie, and also gave to each other receipts therefor; and they discoursed
+in low voices of their spinning and weaving, of their candle-dipping
+or candle-running, of their success or failure in that yearly trial of
+patience and skill--their soap-making, of their patterns in quilt-piecing,
+and sometimes they slyly exchanged quilt-patterns. A sentence in an old
+letter reads thus: "Anne Bradford gave to me last Sabbath in the Noon House
+a peecing of the Blazing Star; tis much Finer than the Irish Chain or the
+Twin Sisters. I want yelloe peeces for the first joins, small peeces will
+do. I will send some of my lilac flowered print for some peeces of Cicelys
+yelloe India bed vallants, new peeces not washed peeces." They gave one
+another medical advice and prescriptions of "roots and yarbs" for their
+"rheumatiz," "neuralgy," and "tissick;" and some took snuff together, while
+an ancient dame smoked a quiet pipe. And perhaps (since they were women as
+well as Puritans) they glanced with envy, admiration, or disapproval, or
+at any rate with close scrutiny, at one another's gowns and bonnets and
+cloaks, which the high-walled pews within the meeting-house had carefully
+concealed from any inquisitive, neighborly view.
+
+The wood for these beneficent noon-house fires was given by the farmers
+of the congregation, a load by each well-to-do land-owner, if it were a
+"society-house," and occasionally an apple-growing farmer gave a barrel of
+"cyder" to supply internal instead of external warmth. Cider sold in 1782
+for six shillings "Old Tenor" a barrel, so it was worth about the same
+as the wood both in money value and calorific qualities. A hundred years
+previously--in 1679--cider was worth ten shillings a barrel. In 1650, when
+first made in America, it was a costly luxury, selling for L4 4s. a barrel.
+That this thawed-out Sunday barrel of cider would prove invariably a source
+of much refreshment, inspiration, solace, tongue-loosing, and blood-warming
+to the chilled and shivering deacons, elders, and farmers who gathered in
+the noon-house, any one who has imbibed that all-potent and intoxicating
+beverage, oft-frozen "hard" cider, can fervently testify.
+
+Sometimes a very opulent farmer having built a noon-house for his own and
+his family's exclusive use, would keep in it as part of his "duds" a few
+simple cooking utensils in which his wife or daughters would re-heat or
+partially cook his noon-day Sabbath meal, and mix for him a hot toddy or
+punch, or a mug of that "most insinuating drink"--flip. Flip was made of
+home-brewed beer, sugar, and a liberal dash of Jamaica rum, and was mixed
+with a "logger-head"--a great iron "stirring-stick" which was heated in the
+fire until red hot and then thrust into the liquid. This seething iron made
+the flip boil and bubble and imparted to it a burnt, bitter taste which was
+its most attractive attribute. I doubt not that many a "loggerhead" was
+kept in New England noon-houses and left heating and gathering insinuating
+goodness in the glowing coals, while the pious owner sat freezing in the
+meeting-house, also gathering goodness, but internally keeping warm at the
+thought of the bitter nectar he should speedily brew and gladly imbibe at
+the close of the long service.
+
+The comfort of a hot midday dinner on the Sabbath was not regarded with
+much favor, though perhaps with secret envy, by the neighbors of the
+luxury-loving farmer, who saw in it too close an approach to "profanation
+of the Sabbath." The heating and boiling of the flip with the red hot
+"loggerhead" hardly came under the head of "unnecessary Sabbath cooking"
+even in the minds of the most straight-laced descendants of the Puritans.
+
+When stoves were placed and used in the New England meeting-houses, the
+noon-day lunches were eaten within the pews inside the sanctuary, and the
+noon-houses, no longer being needed, followed the law of cause and effect,
+and like many other institutions of the olden times quickly disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+The Deacon's Office.
+
+
+
+The deacons in the early New England churches had, besides their regular
+duties on the Lord's Day, and their special duties on communion Sabbaths,
+the charge of prudential concerns, and of providing for the poor of the
+church. They also "dispensed the word" on Sabbaths to the congregation
+during the absence of the ordained minister. Judge Sewall thus describes
+in his diary under the date of November, 1685, the method at that time of
+appointing or ordaining a deacon:--
+
+    "In afternoon Mr. Willard ordained our Brother Theophilus Frary to the
+    office of a Deacon. Declared his acceptance January 11th first
+    now again. Propounded him to the congregation at Noon. Then in even
+    propounded him if any of the church of other had to object they might
+    speak. Then took the Church's Vote, then call'd him up to the Pulpit,
+    laid his Hand on's head, and said I ordain Thee, etc., etc., gave him
+    his charge, then Prayed & sung 2nd Part of 84th Psalm."
+
+The deacons always sat near the pulpit in a pew, which was generally
+raised a foot or two above the level of the meeting-house floor, and which
+contained, usually, several high-backed chairs and a table or a broad
+swinging-shelf for use at the communion service. These venerable men were
+a group of awe-inspiring figures, who, next to the parson, received the
+respect of the community. In Bristol, Connecticut, the deacons wore
+starched white linen caps in the meeting-house to indicate their office,--a
+singular local custom. One of their duties in many communities was
+naturally to furnish the sacramental wines, and the money for the payment
+thereof was allowed to them from the church-rates, or was raised by special
+taxation. In Farmington, Connecticut, in 1669, each male inhabitant was
+ordered to pay a peck of wheat or one shilling to the deacons of the church
+to defray the expenses of the sacrament. In Groton church, in 1759, "4
+Coppers for every Sacrament for 1 year" was demanded from each communicant.
+In Springfield the "deacon's rate" was paid in "wampam,"--sixpence in
+"wampam" or a peck of Indian corn from each family in the town. This
+special tax was somewhat modified in case a man had no wife, or if he were
+not a church-member, but in the latter case he still had to pay some dues,
+though of course he could not take part in the communion service. In 1734
+the Milton church ordered the deacons to procure "good Canary Wine for
+the Communion Table." Abuses sometimes arose,--abominably poor wines were
+furnished, though full rates were paid for the purchase of wine of
+good quality; and in Newbury the man who was appointed to furnish the
+sacramental wines, sold, under that religious cover, wine and liquors at
+retail.
+
+The deacons also had charge of the vessels used in the communion service.
+These vessels were frequently stored, when not in use, under the pulpit in
+a little closet which opened into "the Ministers wives pue," and which was
+fabled to be at the disposal of the tithingmen and deacons for the darksome
+incarceration of unruly and Sabbath-breaking boys. The communion vessels
+were not always of valuable metal; John Cotton's first church had wooden
+chalices; the wealthier churches owned pieces of silver which had been
+given to them, one piece at a time, by members or friends of the church;
+but communion services of pewter were often seen.
+
+The church in Hanover, Massachusetts, bought a pewter service in 1728, and
+the record of the purchase still exists. It runs thus:--
+
+  3 Pewter Tankards marked C. T.    10 shillings.
+  5   "    Beakers    "    C. E.    6 sh. 6d. each.
+  2   "    Platters   "    C. P.    5 sh. each.
+  1   "    Basin for Baptisms.
+
+This pewter service is still owned by the Hanover church, a highly prized
+relic. Until 1753 the church in Andover used a pewter communion service,
+but when a silver service was given to it, the Andover church sent the
+vessels of baser metal to a sister church in Methuen. In Haverhill the will
+of a church-member named White gave to the church absolutely the pewter
+dishes which were used at the sacrament, and which had been his personal
+property. The "ffirst church" of Hartford had "one Puter fflagon, ffower
+pewter dishes, and a bason" left to it by the bequest of one of its
+members. When the Danvers church was burned in 1805, the pewter communion
+vessels were saved while the silver ones were either burnt or stolen. As
+pewter was, in the early days of New England, far from being a despised
+metal, and as pewter dishes and plates were seen on the tables of the
+wealthiest families, were left by will as precious possessions, were
+engraved with initials and stamped with coats of arms, and polished with
+as much care as were silver vessels, a communion service of pewter was
+doubtless felt to be a thoroughly satisfactory acquisition and appointment
+to a Puritan church.
+
+The deacons of course took charge of the church contributions. Lechford,
+in his "Plaine Dealing," thus describes the manner of giving in the Boston
+church in 1641:--
+
+    "Baptism being ended, follows the contribution, one of the deacons
+    saying, 'Brethren of the Congregation, now there is time left for
+    contribution, whereof as God has prospered you so freely offer.' The
+    Magistrates and chief gentlemen first, and then the Elders and all the
+    Congregation of them, and most of them that are not of the church, all
+    single persons, widows and women in absence of their husbands, came up
+    one after another one way, and bring their offering to the deacon at
+    his seat, and put it into a box of wood for the purpose, if it be money
+    or papers. If it be any other Chattel they set or lay it down before
+    the deacons; and so pass on another way to their seats again; which
+    money and goods the Deacons dispose towards the maintenance of the
+    Minister, and the poor of the Church, and the Churches occasions
+    without making account ordinarily."
+
+Lechford also said he saw a "faire gilt cup" given at the public
+contribution; and other gifts of value to the church and minister were
+often made. Libellous verses too were thrown into the contribution boxes,
+and warning and gloomy messages from the Quakers; and John Rogers,
+in derision of a pompous New London minister, threw in the insulting
+contribution of an old periwig. One Puritan goodwife, sternly unforgiving,
+never saw a contribution taken for proselyting the Indians without
+depositing in the contribution-box a number of leaden bullets, the only
+tokens she wished to see ever dispersed among the red men.
+
+Even our pious forefathers were not always quite honest in their church
+contributions, and had to be publicly warned, as the records show, that
+they must deposit "wampum without break or deforming spots," or "passable
+peage without breaches." The New Haven church was particularly tormented by
+canny Puritans who thus managed to dispose of their broken and worthless
+currency with apparent Christian generosity. In 1650 the New Haven "deacons
+informed the Court that the wampum which is putt into the Church Treasury
+is generally so bad that the Elders to whom they pay it cannot pay it
+away."
+
+In 1651, as the bad wampum was still paid in by the pious New Haven
+Puritans, it was ordered that "no money save silver or bills" be accepted
+by the deacons. After this order the deacons and elders found tremendous
+difficulty in getting any contributions at all, and many are the records of
+the actions and decisions of the church in regard to the perplexing matter.
+It should be said, in justice to the New Haven colonists, though they were
+the most opulent of the New England planters, save the wealthy settlers
+of Narragansett, that money of all kinds was scarce, and that the Indian
+money, wampum-peag, being made of a comparatively frail sea-shell, was more
+easily disfigured and broken than was metal coin; and that there was little
+transferable wealth in the community anyway, even in "Country Pay." The
+broken-wampum-giver of the seventeenth century, who contributed with intent
+to defraud and deceive the infant struggling church was the direct and
+lineal ancestor of the sanctimonious button-giver of nineteenth-century
+country churches.
+
+In Revolutionary times, after the divine service, special contributions
+were taken for the benefit of the Continental Army. In New England large
+quantities of valuable articles were thus collected. Not only money, but
+finger-rings, earrings, watches, and other jewelry, all kinds of male
+attire,--stockings, hats, coats, breeches, shoes,--produce and groceries of
+all kinds, were brought to the meeting-house to give to the soldiers. Even
+the leaden weights were taken out of the window-sashes, made into bullets,
+and brought to meeting. On one occasion Madam Faith Trumbull rose up in
+Lebanon meeting-house in Connecticut, when a collection was being made for
+the army, took from her shoulders a magnificent scarlet cloak, which had
+been a present to her from Count Rochambeau, the commander-in-chief of the
+French allied army, and advancing to the altar, gave it as her offering to
+the gallant men, who were fighting not only the British army, but terrible
+want and suffering. The fine cloak was cut into narrow strips and used as
+red trimmings for the uniforms of the soldiers. The romantic impressiveness
+of Madam Trumbull's patriotic act kindled warm enthusiasm in the
+congregation, and an enormous collection was taken, packed carefully, and
+sent to the army.
+
+One early duty of the deacons which was religiously and severely performed
+was to watch that no one but an accepted communicant should partake of the
+holy sacrament. One stern old Puritan, having been officially expelled from
+church-membership for some temporal rather than spiritual offence, though
+ignored by the all-powerful deacon, still refused to consider himself
+excommunicated, and calmly and doggedly attended the communion service
+bearing his own wine and bread, and in the solitude of his own pew communed
+with God, if not with his fellow-men. For nearly twenty years did this
+austere man rigidly go through this lonely and sad ceremonial, until he
+conquered by sheer obstinacy and determination, and was again admitted to
+church-fellowship.
+
+A very extraordinary custom prevailed in several New England churches.
+Through it the deacons were assigned a strange and serious duty which
+appeared to make them all-important and possibly self-important, and
+which must have weighed heavily upon them, were they truly godly, and
+conscientious in the performance of it. In the rocky little town of Pelham
+in the heart of Massachusetts, toward the close of the eighteenth century
+and during the pastorate of the notorious thief, counterfeiter, and forger,
+Rev. Stephen Burroughs, that remarkable rogue organized and introduced to
+his parishioners the custom of giving during the month a metal check to
+each worthy and truly virtuous church-member, on presentation of which the
+check-bearer was entitled to partake of the communion, and without which he
+was temporarily excommunicated. The duty of the deacon in this matter was
+to walk up and down the aisles of the church at the close of each service
+and deliver to the proper persons (proper in the deacon's halting human
+judgment) the significant checks. The deacon had also to see that this
+religionistic ticket was presented on the communion Sabbath. Great must
+have been the disgrace of one who found himself checkless at the end of the
+month, and greater even than the heart-burnings over seating the meeting
+must have been the jealousies and church quarrels that arose over the
+communion-checks. And yet no records of the protests or complaints of
+indignant or grieving parishioners can be found, and the existence of
+the too worldly, too business-like custom is known to us only through
+tradition.
+
+Many of the little chips called "Presbyterian checks" are, however, still
+in existence. They are oblong discs of pewter, about an inch and a half
+long, bearing the initials "P. P.," which stand, it is said, for "Pelham
+Presbyterian." I could not but reflect, as I looked at the simple little
+stamped slips of metal, that in a community so successful in the difficult
+work of counterfeiting coin, it would have been very easy to form a mould
+and cast from it spurious checks with which to circumvent the deacons and
+preserve due dignity in the meeting.
+
+The Presbyterian checks have never been attributed in Massachusetts to
+other than the Pelham church, and are usually found in towns in the
+vicinity of Pelham; and there the story of their purpose and use is
+universally and implicitly believed. A clergyman of the Pelham church gave
+to many of his friends these Presbyterian checks, which he had found among
+the disused and valueless church-properties, and the little relics of the
+old-time deacons and services have been carefully preserved.
+
+In New Hampshire, however, a similar custom prevailed in the churches of
+Londonderry and the neighboring towns.. The Londonderry settlers were
+Scotch-Irish Presbyterians (and the Pelham planters were an off-shoot of
+the Londonderry settlement), and they followed the custom of the Scotch
+Presbyterians in convening the churches twice a year to partake of the
+Lord's Supper. This assembly was always held in Londonderry, and ministers
+and congregations gathered from all the towns around. Preparatory services
+were held on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Long tables were placed in
+the aisles of the church on the Sabbath; and after a protracted and solemn
+address upon the deep meaning of the celebration and the duties of the
+church-members, the oldest members of the congregation were seated at the
+table and partook of the sacrament. Thin cakes of unleavened bread were
+specially prepared for this sacred service. Again and again were the tables
+refilled with communicants, for often seven hundred church-members were
+present. Thus the services were prolonged from early morning until
+nightfall. When so many were to partake of the Lord's Supper, it seemed
+necessary to take means to prevent any unworthy or improper person from
+presenting himself. Hence the tables were fenced off, and each communicant
+was obliged to present a "token." These tokens were similar to the
+"Presbyterian checks;" they were little strips of lead or pewter stamped
+with the initials "L. D.," which may have stood for "Londonderry" or
+"Lord's Day." They were presented during the year by the deacons and elders
+to worthy and pious church-members. This bi-annual celebration of the
+Lord's Supper--this gathering of old friends and neighbors from the rocky
+wilds of New Hampshire to join, in holy communion--was followed on Monday
+by cheerful thanksgiving and social intercourse, in which, as in every
+feast, our old friend, New England rum, played no unimportant part. The
+three days previous to the communion Sabbath were, however, solemnly
+devoted to the worship of God; a Londonderry man was reproved and
+prosecuted for spreading grain upon a Thursday preceding a communion
+Sunday, just as he would have been for doing similar work upon the Sabbath.
+The use of these "tokens" in the Londonderry church continued until the
+year 1830.
+
+In the coin collection of the American Antiquarian Society are little
+pewter communion-checks, or tokens, stamped with a heart. These were used
+in the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, and were delivered to pious
+church-members at the Friday evening prayer-meeting preceding the communion
+Sabbath. Long tables were set in the aisles, as at Londonderry. In
+practice, belief, and origin, the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania churches
+were sisters.
+
+The deacons had many minor duties to perform in the different parishes.
+Some of these duties they shared with the tithingman. They visited the
+homes of the church-members to hear the children say the catechism, they
+visited and prayed with the sick, and they also reported petty offences,
+though they were not accorded quite so powerful legal authority as the
+tithingmen and constables.
+
+It was much desired by several of the first-settled ministers that there
+should be deaconesses in the New England Puritan church, and many good
+reasons were given for making such appointments. It was believed that
+for the special duty of visiting the sick and afflicted in the community
+deaconesses would be more useful than deacons. There had been an aged
+deaconess in the Puritan church in Holland, who with a "little birchen
+rod" had kept the children in awe and order in meeting, and who had also
+exercised "her guifts" in speaking; but when she died no New England
+successor was appointed to fill her place.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims.
+
+
+We read in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," of the fair Priscilla, when
+John Alden came to woo her for his friend, the warlike little captain, that
+
+    "Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,
+    Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together; Rough-hewn,
+    angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and
+    overhung by the running vine of the verses. Such was the book from
+    whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem."
+
+One of these "well-worn psalm-books of Ainsworth" lies now before me,
+perhaps the very one from which the lonely Priscilla sang as she sat
+a-spinning.
+
+There is something especially dear to the lover and dreamer of the olden
+time, to the book-lover and antiquary as well, in an old, worn psalm or
+hymn book. It speaks quite as eloquently as does an old Bible of loving
+daily use, and adds the charm of interest in the quaint verse to reverence
+for the sacred word. A world of tender fancies springs into life as I turn
+over the pages of any old psalm-book "reading between the lines," and as
+I decipher the faded script on the titlepage. But this "psalm-book of
+Ainsworth," this book loved and used by the Pilgrims, brought over in one
+of those early ships, perhaps in the "Mayflower" itself, this book so
+symbolic of those early struggling days in New England, has a romance, a
+charm, an interest which thrills every drop of Puritan blood in my veins.
+
+It is pleasing, too, this "Ainsworth's Version," aside from any thought of
+its historic associations; its square pages of diversified type are well
+printed, and have a quaint unfamiliar look which is intensely attractive,
+and to which the odd, irregular notes of music, the curiously ornamented
+head and tail pieces, and the occasional Hebrew or Greek letters add their
+undefinable charm.
+
+It is a square quarto of three hundred and forty-eight closely printed
+pages, bound in time-stained but well-preserved parchment, and even the
+parchment itself is interesting, and lovely to the touch. The titlepage is
+missing, but I know that this is the edition printed, as was Priscilla's,
+in Amsterdam in 1612 (not "in England in 1600" as a note written in the
+last blank page states). The full title was "The Book of Psalms. Englished
+both in Prose and Metre. With annotations opening the words and sentences
+by conference with other Scriptures. Eph. v: 18,19. Bee yee filled with
+the Spirit speaking to yourselves in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual-Songs
+singing and making melodie in your hearts to the Lord." The book contains
+besides the Psalms and Annotations, on its first pages, a "Preface
+declaring the reason and use of the Book;" and at the last pages a "Table
+directing to some principal things observed in the Annotations of the
+Psalms," a list of "Hebrew phrases observed which are somewhat hard and
+figurative," and also some "General Observations touching the Psalms."
+
+I can well imagine what a pious delight this book was to our Pilgrim
+Fathers; and what a still greater delight it was to our Pilgrim Mothers,
+in that day and country of few books. They possessed in it, not only a
+wonderful new metrical version of the Psalms for singing, but a prose
+version for comparison as well; and the deeply learned and profoundly
+worded annotations placed at the end of each Psalm were doubtless of
+special interest to such "scripturists with all their hearts" as they were.
+
+There were also, "for the use and edification of the saints," printed above
+each psalm the airs of appropriate tunes. The "rough-hewn, angular notes"
+are irregularly lozenge-shaped, like the notes or "pricks" in Queen
+Elizabeth's "Virginal-Book," and are placed on the staff without bars.
+Ainsworth, in his preface, says, "Tunes for the Psalms I find none set of
+God: so that ech people is to use the most grave decent and comfortable
+manner that they know how, according to the general rule. The singing notes
+I have most taken from our Englished psalms when they will fit the mesure
+of the verse: and for the other long verses I have also taken (for the most
+part) the gravest and easiest tunes of the French and Dutch psalmes." Easy
+the tunes certainly are, to the utmost degree of simplicity.
+
+Great diversity too of type did the Pilgrims find in their Psalm-book:
+Roman type, Italics, black-letter, all were used; the verse was printed in
+Italics, the prose in Roman type, and the annotation in black-letter and
+small Roman text with close-spaced lines. This variety though picturesque
+makes the text rather difficult to read; for while one can decipher
+black-letter readily enough when reading whole pages of it, when it is
+interspersed with other type it makes the print somewhat confusing to the
+unaccustomed eye.
+
+One curious characteristic of the typography is the frequent use of the
+hyphen, compound words or rather compound phrases being formed apparently
+without English rule or reason. Such combinations as these are given as
+instances: "highly-him-preferre," "renowned-name," "repose-me-quietlie,"
+"in-mind-uplay," "turn-to-ashes," "my-alonely-soul," "beat-them-final,"
+"pouring-out-them-hard," "inveyers-mak-streight," and
+"condemn-thou-them-as-guilty,"--which certainly would make fit verses to
+be sung to the accompaniment of Master Mace's
+"excellent-large-plump-lusty-fullspeaking-organ."
+
+Ainsworth's Version when read proves to be a scholarly book, exhibiting far
+better grammar and punctuation and more uniformity of spelling than "The
+New England Psalm-book," which at a later date displaced Ainsworth in the
+affections and religious services of the New England Puritans and Pilgrims.
+Both versions are somewhat confused in sense, and of uncouth and grotesque
+versification; though the metre of Ainsworth is better than the rhyme. It
+is all written in "common metre," nearly all in lines of eight and six
+syllables alternately.
+
+The name of the author of this version was Henry Ainsworth; he was the
+greatest of all the Holland Separatists, a typical Elizabethan Puritan,
+who left the church in which he was educated and attached himself to the
+Separatists, or Brownists, as they were called. He went into exile in
+Amsterdam in 1593, and worked for some time as a porter in a book-seller's
+shop, living (as Roger Williams wrote) "upon ninepence in the weeke with
+roots boyled." He established, with the Reverend Mr. Johnson, the new
+church in Holland; and when it was divided by dissension, he became the
+pastor of the "Ainsworthian Brownists" and so remained for twelve years.
+He was a most accomplished scholar, and was called the "rabbi of his age."
+Governor Bradford, in his "Dialogue," written in 1648, says of Ainsworth,
+"He had not his better for the Hebrew tongue in the University nor scarce
+in Europe." Hence, naturally, he was constantly engaged upon some work of
+translating or commentating, and still so highly prized is some of his work
+that it has been reprinted during this century. He also, being a skilful
+disputant, wrote innumerable controversial pamphlets and books, many
+of which still exist. It is said that he once had a long and spirited
+controversy with a brother divine as to whether the ephod of Aaron were
+blue or green. I fear we of to-day have lost much that the final, decisive
+judgment from so learned scholars and students as to the correct color has
+not descended to us, and now, if we wish to know, we shall have to fight it
+all over again.
+
+In spite of his power of argument (or perhaps on account of it) the most
+prominent part which Ainsworth seemed to take in Amsterdam for many years
+was that of peacemaker, as many of his contemporaries testify: for they
+quarrelled fiercely among themselves in the exiled church, though they
+had such sore need of unity and good fellowship; and they had many church
+arguments and judgments and lawsuits. They quarrelled over the exercise of
+power in the church; over the true meaning of the text Matthew xviii. 17;
+whether the members of the congregation should be allowed to look on their
+Bibles during the preaching or on their Psalm-books during the singing;
+whether they should sing at all in their meetings; over the power of the
+office of ruling elder (a fruitful source of dissension and disruption in
+the New England congregations likewise) and above all, they quarrelled long
+and bitterly over the unseemly and gay dress of the parson's wife, Madam
+Johnson. These were the terrible accusations that were brought against that
+bedizened Puritan: that she wore "her bodies tied to the petticote with
+points as men do their doublets and hose; contrary to I Thess. v: 22,
+conferred with Deut. xx: 11;" that she also wore "lawn coives," and
+"busks," and "whalebones in the petticote bodies," and a "veluet hoode,"
+and a "long white brest;" and that she "stood gazing bracing and vaunting
+in the shop dores;" and that "men called her a bounceing girl" (as if
+she could help that!). And one of her worst and most bitterly condemned
+offences was that she wore "a topish hat." This her husband vehemently
+denied; and long discussions and explanations followed on the hat's
+topishness,--"Mr. Ainsworth dilating much upon a greeke worde" (as of
+course so learned a man would). For the benefit of unlearned modern
+children of the Puritans let me give the old Puritan's precise explanation
+and classification of topishness. "Though veluet in its nature were not
+topish, yet if common mariners should weare such it would be a sign of
+pride and topishness in them. Also a gilded raper and a feather are not
+topish in their nature, neither in a captain to weare them, and yet if a
+minister should weare them they would be signs of great vanity topishness
+and lightness." I wonder that topish hat had not undone the whole Puritan
+church in Holland.
+
+In settling all these and many other disputes, in translating,
+commentating, and versifying, did Henry Ainsworth pass his days; until,
+worn out by hard labor, and succumbing to long continued weakness, he died
+in 1623. This romantic story of his death is told by Neal. "It was sudden
+and not without suspicion of violence; for it is reported that, having
+found a diamond of very great value in the streets of Amsterdam, he
+advertised it in print; and when the owner, who was a Jew, came to demand
+it, he offered him any acknowledgment he would desire, but Ainsworth though
+poor would accept of nothing but conference with some of his rabbis upon
+the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the Messiah, which the
+other promised, but not having interest enough to obtain it he was
+poisoned." This rather ambiguous sentence means that Ainsworth was
+poisoned, not the Jew. Brooks's account of the story is that the conference
+took place, the Jews were vanquished, and in revenge poisoned the champion
+of Christianity afterwards. Dexter most unromantically throws cold water on
+this poisoning story, and adduces much circumstantial testimony to prove
+its improbability; but it could hardly have been invented in cold blood by
+the Puritan historians, and must have had some foundation in truth. And
+since he is dead, and the thought cannot harm him, I may acknowledge that I
+firmly believe and I like to believe that he died in so romantic a way.
+
+The Puritans were psalm-singers ever; and in Holland the Brownist division
+of the church came under strong influences from Geneva and Wittenberg, the
+birth-places of psalm-singing, that made them doubly fond of "worship in
+song." Hence the Pilgrim Fathers, Brewster, Bradford, Carver, and Standish,
+for love of music as well as in affectionate testimony to their old pastor
+and friend, brought to the New World copies of his version of the Psalms
+and sang from it with delight and profit to themselves, if not with ease
+and elegance.
+
+Dexter says very mildly of Ainsworth's literary work that "there are
+diversities of gifts, and it is no offence to his memory to conclude that
+he shone more as an exegete than as a poet." Poesy is a gift of the gods
+and cometh not from deep Hebrew study nor from vast learning, and we must
+accept Ainsworth's pious enthusiasm in the place of poetic fervor. Of the
+quality of his work, however, it is best to judge for one's self. Here is
+his rendition of the Nineteenth Psalm, so well known to us in verse by
+Addison's glorious "The spacious firmament on high." The prose version is
+printed in one column and the verse by its side.
+
+    1. To the Mayster of the Musik: A Psalm of David
+
+    2. The heavens, doo tel the glory of God: and the out-spred firmament
+    shevveth; the work of his hand.
+
+    3. Day unto day uttereth speech: and night unto night manifesteth
+    knowledge:
+
+    4. No speech, and no words: not heard is their voice
+
+    5. Through all the earth, gone-forth is their line: and unto the
+    utmost-end of the world their speakings: he hath put a tent in them for
+    the sun.
+
+    6. And he; as a bridegroom, going-forth out of his privy-chamber:
+    joyes as a mighty-man to run a race
+
+    7. From the utmost end of the heavens is his egress; and his
+    compassing-regress is unto the utmost-ends of them: and none _is_
+    hidd, from his heat.
+
+    2. The heav'ne, doo tel the glory of God and his firmament dooth
+    preach.
+
+    3. work of his hands. Day unto day dooth largely-utter speach and night
+    unto night dooth knowledge shew
+
+    4. No speach, and words are none.
+
+    5. thier voice it-is not heard. Thier line through all the earth is
+    gone: and to the worlds end, thier speakings: in them he did dispose,
+
+    6. tent for the Sun. Who-bride-groom-like out of his chamber goes:
+    joyes strong-man-like, to run a race
+
+    7. From heav'ns end, his egress: and his regress to the end of them
+    hidd from his heat, none is:
+
+In order to show the proportion of annotation in the book, and to indicate
+the mental traits of the author, let me state that this psalm, in both
+prose and metrical versions, occupies about one page; while the closely
+printed annotations fill over three pages; which is hardly "explaining with
+brevitie," as Ainsworth says in his preface. With this psalm the notes
+commence thus:--
+
+"2. (the out-spred-firmament) the whole cope of heaven, with the aier which
+though it be soft and liquid and spred over the Earth, yet it is fast and
+firm and therefore called of us according to the common Greek version a
+firmament: the holy Ghost expresseth it by another term Mid-heaven.
+This out-spred-firmament of expansion God made amidds the waters for a
+separation and named it Heaven, which of David is said to be stretched out
+as courtayn and elsewhere is said to be as firm as moulten glass. So under
+this name firmament be commised the orbs of the heav'ns and the aier and
+the whole spacious country above the earth."
+
+These annotations must have formed to the Pilgrims not only a dictionary
+but a perfect encyclopaedia of useful knowledge. Things spiritual and things
+temporal were explained therein. Scientific, historic, and religious
+information were dispensed impartially. Much and varied instruction was
+given in Natural History, though viewed of course from a strictly religious
+point of view. The little Pilgrims learned from their Psalm-Book that the
+"Leviathan is the great whalefish or seadragon, so called of the fast
+joyning together of his scales as he is described Job 40: 20, 41 and
+is used to resemble great tyrants." They also learned that "Lions of
+sundry-kinds have sundry-names. Tear-in-pieces like a lion. That he ravin
+not, make-a-prey; called a plueker Renter or Tearer, and elsewhere Laby
+that is, Harty and couragious; Kphir, this lurking, Couchant. The reason
+of thier names is shewed, as The renting-lion as greedy to tear, and the
+lurking-Lion as biding in covert places. Other names are also given to this
+kind as Shachal, of ramping, of fierce nature; and Lajith of subduing his
+prey. Psalm LVI Lions called here Lebain, harty, stowt couragious, Lions.
+Lions are mentioned in the Scriptures for the stowtness of thier hart,
+boldnes, and grimnes of thier countenance."
+
+Here are other annotations taken at hap-hazard. The lines,
+
+  "Al they that doo upon me look
+    a scoff at me doe make
+  they with the lip do make-a-mow
+    the head they scornful-shake,"
+
+Ainsworth thus explains: "Make-a-mow, making-an-opening with the lip
+which may be taken both for mowing and thrusting out of the lip and for
+licentious opening thereof to speak reproach." The expression "Keep thou me
+as the black of the apple of the eye" is thus annotated: "The black, that
+is, the sight in the midds of the eye wherein appeareth the resemblance of
+a little man, and thereupon seemeth to be called in Hebrew Ishon which is a
+man. And as that part is blackish so this word is also used for other black
+things as the blackness of night. The apple so we call that which the
+Hebrew here calleth bath and babath that is the babie or little image
+appearing in the eye." Anger receives this definition: "ire, outward in
+the face, grauue, grimnes or fiercenes of countenance. The original Aph
+signifieth both the nose by which one breatheth, and Anger which appeareth
+in the snuffing or breathing of the nose."
+
+Before the Holland exiles had this version of Ainsworth's to sing from,
+they used the book known as "Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms." They gave it
+up gladly to show honor to the work of their loved pastor, and perhaps also
+with a sense of pleasure in not having to sing any verses which had been
+used and authorized by the Church of England. In doing this they had to
+abandon, however, such spirited lines as Sternhold's--
+
+  "The earth did shake, for feare did quake
+    the hills their bases shook.
+  Removed they were, in place most fayre
+    at God's right fearfull looks.
+
+  "He rode on hye, and did soe flye
+    Upon the cherubins
+  He came in sight and made his flight
+    Upon the winges of windes."
+
+They sung instead,--
+
+  "And th' earth did shake and quake and styrred bee
+  grounds of the mount: & shook for wroth was hee
+  Smoke mounted, in his wrath, fyre did eat
+  out of his mouth: from it burned-with heat."
+
+Alas, poor Priscilla! how could she sing with ease or reverence such
+confused verses? The tune, too, set in the psalm-book seems absolutely
+unfitted to the metre. I fear when she sang from the pages "the old Puritan
+anthem" that she was forced to turn it into a chant, else the irregular
+lines could never have been brought within the compass of the melody; and
+yet, the metre is certainly better than the sense.
+
+It may be thought that these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for
+their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome
+that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the
+most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the
+reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot be hidden, even by
+the wording of the learned Puritan minister:--
+
+    1. Jehovah feedeth me: I shall not lack
+
+    2. In grassy fields, he downe dooth make me lye: he gently-leads mee,
+    quiet-Waters by.
+
+    3. He dooth return my soul: for his name-sake in paths of justice
+    leads-me-quietly.
+
+    4. Yea, though I walk in dale of deadly-shade ile fear none yll, for
+    with me thou wilt be thy rod, thy staff eke, they shall comfort mee.
+
+But few of these psalm-books of Ainsworth are now in existence; but few
+indeed came to New England. Elder Brewster owned one, as is shown by
+the inventory of the books in his library. Not every member of the
+congregation, not every family possessed one; many were too poor, many
+"lacked skill to read," and in some communities only one psalm-book was
+owned in the entire church. Hence arose the odious custom of "deaconing" or
+"lining" the psalm, by which each line was read separately by the deacon or
+elder and then sung by the congregation. There is no doubt, however,
+that this Ainsworth's Version was used in many of the early New England
+meetings. Reverend Thomas Symmes, in his "Joco-Serious Dialogue," printed
+in 1723, wrote: "Furthermore the Church of Plymouth made use of Ainsworths
+Version of the Psalms until the year 1692. For altho' our New England
+version of the Psalms was compiled by sundry hands and completed by
+President Dunster about the year 1640; yet that church did not use it, it
+seems, 'till two and fifty years after but stuck to Ainsworth; and until
+about 1682 their excellent custom was to sing without reading the lines."
+
+John Cotton's account of the Salem church written in 1760, says, "On June
+19, 1692, the pastor propounded to the church that seeing many of the
+psalms in Mr. Ainsworth's translation which had hitherto been sung in the
+congregation had such difficult tunes that none in the church could set,
+they would consider of some expedient that they might sing all the psalms.
+After some time of consideration on August 7 following, the church voted
+that when the tunes were difficult in the translation then used, they
+would make use of the New England psalm-book, long before received in
+the churches of the Massachusetts colony, not one brother opposing the
+conclusion. But finding it inconvenient to use two psalm-books, they at
+length, in June 1696 agreed wholly to lay aside Ainsworth and with general
+consent introduced the other which is used to this day, 1760. And here it
+will be proper to observe that it was their practice until the beginning of
+October, 1681 to sing the psalms without reading the lines; but then, at
+the motion of a brother who otherwise could not join in the ordinance [I
+suppose because he could not read] they altered the custom, and reading
+was introduced, the elder performing that service after the pastor had
+first expounded the psalm, which were usually sung in course."
+
+On the blank leaf of the copy of Ainsworth now lying before me are written
+these words, "This was used in Salem half-a-century from the first
+settlement." In a record of the Salem church is this entry of a church
+meeting: "4 of 5th month, 1667. The pastor having formerly propounded
+and given reason for the use of the Bay Psalm Book in regard to the
+_difficulty of the tunes_ and that we could not sing them so well
+as formerly and _that there was a singularity in our using Ainsworths
+tunes_: but especially because we had not the liberty of singing all the
+scripture Psalms according to Col. iii. 16. He did not again propound the
+same, and after several brethren had spoken, there was at last a unanimous
+consent with respect to the last reason mentioned, that the Bay Psalm Book
+should be used together with Ainsworth to supply the defects of it."
+
+It is significant enough of the "low state of the musik in the meetings"
+when we find that the simple tunes written in Ainsworth's Version were too
+difficult for the colonists to sing. To such a condition had church-music
+been reduced by "lining the psalm" and by the lack of musical instruments
+to guide and control the singers. It was not much better in old England;
+for we find in the preface of Rous' Psalms (which were published in
+1643 and authorized to be used in the English Church) references to the
+"difficulty of Ainsworth's tunes."
+
+Hood says, "There is almost a certainty that no other version than
+Ainsworth was ever used in the colonies until the New England Version was
+published. But if any one was used in one or two of the churches it was
+Sternhold and Hopkins." I cannot feel convinced of this, but believe that
+both Ravenscroft's and Sternhold and Hopkins' Versions were used at first
+in many of the Bay settlements. Salem church had a peculiar connection in
+its origin with the church of Plymouth, which would account, doubtless,
+for its protracted use of the version so loved by the Pilgrims; but the
+Puritans of the Bay, coming directly from England, must have brought with
+them the version which they had used in England, that of Sternhold and
+Hopkins; and they would hardly have wished, nor would it have been possible
+for them to acquire speedily in the new land the Ainsworth's Version used
+by the Pilgrims from Holland.
+
+The second edition of Ainsworth's Version was printed in 1617, a third
+in 1618; the fourth, in London in 1639, was a folio; and the sixth, in
+Amsterdam in 1644, was an octavo. A little 24mo copy is in the Essex
+Institute in Salem, and an octavo is in the Prince Library, now in the
+custody of the Public Library of the City of Boston. The latter copy has
+a note in it written by the Rev. Thomas Prince: "Plymouth, May 1, 1732. I
+have seen an edition of this version of 1618; and this version was sung
+in Plymouth Colony and I suppose in the rest of New England 'till the New
+England Version was printed."
+
+There is a copy of the first edition of Ainsworth in the Bodleian Library
+and one in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The American Antiquarian
+Society and the Lenox Library are the only public libraries in America that
+possess copies, so far as I know. The one in the library of the American
+Antiquarian Society was presented to it in 1815 by the Rev. William Bentley
+of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom also belonged the copy of the Bay Psalm
+Book now in the library at Worcester. He was a divine and a bibliophile and
+an antiquary, but there also ran in his veins blood of warmer flow. During
+the war of 1812, when the report came, in meeting-time, that the frigate
+"Constitution" was being chased into Marblehead harbor, the loyal parson
+Bentley locked up his church, and tucked up his gown, and sallied forth
+with his whole flock of parishioners to march to Marblehead with the
+soldiers, ready to "fight unto death" if necessary. Being short and fat,
+and the mercury standing at eighty-five degrees, the doctor's physical
+strength gave out, and he had to be hoisted up astride a cannon to ride to
+the scene of conflict,--martial in spirit though weak in the legs.
+
+But this association with the old book is comparatively of our own day; and
+the most pleasing fancy which the "psalm-book of Ainsworth" brings to my
+mind, the most sacred and reverenced thought, is of a far more remote, a
+more peaceful and quiet scene; though men of warlike blood and fighting
+stock were there present and took part therein. It is with that Sabbath Day
+before the Landing at Plymouth which was spent by the Pilgrims, as Mather
+says, "in the devout and pious exercises of a sacred rest." And though
+Matthew Arnold thought that the Mayflower voyagers would have been
+intolerable company for Shakespeare and Virgil, yet in that quiet day of
+devout prayer and praise they show a calm religious peace and trust that
+is, perhaps, the highest spiritual type of "sweetness and light." And from
+this quaint old book their lips found words and music to express in song
+their pure and holy faith.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The Bay Psalm-Book.
+
+
+
+It seems most proper that the first book printed in New England should be
+now its rarest one, and such is the case. It was also meet that the first
+book published by the Puritan theocracy should be a psalm-book. This New
+England psalm-book, being printed by the colony at Massachusetts Bay, is
+familiarly known as "The Bay Psalm-Book," and was published two hundred
+and fifty years ago with this wording on the titlepage: "The Whole Book of
+Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre. Whereunto is prefixed a
+discourse declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the
+Heavenly Ordinance of Singing Psalmes in the Churches of God.
+
+"Coll. III. Let the word of God dwell plenteously in you in all wisdome,
+teaching, and exhorting one another in Psalmes, Himnes, and spirituall
+Songs, singing to the Lord with grace in your hearts.
+
+"James V. If any be afflicted, let him pray; and if any be merry let him
+sing psalmes. Imprinted 1640."
+
+The words "For the Use, Edification, and Comfort of the Saints in Publick
+and Private especially in New England," though given in Thomas's "History
+of Printing," Lowndes's "Bibliographers Manual," Hood's "History of Music
+in New England," and many reliable books of reference, as part of the
+correct title, were in fact not printed upon the titlepage of this first
+edition, but appeared on subsequent ones. Mr. Thomas, at the time he wrote
+his history, knew of but one copy of the first edition; "an entire copy
+except the title-page is now in the possession of rev. mr. Bentley of
+Salem." The titlepage being missing, he probably fell into the error of
+copying the title of a later edition, and other cataloguers and manualists
+have blindly followed him.
+
+There were in 1638 thirty ministers in New England, all men of intelligence
+and education; and to three of them, Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John
+Eliot was entrusted the literary part of the pious work. They managed to
+produce one of the greatest literary curiosities in existence. The book
+was printed in the house of President Dunster of Harvard College upon a
+"printery," or printing-press, which had cost L50, and was the gift of
+friends in Holland to the new community in 1638, the name-year of Harvard
+College. Governor Winthrop in his journal tells us that the first sheet
+printed on this press was the Freeman's Oath, certainly a characteristic
+production; the second an almanac for New England, and the third, "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." Some, who deem an almanac a book, call this psalm-book the
+second book printed in British America.
+
+A printer named Steeven Daye was brought over from England to do the
+printing on this new press. Now Steeven must have been given entire charge
+of the matter, and could not have been a very literate fellow (as we
+know positively he was a most reprehensible one), or the three reverend
+versifiers must have been most uncommonly careless proof-readers, for
+certainly a worse piece of printer's work than "The Bay Psalm Book" could
+hardly have been struck off. Diversity and grotesqueness of spelling were
+of course to be expected, and paper might have been coarse without reproof,
+in that new and poor country; but the type was good and clear, the paper
+strong and firm, and with ordinary care a very presentable book might have
+been issued. The punctuation was horrible. A few commas and periods and
+a larger number of colons were "pepered and salted" _a la_ Timothy
+Dexter, apparently quite by chance, among the words. Periods were placed
+in the middle of sentences; words of one syllable were divided by hyphens;
+capitals and italics were used after the fashion of the time, apparently
+quite at random; and inverted letters were common enough. The pages were
+unnumbered, and on every left-hand page the word "Psalm" in the title was
+spelled correctly, while on the right-hand page it is uniformly spelled
+"Psalme." But after all, these typographical blemishes might be forgiven if
+the substance, the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification
+was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the
+sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with
+the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical
+construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct.
+Such amazing verses as these may be found:--
+
+  "And sayd He would not them waste: had not
+  Moses stood (whom He chose)
+  'fore him i' th' breach; to turne his wrath
+  lest that he should waste those."
+
+Cotton Mather, in his "Magnalia," gives thus the full story of the
+production of "The Bay Psalm-book":--
+
+    "About the year 1639, the New-English reformers, considering that their
+    churches enjoyed the other ordinances of Heaven in their scriptural
+    purity were willing that the 'The singing of Psalms' should be restored
+    among them unto a share of that _purity_. Though they blessed God
+    for the religious endeavours of them who translated the Psalms into the
+    _meetre _usually annexed at the end of the Bible, yet they beheld
+    in the translation so many _detractions _from, _additions
+    _to, and _variations _of, not only the text, but the very
+    _sense _of the psalmist, that it was an offense unto them.
+    Resolving then upon a new translation, the chief divines in the country
+    took each of them a portion to be translated; among whom were Mr. Welds
+    and Mr. Eliot of Eoxbury, and Mr. Mather of Dorchester. These like the
+    rest were so very different a _genius_ for their poetry that Mr.
+    Shephard, of Cambridge, on the occasion addressed them to this purpose:
+
+      You Roxb'ry poets keep clear of the crime
+      Of missing to give us very good rhime.
+      And you of Dorchester, your verses lengthen
+      And with the text's own words, you will them strengthen.
+
+    The Psalms thus turned into _meetre_ were printed at Cambridge, in
+    the year 1640. But afterwards it was thought that a little more of art
+    was to be employed upon them; and for that cause they were committed
+    unto Mr. Dunster, who revised and refined this translation; and (with
+    some assistance from Mr. Richard Lyon who being sent over by Sir Henry
+    Mildmay as an attendant unto his, son, then a student at Harvard
+    College, now resided in Mr. Dunster's house:) he brought it
+    the condition wherein our churches have since used it. Now though
+    I heartily join with those gentlemen who wish that the _poetry_
+    thereof were mended, yet I must confess, that the Psalms have never
+    yet seen a _translation_ that I know of nearer to the Hebrew
+    original; and I am willing to receive the excuse which our translators
+    themselves do offer us when they say: 'If the verses are not always so
+    elegant as some desire or expect, let them consider that God's
+    altar needs not our pollishings; we have respected rather a plain
+    translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any
+    paraphrase. We have attended conscience rather than elegance, fidelity
+    rather than ingenuity, that so we may sing in Zion the Lord's songs of
+    praise, according unto his own will, until he bid us enter into our
+    Master's joy to sing eternal hallelujahs.'"
+
+I have never liked Cotton Mather so well as after reading this calm
+and kindly account of the production of "The Bay-Psalm-Book." He was a
+scholarly man, and doubtless felt keenly and groaned inwardly at the
+inelegance, the appalling and unscholarly errors in the New England
+version; and yet all he mildly said was that "it was thought that a little
+more of art was to be employed upon them," and that he "wishes the poetry
+hereof was mended." Such justice, such self-repression, such fairness
+make me almost forgive him for riding around the scaffold on which his
+fellow-clergyman was being executed for witchcraft, and urging the crowd
+not to listen to the poor martyr's dying words. I can even almost overlook
+the mysterious fables, the outrageous yarns which he imposed upon us under
+the guise of history.
+
+The three reverend versifiers who turned out such questionable poetry are
+known to have been writers of clear, scholarly, and vigorous prose. They
+were all graduated at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the nursery of Puritans.
+Mr. Welde soon returned to England and published there two intelligent
+tracts vindicating the purity of the New England worship. Richard Mather
+was the general prose-scribe for the community; he drafted the "Cambridge
+Platform" and other important papers, and was clear and scholarly enough
+in all his work _except_ the "Bay Psalm-Book." From his pen came the
+tedious, prolix preface to the work; and the first draft of it in his own
+handwriting is preserved in the Prince Library. The other co-worker was
+John Eliot, that glory of New England Puritanism, the apostle to the
+Indians. His name heads my list of the saints of the Puritan calendar; but
+I confess that when I consider his work in "The Bay Psalm-Book," I have
+sad misgivings lest the hymns which he wrote and published in the Indian
+language may not have proved to the poor Massachusetts Indians all that our
+loving and venerating fancy has painted them. It is said also that Francis
+Quarles, the Puritan author of "Divine Emblems," sent across the Atlantic
+some of his metrical versions of the psalms as a pious contribution to the
+new version of the new church in the new land.
+
+The "little more of art" which was bestowed by the improving President
+Dunster left the psalms still improvable, as may be seen by opening at
+random at any page of the revised editions. Mr. Lyon conferred also upon
+the New England church the inestimable boon of a number of hymns or
+"Scripture-Songs placed in order as in the Bible." They were printed in
+that order from the third until at least the sixteenth edition, but in
+subsequent editions the hymns were all placed at the end of the book after
+the psalms. I doubt not that the Puritan youth, debarred of merry catches
+and roundelays, found keen delight in these rather astonishing renditions
+of the songs of Solomon, portions of Isaiah, etc. Those Scripture-Songs
+should be read quite through to be fully appreciated, as no modern
+Christian could be full enough of grace to sing them. Here is a portion of
+the song of Deborah and Barak:--
+
+  24. Jael the Kenite Hebers wife
+  'bove women blest shall be:
+  Above the women in the tent
+  a blessed one is she.
+  25. He water ask'd: she gave him milk
+  him butter forth she fetch'd
+  26. In lordly dish: then to the nail
+  she forth her left hand stretched.
+
+  Her right the workman's hammer held
+  and Sisera struck dead:
+  She pierced and struck his temple through
+  and then smote off his head.
+  27. He at her feet bow'd, fell, lay down
+  he at her feet bow'd, where
+  He fell: ev'n where he bowed down
+  he fell destroyed there.
+
+  28. Out of a window Sisera
+  his mother looked and said
+  The lattess through in coming why
+  so long his chariot staid?
+  His chariot wheels why tarry they?
+  29.   her wise dames, answered
+  Yea she turned answer to herself
+  30.   and what have they not sped?
+
+  31. The prey by poll; a maid or twain
+  what parted have not they?
+  Have they not parted, Sisera,
+  a party-colour'd prey
+  A party-colour'd neildwork prey
+  of neildwork on each side
+  That's party-colour'd meet for necks
+  of them that spoils divide?
+
+Our Pilgrim Fathers accepted these absurd, tautological verses gladly, and
+sang them gratefully; but we know the spirit of poesy could never have
+existed in them, else they would have fought hard against abandoning such
+majestic psalms as Sternhold's--
+
+  "The Lord descended from above
+    and bow'd the heavens hye
+  And underneath his feete he cast
+    the darkness of the skye.
+
+  "On cherubs and on cherubines
+    full royally he road
+  And on the winges of all the windes
+    came flying all abroad."
+
+They gave up these lines of simple grandeur, to which they were accustomed,
+for such wretched verses as these of the New England version:--
+
+  9.  Likewise the heavens he downe-bow'd and he descended, & there was
+      under his feet a gloomy cloud
+  10. And he on cherub rode and flew; yea, he flew on the wings of winde.
+  11. His secret place hee darkness made his covert that him round confide.
+
+I cannot understand why they did not sing the psalms of David just as
+they were printed in the English Bible; it would certainly be quite as
+practicable as to sing this latter selection.
+
+President Dunster's improving hand and brain evolved this rendition:--
+
+  "Likewise the heavens he down-bow'd
+    and he descended: also there
+  Was at his feet a gloomy cloud
+    and he on cherubs rode apace.
+  Yea on the wings of wind he flew
+    he darkness made his secret place
+  His covert round about him drew."
+
+Though the grotesque wording and droll errors of these old psalm-books can,
+after the lapse of centuries, be pointed out and must be smiled at, there
+is after all something so pathetic in the thought of those good, scholarly
+old New England saints, hampered by poverty, in dread of attack of Indians,
+burdened with hard work, harassed by "eighty-two pestilent heresies," still
+laboring faithfully and diligently in their strange new home at their
+unsuited work,--something so pathetic, so grand, so truly Christian, that
+when I point out any of the absurdities or failures in their work, I dread
+lest the shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather, of Eliot, brand me as of
+old, "in capitall letters," as "AN OPEN AND OBSTINATE CONTEMNER OF GOD'S
+HOLY ORDINANCES," or worse still, with that mysterious, that dread name, "A
+WANTON GOSPELLER."
+
+The second edition of the "New England Psalm-Book" was published in 1647;
+the one copy known to exist has sold for four hundred and thirty-five
+dollars. The third edition was the one revised by President Dunster and
+Mr. Lyon, and was printed in 1650. In 1691 the unfortunate book was again
+"pollished" by a committee of ministers, who thus altered the last two
+stanzas of the Song of Deborah and Barak:--
+
+  28. Out of a window Sisera
+        His mother look'd and said
+      The lattess through in coming why
+        So long's chariot staid?
+      His chariot-wheels why tarry they?
+        Her ladies wise reply'd
+  29. Yea to herself the answer made,
+  30.     Have they not speed? she cry'd.
+
+  31. The prey to each a maid or twain
+        Divided have not they?
+      To Sisera have they not shar'd
+        A divers-colour'd prey?
+      Of divers-colour'd needle-work
+        Wrought curious on each side
+      Of various colours meet for necks
+        Of those who spoils divide?
+
+Rev. Elias Nason wittily says of "The Bay Psalm-Book," "Welde, Eliot, and
+Mather mounted the restive steed Pegasus, Hebrew psalter in hand, and
+trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical
+psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and slashing,
+mending and patching, twisting and turning, finally produced what must ever
+remain the most unique specimen of poetical tinkering in our literature."
+
+Other editions quickly followed these "pollishings" until, in 1709, sixteen
+had been printed. Mr. Hood stated that at least seventy editions in all
+were brought out. Some of these were printed in England and Scotland, in
+exceedingly fine and illegible print, and were intended to be bound up with
+the Bible; and occasionally duodecimo Bibles were sent from Scotland to
+New England with "The Bay Psalm-Book" bound at the back part of the book.
+Strange as it may seem, the poor, halting New England version was used in
+some of the English dissenting congregations and Scotch kirks, instead of
+the smoother verses composed in England for the English churches.
+
+The Reverend Thomas Prince, after two years of careful work thereon,
+published in 1758 a revised edition of the much-published book, and it was
+adopted by his church, the Old South, of Boston, the week previous to his
+death. It was used by his congregation until 1786. He clung closely to the
+form of the old editions, changing only an occasional word. In his preface
+Dr. Prince says that "The Bay Psalm-Book" "had the honor of being the
+first book printed in North America, and as far as I can find, in this
+New World." We have fuller means of information now-a-days than had the
+reverend reviser, and we know that as early as 1535 a book called "The
+Book of St. John Climacus or The Spiritual Ladder" had been printed in the
+Spanish tongue, in Mexico; and no less than one hundred and sixteen other
+Spanish works in the sixteenth century, as the "Bibliografia Mexicana"
+testifies.
+
+If the printing of all these various editions was poor, and the diction
+worse, the binding certainly was good and could be copied in modern times
+to much advantage. No flimsy cloth or pasteboard covers, no weak paper
+backs, no ill-pasted leaves, no sham-work of any kind was given; securely
+sewed, firmly glued, with covers of good strong leather, parchment, kid, or
+calfskin, these psalm-books endured constant _daily_ (not weekly) use
+for years, for decades, for a century, and are still whole and firm.
+They were carried about in pockets, in saddle-bags, and were opened, and
+handled, and conned, as often as were the Puritan Bibles, and they bore the
+usage well. They were distinctively characteristic of the unornamental,
+sternly pious, eminently honest, and sturdily useful race that produced
+them.
+
+Judge Sewall makes frequent mention in his famous diary of "the New Psalm
+Book." He bought one "bound neatly in Kids Leather" for "3 shillings &
+sixpence" and gave it to a widow whom he was wooing. Rather a serious
+lover's gift, but characteristic of the giver, and not so gloomy as
+"Dr. Mathers Vials of Wrath," "Dr. Sibbs Bowels," "Dr. Preston's Church
+Carriage," and "Dr. Williard's Fountains opened," all of which he likewise
+presented to her.
+
+The Judge frequently gave a copy as a bridal gift, after singing from it
+"Myrrh aloes," to the gloomy tune of Windsor, at the wedding.
+
+  8. Myrrh Aloes and Cussias _smell_
+       all of thy garments _had_
+     Out of the yvory pallaces
+       whereby they made thee glad:
+
+  9. Amongst thine honourable maids
+       kings daughters present were
+     The Queen is set at thy right hand
+       in fine gold of Ophir.
+
+But his most frequent mention of the "new psalm-book" is in his "Humbell
+acknowledgement" made to God of the "great comfort and merciful kindness
+received through singing of His Psalmes;" and the pages of the diary bear
+ample testimony that whatever the book may appear to us now, it was to the
+early colonists the very Word of God.
+
+As years passed on, however, and singing-schools multiplied, it became much
+desired, and even imperative that there should be a better style and manner
+of singing, and open dissatisfaction arose with "The Bay Psalm-Book;" the
+younger members of the congregations wished to adopt the new and smoother
+versions of Tate and Brady, and of Watts. Petitions were frequently made in
+the churches to abolish the century-used book. Here is an opening sentence
+of one church-letter which is still in existence; it was presented to the
+ministers and elders of the Roxbury church September 11th, 1737, and was
+signed by many of the church members:--
+
+"The New England Version of Psalms however useful it may formerly have
+been, has now become through the natural variableness of Language, not only
+very uncouth but in many Places unintelligible; whereby the mind instead
+of being Raised and spirited in Singing The Praises of Almighty God and
+thereby being prepared to Attend to other Parts of Divine Service is Damped
+and made Spiritless in the Performance of the Duty at least such is the
+Tendency of the use of that Version," etc., etc.
+
+Great controversy arose over the abolition of the accustomed book, and
+church-quarrels were rife; but the end of the century saw the dearly loved
+old version consigned to desuetude, uever again to be opened, alas! but by
+critical or inquisitive readers.
+
+There is owned by the American Antiquarian Society, and kept carefully
+locked in the iron safe in the building of that Society in Worcester, a
+copy of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm Book." It is a quarto (not
+octavo, as Thomas described it in his "History of Printing") and is in very
+good condition, save that the titlepage is missing. It is in the original
+light-colored, time-stained parchment binding, and contains the autograph
+of Stephen Sewall. It also bears on the inside of the front cover the
+book-plate of Isaiah Thomas, and at the back, in the veteran printer's
+clear and beautiful handwriting, this statement: "After advertising for
+another copy of this book and making enquiry in many places in New England
+&c. I was not able to obtain or even hear of another. This copy is
+therefore invaluable and must be preserved with the greatest care. Isaiah
+Thomas, Sep. 20. 1820." His "History of Printing," was published in 1810,
+and the Society had acquired through the gift of "the rev. mr. Bentley" the
+copy which Thomas mentioned in his book.
+
+It is strange that Thomas should have been ignorant of the existence of
+other copies of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm-Book," for there were
+at that time six copies belonging to the Prince Library in the possession
+of the Old South Church of Boston. One would fancy that the Prince Library
+would have been one of his first objective points of search, save that a
+dense cloud of indifference had overshadowed that collection for so long
+a time. Five of those copies remained in the custody of the deacons and
+pastor of the Old South Church until 1860, and they were at one time all
+deposited in the Public Library of the City of Boston. Two still remain in
+that suitable place of deposit; they are almost complete in paging, but are
+in modern bindings. The other three copies were surrendered by Lieut-Gov.
+Samuel Armstrong (who, as one of the deacons of the Old South Church,
+had joint custody of the Prince Library), severally, to Mr. Edward
+Crowninshield of Boston, Dr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff of Boston, and Mr.
+George Livermore of Cambridge. Governor Armstrong surrendered these three
+books in consideration of certain modern books being given to the Prince
+Library, and of the modern bindings bestowed on the two other copies; which
+seems to us hardly a brilliant or judicious exchange.
+
+In Dr. Shurtleff "The Bay Psalm-Book" found a congenial and loving owner;
+and under his careful superintendence an exact reprint was published in
+1862 in the Riverside Press at Cambridge. He wrote for it a preface. It was
+published by subscription; one copy on India paper, fifteen on thick paper,
+and fifty on common paper. Copies on the last named paper have sold readily
+for thirty dollars each. All the typographical errors of the original were
+carefully reproduced in this reprint.
+
+At Dr. Shurtleffs death, his "Bay Psalm-Book" was catalogued with the rest
+of his library, which was to be sold on Dec. 2, 1875; but an injunction was
+obtained by the deacons of the Old South Church, to prevent the sale of the
+old psalm-book. They were rather late in the day however, to try to obtain
+again the too easily parted with book, and the ownership of it was adjudged
+to the estate. The book was sold Oct. 12, 1876, at the Library salesroom,
+Beacon Street, Boston, for one thousand and fifty dollars. It is now in the
+library of Mrs. John Carter Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island. Special
+interest attaches to this copy, because it was "Richard Mather, His Book"
+as several autographs in it testify; and the author's own copy is always of
+extra value. Cotton Mather, a grandson of Richard, was the close friend of
+the Reverend Thomas Prince, who founded the Prince Library, and who left it
+by will to the Old South Church in 1758. Mr. Prince's book-plate is on the
+reverse of the titlepage of this copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book," and is in
+itself a rarity. It reads thus:--
+
+     "This Book belongs to
+      The New England Library
+  Begun to be collected by Thomas Prince
+  upon his ent'ring Harvard-College July 6
+  1703, and was given by said Prince, to
+      remain therein forever."
+
+There was a sixth copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book" in the Prince Library in
+1830 when Dr. Wisner wrote his four sermons on the Old South Church of
+Boston,--a copy annotated by Dr. Prince and used by him while he was
+engaged on his revision. It has disappeared, together with many other
+important books and manuscripts belonging to the same library. The
+vicissitudes through which this most valuable collection has passed--lying
+neglected for years on shelves, in boxes, and in barrels in the
+steeple-room of the Old South Church, depleted to use for lighting fires,
+injured by British soldiery, but injured still more by the neglect and
+indifference of its custodians--are too painful to contemplate or relate.
+They contribute to the scholarly standing and honor of neither pastors nor
+congregations during those years. It is enough to state, however, that it
+is to the noble and ill-requited forethought of Dr. Prince that we owe all
+but three of the copies of the Bay Psalm-Book which are now known to be in
+existence.
+
+There is also a perfect copy of the first edition of the old book in the
+Lenox Library in New York, and the manner in which it was acquired (and
+also some further accounts of two of our old friends of the Prince Library,
+the acquisitions of Messrs. Crowninshield and Liverraore) is told so
+entertainingly by Henry Stevens, of Vermont, in his charming book,
+"Recollections of Mr. James Lenox" that it is best to quote his account in
+full:--
+
+    "For nearly ten years Mr. Lenox had entertained a longing de
+    to possess a perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book.' He gave me to
+    understand that if an opportunity occurred of securing a copy for him I
+    might go as far as one hundred guineas. Accordingly from 1847 till his
+    death, six years later, my good friend William Pickering and I put our
+    heads and book-hunting forces together to run down this rarity. The
+    only copy we knew of on this side the Atlantic was a spotless one in
+    the Bodleian Library, which had lain there unrecognized for ages, and
+    even in the printed catalogue of 1843 its title was recorded without
+    distinction among the common herd of Psalms in verse. I had handled it
+    several times with great reverence, and noted its many peculiar points,
+    but, as agreed with Mr. Pickering, without making any sign or imparting
+    any information to our good and obliging friend Dr. Bandinel, Bodley's
+    Librarian. We thought that when we had secured a copy for oursel
+    it would be time enough to acquaint the learned Doctor that he was
+    entertaining unawares this angel of the New World.
+
+    "Under these circumstances, therefore, only an experienced collector
+    can judge of my surprise and inward satisfaction, when on the 12
+    January, 1855, at Sotheby's, at one of the sales of Pickering's stock,
+    after untying parcel after parcel to see what I might chance to see,
+    and keeping ahead of the auctioneer, Mr. Wilkinson, on resolving to
+    prospect in one parcel more before he overtook me, my eye rested
+    an instant only on the long-lost Benjamin, clean and unspotted. I
+    instantly closed the parcel (which was described in the Catalogue as
+    Lot '531 Psalmes, other editions, 1630 to 1675 black letter, a parcel')
+    and tightened the string just as Alfred came to lay it on the table. A
+    cool-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing to the table behind Mr.
+    Lilly I quietly bid, in a perfectly natural tone, 'Sixpence,' and so
+    the bids went on increasing by sixpence until half a crown was reached,
+    and Mr. Lilly had loosened the string. Taking up this very volume he
+    turned to me and remarked that 'This looks a rare edition, Mr. Stevens,
+    don't you think so? I do not remember having seen it before,' and
+    raised the bid to five shillings. I replied that I had little doubt of
+    its rarity though comparatively a late edition of the Psalms,
+    at the same time gave Mr. Wilkinson a six-penny nod. Thenceforth a
+    'spirited competition' arose between Mr. Lilly and myself, until
+    finally the lot was knocked down to 'Stevens' for nineteen shillings. I
+    then called out with perhaps more energy than discretion, 'Delivered!'
+    On pocketing this volume, leaving the other seven to take the usual
+    course, Mr. Lilly and others inquired with some curiosity, 'What rarity
+    have you got now?' 'Oh, nothing,' said I, 'but the first English book
+    printed in America.' There was a pause in the sale, while all had a
+    good look at the little stranger. Some said jocularly, 'There has
+    evidently been a mistake; put up the lot again.' Mr. Stevens, with the
+    book again safely in his pocket, said, 'Nay, if Mr. Pickering, whose
+    cost mark of [3s] did not recognize the prize he had won, certainly the
+    cataloguer might be excused for throwing it away into the hands of the
+    right person to rescue, appreciate, and preserve it. I am now fully
+    rewarded for my long and silent hunt of seven years.'
+
+    "On reaching Morley's I eagerly collated the volume, and at first found
+    it right witli all the _usual_ signatures correct. The leaves were
+    not paged or folioed. But on further collation I missed sundry of the
+    Psalms, enough to fill four leaves. The puzzle was finally solved when
+    it was discovered that the inexperienced printer had marked the sheet
+    with the signature w after v, which is very unusual.
+
+    "This was a very disheartening disappointment, but I held my tongue,
+    and knowing that my old friend and correspondent, George Liverm
+    of Cambridge, N. E., possessed an imperfect copy, which he and Mr.
+    Crowninshield, after the noble example of the 'Lincoln Nosegay,' had
+    won from the Committee of the 'Old South' together with another and
+    perfect copy, I proposed an advantageous exchange and obtained
+    four missing leaves. Mr. Crowninshield strongly advised Mr. Livermore
+    against parting with his four leaves, because, as he said, 'They would
+    enable Stevens to complete his copy and to place it in the library of
+    Mr. Lenox, who would then crow over us because he also had a perfect
+    copy of "The Bay-Psalm Book."'
+
+    "Having thus completed my copy and had it bound by Francis Bedford in
+    his best style, I sent it to Mr. Lenox for L80. Five years later I
+    bought the Crowninshield Library in Boston for $10,000, mainly to
+    obtain his perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book,' and brought the whole
+    library to London. This second copy, after being held several months,
+    was at the suggestion of Mr. Thomas Watts, offered to the British
+    Museum for L150. The Keeper of the Printed Books, however, never had
+    the courage to send it before the Trustees for approval and payment; so
+    after waiting five or six years longer the volume was withdrawn, bound
+    by Bedford, taken to America in 1868, and sold to Mr. George Brinley
+    for 150 guineas. At the Brinley sale, in March, 1878, it was bought by
+    Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for $1200, or more than three times the cost
+    of my first copy to Mr. Lenox."
+
+We hear the expression of a book being "worth its weight in gold." "The Bay
+Psalm-Book," in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society, weighs
+nine ounces, hence Mr. Vanderbilt paid at least seven times its weight in
+gold for his precious book. Lowndes's "Bibliographers' Manual" says, "This
+volume, which is extremely rare and would at an auction in America produce
+from four to six thousand dollars, is familiarly termed 'The Bay Psalm
+Book.'" This must have been intended to be printed four to six hundred
+dollars, and is about as correct as the remainder of the description in
+that manual.
+
+The copy which is spoken of by Mr. Stevens as being in the Bodleian Library
+at Oxford was once the property of Bishop Tanner, the famous antiquary.
+Thus it is seen that there are seven copies at least of the first edition
+of "The Bay Psalm-Book" now in existence in America, instead of "five or
+at the most six," as a recent writer in "The Magazine of American History"
+states.
+
+And of all the manifold later editions of the New England Psalm-Book
+comparatively few copies now remain. Occasionally one is discovered in an
+old church library or seen in the collection of an antiquary. It is usually
+found to bear on its titlepage the name of its early owner, and often,
+also, in a different handwriting, the simple record and date of his death.
+Tender little memorial postils are frequently written on the margins of
+the pages: "Sung this the day Betty was baptized"--"This Psalm was sung at
+Mothers Funeral" "Gods Grace help me to heed this word." Sometimes we see
+on the blank pages, in a fine, cramped handwriting, the record of the
+births and deaths of an entire family. More frequently still we find the
+familiar and hackneyed verses of ancient titlepage lore, such as are
+usually seen on the blank leaves of old Bibles. This script was written in
+a "Bay Psalm-Book" of the sixteenth edition, and with the characteristic
+indifference of our New England forefathers for tiresome repetition, or
+possibly with their disdain of novelty, was seen on each and every blank
+page of the book:--
+
+  "Israel Balch, His Book,
+  God give him Grace theirin to look
+  And when the Bell for him doth toal
+  May God have mearcy on his Sole."
+
+What the diction lacked in variety is quite made up, however, in the
+spelling, which was painstakingly different on each page.
+
+Another Psalm-Book bore, inscribed in an elegant, minute handwriting, these
+lines, which were probably intended for verse, since the first word of each
+line commenced with a capital letter:--
+
+  "Abednego Prime His Book
+  When he withein these pages looks
+  May he find Grace to sing therein
+  Seventeen hundred and forty-seven."
+
+This is certainly pretty bad poetry,--bad enough to be worthy a place in
+"The Bay Psalm Book,"--but is also a most noble, laudable, and necessary
+aspiration; for power of Grace was plainly needed to enable Abednego or any
+one else to sing from those pages; and our pious New England forefathers
+must have been under special covenant of grace when they persevered against
+such obstacles and under such overwhelming disadvantages in having singing
+in their meetings.
+
+Another copy of the old New England Psalm-Book was thus inscribed:--
+
+      "Elam Noyes His Book
+  You children of the name of Noyes
+  Make Jesus Christ your only choyse."
+
+The early members of the Noyes family all seemed to be exceedingly and
+properly proud of this rhyming couplet; it formed a sort of patent of
+nobility. They wrote the pious injunction to their descendants in their
+Psalm-Books and their Bibles, in their wills, their letters; and they,
+with the greatest unanimity of feeling, had it cut upon their several
+tombstones. It was their own family motto,--their totem, so to speak.
+
+In a New England Psalm-Book in the possession of the American Antiquarian
+Society there is written in the distinct handwriting of Isaiah Thomas these
+explanatory words:--
+
+"This was the Pocket Psalm-book of John Symmons who died at Salem at
+100 years. He was born at North Salem went a-fishing in his youth was a
+prisoner with the Indians in Nova Scotia afterwards followed his labours in
+a Shipyard and till great old age laboured upon his lands and died
+without pain Aet 100. 31 October, 1791. He was a worthy conscientious and
+well-informed man and agreeable until the last hour of his life."
+
+I can think of no pleasanter tribute to be given to the character of any
+one than the simple words, "He was agreeable until the last hour of his
+life." What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and
+enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present
+influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant
+study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet
+agreeability which so characterized John Symmons.
+
+There lies now before me a copy of one of the early editions of "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." As I open the little dingy octavo volume, with its worn
+and torn edges, I am conscious of that distinctive, penetrating,
+_old-booky_ smell,--that ancient, that fairly _obsolete_ odor that
+never is exhaled save from some old, infrequently opened, leather-bound
+volume, which has once in years far past been much used and handled. A book
+which has never been familiarly used and loved cannot have quite the same
+antique perfume. The mouldering, rusty, flaky leather comes off in a
+yellow-brown powder on my fingers as I take up the book; and the cover
+nearly breaks off as I open it, though with tender, book-loving usage. The
+leather, though strong and honest, has rotted or disintegrated until it has
+almost fallen into dust. Across the yellow, ill-printed pages there runs,
+zig-zagging sideways and backwards crab-fashion on his crooked brown legs,
+one of those pigmy book-spiders,--those ugly little bibliophiles that seem
+flatter even than the close-pressed pages that form their home.
+
+Fair Puritan hands once held this dingy little book, honest Puritan eyes
+studied its ill-expressed words, and sweet Puritan lips sang haltingly but
+lovingly from its pages. This was "Cicely Morse Her Book" in the year 1710,
+and bears on many a page her name and the simple little couplet:--
+
+  "In youth I praise
+  And walk thy ways."
+
+And pretty it were to see Cicely in her praiseful and godly-walking youth,
+as she stood primly clad in her sad-colored gown and long apron, with a
+quoif or ciffer covering her smooth hair, and a red whittle on her slender
+shoulders, a-singing in the old New England meeting-house through the
+long, tedious psalms, which were made longer and more tedious still by the
+drawling singing and the deacons' "lining." Truly that were a pretty sight
+for our eyes, and for other eyes than ours, without doubt. Staid Puritan
+youth may have glanced soberly across the old meeting-house at the fair
+girl as she sung the Song of Solomon, with its ardent wording, without any
+very deep thought of its symbolic meaning:--
+
+  "Let him with kisses of his mouth
+    be pleased me to kiss,
+  Because much better than the wine
+    thy loving-kindness is.
+  To troops of horse in Pharoahs coach,
+    my love, I thee compare,
+  Thy neck with chains, with jewels new,
+    thy cheeks full comely are.
+  Borders of gold with silver studs
+    for thee make up we will,
+  Whilst that the king at's table sits
+    my spikenard yields her smell.
+
+  Like as of myrrh a bundle is
+    my well-belov'd to be,
+  Through all the night betwixt my breasts
+    his lodging-place shall be;
+  My love as in Engedis vines
+    like camphire-bunch to me,
+  So fair, my love, thou fair thou art
+    thine eyes as doves eyes be."
+
+Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school--that
+safety-valve of young New England life--had not then been established or
+even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical
+love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old
+meeting-house at Cicely as she sung.
+
+But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book. She may
+have been stately and prosperous and seated in the dignified "foreseat;"
+she may have been feeble and infirm in her place in the "Deaf Pue;" and she
+may have been careworn and sad, tired of fighting against poverty, worn
+with dread of fierce Indians, weary of the howls of the wolves in the dense
+forests so near, and home-sick and longing for the yonderland, her "faire
+Englishe home;" but were she sad or careworn or heartsick, in her treasured
+psalm-book she found comfort,--comfort in the halting verses as well as
+in the noble thoughts of the Psalmist. And the glamour of eternal,
+sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the
+inscription in the old psalm-book,--
+
+  "In youth I praise
+  And walk thy ways,"--
+
+the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole
+New World was young.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms.
+
+
+
+The metrical translation of the Psalms known as Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was doubtless used in the public worship of God in many of the
+early New England settlements, especially those of the Connecticut River
+Valley, though the old register of the town of Ipswich is the only local
+record that gives positive proof of its use in the Puritan church. In
+1693 an edition of Sternhold and Hopkins was printed in Cambridge,
+Massachusetts. It was not a day nor a land where a whole edition of such a
+book would be printed for reference or comparison only; and to thus publish
+the work of the English psalmists in the very teeth of the popularity of
+"The Bay Psalm Book" is to me a proof that Sternhold and Hopkins' Version
+was employed far more extensively in the colonial churches and homes than
+we now have records of, and than many of our church historians now fancy.
+Certainly the familiar English psalm-books must have been brought across
+the ocean and used temporarily until the newly landed colonists could
+acquire the version of Ainsworth or of the New England divines.
+
+An everlasting interest attaches to this metrical arrangement of the
+Psalms, to Americans as well as to Englishmen, because it was the earliest
+to be adopted in public worship in England. According to Strype, in his
+Memorial, the singing of psalms was allowed in England as early as 1548,
+but it was not until 1562 that the versified psalms of Sternhold and
+Hopkins were appended to the Book of Common Prayer. Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was also the first to give all the psalms of David in English verse
+to the English public.
+
+Very little is known of the authors of this version. Sternhold was educated
+at Oxford; was Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., was a
+"bold and busy Calvinist," and died in 1549. The little of interest told
+of John Hopkins is that he was a minister and schoolmaster, and that he
+assisted the work of Sternhold.
+
+The full reason for Sternhold's pious work is thus given by an old English
+author, Wood: "Being a most zealous reformer and a very strict liver he
+became so scandalyzed at the loose amorous songs used in the court that he
+forsooth turned into English metre fifty-one of Davids Psalms, and caused
+musical notes to be set to them, thinking thereby that the courtiers
+would sing them instead of their sonnets; but they did not, only some few
+excepted." The preface printed in the book stated Sternhold's wish and
+intention that the verses should be sung by Englishmen, not only in church,
+but "moreover in private houses for their godly solace and comfort; laying
+apart all ungodly Songs & Ballads which tend only to the nourishment of
+vice & corrupting of youth."
+
+The first edition contained nineteen psalms only, which were all versified
+by Sternhold. It was published in 1548 or 1549, under this title, "Certayn
+Psalmes chosen out of the Psalter of Daid and drawen into English Metre by
+Thomas Sternhold Groom of ye Kynges Maiesties Roobes." I believe no copy of
+this edition is now known to exist.
+
+The praise which Sternhold received for his pious rhymes had the same
+effect upon him as did similar encomiums upon his predecessor, the French
+psalm-writer Marot,--it encouraged him to write more psalm-verses.
+
+The second edition was printed in 1549, and contained thirty-seven psalms
+by Sternhold and seven by Hopkins. It bore this title, "Al such Psalmes of
+David as Thomas Sternehold late grome of his maiesties robes did in his
+lyfe tyme drawe into English metre." It was a well-printed book and copies
+are still preserved in the British Museum and the Public Library of
+Cambridge, England. This second and enlarged edition was dedicated, in a
+four-page preface, to King Edward VI., and a pretty story is told of the
+young king's interest in the verses. The delicate and gentle boy of twelve
+heard Sternhold when "singing them to his organ" as Strype says, and
+wandered in to hear the music and listen to the words. So great was his
+awakened interest in the sacred songs that Sternhold resolved to write in
+verse for him still further of the psalms. The dedication reads: "Seeing
+that your tender and godly zeale dooth more delight in the holye songs of
+veritie than in any fayncd rymes of vanytie, I am encouraged to travayle
+further in the said booke of Psalmes." This young king restored to the
+English people the free reading of the Bible, which his wicked father,
+Henry VIII., had forbidden them, and he was of a sincerely religious
+nature. He also was a music-lover, and encouraged the art as much as his
+short life and troubled reign permitted.
+
+Hopkins also wrote a preface for his share of the work, in which he spoke
+with much modesty of himself and much praise of Sternhold. He said his own
+verses were not "in any parte to bee compared with his [Sternhold's] most
+exquisite dooynges." He thinks, however, that his owne are "fruitfull
+though they bee not fyne."
+
+The third edition, in 1556, contained fifty-one psalms; the fourth, in
+1560, had sixty-seven psalms; the fifth, in 1561, increased the number to
+eighty-seven; and in 1562 or 1563 the whole book of psalms appeared. Other
+authors had some share in this work: Norton, Whyttyngham (a Puritan divine
+who married Calvin's sister), Kethe, who wrote the 100th Psalm, "All people
+that on earth do dwell," which is still seen in some of our hymn-books. Of
+all these men, sly old Thomas Fuller truthfully and quaintly said, "They
+were men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more
+of Jordan than of Helicon."
+
+For over one hundred years from the first publication there was a steady
+outpour of editions of these Psalms. Before the year 1600 there were
+seventy-four editions,--a most astonishing number for the times; and from
+1600 to 1700 two hundred and thirty-five editions. In 1868 six hundred and
+one editions were known, including twenty-one in this nineteenth century
+and doubtless there were still others uncatalogued and forgotten. Among
+other editions this version had in the time of Charles II. two in
+shorthand, one printed by "Thos. Cockerill at the Three Legs and Bible in
+the Poultry." Two copies of these editions are in the British Museum. They
+are tiny little 64mos, of which half a dozen could be laid side by side on
+the palm of the hand. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version had also in 1694 the
+honor of having arranged for it a Concordance.
+
+Upon no production of the religious Muse in the English tongue has greater
+diversity of criticism been displayed or more extraordinary or varied
+judgment been rendered than upon Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. A world of
+testimony could be adduced to fortify any view which one chose to take
+of them. At the time of their early publication they induced a swarm of
+stinging lampoons and sneering comments, that often evince most plainly
+that a difference in religious belief or scorn for an opposing sect brought
+them forth. The poetry of that and the succeeding century abounds in
+allusions to them. Phillips wrote:--
+
+      "Singing with woful noise
+  Like a crack'd saints bell jarring in the steeple,
+  Tom Sternhold's wretched prick-song for the people."
+
+Another poet, a courtier, wrote:--
+
+  "Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms
+  When they translated David's psalms."
+
+But I see no signs of qualmishness; they show to me rather a healthy
+sturdiness as one of their strongest characteristics.
+
+Pope at a later day wrote:--
+
+  "Not but there are who merit other palms
+    Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms.
+  The boys and girls whom charity maintains
+    Implore your help in these pathetic strains.
+  How could devotion touch the country pews
+    Unless the gods bestowed a proper muse."
+
+Wesley sneered at this version, saying, "When it is seasonable to sing
+praises to God we do it, not in the scandalous doggrel of Hopkins and
+Sternhold, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such
+as would provoke a _critic_ to turn _Christian_ rather than a
+_Christian_ to turn _critic_."
+
+The edition of 1562 was printed with the notes of melodies that were then
+called Church Tunes. They formed the basis of all future collections of
+psalm-music for over a century. They soon were published in harmony in four
+parts, "which may be sung to all musical instrumentes set forth for the
+encrease of vertue and abolyshing of other vayne and tryfling ballads." In
+1592 a very important collection of psalm-tunes was published to use with
+Sternhold and Hopkins' words. It is called "The Whole Booke of Psalmes:
+with their wonted tunes as they are sung in Churches composed into four
+parts." This book is noteworthy because in it the tunes are for the first
+time named after places, as is still the custom. The music contained square
+or oblong notes and also lozenge-shaped notes. The square note was a
+"semy-brave," the lozenge-shaped note was a "prycke" or a "mynymme," and
+"when there is a prycke by the square note, that prycke is half as much as
+the note that goeth before."
+
+Music at that time was said to be pricked, not printed,--the word being
+derived from the prick or dot which formed the head of the note. Any song
+which was printed in various parts was called a prick-song, to distinguish
+it from one sung extemporaneously or by ear. The word prick-song occurs not
+only in all the musical books, but in the literature of the time, and in
+Shakespeare. "Tom Sternhold's" songs were entitled to be called prick-songs
+because they had notes of music printed with them. Many of the tunes
+in this collection were taken from the Genevan Psalter and Luther's
+Psalm-Book, or from Marot and Beza's French Book of Psalms. Hence they were
+irreverently called "Genevan Jiggs," and "Beza's Ballets."
+
+There is much difference shown in the wording of these various editions of
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. The earlier ones were printed as Sternhold
+wrote them; but with the Genevan editions began great and astonishing
+alterations. Warton, who was no lover of Sternhold and Hopkins' verses,
+calling them "the disgrace of sacred poetry," said of these attempted
+improvements, with vehemence, that "many stanzas already too naked and weak
+like a plain old Gothic edifice stripped of its signatures of antiquity,
+have lost that little and almost only strength and support which they
+derived from ancient phrases." Other old critics thought that Sternhold,
+could he return to life, would hardly know his own verses.
+
+This is Sternhold's rendering of the Psalm in the edition of 1549:--
+
+  1.  The heavens & the fyrmamente
+        do wondersly declare
+      The glory of God omnipotent
+        his workes and what they are.
+
+  2.  Ech daye declareth by his course
+        an other daye to come
+      And By the night we know lykwise
+        a nightly course to run.
+
+  3.  There is no laguage tong or speche
+        where theyr sound is not heard,
+      In al the earth and coastes thereof
+        theyr knowledge is conferd.
+
+  4.  In them the lord made royally
+        a settle for the sunne
+      Where lyke a Gyant joyfully
+        he myght his iourney runne.
+
+  5.  And all the skye from ende to ende
+        he compast round about
+      No man can hyde hym from his heate
+        but he wll fynd hym out
+
+In order to show the liberties taken with the text we can compare with it
+the Genevan edition printed in 1556. The second verse of that presumptuous
+rendering reads,--
+
+  "The wonderous works of God appears
+    by every days success
+  The nyghts which likewise their race runne
+    the selfe same thinges expresse."
+
+The fourth,--
+
+  "In them the lorde made for the sunne
+    a place of great renoune
+  Who like a bridegrome rady-trimed
+    doth from his chamber come."
+
+The expression "rady-trimed," meaning close-shaven, is often instanced as
+one of the inelegancies of Sternhold, but he surely ought not to be held
+responsible for the "improvements" of the Genevan edition published after
+his death.
+
+The Genevan editors also invented and inserted an extra verse:--
+
+  "And as a valiant champion
+    who for to get a prize
+  With joye doth hast to take in hande
+    some noble enterprise."
+
+The fifth verse is thus altered:--
+
+  "And al the skye from ende to ende
+    he compasseth about,
+  Nothing can hyde it from his heate
+    but he wil finde it out."
+
+I cannot express the indignation with which I read these belittling and
+weakening alterations and interpolations; they are so unjust and
+so degrading to the reputation of Sternhold. It seems worse than
+forgery--worse than piracy; for instead of stealing from the defenceless
+dead poet, it foists upon him a spurious and degrading progeny; there is no
+word to express this tinkering libellous literary crime.
+
+Cromwell had a prime favorite among these psalms; it was the one hundred
+and ninth and is known as the "cursing psalm." Here are a few lines from
+it:--
+
+  "As he did cursing love, it shall
+    betide unto him so,
+  And as he did not blessing love
+    it shall be farre him fro,
+  As he with cursing clad himselfe
+    so it like water shall
+  Into his bowels and like oyl
+    Into his bones befall.
+  As garments let it be to him
+    to cover him for aye
+  And as a girdle wherewith he
+    may girded be alway."
+
+Another authority gives the "cursing psalm" as the nineteenth of King
+James's version; but there is nothing in "The heavens declare the glory of
+God," &c. to justify the nickname of "cursing."
+
+It is said when the tyrannical ruler Andros visited New Haven and attended
+church there that (Sternhold and Hopkins' Version being used) the fearless
+minister very inhospitably gave out the fifty-second psalm to be sung. The
+angry governor, who took it as a direct insult, had to listen to the lining
+and singing of these words, and I have no doubt they were roared out with a
+lusty will:--
+
+  1.  Why dost thou tyrant boast thyself
+        thy wicked deeds to praise
+      Dost thou not know there is a God
+        whose mercies last alwaies?
+
+  2.  Why doth thy mind yet still deuise
+        such wisked wiles to warp?
+      Thy tongue untrue, in forging lies
+        is like a razer sharp.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  4.  Thou dost delight in fraude & guilt
+        in mischief bloude and wrong:
+      Thy lips have learned the flattering stile
+        O false deceitful tongue.
+
+  5.  Therefore shall God for eye confounde
+        and pluck thee from thy place.
+      Thy seed and root from out the grounde
+        and so shall thee deface;
+
+  6.  The just when they behold thy fall
+        with feare will praise the Lord:
+      And in reproach of thee withall
+        cry out with one accord.
+
+When the unhappy King Charles fled from Oxford to a camp of troops he also
+was insulted by having the same psalm given out in his presence by the
+boorish chaplain of the troops. After the cruel words were ended the
+heartsick king rose and asked the soldiers to sing the fifty-sixth psalm.
+Whenever I read the beautiful and pathetic words, as peculiarly appropriate
+as if they had been written for that occasion only, I can see it all before
+me,--the great camp, the angry minister, the wretched but truly royal king;
+and I can hear the simple and noble song as it pours from the lips of
+hundreds of rude soldiers:
+
+  1.  Have mercy Lord on mee I pray
+        for man would mee devour.
+      He fighteth with me day by day
+        and troubleth me each hour.
+
+  2.  Mine enemies daily enterprise
+        to swallow mee outright
+      To fight against me many rise
+        O thou most high of might
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  5.  What things I either did or spake
+        they wrest them at thier wil:
+      And all the councel that they take
+        is how to work me il.
+
+  6.  They all consent themselves to hide
+        close watch for me to lay:
+      They spie my pathes, and snares have layd
+        to take my life away.
+
+  7.  Shall they thus scape on mischief set,
+        thou God on them wilt frowne:
+      For in his wrath he will not let
+        to throw whole kingdomes downe.
+
+It would perhaps be neither just nor conducive to proper judgment to gather
+only a florilege of noble verses from Sternhold and Hopkins' Version and
+point out none of the "weedy-trophies," the quaint and even uncouth lines
+which disfigure the work. We must, however, in considering and judging
+them, remember that many words and even phrases which at present
+seem rather ludicrous or undignified had, in the sixteenth century,
+significations which have now become obsolete, and which were then neither
+vulgar nor unpoetical. I also have been forced to take my selections from
+a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins printed in 1599, and bound up with a
+"Breeches Bible;" for I have access to no earlier edition. Sternhold
+and Hopkins themselves may not be in truth responsible for many of
+the crudities. Hopkins, in his rendition of the 12th verse of the
+seventy-fourth Psalm, thus addresses the Deity:--
+
+  "Why doost withdraw thy hand abacke
+    and hide it in thy lappe?
+  O pluck it out and bee not slacke
+    to give thy foes a rap."
+
+"Rap" may have meant a heavier, a mightier blow then than it does
+now-a-days.
+
+Here is another curious verse from the seventieth psalm,--
+
+  "Confounde them that apply
+    and seeke to make my shame
+  And at my harme doe laugh & crye
+    So So there goeth the game."
+
+The sixth verse of the fifty-eighth psalm is rendered thus:--
+
+  "O God breake thou thier teeth at once
+    within thier mouthes throughout;
+  The tuskes that in thier great jawbones
+    like Lions whelpes hang out."
+
+Another verse reads thus:--
+
+  "The earth did quake, the raine pourde down
+    Heard men great claps of thunder
+  And Mount Sinai shooke in such state
+    As it would cleeve in sunder."
+
+One verse of the thirty-fifth psalm reads thus:--
+
+  "The belly-gods and flattering traine
+    that all good things deride
+  At me doe grin with greate disdaine
+    and pluck thier mouths aside.
+  Lord when wilt thou amend this geare
+    why dost thou stay & pause?
+  O rid my soul, my onely deare,
+    out of these Lions clawes."
+
+The word tush occurs frequently and quaintly: "Tush I an sure to fail;"
+"Tush God forgetteth this."
+
+  "And with a blast doth puff against
+  such as would him correct
+  Tush Tush saith he I have no dread."
+
+Here are some of the curious expressions used:--
+
+  "Though gripes of grief and pangs full sore
+    shall lodge with us all night."
+
+  "For why their hearts were nothing lent
+    to Him nor to His trade."
+
+  "Our soul in God hath joy and game."
+
+  "They are so fed that even for fat
+    thier eyes oft-times out start."
+
+  "They grin they mow they nod thier heads."
+
+  "While they have war within thier hearts."
+    as butter are thier words."
+
+  "Divide them Lord & from them pul
+    thier devilish double-tongue."
+
+  "My silly soul uptake."
+
+  "And rained down Manna for them to eat
+    a food of mickle-wonder."
+
+  "For joy I have both gaped & breathed."
+
+But it is useless to multiply these selections, which, viewed individually,
+are certainly absurd and inelegant. They often indicate, however, the exact
+thought of the Psalmist, and are as well expressed as the desire to be
+literal as well as poetic will permit them to be. Sternhold's verses
+compare quite favorably, when looked at either as a whole or with regard to
+individual lines, with those of other poets of his day, for Chaucer was the
+only great poet who preceded him.
+
+I must acknowledge quite frankly in the face of critics of both this and
+the past century that I always read Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms with a
+delight, a satisfaction that I can hardly give reasons for. Many of the
+renderings, though unmelodious and uneven, have a rough vigor and a
+sweeping swing that is to me wonderfully impressive, far more so than many
+of the elegant and polished methods of modern versifiers. And they are so
+thoroughly antique, so devoid of any resemblance to modern poems, that I
+love them for their penetrating savor of the olden times; and they seem no
+more to be compared and contrasted with modern verses than should an old
+castle tower be compared with a fine new city house. We prefer the latter
+for a habitation, it is infinitely better in every way, but we can admire
+also the rough grandeur of the old ruin.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Other Old Psalm-Books.
+
+
+
+There are occasionally found in New England on the shelves of old
+libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old
+farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a
+pile of dusty books in a barrel,--there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered
+psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly
+used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed
+in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some
+colonist, in affectionate remembrance of the church of his youth, and sung
+from only with tender reminiscent longing in his own home. But when groups
+of settlers who were neighbors and friends in their old homes came to
+America and formed little segregated communities by themselves, there is no
+doubt that they sung for a time from the psalm-books that they brought with
+them.
+
+A rare copy is sometimes seen of Marot and Beza's French Psalm-book,
+brought to America doubtless by French Huguenot settlers, and used by them
+until (and perhaps after) the owners had learned the new tongue. Some of
+the Huguenots became members of the Puritan churches in America, others
+were Episcopalians. In Boston the Fancuils, Baudoins, Boutineaus,
+Sigourneys, and Johannots were all Huguenots, and attended the little brick
+church built on School Street in 1704, which was afterwards occupied by
+the Twelfth Congregational Society of Boston, and in 1788 became a Roman
+Catholic church.
+
+The pocket psalm-book of Gabriel Bernon, the builder of the old French Fort
+at Oxford, is one of Marot and Beza's Version, and is still preserved and
+owned by one of his descendants; other New England families of French
+lineage cherish as precious relics the French psalm-books of their Huguenot
+ancestors. There has been in France no such incessant production of new
+metrical versions of the psalms as in England. From the time of the
+publication of the first versified psalms in 1540, through nearly three
+centuries the psalm-book of all French Protestants has been that of Marot
+and Beza. This French version of the psalms is of special interest to all
+thoughtful students of the history of Protestantism, because it was the
+first metrical translation of the psalms ever sung and used by the people;
+and it was without doubt one of the most powerful influences that assisted
+in the religious awakening of the Reformation.
+
+Clement Marot was the "Valet of the Bed-chamber to King Francis I.," and
+was one of the greatest French poets of his time; in fact, he gave his
+name to a new school of poetry,--"Marotique." He had tried his hand at
+an immense variety of profane verse, he had written ballades, chansons,
+pastourelles, vers equivoques, eclogues, laments, complaints, epitaphs,
+chants-royals, blasons, contreblasons, dizains, huitains, envois; he had
+been, Warton says, "the inventor of the rondeau and the restorer of the
+madrigal;" and yet, in spite of his well-known ingenuity and versatility,
+it occasioned much surprise and even amusement when it was known that the
+gay poet had written psalm-songs and proposed to substitute them for the
+love-songs of the French court. I doubt if Marot thought very deeply of the
+religious influence of his new songs, in spite of Mr. Morley's belief in
+the versifier's serious intent. He was doubtless interested and perhaps
+somewhat infected by "Lutheranisme," though perhaps he was more of a
+free-thinker than a Protestant. He himself said of his faith:--
+
+              "I am not a Lutherist
+  Nor Zuinglian and less Anabaptist,
+  I am of God through his son Jesus Christ.
+  I am one who has many works devised
+  From which none could extract a single line
+  Opposing itself to the law divine."
+
+And again:--
+
+  "Luther did not come down from heaven for me
+  Luther was not nailed to the cross to be
+  My Saviour; for my sins to suffer shame,
+  And I was not baptized in Luther's name.
+  The name I was baptized in sounds so sweet
+  That at the sound of it, what we entreat
+  The Eternal Father gives."
+
+In the year 1540, at the instigation of King Francis, Marot presented a
+manuscript copy of his thirty new psalm-songs to Charles V., king of Spain,
+receiving therefor two hundred gold doubloons. Francis encouraged him by
+further gifts, and so praised his work that the author soon published the
+thirty in a book which he dedicated to the king; and to which he also
+prefixed a metrical address to the ladies of France, bidding these fair
+dames to place their
+
+    "doigts sur les espinettes
+  Pour dire sainctes chansonnettes."
+
+These "sainctes chansonnettes" became at once the rage; courtiers and
+princes, lords and ladies, ever ready for some new excitement, seized at
+once upon the novel psalm-songs, and having no special or serious music for
+them, cheerfully sang the sacred words to the ballad-tunes of the times,
+and to their gailliards and measures, without apparently any very deep
+thought of their religious meaning. Disraeli says that each of the royal
+family and each nobleman chose for his favorite song a psalm expressive of
+his own feeling or sentiments. The Dauphin, as became a brave huntsman,
+chose
+
+  "Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre,"
+
+  "As the hart panteth after the water-brook,"
+
+and he gayly and noisily sang it when he went to the chase. The Queen chose
+
+  "Ne vueilles pas, o sire,
+  Me reprendre en ton ire."
+
+  "Rebuke me not in thine indignation."
+
+Antony, king of Navarre, sung
+
+  "Revenge moy prens la querelle,"
+
+  "Stand up, O Lord! to revenge my quarrel,"
+
+to the air of a dance of Poitou. Diane de Poictiers chose
+
+  "Du fond de ma pensee."
+
+  "From the depth of my heart."
+
+But when from interest in her psalm-song she wished to further read and
+study the Bible, she was warned from the danger with horror by the Cardinal
+of Lorraine. This religious awakening and inquiry was of course deprecated
+and dreaded by the Romish Church; to the Sorbonne all this rage for
+psalm-singing was alarming enough. What right had the people to sing God's
+word, "I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall be continually
+in my mouth"? The new psalm-songs were soon added to the list of "Heretical
+Books" forbidden by the Church, and Marot fled to Geneva in 1543. He had
+ere this been under ban of the Church, even under condemnation of death;
+had been proclaimed a heretic at all the cross-ways throughout the kingdom,
+and had been imprisoned. But he had been too good a poet and courtier to be
+lost, and the king had then interested himself and obtained the release of
+the versatile song writer. The fickle king abandoned for a second time the
+psalm versifier, who never again returned to France.
+
+The austere and far-seeing Calvin at once adopted Marot's version of the
+Psalms, now enlarged to the number of fifty, and added them to the Genevan
+Confession of Faith,--recommending however that they be sung with the grave
+and suitable strains written, for them by Guillaume Frane.
+
+The collection was completed with the assistance of Theodore Beza, the
+great theologian, and the demand for the books was so great that the
+printers could not supply them quickly enough. Ten thousand copies were
+sold at once,--a vast number for the times.
+
+But Marot was not happy in Geneva with Calvin and the Calvinists, as we can
+well understand. Beza, in his "History of the French Reformed Churches"
+said, "He (Marot) had always been bred up in a very bad school, and could
+not live in subjection to the reformation of the Gospel, and therefore
+went and spent the rest of his days in Piedmont, which was then in the
+possession of the king, where he lived in some security under the favor of
+the governor." He lived less than a year, however, dying in 1544.
+
+These psalms of Marot's passed through a great number and variety of
+editions. In addition to the Genevan publications, an immense number were
+printed in England. Nearly all the early editions were elegant books;
+carefully printed on rich paper, beautifully bound in rich moroccos and
+leathers, often emblazoned with gold on the covers, and with corners and
+clasps of precious metals,--they show the wealth and fashion of the owners.
+When, however, it came to be held an infallible sign of "Lutheranisme" to
+be a singer of psalms, simpler and cheaper bindings appear; hence the dress
+of the French Psalm-Book found in New England is often dull enough, but
+invariably firm and substantial.
+
+These psalms of Marot's are written in a great variety of song-measures,
+which seem scarcely as solemn and religious as the more dignified and even
+metres used by the early English writers. Some are graceful and smooth,
+however, and are canorous though never sonorous. They are pleasing to read
+with their quaint old spelling and lettering.
+
+In the old Sigourney psalm-book the nineteenth psalm was thus rendered:--
+
+  "Les cieux en chaque lieu
+  La puissance de Dieu
+    Racourent aux humains
+  Ce grand entour espars
+  Publie en toutes parts
+    L'ouvrage de ses mains.
+
+  "Iour apres iour coulant
+  Du Saigneur va parlant
+    Par longue experience.
+  La nuict suivant la nuict,
+  Nous presche et nous instruicst
+    De sa grad sapience"
+
+Another much-employed metre was this, of the hundred and thirty-third
+psalm:--
+
+  "Asais aux bors do ce superbe fleuve
+  Que de Babel les campagnes abreuve,
+  Nos tristes coeurs ne pensoient qu' a Sion.
+  Chacun, helas, dans cette affliction
+  Les yeux en pleurs la morte peinte au visage
+  Pendit sa harpe aux saules du rivage."
+
+A third and favorite metre was this:--
+
+  "Mais sa montagne est un sainct lieu:
+  Qui viendra done au mont de Dieu?
+    Qui est-ce qui la tiendra place?
+  Le homine de mains et coeur lave,
+  En vanite non esleve
+    Et qui n'a jure en fallace."
+
+Marot wrote in his preface to the psalms:--
+
+  "Thrice happy they who shall behold
+  And listen in that age of gold
+  As by the plough the laborer strays
+  And carman 'mid the public ways
+  And tradesman in his shop shall swell
+  The voice in psalm and canticle,
+  Sing to solace toil; again
+  From woods shall come a sweeter strain,
+  Shepherd and shepherdess shall vie
+  In many a tender Psalmody,
+  And the Creator's name prolong
+  As rock and stream return their song."
+
+Though these words seem prophetic, the gay and volatile Marot could never
+have foreseen what has proved one of the most curious facts in religious
+history,--that from the airy and unsubstantial seed sown by the French
+courtier in such a careless, thoughtless manner, would spring the
+great-spreading and deep-rooted tree of sacred song.
+
+Little volumes of the metrical rendering of the Psalms, known as "Tate and
+Brady's Version," are frequently found in New England. It was the first
+English collection of psalms containing any smoothly flowing verses. Many
+of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal
+renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were
+"tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were
+certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate.
+It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able
+to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too
+modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write
+an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel.
+Brady--equally modest--translated the Aeneid in rivalry of Dryden. "This
+translation," says Johnson, "when dragged into the world did not live long
+enough to cry."
+
+Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a
+stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's
+hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them
+we owe, however, these noble lines, which were written thus:--
+
+  "Be thou, O God, exalted High,
+  And as thy glory fills the Skie
+  So let it be on Earth displaid
+  Till thou art here as There obeyed."
+
+The hymn commencing,--
+
+  "My soul for help on God relies,
+    From him alone my safety flows,"
+
+is also of their composition.
+
+The first edition of these psalms was printed in 1696, and bore this
+title, "The Book of Psalms, a new version in metre fitted to the tunes used
+in Churches. By N. Tate and N. Brady." It was dedicated to King William,
+and though its use was permitted in English churches, it never supplanted
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version. In New England Tate and Brady's Psalms
+became more universally popular,--not, however, without fierce opposing
+struggles from the older church-members at giving up the venerated "Bay
+Psalm-Book."
+
+Another version of Psalms which is occasionally found in New England is
+known as "Patrick's Version." The title is "The Psalms of David in Metre
+Fitted to the Tunes used in Parish Churches by John Patrick, D.D. Precentor
+to the Charter House London." A curious feature of this octavo edition of
+1701, which I have, is, "An Explication of Some Words of less Common
+Use For the Benefit of the Common People." Here are a few of the
+"explications:"--
+
+  "Celebrate--Make renown'd.
+  Climes--Countries differing in length of days.
+  Detracting--Lessening one's credit.
+  Fluid--Yielding.
+  Infest--Annoy.
+  Theam--Matter of Discourse.
+  Uncessant--Never ceasing.
+  Stupemlious--Astonishing."
+
+Baxter said of Patrick, "His holy affection and harmony hath so far
+reconciled the Nonconformists that diverse of them use his Psalms in
+their congregation." I doubt if the version were used in New England
+Nonconformist congregations. Some of his verses read thus:--
+
+  "Lord hear the pray'rs and mournfull cries
+    Of mine afflicted estate,
+  And with thy Comforts chear my soul,
+    Before it is too late.
+
+  "My days consume away like Smoak
+    Mine anguish is so great,
+  My bones are not unlike a hearth
+    Parched & dry with heat.
+
+  "Such is my grief I little else
+    Can do but sigh and groan.
+  So wasted is my flesh I'm left
+    Nothing but skin and bone.
+
+  "Like th' Owl and Pelican that dwell
+    In desarts out of sight,
+  I sadly do bemoan myself,
+    In solitude delight.
+
+  "The wakeful bird that on Housetops
+    Sits without company
+  And spends the night in mournful cries
+    Leads such a life as I.
+
+  "The Ashes I rowl in when I eat
+    Are tasted with my bread,
+  And with my Drink are mixed the tears
+    I plentifully shed."
+
+A version of the Psalms which seems to have demanded and deserved more
+attention than it received was written by Cotton Mather. He was doomed to
+disappointment in seeing his version adopted by the New England churches
+just as his ambitions and hopes were disappointed in many other ways. This
+book was published in 1718. It was called "Psalterium Americanum. A Book
+of Psalms in a translation exactly conformed unto the Original; but all
+in blank verse. Fitted unto the tunes commonly used in the Church." By a
+curious arrangement of brackets and the use of two kinds of print these
+psalms could be divided into two separate metres and could be sung to
+tunes of either long or short metre. After each psalm were introduced
+explanations written in Mather's characteristic manner,--a manner both
+scholarly and bombastic. I have read the "Psalterium Americanum" with care,
+and am impressed with its elegance, finish, and dignity. It is so popular,
+however, even now-a-days, to jibe at poor Cotton Mather, that his Psalter
+does not escape the thrusts of laughing critics. Mr. Glass, the English
+critic, holds up these lines as "one of the rich things:"--
+
+  "As the Hart makes a panting cry
+    For cooling streams of water,
+  So my soul makes a panting cry
+    For thee--O Mighty God."
+
+I have read these lines over and over again, and fail to see anything very
+ludicrous in them, though they might be slightly altered to advantage.
+Still they may be very absurd and laughable from an English point of view.
+
+So superior was Cotton Mather's version to the miserable verses given in
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" that one wonders it was not eagerly accepted by the
+New England churches. Doubtless they preferred rhyme--even the atrocious
+rhyme of "The Bay Psalm Book." And the fact that the "Psalterium
+Americanum" contained no musical notes or directions also militated against
+its use.
+
+Other American clergymen prepared metrical versions of the psalms that were
+much loved and loudly sung by the respective congregations of the writers.
+The work of those worthy, painstaking saints we will neither quote nor
+criticise,--saying only of each reverend versifier, "Truly, I would
+the gods had made thee poetical." Rev. John Barnard, who preached for
+fifty-four years in Marblehead, published at the age of seventy years a
+psalm-book for his people. Though it appeared in 1752, a time when "The Bay
+Psalm Book" was being shoved out of the New England churches, Barnard's
+Version of the Psalms was never used outside of Marblehead. Rev. Abijah
+Davis published another book of psalms in which he copied whole pages from
+Watts without a word of thanks or of due credit, which was apparently
+neither Christian, clerical nor manly behavior.
+
+Watts's monosyllabic Hymns, which were not universally used in America
+until after the Revolution, are too well known and are still too frequently
+seen to need more than mention. Within the last century a flood of new
+books of psalms of varying merit and existence has poured out upon the New
+England churches, and filled the church libraries and church, pews, the
+second-hand book shops, the missionary boxes, and the paper-mills.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+The Church Music.
+
+
+
+Of all the dismal accompaniments of public worship in the early days of New
+England, the music was the most hopelessly forlorn,--not alone from the
+confused versifications of the Psalms which were used, but from the
+mournful monotony of the few known tunes and the horrible manner in which
+those tunes were sung. It was not much better in old England. In 1676
+Master Mace wrote of the singing in English churches, "'T is sad to
+hear what whining, toling, yelling or shreaking there is in our country
+congregations."
+
+A few feeble efforts were made in America at the beginning of the
+eighteenth century to attempt to guide the singing. The edition of 1698 of
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" had "Some few Directions" regarding the singing added
+on the last pages of the book, and simple enough they were in matter if not
+in form. They commence, "_First_, observe how many note-compass the
+tune is next the place of your first note, and how many notes above and
+below that so as you may begin the tune of your first note, as the rest may
+be sung in the compass of your and the peoples voices without Squeaking
+above or Grumbling below."
+
+This "Squeaking above and Grumbling below" had become far too frequent in
+the churches; Judge Sewall writes often with much self-reproach of his
+failure in "setting the tune," and also records with pride when he "set the
+psalm well." Here is his pathetic record of one of his mistakes: "He spake
+to me to set the tune. I intended Windsor and fell into High Dutch, and
+then essaying to set another tune went into a Key much to high. So I pray'd
+to Mr. White to set it which he did well. Litchfield Tune. The Lord Humble
+me and Instruct me that I should be the occasion of any interruption in the
+worship of God."
+
+The singing at the time must have been bad beyond belief; how much of its
+atrocity was attributable to the use of "The Bay Psalm-Book," cannot now
+be known. The great length of many of the psalms in that book was a fatal
+barrier to any successful effort to have good singing. Some of them were
+one hundred and thirty lines long, and occupied, when lined and sung, a
+full half-hour, during which the patient congregation stood. It is told of
+Dr. West, who preached in Dartmouth in 1726, that he forgot one Sabbath Day
+to bring his sermon to meeting. He gave out a psalm, walked a quarter of a
+mile to his house, got his sermon, and was back in his pulpit long before
+the psalm was finished. The irregularity of the rhythm in "The Bay Psalm
+Book" must also have been a serious difficulty to overcome. Here is the
+rendering given of the 133d Psalm:--
+
+  1. How good and sweet to see
+       i'ts for bretheren to dwell
+       together in unitee:
+
+  2. Its like choice oyle that fell
+       the head upon
+       that down did flow
+       the beard unto
+       beard of Aron:
+       The skirts of his garment
+       that unto them went down:
+
+  3. Like Hermons dews descent
+       Sions mountains upon
+       for there to bee
+       the Lords blessing
+       life aye lasting
+       commandeth hee.
+
+How this contorted song could have been sung even to the simplest tune by
+unskilled singers who possessed no guiding notes of music is difficult
+to comprehend. Small wonder that Judge Sewall was forced to enter in his
+diary, "In the morning I set York tune and in the second going over, the
+gallery carried it irresistibly to St. Davids which discouraged me very
+much." We can fancy him stamping his foot, beating time, and roaring York
+at the top of his old lungs, and being overcome by the strong-voiced
+gallery, and at last sadly succumbing to St. David's. Again he writes: "I
+set York tune and the Congregation went out of it into St. Davids in the
+very 2nd going over. They did the same 3 weeks before. This is the 2nd
+Sign. It seems to me an intimation for me to resign the Praecentor's Place
+to a better Voice. I have through the Divine Long suffering and Favour done
+it for 24 years and now God in his Providence seems to call me off, my
+voice being enfeebled." Still a third time he "set Windsor tune;" they "ran
+over into Oxford do what I would." These unseemly "running overs" became
+so common that ere long each singer "set the tune" at his own will and the
+loudest-voiced carried the day. A writer of the time, Rev. Thomas Walter,
+says of this reign of _concordia discors_: "The tunes are now
+miserably tortured and twisted and quavered, in some Churches, into a
+horrid Medly of confused and disorderly Voices. Our tunes are left to the
+Mercy of every unskilful Throat to chop and alter, to twist and change,
+according to their infinitely divers and no less Odd Humours and Fancies.
+I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two Men in the
+Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good
+Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with
+perpetual Interfearings with one another."
+
+Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and
+unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they
+possessed,--a foretaste of heaven;
+
+      "for all we know
+  Of what the blessed do above
+  Is that they sing and that they love."
+
+And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous
+melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal.
+
+Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the
+early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering
+and holding the colonists together in love. And they reverenced their poor
+halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever
+a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a
+psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he
+doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must
+believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,--
+
+    "There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged,
+    I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune."
+
+Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved
+to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words.
+"The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears
+at the words, _bought with thy blood_." He also, with a vehemence of
+language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that
+he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of
+his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield,
+Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs.
+
+About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously
+prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing
+Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These
+thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound
+often with "The Bay Psalm-Book." They were reprinted from Playford's "Book
+of Psalms" and the notes of the staff were replaced with letters and dots,
+and the bars marking the measures were omitted. To the Puritans, this great
+number of new tunes appeared fairly monstrous, and formed the signal for
+bitter objections and fierce quarrels.
+
+In 1647 a tract had appeared on church-singing which had attracted much
+attention. It was written by Rev John Cotton to attempt to influence the
+adoption and universal use of "The Bay Psalm-Book." This tract thoroughly
+considered the duty of singing, the matter sung, the singers, and the
+manner of singing, and, like all the literature of the time, was full of
+Biblical allusion and quotation. It had been said that "man should sing
+onely and not the women. Because it is not permitted to a woman to speake
+in the Church, how then shall they sing? Much lesse is it permitted to them
+to prophecy in the church and singing of Psalms is a kind of Prophecying."
+Cotton fully answered and contradicted these false reasoners, who would
+have had to face a revolution had they attempted to keep the Puritan women
+from singing in meeting. The tract abounds in quaint expressions, such as,
+"they have scoffed at Puritan Ministers as calling the people to sing one
+of _Hopkins-Jiggs_ and so _hop_ into the pulpit." Though he wrote
+this tract to encourage good singing in meeting, his endorsement of "lining
+the Psalm" gave support to the very element that soon ruined the singing.
+His reasons, however, were temporarily good, "because many wanted books and
+skill to read." At that time, and for a century later, many congregations
+had but one or two psalm-books, one of which was often bound with the
+church Bible and from which the deacon lined the psalm.
+
+So villanous had church-singing at last become that the clergymen arose in
+a body and demanded better performances; while a desperate and disgusted
+party was also formed which was opposed to all singing. Still another band
+of old fogies was strong in force who wished to cling to the same way of
+singing that they were accustomed to; and they gave many objections to the
+new-fangled idea of singing by note, the chief item on the list being the
+everlasting objection of all such old fossils, that "the old way was good
+enough for our fathers," &c. They also asserted that "_the names of
+the notes were blasphemous_;" that it was "popish;" that it was a
+contrivance to get money; that it would bring musical instruments into the
+churches; and that "no one could learn the tunes any way." A writer in the
+"New England Chronicle" wrote in 1723, "Truly I have a great jealousy
+that if we begin to _sing_ by _rule_, the next thing will be
+to _pray_ by rule and _preach_ by rule and _then comes popery_."
+
+It is impossible to overestimate the excitement, the animosity, and the
+contention which arose in the New England colonies from these discussions
+over "singing by rule" or "singing by rote." Many prominent clergymen wrote
+essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of
+Regular Singing," also a "Joco-serious Dialogue on Singing," by Reverend
+Mr. Symmes; "Cases of Conscience," compiled by several ministers; "The
+Accomplished Singer," by Cotton Mather, were the most important. "Singing
+Lectures" also were given in many parts of New England by various prominent
+ministers. So high was party feud that a "Pacificatory Letter" was
+necessary, which was probably written by Cotton Mather, and which soothed
+the troubled waters. The people who thought the "old way was the best" were
+entirely satisfied when they were convinced that the oldest way of all was,
+of course, by note and not by rote.
+
+This naive extract from the records of the First Church of Windsor,
+Connecticut, will show the way in which the question of "singing by rule"
+was often settled in the churches, and it also gives a very amusing glimpse
+of the colonial manner of conducting a meeting:--
+
+"July 2. 1736. At a Society meeting at which Capt. Pelatiah Allyn
+Moderator. The business of the meeting proceeded in the following manner
+Viz. the Moderator proposed as to the consideration of the meeting in the
+1st Place what should be done respecting that part of publick Woiship
+called Singing viz. whether in their Publick meetings as on Sabbath day,
+Lectures &c they would sing the way that Deacon Marshall usually sung in
+his lifetime commonly called the 'Old Way' or whether they would sing the
+way taught by Mr. Beal commonly called 'Singing by Rule,' and when the
+Society had discoursed the matter the Moderator pioposed to vote for said
+two ways as followeth viz. that those that were for singing in publick in
+the way practiced by Deacon Marshall should hold up their hands and be
+counted, and then that those that were desirous to sing in Mr. Beals way
+called 'by Rule' would after show their minds by the same sign which method
+was proceeded upon accordingly. But when the vote was passed there being
+many voters it was difficult to take the exact number of votes in order to
+determine on which side the major vote was; whereupon the Moderator ordered
+all the voters to go out of the seats and stand in the alleys and then
+those that were for Deacon Marshalls way should go into the mens seats and
+those that were for Mr. Beals way should go into the womens seat and
+after much objections made against that way, which prevailed not with the
+Moderator, it was complied with, and then the Moderator desired that those
+that were of the mind that the way to be practiced for singing for the
+future on the Sabbath &c should be the way sung by Deacon Marshall as
+aforesaid would signify the same by holding up their hands and be counted,
+and then the Moderator and myself went and counted the voters and the
+Moderator asked me how many there was. I answered 42 and he said there was
+63 or 64 and then we both counted again and agreed the number being 43.
+Then the Moderator was about to count the number of votes for Mr. Beals
+way of Singing called 'by Rule' but it was offered whether it would not be
+better to order the voters to pass out of the Meeting House door and there
+be counted who did accordingly and their number was 44 or 45. Then the
+Moderator proceeded and desired that those who were for singing in Public
+the way that Mr. Beal taught would draw out of their seats and pass out of
+the door and be counted. They replied they were ready to show their minds
+in any proper way where they were if they might be directed thereto but
+would not go out of the door to do the same and desired that they might be
+led to a vote where they were and they were ready to show their minds which
+the Moderator refused to do and thereupon declared that it was voted that
+Deacon Marshalls way of singing called the 'Old Way' should be sung in
+Publick for the future and ordered me to record the same as the vote of the
+Said Society which I refused to do under the circumstances thereof and have
+recorded the facts and proceedings."
+
+Good old lining, droning Deacon Marshall! though you were dead and gone,
+you and your years of psalm-singings were not forgotten. You lived, an
+idealized memory of pure and pious harmony, in the hearts of your old
+church friends. Warmly did they fight for your "way of singing;" with
+most undeniable and open partiality, with most dubious ingenuousness and
+rectitude, did your old neighbor, Captain Pelatiah Allyn, conduct that hot
+July music-meeting, counting up boldly sixty-three votes in favor of your
+way, when there were only forty-three voters on your side of the alley, and
+crowding a final decision in your favor. It is sad to read that when icy
+winter chilled the blood, warm partisanship of old friends also cooled, and
+innovative Windsor youth carried the day and the music vote, and your good
+old way was abandoned for half the Sunday services, to allow the upstart
+new fashion to take control.
+
+One happy result arose throughout New England from the victory of the
+ardent advocates of the "singing by rule,"--the establishment of the New
+England "singing-school,"--that outlet for the pent-up, amusement-lacking
+lives of young people in colonial times. What that innocent and
+happy gathering was in the monotonous existence of our ancestors and
+ancestresses, we of the present pleasure-filled days can hardly comprehend.
+
+Extracts from the records of various colonial churches will show how soon
+the respective communities yielded to the march of improvement and "seated
+the taught singers" together, thus forming choirs. In 1762 the church
+at Rowley, Massachusetts, voted "that those who have learned the art of
+Singing may have liberty to sit in the front gallery." In 1780 the same
+parish "requested Jonathan Chaplin and Lieutenant Spefford to assist the
+deacons in Raising the tune in the meeting house." In Sutton, in 1791, the
+Company of Singers were allowed to sit together, and $13 was voted to pay
+for "larning to sing by Rule." The Roxbury "First Church" voted in 1770
+"three seats in the back gallery for those inclined to sit together for
+the purpose of singing" The church in Hanover, in 1742, took a vote to
+see whether the "church will sing in the new way" and appoint a tuner. In
+Woodbury, Connecticut, in 1750 the singers "may sitt up Galery all day if
+they please but to keep to there own seat & not to Infringe on the Women
+Pues." In 1763, in the Ipswich First Parish, the singers were allowed to
+sit "two back on each side of the front alley." Similar entries may be
+found in nearly every record of New England churches in the middle or
+latter part of that century.
+
+The musical battle was not finished, however, when the singing was at last
+taught by rule, and the singers were allowed to sit together and form a
+choir. There still existed the odious custom of "lining" or "deaconing"
+the psalm. To this fashion may be attributed the depraved condition of
+church-singing of which Walters so forcibly wrote, and while it continued
+the case seemed hopeless, in spite of singing-schools and singing-teachers.
+It would be trying to the continued uniformity of pitch of an ordinary
+church choir, even now-a-days, to have to stop for several seconds between
+each line to listen to a reading and sometimes to an explanation of the
+following line.
+
+The Westminster Assembly had suggested in 1664 the alternate reading and
+singing of each line of the psalm to those churches that were not well
+supplied with psalm-books. The suggestion had not been adopted without
+discussion, It was in 1680 much talked over in the church in Plymouth, and
+was adopted only after getting the opinion of each male church member.
+When once taken into general use the custom continued everywhere, through
+carelessness and obstinacy, long after the churches possessed plenty of
+psalm-books. An early complaint against it was made by Dr. Watts in the
+preface of his hymns, which were published by Benjamin Franklin in 1741. As
+Watts' Psalms and Hymns were not, however, in general use in New England
+until after the Revolution, this preface with its complaint was for a long
+time little seen and little heeded.
+
+It is said that the abolition came gradually; that the impetuous and
+well-trained singers at first cut off the last word only of the deacon's
+"lining;" they then encroached a word or two further, and finally sung
+boldly on without stopping at all to be "deaconed." This brought down
+a tempest of indignation from the older church-members, who protested,
+however, in vain. A vote in the church usually found the singers
+victorious, and whether the church voted for or against the "lining," the
+choir would always by stratagem vanquish the deacon. One old soldier took
+his revenge, however. Being sung down by the rampant choir, he still showed
+battle, and rose at the conclusion of the psalm and opened his psalm-book,
+saying calmly, "_Now_ let the _people of the Lord sing_."
+
+The Rowley church tried diplomacy in their struggle against "deaconing,"
+by instituting a gradual abolishing of the custom. In 1785 the choir was
+allowed "to sing once on the Lord's Day without reading by the Deacon." In
+five years the Rowley singers were wholly victorious, and "lining out" the
+psalm was entirely discontinued.
+
+In 1770, dissatisfaction at the singing in the church was rife in
+Wilbraham, and a vote was taken to see whether the town would be willing
+to have singing four times at each service; and it was voted to "take into
+consideration the Broken State of this Town with regard to singing on the
+Sabbath Day." Special and bitter objection was made against the leader
+beating time so ostentatiously. A list of singers was made and a
+singing-master appointed. The deacon was allowed to lead and line and beat
+time in the forenoon, while the new school was to have control in the
+afternoon; and "whoever leads the singing shall be at liberty to use the
+motion of his hand while singing for the space of three months only." It is
+needless to state who came off victorious in the end. The deacon left as a
+parting shot a request to "make Inquiry into the conduct of those who call
+themselves the Singers in this town."
+
+In Worcester, in 1779, a resolution adopted at the town meeting was "that
+the mode of singing in the congregation here be without reading the psalms
+line by line." "The Sabbath succeeding the adoption of this resolution,
+after the hymn had been read by the minister, the aged and venerable Deacon
+Chamberlain, unwilling to abandon the custom of his fathers and his own
+honorable prerogative, rose and read the first line according to his usual
+practice. The singers, previously prepared to carry the desired alteration
+into effect, proceeded in their singing without pausing at the conclusion
+of the line. The white-haired officer of the church with the full power
+of his voice read on through the second line, until the loud notes of the
+collected body of singers overpowered his attempt to resist the progress
+of improvement. The deacon, deeply mortified at the triumph of the musical
+reformation, then seized his hat and retired from the meeting-house in
+tears." His conduct was censured by the church, and he was for a time
+deprived of partaking in the communion, for "absenting himself from the
+public services of the Sabbath;" but in a few weeks the unhouselled deacon
+was forgiven, and never attempted to "line" again.
+
+Though the opponents of "lining" were victorious in the larger villages and
+towns, in smaller parishes, where there were few hymn-books, the lining
+of the psalms continued for many years. Mr. Hood wrote, in 1846, the
+astonishing statement that "the habit of lining prevails to this day over
+three-fourths of the United States." This I can hardly believe, though I
+know that at present the practice obtains in out of the way towns with poor
+and ignorant congregations. The separation of the lines often gives a very
+strange meaning to the words of a psalm; and one wonders what the Puritan
+children thought when they heard this lino of contradictions that Hood
+points out:--
+
+  "The Lord will come and He will not,"
+
+and after singing that line through heard the second line,--
+
+  "Keep silence, but speak out."
+
+Many new psalm-books appeared about the time of the Revolutionary War, and
+many church petitions have been preserved asking permission to use the
+new and more melodious psalm and hymn books. Books of instruction also
+abounded,--books in which the notes were not printed on the staff, and
+books in which there were staffs but no notes, only letters or other
+characters (these were called "dunce notes"); books, too, in which the
+notes were printed so thickly that they could scarcely be distinguished one
+from the other.
+
+  "A dotted tribe with ebon heads
+  That climb the slender fence along,
+  As black as ink, as thick as weeds,
+  Ye little Africans of song."
+
+One book--perhaps the worst, since it was the most pretentious--was "The
+Compleat Melody or Harmony of Sion," by William Tansur,--"Ingenious
+Tans'ur Skilled in Musicks Art." It was a most superficial, pedantic, and
+bewildering composition. The musical instruction was given in the form of a
+series of ill-spelled dialogues between a teacher and pupil, interspersed
+with occasional miserable rhymes. It was ill-expressed at best, and
+such musical terms as "Rations of Concords," "Trilloes," "Trifdiapasons,"
+"Leaps," "Binding cadences," "Disallowances," "Canons," "Prime Flower
+of Florid," "Consecutions of Perfects," and "Figurates," make the book
+exceedingly difficult of comprehension to the average reader, though
+possibly not to a student of obsolete musical phraseology.
+
+A side skirmish on the music field was at this time fought between the
+treble and the tenor parts. Ravenscroft's Psalms and Walter's book had
+given the melody, or plain-song, to the tenor. This had, of course, thrown
+additional difficulties in the way of good singing; but when once the
+trebles obtained the leading part, after the customary bitter opposition,
+the improved singing approved the victory.
+
+Many objections, too, were made to the introduction of "triple-time" tunes.
+It gave great offence to the older Puritans, who wished to drawl out all
+the notes of uniform length; and some persons thought that marking and
+accenting the measure was a step toward the "Scarlet Woman." The time was
+called derisively, "a long leg and a short one."
+
+These old bigots must have been paralyzed at the new style of psalm-singing
+which was invented and introduced by a Massachusetts tanner and
+singing-master named Billings, and which was suggested, doubtless, by the
+English anthems. It spread through the choirs of colonial villages and
+towns like wild-fire, and was called "fuguing." Mr. Billings' "Fuguing
+Psalm Singer" was published in 1770. It is a dingy, ill-printed book with
+a comically illustrated frontispiece, long pages of instruction, and this
+motto:--
+
+  "O, praise the Lord with one consent
+    And in this grand design
+  Let Britain and the Colonies
+    Unanimously join."
+
+The succeeding hymn-books, and the patriotic hymns of Billings in
+post-Revolutionary years have no hint of "Britain" in them. The names
+"Federal Harmony," "Columbian Harmony," "Continental Harmony," "Columbian
+Repository," and "United States Sacred Harmony" show the new nation.
+Billings also published the "Psalm Singer's Amusement," and other
+singing-books. The shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather must have groaned
+aloud at the suggestions, instructions, and actions of this unregenerate,
+daring, and "amusing" leader of church-singing.
+
+It seems astonishing that New England communities in those times of anxious
+and depressing warfare should have so delightedly seized and adopted this
+unusual and comparatively joyous style of singing, but perhaps the new
+spirit of liberty demanded more animated and spirited expression; and
+Billings' psalm-tunes were played with drum and fife on the battlefield to
+inspire the American soldiers. Billings wrote of his fuguing invention, "It
+has more than twenty times the power of the old slow tunes. Now the solemn
+bass demands their attention, next the manly tenor, now the lofty counter,
+now the volatile treble. Now here! Now there! Now here again! Oh ecstatic,
+push on, ye sons of harmony!" Dr. Mather Byles wrote thus of fuguing:--
+
+  "Down starts the Bass with Grave Majestic Air,
+  And up the Treble mounts with shrill Career,
+  With softer Sounds in mild melodious Maze
+  Warbling between, the Tenor gently plays
+  And, if th' inspiring Altos joins the Force
+  See! like the Lark it Wings its towering Course
+  Thro' Harmony's sublimest Sphere it flies
+  And to Angelic Accents seems to rise."
+
+A more modern poet in affectionate remembrance thus sings the fugue:--
+
+  "A fugue let loose cheers up the place,
+    With bass and tenor, alto, air,
+  The parts strike in with measured grace,
+    And something sweet is everywhere.
+
+  "As if some warbling brood should build
+    Of bits of tunes a singing nest;
+  Each bringing that with which it thrilled
+    And weaving it with all the rest."
+
+All public worshippers in the meetings one hundred years ago did not,
+however, regard fuguing as "something sweet everywhere," nor did they agree
+with Billings and Byles as to its angelic and ecstatic properties. Some
+thought it "heartless, tasteless, trivial, and irreverent jargon." Others
+thought the tunes were written more for the absurd inflation of the singers
+than for the glory of God; and many fully sympathized with the man who
+hung two cats over Billings's door to indicate his opinion of Billings's
+caterwauling. An old inhabitant of Roxbury remembered that when fuguing
+tunes were introduced into his church "they produced a literally fuguing
+effect on the older people, who went out of the church as soon as the first
+verse was sung." One scandalized and belligerent old clergyman, upon the
+Sabbath following the introduction of fuguing into his church, preached
+upon the prophecy of Amos, "The songs of the temple shall be turned
+into howling," while another took for his text the sixth verse of the
+seventeenth chapter of Acts, "Those that have turned the world upside down,
+are come hither also." One indignant and disgusted church attendant thus
+profanely recorded in church his views:--
+
+"Written out of temper on a Pannel in one of the Pues in Salem Church:--
+
+  "Could poor King David but for once
+    To Salem Church repair;
+  And hear his Psalms thus warbled out,
+    Good Lord, how he would swear
+
+  "But could St Paul but just pop in,
+    From higher scenes abstracted,
+  And hear his Gospel now explained,
+    By Heavens, he'd run distracted."
+
+These lines were reprinted in the "American Apollo" in 1792.
+
+The repetition of a word or syllable in fuguing often lead to some
+ridiculous variations in the meanings of the lines. Thus the words--
+
+  "With reverence let the saints appear
+  And bow before the Lord,"
+
+were forced to be sung, "And bow-wow-wow, And bow-ow-ow," and so on until
+bass, treble, alto, counter, and tenor had bow-wowed for about twenty
+seconds; yet I doubt if the simple hearts that sung ever saw the absurdity.
+
+It is impossible while speaking of fuguing to pass over an extraordinary
+element of the choir called "singing counter." The counter-tenor parts in
+European church-music were originally written for boys' voices. From
+thence followed the falsetto singing of the part by men; such was also
+the "counter" of New England. It was my fortune to hear once in a country
+church an aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and
+respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start
+of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and
+apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir,
+but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however
+chosen, would fail in attempting to describe the grotesque and uncanny
+sound.
+
+It is very evident, when once choirs of singers were established and
+attempts made for congregations to sing the same tune, and to keep
+together, and upon the same key, that in some way a decided pitch must be
+given to them to start upon. To this end pitch-pipes were brought into the
+singers' gallery, and the pitch was given sneakingly and shamefacedly to
+the singers. From these pitch-pipes the steps were gradual, but they led,
+as the Puritan divines foresaw, to the general introduction of musical
+instruments into the meetings.
+
+This seemed to be attacking the very foundations of their church; for the
+Puritans in England had, in 1557, expressly declared "concerning singing of
+psalms we allow of the people joining with one voice in a plain tune, but
+not in tossing the psalms from one side to the other with mingling of
+organs." The Round-heads had, in 1664, gone through England destroying the
+noble organs in the churches and cathedrals. They tore the pipes from the
+organ in Westminster Abbey, shouting, "Hark! how the organs go!" and, "Mark
+what musick that is, that is lawful for a Puritan to dance," and they sold
+the metal for pots of ale. Only four or five organs were left uninjured in
+all England. 'Twas not likely, then, that New England Puritans would take
+kindly to any musical instruments. Cotton Mather declared that there was
+not a word in the New Testament that authorized the use of such aids to
+devotion. The ministers preached often and long on the text from the
+prophecy of Amos, "I will not hear the melody of thy viols;" while,
+Puritan-fashion, they ignored the other half of the verse, "Take thou away
+from me the noise of thy songs." Disparaging comparisons were made with
+Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut,
+and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical
+knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players."
+
+Some of the first pitch-pipes were comical little apple-wood instruments
+that looked like mouse-traps, and great pains was taken to conceal them as
+they were passed surreptitiously from hand to hand in the choir. I have
+seen one which was carefully concealed in a box that had a leather binding
+like a book, and which was ostentatiously labelled in large gilt letters
+"Holy Bible;" a piece of barefaced and unnecessary deception on the part of
+some pious New England deacon or chorister.
+
+Little wooden fifes were also used, and then metal tuning-forks. A canny
+Scotchman, who abhorred the thought of all musical instruments anywhere,
+managed to have one fling at the pitch-pipe. The pitch had been given but
+was much too high, and before the first verse was ended the choir had to
+cease singing. The Scotchman stood up and pointed his long finger to the
+leader, saying in broad accents of scorn, "Ah, Johnny Smuth, now ye can
+have a chance to blaw yer braw whustle agaen." At a similar catastrophe
+owing to the mistake of the leader in Medford, old General Brooks rose in
+his pew and roared in an irritated voice of command, "Halt! Take another
+pitch, Bailey, take another pitch."
+
+In 1713 there was sent to America an English organ, "a pair of organs" it
+was called, which had chanced, by being at the manufacturers instead of in
+a church, to have escaped the general destruction by the Round-heads. It
+was given by Thomas Brattle to the Brattle Street Church in Boston. The
+congregation voted to refuse the gift, and it was then sent to King's
+Chapel, where it remained unpacked for several months for fear of hostile
+demonstrations, but was finally set up and used. In 1740 a Bostonian named
+Bromfield made an organ, and it was placed in a meeting-house and used
+weekly. In 1794 the church in Newbury obtained an organ, and many
+unpleasant and disparaging references were made by clergymen of other
+parishes to "our neighbor's box of whistles," "the tooting tub."
+
+Violoncellos, or bass-viols, as they were universally called, were almost
+the first musical instruments that were allowed in the New England
+churches. They were called, without intentional irreverence, "Lord's
+fiddles." Violins were widely opposed, they savored too much of low, tavern
+dance-music. After much consultation a satisfactory compromise was agreed
+upon by which violins were allowed in many meetings, if the performers
+"would play the fiddle wrong end up." Thus did our sanctimonious
+grandfathers cajole and persuade themselves that an inverted fiddle was
+not a fiddle at all, but a small bass-viol. An old lady, eighty years old,
+wrote thus in the middle of this century, of the church of her youth:
+"After awhile there was a bass-viol Introduced and brought into meeting and
+did not suit the Old people; one Old Gentleman got up, took his hat off
+the peg and marched off. Said they had begun fiddling and there would be
+dancing soon." Another church-member, in derisive opposition to a clarinet
+which had been "voted into the choir," brought into meeting a fish-horn,
+which he blew loud and long to the complete rout of the clarinet-player and
+the singers. When reproved for this astounding behavior he answered stoutly
+that "if one man could blow a horn in the Lord's House on the Sabbath day
+he guessed he could too," and he had to be bound over to keep the peace
+before the following Sunday. A venerable and hitherto decorous old deacon
+of Roxbury not only left the church when the hated bass-viol began its
+accompanying notes, but he stood for a long time outside the church door
+stridently "caterwauling" at the top of his lungs. When expostulated with
+for this unseemly and unchristianlike annoyance he explained that he was
+"only mocking the banjo." To such depths of rebellion were stirred the
+Puritan instincts of these religious souls.
+
+Many a minister said openly that he would like to walk out of his pulpit
+when the obnoxious and hated flutes, violins, bass-viols, and bassoons were
+played upon in the singing gallery. One clergyman contemptuously announced
+"We will now sing and fiddle the forty-fifth Psalm." Another complained of
+the indecorous dress of the fiddle-player. This had reference to the almost
+universal custom, in country churches in the summer time, of the bass-viol
+player removing his coat and playing "in his shirt sleeves." Others hated
+the noisy tuning of the bass-viol while the psalm was being read. Mr.
+Brown, of Westerly, sadly deplored that "now we have only catgut and resin
+religion."
+
+In 1804 the church in Quincy, being "advanced," granted the singers the
+sum of twenty-five dollars to buy a bass-viol to use in meeting, and a few
+other churches followed their lead. From the year 1794 till 1829 the
+church in Wareham, Massachusetts, was deeply agitated over the question of
+"Bass-Viol, or No Bass-Viol." They voted that a bass-viol was "expedient,"
+then they voted to expel the hated abomination; then was obtained "Leave
+for the Bass Viol to be brought into ye meeting house to be Played On every
+other Sabbath & to Play if chosen every Sabbath in the Intermission between
+meetings & not to Pitch the Tunes on the Sabbaths that it don't Play" Then,
+they tried to bribe the choir for fifty dollars not to use the "bars-vile,"
+but being unsuccessful, many members in open rebellion stayed away from
+church and were disciplined therefor. Then they voted that the bass-viol
+could not be used unless Capt. Gibbs were previously notified (so he and
+his family need not come to hear the hated sounds); but at last, after
+thirty years, the choir and the "fiddle-player" were triumphant in Wareham
+as they were in other towns.
+
+We were well into the present century before any cheerful and also simple
+music was heard in our churches; fuguing was more varied and surprising
+than cheerful. Of course, it was difficult as well as inappropriate to
+suggest pleasing tunes for such words as these:--
+
+  "Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+    The land of horror and despair,
+  Justice hath built a dismal hell,
+    And laid her stores of vengeance there:
+
+  "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+    Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+  And darts to inflict immortal pains,
+    Dyed in the blood of damned souls."
+
+But many of the words of the old hymns were smooth, lively, and
+encouraging; and the young singers and perhaps the singing-masters craved
+new and less sober tunes. Old dance tunes were at first adapted; "Sweet
+Anne Page," "Babbling Echo," "Little Pickle" were set to sacred words. The
+music of "Few Happy Matches" was sung to the hymn "Lo, on a narrow neck
+of land;" and that of "When I was brisk and young" was disguised with
+the sacred words of "Let sinners take their course." The jolly old tune,
+"Begone dull care," which began,--
+
+  "My wife shall dance, and I will sing,
+  And merrily pass the day."
+
+was strangely appropriated to the solemn words,--
+
+  "If this be death, I soon shall be
+  From every pain and sorrow free,"
+
+and did not seem ill-fitted either.
+
+"Sacred arrangements," "spiritual songs," "sacred airs," soon followed, and
+of course demanded singers of capacity and education to sing them. From
+this was but a step to a paid quartette, and the struggle over this last
+means of improvement and pleasure in church music is of too recent a date
+to be more than referred to.
+
+I attended a church service not many years ago in Worcester, where an old
+clergyman, the venerable "Father" Allen, of Shrewsbury, then too aged
+and feeble to preach, was seated in the front pew of the church. When a
+quartette of singers began to render a rather operatic arrangement of a
+sacred song he rose, erect and stately, to his full gaunt height, turned
+slowly around and glanced reproachfully over the frivolous, backsliding
+congregation, wrapped around his spare, lean figure his full cloak
+of quilted black silk, took his shovel hat and his cane, and stalked
+indignantly and sadly the whole length of the broad central aisle, out
+of the church, thus making a last but futile protest against modern
+innovations in church music. Many, in whom the Puritan instincts and blood
+are still strong, sympathize internally with him in this feeling; and all
+novelty-lovers must acknowledge that the sublime simplicity and deep piety
+in which the old Puritan psalm-tunes abound, has seldom been attained in
+the modern church-songs. Even persons of neither musical knowledge, taste,
+nor love, feel the power of such a tune as Old Hundred; and more modern and
+more difficult melodies, though they charm with their harmony and novelty,
+can never equal it in impressiveness nor in true religious influence.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+The Interruptions of the Services.
+
+
+
+Though the Puritans were such a decorous, orderly people, their religious
+meetings were not always quiet and uninterrupted. We know the torment they
+endured from the "wretched boys," and they were harassed by other
+annoying interruptions. For the preservation of peace and order they made
+characteristic laws, with characteristic punishments. "If any interrupt
+or oppose a preacher in season of worship, they shall be reproved by the
+Magistrate, and on repetition, shall pay L5, or stand two hours on a block
+four feet high, with this inscription in Capitalls, 'A WANTON GOSPELLER.'"
+As with other of their severe laws the rigid punishment provoked the crime,
+for Wanton Gospellers abounded. The Baptists did not hesitate to state
+their characteristic belief in the Puritan meetings, and the Quakers or
+"Foxians," as they were often called, interrupted and plagued them sorely.
+Judge Sewall wrote, in 1677, "A female quaker, Margaret Brewster, in
+sermon-time came in, in a canvass frock, her hair dishevelled loose like a
+Periwig, her face as black as ink, led by two other quakers, and two other
+quakers followed. It occasioned the greatest and most amazing uproar that I
+ever saw." More grievous irruptions still of scantily clad and even naked
+Quaker women were made into other Puritan meetings; and Quaker men shouted
+gloomily in through the church windows, "Woe! Woe! Woe to the people!"
+and, "The Lord will destroy thee!" and they broke glass bottles before
+the minister's very face, crying out, "Thus the Lord will break thee in
+pieces!" and they came into the meeting-house, in spite of the fierce
+tithingman, and sat down in other people's seats with their hats on their
+heads, in ash-covered coats, rocking to and fro and groaning dismally, as
+if in a mournful obsession. Quaker women managed to obtain admission to the
+churches, and they jumped up in the quiet Puritan assemblies screaming out,
+"Parson! thou art an old fool," and, "Parson! thy sermon is too long," and,
+"Parson! sit down! thee has already said more than thee knows how to say
+well," and other unpleasant, though perhaps truthful personalities. It is
+hard to believe that the poor, excited, screaming visionaries of those
+early days belonged to the same religious sect as do the serene,
+low-voiced, sweet-faced, and retiring Quakeresses of to-day. And there is
+no doubt that the astounding and meaningless freaks of these half-crazed
+fanatics were provoked by the cruel persecutions which they endured from
+our much loved and revered, but alas, intolerant and far from perfect
+Puritan Fathers. These poor Quakers were arrested, fined, robbed, stripped
+naked, imprisoned, laid neck and heels, chained to logs of wood, branded,
+maimed, whipped, pilloried, caged, set in the stocks, exiled, sold
+into slavery and hanged by our stern and cruel ancestors. Perhaps some
+gentle-hearted but timid Puritan souls may have inwardly felt that the
+Indian wars, and the destructive fires, and the earthquakes, and the dead
+cattle, blasted wheat, and wormy peas, were not judgments of God for small
+ministerial pay and periwig-wearing, but punishments for the heartrending
+woes of the persecuted Quakers.
+
+Others than the poor Quakers spoke out in colonial meetings. In Salem
+village and in other witch-hunting towns the crafty "victims" of the
+witches were frequently visited with their mock pains and sham fits in the
+meeting-houses, and they called out and interrupted the ministers most
+vexingly. Ann Putnam, the best and boldest actress among those cunning
+young Puritan witch-accusers, the protagonist of that New England tragedy
+known as the Salem Witchcraft, shouted out most embarrassingly, "There is
+a yellow-bird sitting on the minister's hat, as it hangs on the pin in the
+pulpit." Mr. Lawson, the minister, wrote with much simplicity that "these
+things occurring in the time of public worship did something interrupt me
+in my first prayer, being so unusual." But he braced himself up in spite
+of Ann and the demoniacal yellow-bird, and finished the service. These
+disorderly interruptions occurred on every Lord's Day, growing weekly
+more constant and more universal, and must have been unbearable. Some few
+disgusted members withdrew from the church, giving as reason that "the
+distracting and disturbing tumults and noises made by persons under
+diabolical power and delusions, preventing sometimes our hearing and
+understanding and profiting of the word preached; we having after many
+trials and experiences found no redress in this case, accounted ourselves
+under a necessity to go where we might hear the word in quiet." These
+withdrawing church-members were all of families that contained at least
+one person that had been accused of practising witchcraft. They were thus
+severely intolerant of the sacrilegious and lawless interruptions of the
+shy young "victims," who received in general only sympathy, pity, and even
+stimulating encouragement from their deluded and excited neighbors.
+
+One very pleasing interruption,--no, I cannot call it by so severe a
+name,--one very pleasing diversion of the attention of the congregation
+from the parson was caused by an innocent custom that prevailed in many a
+country community. Just fancy the flurry on a June Sabbath in Killingly, in
+1785, when Joseph Gay, clad in velvet coat, lace-frilled shirt, and white
+broadcloth knee-breeches, with his fair bride of a few days, gorgeous in a
+peach-colored silk gown and a bonnet trimmed "with sixteen yards of white
+ribbon," rose, in the middle of the sermon, from their front seat in the
+gallery and stood for several minutes, slowly turning around in order to
+show from every point of view their bridal finery to the eagerly gazing
+congregation of friends and neighbors. Such was the really delightful and
+thoughtful custom, in those fashion-plateless days, among persons of
+wealth in that and other churches; it was, in fact, part of the wedding
+celebration. Even in midwinter, in the icy church, the blushing bride would
+throw aside her broadcloth cape or camblet roquelo and stand up clad in a
+sprigged India muslin gown with only a thin lace tucker over her neck, warm
+with pride in her pretty gown, her white bonnet with ostrich feathers and
+embroidered veil, and in her new husband.
+
+The services in the meeting-house on the Sabbath and on Lecture days
+were sometimes painfully varied, though scarcely interrupted, by a very
+distressing and harrowing custom of public abasement and self-abnegation,
+which prevailed for many years in the nervously religious colonies. It was
+not an enforced punishment, but a voluntary one. Men and women who had
+committed crimes or misdemeanors, and who had sincerely repented of their
+sins, or who were filled with remorse for some violation of conscience, or
+even with regret for some neglect of religious ethics, rose in the Sabbath
+meeting before the assembled congregation and confessed their sins, and
+humbly asked forgiveness of God, and charity from their fellows. At
+other times they stood with downcast heads while the minister read their
+confession of guilt and plea for forgiveness. A most graphic account of one
+of those painful scenes is thus given by Governor Winthrop in his "History
+of New England:"--
+
+    "Captain Underhill being brought by the blessing of God in this
+    church's censure of excommunication, to remorse for his foul sins,
+    obtained, by means of the elders, and others of the church of Boston, a
+    safe conduct under the hand of the governor and one of the council to
+    repair to the church. He came at the time of the court of assistants,
+    and upon the lecture day, after sermon, the pastor called him forth and
+    declared the occasion, and then gave him leave to speak: and in
+    it was a spectacle winch caused many weeping eyes, though it afforded
+    matter of much rejoicing to behold the power of the Lord Jesus in his
+    ordinances, when they are dispensed in his own way, holding forth the
+    authority of his regal sceptre in the simplicity of the gospel
+    came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his
+    bravery and neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close
+    to his eyes; and standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs
+    and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his
+    hypocrisy, his persecution of God's people here, and especially his
+    pride (as the root of all which caused God to give him over to his
+    other sinful courses) and contempt of the magistrates.... He spake
+    well save that his blubbering &c interrupted him, and all along he
+    discovered a broken and melting heart and gave good exhortations to
+    take heed of such vanities and beginnings of evil as had occasioned his
+    fall; and in the end he earnestly and humbly besought the church to
+    have compassion of him and to deliver him out of the hands of Satan."
+
+What a picture! what a story! "Of all tales 'tis the saddest--and more sad
+because it makes us smile."
+
+Captain John Underhill was a brave though somewhat bumptious soldier, who
+had fought under the Prince of Orange in the War of the Netherlands, and
+had been employed as temporal drill-master in the church-militant in New
+England. He did good service for the colonists in the war with the Pequot
+Indians, and indeed wherever there was any fighting to be done. "He thrust
+about and justled into fame" He also managed to have apparently a very good
+time in the new land, both in sinning and repenting. When he stood up on
+the church-seat before the horrified, yet wide-open eyes of pious Boston
+folk, in his studiously and theatrically disarranged garments, and
+blubbered out his whining yet vain-glorious repentance, he doubtless acted
+his part well, for he had twice before been through the same performance,
+supplementing his second rehearsal by kneeling down before an injured
+husband in the congregation, and asking earthly forgiveness. I wish I
+could believe that this final repentance of the resilient captain were
+sincere--but I cannot. Nor did Boston people believe it either, though that
+noble and generous-minded man, Winthrop, thought he saw at the time of
+confession evidences of a truly contrite heart. The Puritans sternly and
+eagerly cast out the gay captain to the Dutch when he became an Antinomian,
+and he came to live and fight and gallant in a town on the western end of
+Long Island, where he perhaps found a church-home with members less severe
+and less sharp-eyed than those of his Boston place of martyrdom, and a
+people less inclined to resent and punish his frailties and his ways of
+amusing himself.
+
+In justice to Underhill (or perhaps to show his double-dealing) I will say
+that he left behind him a letter to Hanserd Knollys, complaining of the
+ill-treatment he had received; and in it he gives a very different account
+of this little affair with the Boston Church from that given us by Governor
+Winthrop. The offender says nothing about his hypocrisy, his public and
+self-abasing confession, nor of his sanctimonious blubbering and wishes for
+death. He explains that his offence was mild and purely mental, that in an
+infaust moment he glanced (doubtless stared soldier-fashion) at "Mistris
+Miriam Wildbore" as she sat in her "pue" at meeting. The elders, noting his
+admiring and amorous glances, thereupon accused him of sin in his heart,
+and severely asked him why he did not look instead at Mistress Newell or
+Mistress Upham. He replied very spiritedly and pertinently that these dames
+were "not desiryable women as to temporal graces," which was certainly
+sufficient and proper reason for any man to give, were he Puritan or
+Cavalier. Then acerb old John Cotton and some other Boston ascetics
+(perhaps Goodman Newell and Goodman Upham, resenting for their wives the
+_spretae injuria formae_) at once hunted up some plainly applicable
+verses from the Bible that clearly proved him guilty of the alleged
+sin--and summarily excommunicated him. He also wrote that the pious church
+complained that the attractive, the temporally graced Mistress Wildbore
+came vainly and over-bravely clad to meeting, with "wanton open-worked
+gloves slitt at the thumbs and fingers for the purpose of taking snuff,"
+and he resented this complaint against the fair one, saying no harm could
+surely come from indulging in the "good creature called tobacco." He would
+naturally feel that snuff-taking was a proper and suitable church-custom,
+since his own conversion,--dubious though it was,--his religious belief had
+come to him, "the spirit fell home upon his heart" while he was indulging
+in a quiet smoke.
+
+The story of his offences as told b his contemporaries does not assign to
+him so innocuous a diversion as staring across the meeting-house, but the
+account is quite as amusing as his own plaintive and deeply injured version
+of his arraignment.
+
+Other letters of his have been preserved to us,--letters blustering as
+was Ancient Pistol, and equally sanctimonious, letters fearfully and
+phonetically spelt. Here is the opening of a letter written while he
+was under sentence of excommunication from the Boston Church, and of
+banishment. It is to Governor Winthrop, his friend and fellow-emigrant:--
+
+"Honnored in the Lord,--
+
+"Your silenc one more admirse me. I Youse chrischan playnnes. I know you
+love it.... Silene can not reduce the hart of youer lovd brother: I would
+the rightchous would smite me espechah youerslfe & the honnered Depoti to
+whom I also dereckt this letter.... I would to God you would tender me
+soule so as to youse playnnes with me. I wrot to you both but now answer: &
+here I am dayli abused by malishous tongue. John Baker I here hath wrot to
+the honnored depoti how as I was drouck & like to be cild & both falc, upon
+okachon I delt with Wannerton for intrushon & finddmg them resolutli bent
+to rout all gud a mong us & advanc there superstischous ways & by boystrous
+words indeferd to fritten men to accomplish his end. & he abusing me to
+my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent & dastardli
+sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with
+intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered
+him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too
+month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let
+justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to soggest youer will to this
+barrer you will find him tracktabel."
+
+My sense of drollery is always most keenly tickled when I read Underhill's
+epistles, with their amazing and highly-varied letter concoctions, and
+remember that he also--wrote a book. What that seventeenth-century printer
+and proof-reader endured ere they presented his "edited" volume to the
+public must have been beyond expression by words. It was a pretty good book
+though, and in it, like many another man of his ilk, he tendered to his
+much-injured wife loud and diffuse praise, ending with these sententious
+words, "Let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife--though she be a
+woman."
+
+And yet, upon careful examination we find a method, a system, in
+Underhill's orthography, or rather in his cacography. He thinks a final
+tion should be spelt chon--and why not? "proposichon," "satisfackchon,"
+"oblegachon," "persekuchon," "dereckchon," "himelyachon"--thus he spells
+such words. And his plurals are plain when once you grasp his laws:
+"poseschouse" and "considderachonse," "facktse," and "respecktse." And
+his ly is alwajs li, "exacktli," "thorroli," "fidelliti," "charriti,"
+"falsciti." And why is not "indiered," as good as 'endeared,' "pregedic,"
+as 'prejudice,' "obstrucktter" as 'obstructer,' "pascheges," and
+"prouydentt," and "antyentt," just as clear as our own way of spelling
+these words? A "painful" speller you surely were, my gay Don Juan
+Underbill, as your pedantic "writtingse" all show, and the most dramatic
+and comic figure among all the early Puritans as well, though you scarcely
+deserve to be called a Puritan; we might rather say of you, as of Malvolio,
+"The devil a Puritan that he was, or anything constantly but a
+time-pleaser ... his ground of faith that all who looked on him loved him."
+
+In keen contrast to this sentimental excitement is the presence of noble
+Judge Sewall, white-haired and benignant, standing up calmly in Boston
+meeting, with dignified face and demeanor, but an aching and contrite
+heart, to ask through the voice of his minister humble forgiveness of God
+and man for his sad share as a judge in the unjust and awful condemnation
+and cruel sentencing to death of the poor murdered victims of that terrible
+delusion the Salem Witchcraft. Years of calm and unshrinking reflection, of
+pleading and constant communion with God had brought to him an overwhelming
+sense of his mistaken and over-influenced judgment, and a horror and
+remorse for the fatal results of his error. Then, like the steadfast and
+upright old Puritan that he was, he publicly acknowledged his terrible
+mistake. It is one of the finest instances of true nobility of soul and of
+absolute self-renunciation that the world affords. And the deep strain, the
+sharp wrench of the step is made more apparent still by the fact of the
+disapproval of his fellow-judges of his public confession and recantation.
+The yearly entries in his diary, simply expressed yet deeply speaking,
+entries of the prayerful fasts which he spent alone in his chamber when
+the anniversary of the fatal judgment-day returned, show that no half-vain
+bigotry, no emotional excitement filled and moved him to the open words of
+remorse. The lesson of his repentance is farther reaching than he
+dreamed, when the story of his confession can so move and affect this
+nineteenth-century generation, and fill more than one soul with a nobler
+idea of the Puritan nature, and with a higher and fuller conception of the
+absolute truth of the Puritan Christianity.
+
+Some very prosaic and earthly interruptions to the church services are
+recorded as being made, and possibly by the church-members themselves. In
+one church, in 1661, a fine of five shillings was imposed on any one "who
+shot off a gun or led a horse into the meeting-house." These seem to me
+quite as unseemly, irreverent, and disagreeable disturbances as shouting
+out, Quaker-fashion, "Parson, your sermon is too long;" but possibly the
+house of God was turned into a stable on week-days, not on the Sabbath.
+
+In many parishes church-attendants were fined who brought their "doggs"
+into the meeting-house. Dogs swarmed in the colony, for they had been
+imported from England, "sufficient mastive dogs, hounds and beagles," and
+also Irish wolf-hounds; and they caused an interruption in one afternoon
+service by chasing into the meeting-house one of those pungently offensive,
+though harmless, animals that abounded even in the earliest colonial
+days, and whose mephitic odor, in this case, had power to scatter the
+congregation as effectively as would have a score of armed Indian braves.
+Officially appointed "Dogg-whippers" and the never idle tithingman expelled
+the intruding and unwelcome canine attendants from the meeting-house with
+fierce blows and fiercer yelps. The swarming dogs, though they were trained
+to hunt the Indians and wolves and tear them in pieces, were much fonder of
+hunting and tearing the peaceful sheep, and thus became such unmitigated
+nuisances, out of meeting as well as in, that they had to be muzzled and
+hobbled, and killed, and land was granted (as in Newbury in 1703) on
+condition that no dog was ever kept thereon. As late as the year 1820, it
+was ordered in the town of Brewster that any dog that came into meeting
+should be killed unless the owner promised to thenceforth keep the intruder
+out.
+
+Alarms of fire in the neighborhood frequently disturbed the quiet of
+the early colonial services; for the combustible catted chimneys were
+a constant source of conflagration, especially on Sundays, when the
+fireplaces with their roaring fires were left unwatched; and all the men
+rushed out of the meeting at sound of the alarm to aid in quenching the
+flames, which could however be ill-fought with the scanty supply of
+water that could be brought in a few leathern fire-buckets and
+milk-pails,--though at a very early date as an aid in extinguishing
+fires each New England family was ordered by law to own a fire-ladder.
+Occasionally the town's ladder and poles and hooks and cedar-buckets were
+kept in the meeting-house, and thus were handy for Sunday fires.
+
+Sometimes armed men, bearing rumors of wars and of hostile attacks, rode
+clattering up to the church-door, and strode with jingling spurs and
+rattling swords into the excited assembly with appeal for more soldiers to
+bear arms, or for more help for those already in the army, and the whole
+congregation felt it no interruption but a high religious privilege and
+duty, to which they responded in word and deed. On some happy Sabbaths the
+armed riders bore good news of great victories, and great was the rejoicing
+thereat in prayer and praise in the old meeting-house.
+
+But usually through the Sabbath services, though the quiet was not that
+of our modern carpeted, cushioned, orderly churches, but few interrupting
+sounds were heard. The cry of a waking infant, the scraping of restless
+feet on the sanded floor, the lumbering noise of the motions of a cramped
+farmer as he stood up to lean over the pew-door or gallery-rail, the
+clatter of an overturned cricket, the twittering of swallows in the
+rafters, and in the summer-time the bumping and buzzing of an invading
+bumble-bee as he soared through the air and against the walls, were
+the only sounds within the meeting-house that broke the monotonous
+"thirteenthly" and "fourteenthly" of the minister's sermon.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+The Observances of the Day.
+
+
+
+The so-called "False Blue Laws" of Connecticut, which were foisted upon the
+public by the Reverend Samuel Peter, have caused much indignation among all
+thoughtful descendants and all lovers of New England Puritans. Three of
+his most bitterly resented false laws which refer to the observance of the
+Sabbath read thus:--
+
+"No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or
+shave on the Sabbath Day.
+
+"No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.
+
+"No one shall ride on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere
+except reverently to and from meeting."
+
+Though these laws were worded by Dr. Peters, and though we are disgusted to
+hear them so often quoted as historical facts, still we must acknowledge
+that though in detail not correct, they are in spirit true records of the
+old Puritan laws which were enacted to enforce the strict and decorous
+observance of the Sabbath, and which were valid not only in Connecticut and
+Massachusetts, but in other New England States. Even a careless glance at
+the historical record of any old town or church will give plenty of details
+to prove this.
+
+Thus in New London we find in the latter part of the seventeenth century a
+wicked fisherman presented before the Court and fined for catching eels on
+Sunday; another "fined twenty shillings for sailing a boat on the Lord's
+Day;" while in 1670 two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused
+of and tried for "sitting together on the Lord's Day under an apple tree in
+Goodman Chapman's Orchard,"--so harmless and so natural an act. In Plymouth
+a man was "sharply whipped" for shooting fowl on Sunday; another was fined
+for carrying a grist of corn home on the Lord's Day, and the miller who
+allowed him to take it was also fined. Elizabeth Eddy of the same town was
+fined, in 1652, "ten shillings for wringing and hanging out clothes." A
+Plymouth man, for attending to his tar-pits on the Sabbath, was set in the
+stocks. James Watt, in 1658, was publicly reproved "for writing a note
+about common business on the Lord's Day, _at least in the evening
+somewhat too soon._" A Plymouth man who drove a yoke of oxen was
+"presented" before the Court, as was also another offender, who drove some
+cows a short distance "without need" on the Sabbath.
+
+In Newbury, in 1646, Aquila Chase and his wife were presented and fined for
+gathering peas from their garden on the Sabbath, but upon investigation the
+fines were remitted, and the offenders were only admonished. In Wareham,
+in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the
+Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham
+citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five
+shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put
+in his shoe" to protect his foot--for doing this piece of heavy work on the
+Lord's Day, was fined, and paid forty shillings.
+
+Captain Kemble of Boston was in 1656 set for two hours in the public stocks
+for his "lewd and unseemly behavior," which, consisted in his kissing his
+wife "publicquely" on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, when
+he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years. The lewd
+offender was a man of wealth and influence, the father of Madam Sarah
+Knights, the "fearfull female travailler" whose diary of a journey from
+Boston to New York and return, written in 1704, rivals in quality if not in
+quantity Judge Sewall's much-quoted diary. A traveller named Burnaby tells
+of a similar offence of an English sea-captain who was soundly whipped for
+kissing his wife on the street of a New England town on Sunday, and of his
+retaliation in kind, by a clever trick upon his chastisers; but Burnaby's
+narrative always seemed to me of dubious credibility.
+
+Abundant proof can be given that the act of the legislature in 1649 was not
+a dead letter which ordered that "whosoever shall prophane the Lords daye
+by doeing any seruill worke or such like abusses shall forfeite for euery
+such default ten shillings or be whipt."
+
+The Vermont "Blue Book" contained equally sharp "Sunday laws." Whoever was
+guilty of any rude, profane, or unlawful conduct on the Lord's Day, in
+words or action, by clamorous discourses, shouting, hallooing, screaming,
+running, riding, dancing, jumping, was to be fined forty shillings and
+whipped upon the naked back not to exceed ten stripes. The New Haven code
+of laws, more severe still, ordered that "Profanation of the Lord's Day
+shall be punished by fine, imprisonment, or corporeal punishment; and
+if proudly, and with a high hand against the authority of God--_with
+death_."
+
+Lists of arrests and fines for walking and travelling unnecessarily on the
+Sabbath might be given in great numbers, and it was specially ordered
+that none should "ride violently to and from meeting." Many a pious New
+Englander, in olden days, was fined for his ungodly pride, and his desire
+to "show off" his "new colt" as he "rode violently" up to the meeting-house
+green on Sabbath morn. One offender explained in excuse of his unnecessary
+driving on the Sabbath that he had been to visit a sick relative, but
+his excuse was not accepted. A Maine man who was rebuked and fined for
+"unseemly walking" on the Lord's Day protested that he ran to save a man
+from drowning. The Court made him pay his fine, but ordered that the money
+should be returned to him when he could prove by witnesses that he had
+been on that errand of mercy and duty. As late as the year 1831, in
+Lebanon, Connecticut, a lady journeying to her father's home was arrested
+within sight of her father's house for unnecessary travelling on the
+Sabbath; and a long and fiercely contested lawsuit was the result, and
+damages were finally given for false imprisonment. In 1720 Samuel Sabin
+complained of himself before a justice in Norwich that he visited on
+Sabbath night some relatives at a neighbor's house. His morbidly tender
+conscience smote him and made him "fear he had transgressed the law,"
+though he felt sure no harm had been done thereby. In 1659 Sam Clarke, for
+"Hankering about on men's gates on Sabbath evening to draw company out
+to him," was reproved and warned not to "harden his neck" and be "wholly
+destrojed." Poor stiff-necked, lonely, "hankering" Sam! to be so harshly
+reproved for his harmlessly sociable intents. Perhaps he "hankered" after
+the Puritan maids, and if so, deserved his reproof and the threat of
+annihilation.
+
+Sabbath-breaking by visiting abounded in staid Worcester town to a most
+base extent, but was severely punished, as local records show. In Belfast,
+Maine, in 1776, a meeting was held to get the "Towns Mind" with regard to
+a plan to restrain visiting on the Sabbath. The time had passed when such
+offences could be punished either by fine or imprisonment, so it was voted
+"that if any person makes unnecessary Vizits on the Sabeth, They shall be
+Look't on with Contempt." This was the universal expression throughout the
+Puritan colonies; and looked on with contempt are Sabbath-breakers and
+Sabbath-slighters in New England to the present day. Even if they committed
+no active offence, the colonists could not passively neglect the Church
+and its duties. As late as 1774 the First Church of Roxbury fined
+non-attendance at public worship. In 1651 Thomas Scott "was fyned ten
+shillings unless he have learned Mr. Norton's 'Chatacise' by the next
+court" In 1760 the legislature of Massachusetts passed the law that "any
+person able of Body who shall absent themselves from publick worship of God
+on the Lord's Day shall pay ten shillings fine." By the Connecticut code
+ten shillings was the fine, and the law was not suspended until the year
+1770. By the New Haven code five shillings was the fine for non-attendance
+at church, and the offender was often punished as well. Captain Dennison,
+one of New Haven's most popular and respected citizens, was fined fifteen
+shillings for absence from church. William Blagden, who lived in New Haven
+in 1647, was "brought up" for absence from meeting. He pleaded that he had
+fallen into the water late on Saturday, could light no fire on Sunday to
+dry his clothes, and so had lain in bed to keep warm while his only suit of
+garments was drying. In spite of this seemingly fair excuse, Blagden was
+found guilty of "sloathefuluess" and sentenced to be "publiquely whipped."
+Of course the Quakers contributed liberally to the support of the Court,
+and were fined in great numbers for refusing to attend the church which
+they hated, and which also warmly abhorred them; and they were zealously
+set in the stocks, and whipped and caged and pilloried as well,--whipped
+if they came and expressed any dissatisfaction, and whipped if they stayed
+away.
+
+Severe and explicit were the orders with regard to the use of the "Creature
+called Tobacko" on the Sabbath. In the very earliest days of the colony
+means had been taken to present the planting of the pernicious weed
+except in very small quantities "for meere necessitie, for phisick, for
+preseruaceon of health, and that the same be taken privatly by auncient
+men." In Connecticut a man could by permission of the law smoke once if
+he went on a journey of ten miles (as some slight solace for the arduous
+trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house.
+Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the
+law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a
+long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor
+buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men
+love it now, they somehow invoked or spirited it into their pipes, though
+they never could smoke it in public unfined and unpunished. The shrewd and
+thrifty New Haven people permitted the raising of it for purposes of trade,
+though not for use, thus supplying the "devil's weed" to others, chiefly
+the godless Dutch, but piously spurning it themselves--in public. Its use
+was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on the Sabbath within two
+miles of the meeting-house, which (since at that date all the homes were
+clustered around the church-green) was equivalent to not smoking it at all
+on the Lord's Day, if the lav were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed,
+poor slaves of habit, who were in Duxbury fined ten shillings for each
+offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it
+told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston
+the fine for "drinking tobacco in the meeting-house" was five shillings for
+each drink, which I take to mean chewing tobacco rather than smoking it;
+many men were fined for thus drinking, and solacing the weary hours, though
+doubtless they were as sly and kept themselves as unobserved as possible.
+Four Yarmouth men--old sea-dogs, perhaps, who loved their pipe--were, in
+1687, fined four shillings each for smoking tobacco around the end of the
+meeting-house. Silly, ostrich-brained Yarmouth men! to fancy to escape
+detection by hiding around the corner of the church; and to think that the
+tithingman had no nose when he was so Argus-eyed. Some few of the ministers
+used the "tobacco weed." Mr. Baily wrote with distress of mind and
+abasement of soul in his diary of his "exceeding in tobacco." The hatred of
+the public use of tobacco lingered long in New England, even in large towns
+such as Providence, though chiefly on account of universal dread lest
+sparks from the burning weed should start conflagrations in the towns.
+Until within a few years, in small towns in western Massachusetts,
+Easthampton and neighboring villages, tobacco-smoking on the street was not
+permitted either on weekdays or Sundays.
+
+Not content with strict observance of the Sabbathday alone, the Puritans
+included Saturday evening in their holy day, and in the first colonial
+years these instructions were given to Governor Endicott by the New England
+Plantation Company: "And to the end that the Sabeth may be celebrated in
+a religious man ner wee appoint that all may surcease their labor every
+Satterday throughout the yeare at three of the clock in the afternoone, and
+that they spend the rest of the day in chatechizing and preparacoon for
+the Sabeth as the ministers shall direct." Cotton Mather wrote thus of his
+grandfather, old John Cotton: "The Sabbath he begun the evening before, for
+which keeping from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming
+to New England, and I suppose 't was from his reason and practice that the
+Christians of New England have generally done so too." He then tells of the
+protracted religious services held in the Cotton household every Saturday
+night,--services so long that the Sabbath-day exercises must have seemed in
+comparison like a light interlude.
+
+John Norton described these Cotton Sabbaths more briefly thus: "He [John
+Cotton] began the Sabbath at evening; therefore then performed family-duty
+after supper, being longer than ordinary in Exposition. After which he
+catechized his children and servants and then returned unto his study. The
+morning following, family-worship being ended, he retired into his study
+until the bell called him away. Upon his return from meeting he returned
+again into his study (the place of his labor and prayer) unto his private
+devotion; where, having a small repast carried him up for his dinner, he
+continued until the tolling of the bell. The public service being over, he
+withdrew for a space to his pre-mentioned oratory for his sacred addresses
+to God, as in the forenoon, then came down, _repeated the sermon in the
+family_, prayed, after supper sang a Psalm, and towards bedtime betaking
+himself again to his study he closed the day with prayer. Thus he spent the
+Sabbath continually." Just fancy the Cotton children and servants listening
+to his long afternoon sermon a second time!
+
+All the New England clergymen were rigid in the prolonged observance of
+Sunday. From sunset on Saturday until Sunday night they would not shave,
+have rooms swept, nor beds made, have food prepared, nor cooking utensils
+and table-ware washed. As soon as their Sabbath began they gathered their
+families and servants around them, as did Cotton, and read the Bible and
+exhorted and prayed and recited the catechism until nine o'clock, usually
+by the light of one small "dip candle" only; on long winter Saturdays it
+must have been gloomy and tedious indeed. Small wonder that one minister
+wrote back to England that he found it difficult in the new colony to get a
+servant who "_enjoyed catechizing and family duties_." Many clergymen
+deplored sadly the custom which grew in later years of driving, and even
+transacting business, on Saturday night. Mr. Bushnell used to call it
+"stealing the time of the Sabbath," and refused to countenance it in any
+way.
+
+It was very generally believed in the early days of New England that
+special judgments befell those who worked on the eve of the Sabbath.
+Winthrop gives the case of a man who, having hired help to repair a
+milldam, worked an hour on Saturday after sunset to finish what he had
+intended for the day's labor. The next day his little child, being left
+alone for some hours, was drowned in an uncovered well in the cellar of his
+house. "The father freely, in open congregation, did acknowledge it the
+righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day."
+
+Visitors and travellers from other countries were forced to obey the rigid
+laws with regard to Saturday-night observance. Archibald Henderson, the
+master of a vessel which entered the port of Boston, complained to the
+Council for Foreign Plantations in London that while he was in sober Boston
+town, being ignorant of the laws of the land, and having walked half an
+hour after sunset on Saturday night, as punishment for this unintentional
+and trivial offence, a constable entered his lodgings, seized him by the
+hair of his head, and dragged him to prison. Henderson claimed L800 damages
+for the detention of his vessel during his prosecution. I have always
+suspected that the gay captain may have misbehaved himself in Boston
+on that Saturday night in some other way than simply by walking in
+the streets, and that the Puritan law-enforcers took advantage of the
+Sabbath-day laws in order to prosecute and punish him. We know of
+Bradford's complaint of the times; that while sailors brought "a greate
+deale" of money from foreign parts to New England to spend, they also
+brought evil ways of spending it--"more sine I feare than money."
+
+The Puritans found in Scripture support for this observance of Saturday
+night, in these words, "The evening and the morning were the first day,"
+and they had many followers in their belief. In New England country towns
+to this day, descendants of the Puritans regard Saturday night, though in
+a modified way, as almost Sunday, and that evening is never chosen for any
+kind of gay gathering or visiting. As late as 1855 the shops in Hartford
+were never open for customers upon Saturday night.
+
+Much satire was directed against this Saturday night observance both by
+English and by American authors. In the "American Museum" for February,
+1787, appeared a poem entitled, "The Connecticut Sabbath." After saying at
+some length that God had thought one day in seven sufficient for rest, but
+New England Christians had improved his law by setting apart a day and a
+half, the poet thus runs on derisively:--
+
+  "And let it be enacted further still
+  That all our people strict observe our will;
+  Five days and a half shall men, and women, too,
+  Attend their bus'ness and their mirth pursue,
+  But after that no man without a fine
+  Shall walk the streets or at a tavern dine.
+  One day and half 'tis requisite to rest
+  From toilsome labor and a tempting feast.
+  Henceforth let none on peril of their lives
+  Attempt a journey or embrace their wives;
+  No barber, foreign or domestic bred,
+  Shall e'er presume to dress a lady's head;
+  No shop shall spare (half the preceding day)
+  A yard of riband or an ounce of tea."
+
+And many similar rhymes might be given.
+
+Sunday night, being shut out of the Sabbath hours, became in the eighteenth
+century a time of general cheerfulness and often merry-making. This sudden
+transition from the religious calm and quiet of the afternoon to the noisy
+gayety of the evening was very trying to many of the clergymen, especially
+to Jonathan Edwards, who preached often and sadly against "Sabbath evening
+dissipations and mirth-making." In some communities singing-schools were
+held on Sunday nights, which afforded a comparatively decorous and orderly
+manner of spending the close of the day.
+
+Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm
+Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath,--sign and token to them,
+not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal
+rest to come. The universal quiet and peace of the community showed the
+primitive instinct of a pure, simple devotion, the sincere religion which
+knew no compromise in spiritual things, no half-way obedience to God's
+Word, but rested absolutely on the Lord's Day--as was commanded. No work,
+no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was
+seen except the necessary care of the patient cattle and other dumb beasts,
+the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the nooning,
+a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead. This
+absolute obedience to the letter as well as to the spirit of God's Word
+was one of the most typical traits of the character of the Puritans, and
+appeared to them to be one of the most vital points of their religion.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The Authority of the Church and the Ministers.
+
+
+
+Severely were the early colonists punished if they ventured to criticise
+or disparage either the ministers or their teachings, or indeed any of the
+religious exercises of the church. In Sandwich a man was publicly whipped
+for speaking deridingly of God's words and ordinances as taught by the
+Sandwich minister. Mistress Oliver was forced to stand in public with a
+cleft stick on her tongue for "reproaching the elders." A New Haven man was
+severely whipped and fined for declaring that he received no profit from
+the minister's sermons. We also know the terrible shock given the Windham
+church in 1729 by the "vile and slanderous expressions" of one unregenerate
+Windhamite who said, "I had rather hear my dog bark than Mr. Bellamy
+preach." He was warned that he would be "shakenoff and givenup," and
+terrified at the prospect of so dire a fate he read a confession of his
+sorrow and repentance, and promised to "keep a guard over his tongue," and
+also to listen to Mr. Bellamy's preaching, which may have been a still more
+difficult task. Mr. Edward Tomlins, of Boston, upon retracting his opinion
+which he had expressed openly against the singing in the churches, was
+discharged without a fine. William Howes and his son were in 1744 fined
+fifty shillings "apeece for deriding such as sing in the congregation,
+tearming them fooles." The church music was as sacred to the Puritans as
+were the prayers, but it must have been a sore trial to many to keep still
+about the vile manner and method of singing. In 1631 Phillip Ratcliffe,
+for "speaking against the churches," had his ears cut off, was whipped and
+banished. We know also the consternation caused in New Haven in 1646 by
+Madam Brewster's saying that the custom of carrying contributions to
+the Deacons' table was popish--was "like going to the High Alter,"
+and "savored of the Mass." She answered her accusers in such a bold,
+highhanded, and defiant manner that her heinous offence was considered
+worthy of trial in a higher court, whose decision is now lost.
+
+The colonists could not let their affection and zeal for an individual
+minister cause them to show any disrespect or indifference to the Puritan
+Church in general. When the question of the settlement of the Reverend Mr.
+Lenthal in the church of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was under discussion, the
+tyranny of the Puritan Church over any who dared oppose or question it was
+shown in a marked manner, and may be cited as a typical case. Mr. Lenthal
+was suspected of being poisoned with the Anne Hutchinson heresies, and he
+also "opposed the way of gathering churches." Hence his ordination over the
+church in the new settlement was bitterly opposed by the Boston divines,
+though apparently desired by the Weymouth congregation. One Britton, who
+was friendly towards Lenthal and who spoke "reproachfully" and slurringly
+of a book which defended the course of the Boston churches, was whipped
+with eleven stripes, as he had no money to pay the imposed fine. John
+Smythe, who "got hands to a blank" (which was either canvassing for
+signatures to a proxy vote in favor of Lenthal or obtaining signatures
+to an instrument declaring against the design of the churches), for thus
+"combining to hinder the orderly gathering" of the Weymouth church at this
+time, was fined L2. Edward Sylvester for the same offence was fined and
+disfranchised. Ambrose Martin, another friend of Lenthal's, for calling
+the church covenant of the Boston divines "a stinking carrion and a human
+invention," was fined L10, while Thomas Makepeace, another Weymouth
+malcontent, was informed by those in power that "they were weary of him,"
+or, in modern slang, that "he made them tired." Parson Lenthal himself,
+being sent for by the convention, weakened at once in a way his church
+followers must have bitterly despised; he was "quickly convinced of his
+error and evil." His conviction was followed with his confession, and in
+open court he gave under his hand a laudable retraction, which retraction
+he was ordered also to "utter in the assembly at Weymouth, and so no
+further censure was passed on him." Thus the chief offender got the
+lightest punishment, and thus did the omnipotent Church rule the whole
+community.
+
+The names of loquacious, babbling Quakers and Baptists who spoke
+disrespectfully of some or all of the ordinances of the Puritan church
+might be given, and would swell the list indefinitely; they were fined and
+punished without mercy or even toleration.
+
+All profanity or blaspheming against God was severely punished. One very
+wicked man in Hartford for his "fillthy and prophane expressions," namely,
+that "hee hoped to meet some of the members of the Church in Hell before
+long, and he did not question but hee should," was "committed to prison,
+there to be kept in safe custody till the sermon, and then to stand the
+time thereof in the pillory, and after sermon to be severely whipped." What
+a severe punishment for so purely verbal an offence! New England ideas of
+profanity were very rigid, and New England men had reason to guard well
+their temper and tongue, else that latter member might be bored with a
+hot iron; for such was the penalty for profanity. We know what horror Mr.
+Tomlins's wicked profanity, "Curse ye woodchuck!" caused in Lynn meeting,
+and Mr. Dexter was "putt in ye billboes ffor prophane saying dam ye cowe."
+The Newbury doctor was sharply fined also for wickedly cursing. When
+drinking at the tavern he raised his glass and said,--
+
+  "I'll pledge my friends, and for my foes
+  A plague for their heels, and a poxe for their toes."
+
+He acknowledged his wickedness and foolishness in using the "olde proverb,"
+and penitently promised to curse no more.
+
+Sad to tell, Puritan women sometimes lost their temper and their
+good-breeding and their godliness. Two wicked Wells women were punished in
+1669 "for using profane speeches in their common talk; as in making answer
+to several questions their answer is, The Devil a bit." In 1640, in
+Springfield, Goody Gregory, being grievously angered, profanely abused an
+annoying neighbor, saying, "Before God I coulde breake thy heade!" But she
+acknowledged her "great sine and faulte" like a woman, and paid her fine
+and sat in the stocks like a man, since she swore like the members of that
+profane sex.
+
+Sometimes the sins of the fathers were visited on the children in a most
+extraordinary manner. One man, "for abusing N. Parker at the tavern," was
+deprived of the privilege of bringing his children to be baptized, and was
+thus spiritually punished for a very worldly offence. For some offences,
+such as "speaking deridingly of the minister's powers," as was done in
+Plymouth, "casting uncharitable reflexions on the minister," as did an
+Andover man; and also for absenting one's self from church services; for
+"sloathefulness," for "walking prophanely," for spoiling hides when tanning
+and refusing explanation thereof; for selling short weight in grain,
+for being "given too much to Jearings," for "Slanndering," for being a
+"Makebayte," for "ronging naibors," for "being too Proude," for "suspitions
+of stealing pinnes," for "pnishouse Squerilouse Odyouse wordes," and for
+"lyeing," church-members were not only fined and punished but were deprived
+of partaking of the sacrament. In the matter of lying great distinction was
+made as to the character and effect of the offence. George Crispe's wife,
+who "told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly," was simply
+admonished and remonstrated with. Will Randall, who told a "plain lie," was
+fined ten shillings. While Ralph Smith, who "lied about seeing a whale,"
+was fined twenty shillings and excommunicated.
+
+In some communities, of which Lechford tells us New Haven was one, these
+unhouselled Puritans were allowed, if they so desired, to stand outside the
+meeting-house door at the time of public worship and catch what few words
+of the service they could. This humble waiting for crumbs of God's word was
+doubtless regarded as a sign of repentance for past deeds, for it was often
+followed by full forgiveness. As excommunicated persons were regarded with
+high disfavor and even abhorrence by the entire pious and godly walking
+community, this apparently spiritual punishment was more severe in its
+temporal effects than at first sight appears. From the Cambridge Platform,
+which was drawn up and adopted by the New England Synod in 1648, we learn
+that "while the offender remains excommunicated the church is to refrain
+from all communion with him in civil things," and the members were
+specially "to forbear to eat and drink with him;" so his daily and even his
+family life was made wretched. And as it was not necessary to wait for the
+action of the church to pronounce excommunication, but the "pastor of a
+church might by himself and authoritatively suspend from the Lord's table
+a brother _suspected_ of scandal" until there was time for full
+examination, we can see what an absolute power the church and even the
+minister had over church-members in a New England community.
+
+Nor could the poor excommunicate go to neighboring towns and settlements to
+start afresh. No one wished him or would tolerate him. Lancaster, in 1653,
+voted not to receive into its plantation "any excommunicat or notoriously
+erring agt the Docktrin & Discipline of churches of this Commonwealth."
+Other towns passed similar votes. Fortunately, Rhode Island--the island of
+"Aquidnay" and the Providence Plantations--opened wide its arms as a place
+of refuge for outcast Puritans. Universal freedom and religious toleration
+were in Rhode Island the foundations of the State. Josiah Quincy said that
+liberty of conscience would have produced anarchy if it had been permitted
+in the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century, but the
+flourishing Narragansett, Providence, and Newport plantations seem to prove
+the absurdity of that statement. Liberty of conscience was there allowed,
+as Dr. MacSparran, the first clergyman of the Narragansett Church,
+complained in his "America Dissected," "to the extent of no religion at
+all." The Gortonians, the Foxians, and Hutchinsonians, the Anabaptists, the
+Six Principle Baptists, the Church of England, apparently all the followers
+of the eighty-two "pestilent heresies" so sadly enumerated and so bitterly
+hated and "cast out to Satan" by the Massachusetts Puritan divines,--all
+the excommunicants and exiles found in Rhode Island a home and
+friends--other friends than the Devil to whom they had been consigned.
+
+Though the early Puritan ministers had such powerful influence in every
+other respect, they were not permitted to perform the marriage-service
+nor to raise their voices in prayer or exhortation at a funeral. Sewall
+jealously notes when the English burial-service began to be read at
+burials, saying, "the office for Burial is a Lying very bad office makes no
+difference between the precious and the vile." The office of marriage was
+denied the parson, and was generally relegated to the magistrate. In this,
+Governor Bradford states, they followed "ye laudable custome of ye Low
+Countries." Not rulers and magistrates only were empowered to perform the
+marriage ceremony; squires, tavern-keepers, captains, various authorized
+persons might wed Puritan lovers; any man of dignity or prominence in the
+community could apparently receive authority to perform that office except
+the otherwise all-powerful parson.
+
+As years rolled on, though the New Englanders still felt great reverence
+and pride for their church and its ordinances, the minister was no longer
+the just man made perfect, the oracle of divine will. The church-members
+escaped somewhat from ecclesiastical power, and some of them found fault
+with and openly disparaged their ministers in a way that would in early
+days have caused them to be pilloried, whipped, caged, or fined; and often
+the derogatory comments were elicited by the most trivial offences. One
+parson was bitterly condemned because he managed to amass eight hundred
+dollars by selling the produce of his farm. Another shocking and severely
+criticised offence was a game of bowls which one minister played and
+enjoyed. Still another minister, in Hanover, Massachusetts, was reproved
+for his lack of dignity, which was shown in his wearing stockings "footed
+up with another color;" that is, knit stockings in which the feet were
+colored differently from the legs. He also was found guilty of having
+jumped over the fence instead of decorously and clerically walking through
+the gate when going to call on one of his parishioners. Rev. Joseph Metcalf
+of the Old Colony was complained of in 1720 for wearing too worldly a wig.
+He mildly reproved and shamed the meddlesome women of his church by asking
+them to come to him and each cut off a lock of hair from the obnoxious
+wig until all the complainers were satisfied that it had been rendered
+sufficiently unworldly. Some Newbury church-members, in 1742, asserted that
+their minister unclerically wore a colored kerchief instead of a band. This
+he indignantly denied, saying that he "had never buried a babe even in most
+tempestuous weather," when he rode several miles, but he always wore a
+band, and he complained in turn that members of his congregation turned
+away from him on the street, and "glowered" at him and "sneered at him."
+Still more unseemly demonstrations of dislike were sometimes shown, as in
+South Hadley, in 1741, when a committee of disaffected parishioners
+pulled the Rev. Mr Rawsom out of the pulpit and marched him out of the
+meeting-house because they did not fancy his preaching. But all such
+actions were as offensive to the general community then as open expressions
+of dissatisfaction and contempt are now.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The Ordination of the Minister.
+
+
+
+The minister's ordination was, of course, an important social as well as
+spiritual event in such a religious community as was a New England colonial
+town. It was always celebrated by a great gathering of people from far and
+near, including all the ministers from every town for many miles around;
+and though a deeply serious service, was also an excuse for much
+merriment. In Connecticut, and by tradition also in Massachusetts, an
+"ordination-ball" was frequently given. It is popularly supposed that at
+this ball the ministers did not dance, nor even appear, nor to it in any
+way give their countenance; that it was only a ball given at the time of
+the ordination because so many people would then be in the town to take
+part in the festivity. That this was not always the case is proved by
+a letter of invitation still in existence written by Reverend Timothy
+Edwards, who was ordained in Windsor in 1694; it was written to Mr. and
+Mrs. Stoughton, asking them to attend the ordination-ball which was to be
+given in his, the minister's house. But whether the parsons approved and
+attended, or whether they strongly discountenanced it, the ordination-ball
+was always a great success. It is recorded that at one in Danvers a young
+man danced so vigorously and long on the sanded floor that he entirely wore
+out a new pair of shoes. The fashion of giving ordination-balls did not die
+out with colonial times. In Federal days it still continued, a specially
+gay ball being given in the town of Wolcott at an ordination in 1811.
+
+There was always given an ordination supper,--a plentiful feast, at which
+visiting ministers and the new pastor were always present and partook with
+true clerical appetite. This ordination feast consisted of all kinds of New
+England fare, all the mysterious compounds and concoctions of Indian corn
+and "pompions," all sorts of roast meats, "turces" cooked in various ways,
+gingerbread and "cacks," and--an inevitable feature at the time of every
+gathering of people, from a corn-husking or apple-bee to a funeral--a
+liberal amount of cider, punch, and grog was also supplied, which latter
+compound beverages were often mixed on the meeting-house green or even in
+punch-bowls on the very door-steps of the church. Beer, too, was specially
+brewed to honor the feast. Rev. Mr. Thatcher, of Boston, wrote in his diary
+on the twentieth of May, 1681, "This daye the Ordination Beare was brewed."
+Portable bars were sometimes established at the church-door, and strong
+drinks were distributed free of charge to the entire assemblage. As late
+as 1825, at the installation of Dr. Leonard Bacon over the First
+Congregational Church in New Haven, free drinks were furnished at an
+adjacent bar to all who chose to order them, and were "settled for" by the
+generous and hospitable society. In considering the extravagant amount of
+moneys often recorded as having been paid out for liquor at ordinations,
+one must not fail to remember that the seemingly large sums were often
+spent in Revolutionary times during the great depreciation of Continental
+money. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars were disbursed for the
+entertainment of the council at the ordination of Mr. Kilbourn, of
+Chesterfield; but the items were really few and the total amount of liquor
+was not great,--thirty-eight mugs of flip at twelve dollars per mug; eleven
+gills of rum bitters at six dollars per gill, and two mugs of sling at
+twenty-four dollars per mug. The church in one town sent the Continental
+money in payment for the drinks of the church-council in a wheelbarrow to
+the tavern-keeper, and he was not very well paid either.
+
+It gives one a strange sense of the customs and habits of the olden times
+to read an "ordination-bill" from a tavern-keeper which is thus endorsed,
+"This all Paid for exsept the Minister's Rum." To give some idea of the
+expense of "keeping the ministers" at an ordination in Hartford in 1784,
+let me give the items of the bill:--
+
+                          L  s. d.
+  To keeping Ministers    0  2  4
+  2 Mugs tody             0  5 10
+  5 Segars                0  3  0
+  1 Pint wine             0  0  9
+  3 lodgings              0  9  0
+  3 bitters               0  0  9
+  3 breakfasts            0  3  6
+  15 boles Punch          1 10  0
+  24 dinners              1 16  0
+  11 bottles wine         0  3  6
+  5 mugs flip             0  5 10
+  3 boles punch           0  6  0
+  3 boles tody            0  3  6
+
+One might say with Falstaff, "O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread
+to this intolerable deal of sack!" I sadly fear me that at that Hartford
+ordination our parson ancestors got grievsously "gilded," to use a choice
+"red-lattice phrase."
+
+Many accounts of gay ordination parties have been preserved in diaries for
+us. Reverend Mr. Smith, who was settled in Portland in the early part of
+the eighteenth century, wrote thus in his journal of an ordination which
+he attended: "Mr. Foxcroft ordained at New Gloucester. We had a pleasant
+journey home. Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry. A _jolly ordination_.
+We lost all sight of decorum." The Mr. L. referred to was Mr. Stephen
+Longfellow, greatgrandfather of the poet.
+
+Bills for ordination-expenses abound in items of barrels of rum and cider
+and metheglin, of bowls of flip and punch and toddy, of boxes of lemons and
+loaves of sugar, in punches, and sometimes broken punchbowls, and in one
+case a large amount of Malaga and Canary wine, spices and "ross water,"
+from which was brewed doubtless an appetizing ordination-cup which may have
+rivalled Josselyn's New England nectar of "cyder, Maligo raisins, spices,
+and sirup of clove-gillyflowers."
+
+In Massachusetts, in January, 1759, the subject of the frequent disorders
+and irregularities in connection with ordination-services, especially in
+country towns, came before the council of the province, who referred
+its consideration to a convention of ministers. The ministers at that
+convention were recommended to each give instruction, exhortation, and
+advice against excesses to the members of his congregation whenever an
+ordination was about to take place in the vicinity of his church. In this
+way it was hoped that the reformation would be aided, and temperance,
+order, and decorum established. The newspapers were free in their
+condemnation of the feasting and roistering at ordination-services. When
+Dr. Cummings was ordained over the Old South Church of Boston in February,
+1761, a feast took place at the Rev. Dr. Sewall's house which occasioned
+much comment. A four-column letter of criticism appeared in the Boston
+Gazette of March 9, 1761, over the signature of "Countryman," which
+provoked several answers and much newspaper controversy. As Dr. Sewall had
+been moderator of the meeting of ministers held only two years previously
+with the hope, and for the purpose of abolishing ordination revelries, it
+is not strange that the circumstance of the feast being given in his house
+should cause public comment and criticism.
+
+"Countryman" complained that "the price of provisions was raised a quarter
+cart in Boston for several days before the instalment by reason of the
+great preparations therefor, and the readiness of the ecclesiastical
+caterers to give almost any price that was demanded. Many Boston people
+complained the town had, by this means, in a few days lost a large sum of
+money; which was, as it were, levied on and extorted from them. If the
+poor were the _better for what remained of so plentiful and splendid a
+feast_ I am very glad but yet think it is a pity the charity were not
+better timed." He reprovingly enumerates, "There were six tables that held
+one with another eighteen persons each, upon each table a good rich plumb
+pudding, a dish of boil'd pork and fowls, and a corn'd leg of pork with
+sauce proper for it, a leg of bacon, a piece of alamode beef, a leg of
+mutton with caper sauce, a roast line of veal, a roast turkey, a venison
+pastee, besides chess cakes and tarts, cheese and butter. Half a dozen
+cooks were employed upon this occasion, upwards of twenty tenders to wait
+upon the tables; they had the best of old cyder, one barrel of Lisbon wine,
+punch in plenty before and after dinner, made of old Barbados spirit. The
+cost of this moderate dinner was upwards of fifty pounds lawful money."
+This special ordination-feast, even as detailed by the complaining
+"Countryman," does not seem to me very reprehensible. The standing of the
+church, the wealth of the congregation, the character of the guests (among
+whom were the Governor and the judges of the Superior Court) all make
+this repast appear neither ostentatious nor extravagant. Fifty pounds was
+certainly not an enormous sum to spend for a dinner with wine for over one
+hundred persons, and such a good dinner too. Nor is it probable that a city
+as large as was Boston at that date could through that dinner have been
+swept of provisions to such an extent that prices would be raised a quarter
+part. I suspect some personal malice caused "Countryman's" attacks, for he
+certainly could have found in other towns more flagrant cases to complain
+of and condemn.
+
+Though no record exists to prove that "the poor were the better for
+what remained" after this Boston feast, in other towns letters
+and church-entries show that any fragments remaining after the
+ordination-dinner were well disposed of. Sometimes they furnished forth the
+new minister's table. In one case they were given to "a widowed family"
+("widowed" here being used in the old tender sense of bereaved). In
+Killingly "the overplush of provisions" was sold to help pay the arrearages
+of the salary of the outgoing minister, thus showing a laudable desire to
+"settle up and start square."
+
+If the church were dedicated at the time of the ordination, that would
+naturally be cause for additional gayety. A very interesting and graphic
+account of the feast at the dedication of the Old Tunnel Meeting-House of
+Lynn in the year 1682 has been preserved. It thus describes the scene:--
+
+"Ye Deddication Dinner was had in ye greate barne of Mr. Hoode which by
+reason of its goodly size was deemed ye most fit place. It was neatly
+adorned with green bows and other hangings and made very faire to look
+upon, ye wreaths being mostly wrought by ye young folk, they meeting
+together, both maides and young men, and having a merry time in doing ye
+work. Ye rough stalls and unbowed posts being gaily begirt and all ye
+corners and cubbies being clean swept and well aired, it truly did appear
+a meet banquetting hall. Ye scaffolds too from which ye provinder had been
+removed were swept cleane as broome could make them. Some seats were put up
+on ye scaffoldes whereon might sitt such of ye antient women as would see &
+ye maides and children. Ye greate floor was all held for ye company which
+was to partake of ye feast of fat things, none others being admitted there
+save them that were to wait upon ye same. Ye kine that were wont to be
+there were forced to keep holiday in the field."
+
+Then follows a minute account of how the fowls persisted in flying in
+and roosting over the table, scattering feathers and hay on the parsons
+beneath.
+
+"Mr. Shepard's face did turn very red and he catched up an apple and hurled
+it at ye birds. But he thereby made a bad matter worse for ye fruit being
+well aimed it hit ye legs of a fowl and brought him floundering and
+flopping down on ye table, scattering gravy, sauce and divers things upon
+our garments and in our faces. But this did not well please some, yet with
+most it was a happening that made great merryment. Dainty meats were on ye
+table in great plenty, bear-stake, deer-meat, rabbit, and fowle, both wild
+and from ye barnyard. Luscious puddings we likewise had in abundance,
+mostly apple and berry, but some of corn meal with small bits of sewet
+baked therein; also pyes and tarts. We had some pleasant fruits, as apples,
+nuts and wild grapes, and to crown all, we had plenty of good cider and ye
+inspiring Barbadoes drink. Mr. Shepard and most of ye ministers were
+grave and prudent at table, discoursing much upon ye great points of ye
+deddication sermon and in silence laboring upon ye food before them. But I
+will not risque to say on which they dwelt with most relish, ye discourse
+or ye dinner. Most of ye young members of ye Council would fain make a
+jolly time of it. Mr. Gerrish, ye Wenham minister, tho prudent in his
+meat and drinks, was yet in right merry mood. And he did once grievously
+scandalize Mr. Shepard, who on suddenly looking up from his dish did spy
+him, as he thot, winking in an unbecoming way to one of ye pretty damsels
+on ye scaffold. And thereupon bidding ye godly Mr. Rogers to labor with him
+aside for his misbehavior, it turned out that ye winking was occasioned by
+some of ye hay seeds that were blowing about, lodging in his eye; whereat
+Mr. Shepard felt greatly releaved.
+
+"Ye new Meeting house was much discoursed upon at ye table. And most thot
+it as comely a house of worship as can be found in the whole Collony save
+only three or four. Mr. Gerrish was in such merry mood that he kept ye end
+of ye table whereby he sat in right jovial humour. Some did loudly laugh
+and clap their hands. But in ye middest of ye merryment a strange disaster
+did happen unto him. Not having his thots about him he endeavored ye
+dangerous performance of gaping and laughing at the same time which he must
+now feel is not so easy or safe a thing. In doing this he set his jaws open
+in such wise that it was beyond all his power to bring them together again.
+His agonie was very great, and his joyful laugh soon turned to grievous
+gioaning. Ye women in ye scaffolds became much distressed for him. We did
+our utmost to stay ye anguish of Mr. Gerrish, but could make out little
+till Mr. Rogers who knoweth somewhat of anatomy did bid ye sufferer to sit
+down on ye floor, which being done Mr. Rogers took ye head atween his legs,
+turning ye face as much upward as possible and then gave a powerful blow
+and then sudden press which brot ye jaws into working order. But Mr.
+Geirish did not gape or laugh much more on that occasion, neither did he
+talk much for that matter.
+
+"No other weighty mishap occurred save that one of ye Salem delegates, in
+boastfully essaying to crack a walnut atween his teeth did crack, instead
+of ye nut, a most usefull double tooth and was thereby forced to appear at
+ye evening with a bandaged face."
+
+This ended this most amusing chapter of disasters to the ministers, though
+the banquet was diversified by interrupting crows from invading roosters,
+fierce and undignified counter-attacks with nuts and apples by the
+clergymen, a few mortifyingly "mawdlin songs and much roistering laughter,"
+and the account ends, "so noble and savoury a banquet was never before
+spread in this noble town, God be praised." What a picture of the good old
+times! Different times make different manners; the early Puritan ministers
+did not, as a rule, drink to excess, any more than do our modern clergymen;
+but it is not strange that though they were of Puritan blood and belief,
+they should have fallen into the universal custom of the day, and should
+have "gone to their graves full of years, honor, simplicity, and rum." The
+only wonder is, when the ministers had the best places at every table, at
+every feast, at every merry-making in New England, that stories of their
+roistering excesses should not have come down to us as there have of the
+intemperate clergy of Virginia.
+
+The ordination services within the meeting-houses were not always decorous
+and quiet scenes. In spite of the reverence which our forefathers had for
+their church and their ministers, it did not prevent them from bitterly
+opposing the settlement of an unwished-for clergyman over them, and many
+towns were racked and divided, then as now, over the important question.
+As years passed on the church members grew bold enough to dare to offer
+personal and bodily opposition. At the ordination of the Rev. Peter
+Thatcher in the New North Church in Boston, in 1720, there were two
+parties. The members who did not wish him to be settled over the church
+went into the meeting-house and made a great disorder and clamor. They
+forbade the proceedings, and went into the gallery, and threw from thence
+water and missiles on the friends of the clergymen who were gathered around
+him at the altar. Perhaps they obtained courage for these sacrilegious acts
+from the barrels of rum and the bowls of strong punch. And this was in
+Puritanical Boston, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of the landing
+of the Mayflower. Thus had one century changed the absolute reverence and
+affectionate regard of the Pilgrims for their church, their ministers,
+and their meeting-houses, to irreverent and obstinate desire for personal
+satisfaction. No wonder that the ministers at that date preached and
+believed that Satan was making fresh and increasing efforts to destroy the
+Puritan church. The hour was ready for Whitefield, for Edwards, for any
+new awakening; and was above all fast approaching for the sadly needed
+temperance reform.
+
+In the seventeenth century a minister was ordained and re-ordained at
+each church over which he had charge; but after some years the name of
+installation was given to each appointment after the first ordination, and
+the ceremony was correspondingly changed.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+The Ministers.
+
+
+
+The picture which Colonel Higginson has drawn of the Puritan minister is so
+well known and so graphic that any attempt to add to it would be futile.
+All the succeeding New England parsons, as years rolled by, were not,
+however, like the black-gowned, black-gloved, stately, and solemn man whom
+he has so clearly shown us. Men of rigid decorum, and grave ceremony there
+were, such as Dr. Emmons and Jonathan Edwards; but there were parsons also
+of another type,--eccentric, unconventional, and undignified in demeanor
+and dress. Parson Robinson, of Duxbury, persisted in wearing in the pulpit,
+as part of his clerical attire, a round jacket instead of the suitable
+gown or Geneva cloak, and he was known thereby as "Master Jack." With
+astonishing inconsistency this Master Jack objected to the village
+blacksmith's wearing his leathern apron into the church, and he assailed
+the offender again and again with words and hints from his pulpit. He was
+at last worsted by the grimaces of the victorious smith (where was the
+Duxbury tithingman?), and indignantly left the pulpit, ejaculating, "I'll
+not preach while that man sits before me." A remonstrating parishioner
+said afterward to Master Jack, "I'd not have left if the Devil sat there."
+"Neither would I", was the quick answer.
+
+Another singular article of attire was worn in the pulpit by Father Mills,
+of Torrington, though neither in irreverence nor indifference. When his
+dearly loved wife died he pondered how he, who always wore black, could
+express to the world that he was wearing mourning; and his simple heart hit
+upon this grotesque device: he left off his full-flowing wig, and tied
+up his head in a black silk handkerchief, which he wore thereafter as a
+trapping of woe.
+
+Parson Judson, of Taunton, was so lazy that he used to preach while sitting
+down in the pulpit; and was so contemptibly fond of comfort that he would
+on summer Sundays give out to the sweltering members of his congregation
+the longest psalm in the psalm-book, and then desert them--piously
+perspiring and fuguing--and lie under a tree enjoying the cool outdoor
+breezes until the long psalm was ended, escaping thus not only the heat but
+the singing; and when we consider the quantity and quality of both, and
+that he condemned his good people to an extra amount of each, it seems
+a piece of clerical inhumanity that would be hard to equal. Surely this
+selfish Taunton sybarite was the prosaic ideal of Hamlet's words:--
+
+  "Some ungracious pastors do
+  Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven,
+  Whilst like a puff'd and reckless libertine
+  Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
+  And recks not his own rede."
+
+But lazy and slothful ministers were fortunately rare in New England. No
+primrose path of dalliance was theirs; industrious and hard-working were
+nearly all the early parsons, preaching and praying twice on the Sabbath,
+and preaching again on Lecture days; visiting the sick and often giving
+medical and "chyrurgycal" advice; called upon for legal counsel and
+adjudication; occupied in spare moments in teaching and preparing young
+men for college; working on their farms; hearing the children say their
+catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,--truly
+they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded
+on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan
+vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John
+Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher,"
+while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a
+contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious
+epithets and descriptions were applied to the parsons; they were called
+"holy-heavenly," "sweet-affecting," "soul-ravishing," "heaven-piercing,"
+"angel-rivalling," "subtil," "irrefragable," "angelical," "septemfluous,"
+"holy-savoured," "princely," "soul-appetizing," "full of antic tastes"
+(meaning having the tastes of an antiquary), "God-bearing." Of two of the
+New England saints it was written:--
+
+  "Thier Temper far from Injucundity,
+  Thier tongues and pens from Infecundity."
+
+Many other fulsome, turgid, and even whimsical expressious of praise might
+be named, for the Puritans were rich in classic sesquipedalian adjectives,
+and their active linguistic consciences made them equally fertile in
+producing new ones.
+
+Ready and unexpected were the solemn Puritans in repartee. A party of gay
+young sparks, meeting austere old John Cotton, determined to guy him. One
+of the young reprobates sent up to him and whispered in his ear, "Cotton,
+thou art an old fool." "I am, I am," was the unexpected answer; "the Lord
+make both thee and me wiser than we are." Two young men of like intent met
+Mr. Haynes, of Vermont, and said with mock sad faces, "Have you heard the
+news? the Devil is dead." Quick came the answer, "Oh, poor, fatherless
+children! what will become of you?"
+
+Gloomy and depressed of spirits they were often. The good Warham, who could
+take faithful and brave charge of his flock in the uncivilized wilds
+of Connecticut among ferocious savages, was tortured by doubts and
+"blasphemous suggestions," and overwhelmed by unbelief, enduring specially
+agonizing scruples about administering and partaking of the Lord's Supper,
+and was thus perplexed and buffeted until the hour of his sad death. The
+ministers went through various stages of uncertainty and gloom, from the
+physical terror of Dr. Cogswell in a thunderstorm, through vacillating and
+harassing convictions about the Half Way Covenant, through doubt of God,
+of salvation, of heaven, of eternite, particularly distressing suspicions
+about the reality of hell and the personality of the Devil, to the stage
+of deep melancholy which was shown in its highest type in "Handkerchief
+Moody," who preached and prayed and always appeared in public with a
+handkerchief over his face, and gave to Hawthorne the inspiration for his
+story of "The Black Veil." Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of
+Charlestown, was so hypochondriacal that he was afraid to preach in the
+pulpit, feeling sure that he would die if he entered therein; so he always
+delivered his sermons to his patient congregation from the deacons' pew.
+Mr. Bradstreet was unconventional in many other respects, and was far from
+being a typical Puritan minister. He seldom wore a coat, but generally
+appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth,--a
+most disreputable addition to the clerical toilet at that date, or, in
+truth, at any date. He was a learned and pious man, however, and was thus
+introduced to a fellow clergyman, "Here is a man who can whistle Greek."
+
+Scarcely one of the early Puritan ministers was free from the sad shadow of
+doubt and fear. No "rose-pink or dirty-drab views of humanity" were theirs;
+all was inky-black. And it is impossible to express the gloom and the
+depression of spirit which fall on one now, after these centuries of
+prosperous and cheerful years, when one considers thoughtfully the deep and
+despairing agony of mind endured by these good, brave, steadfast, godly
+Puritan ministers. Read, for instance, the sentences from the diary of the
+Rev. John Baily, or of Nathaniel Mather, as given by Cotton Mather in his
+"Magnalia." Mather says that poor, sad, heart-sick Baily was filled with
+"desponding jealousies," "disconsolate uneasinesses," gloomy fears, and
+thinks the words from his diary "may be profitable to some discouraged
+minds." Profitable! Ah, no; far from it! The overwhelming blackness
+of despair, the woful doubts and fears about destruction and utter
+annihilation which he felt so deeply and so continually, fall in a heavy,
+impenetrable cloud upon us as we read, until we feel that we too are in the
+"Suburbs of hell" and are "eternally damned."
+
+But in succeeding years they were not always gloomy and not always staid,
+as we know from the stories of the cheerful parties at ordination-times;
+and I doubt not the reverend Assembly of Elders at Cambridge enjoyed to the
+full degree the twelve gallons of sack and six gallons of white wine sent
+to them by the Court as a testimony of deep respect. And the group of
+clergymen who were painted over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of
+Newbury, must have been far from gloom, as the punch-bowl and drinking-cups
+and tobacco and pipes would testify, and their cheerful motto likewise: "In
+essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." And
+the Rev. Mr. ---- no, I will not tell his name--kept an account with
+one Jerome Ripley, a storekeeper, and on one page of this account-book,
+containing thirty-nine entries, twenty-one were for New England rum.
+It somewhat lessens in our notions the personal responsibility, or the
+personal potatory capability of the parson, to discover that there was
+an ordination in town during that rum-paged week, and that the visiting
+ministers probably drank the greater portion of Jerome Ripley's liquor.
+But I wish the store-keeper had--to save this parson's reputation among
+succeeding generations--called and entered the rum as hay, or tea, or
+nails, or anything innocent and virtuous and clerical. When we read of all
+these doings and drinkings of the old New England ministers,--"if ancient
+tales say true, nor wrong these ancient men"--we feel that we cannot so
+fiercely resent nor wonder at the degrading coupling in Byron's sneering
+lines:--
+
+  "There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms,
+  As rum and true religion."
+
+All the cider made by the New England elders did not tend to gloom,
+and they were celebrated for their fine cider. The best cider in
+Massachusetts--that which brought the highest price--was known as the
+Arminian cider, because the minister who furnished it to the market was
+suspected of having Arminian tendencies. A very telling compliment to the
+cider of one of the first New England ministers is thus recorded: "Mr.
+Whiting had a score of appill-trees from which he made delicious cyder.
+And it hath been said yt an Indyan once coming to hys house and Mistress
+Whiting giving him a drink of ye cyder, he did sett down ye pot and smaking
+his lips say yt Adam and Eve were rightlie damned for eating ye appills in
+ye garden of Eden, they should have made them into cyder." This perverse
+application of good John Eliot's teaching would have vexed the apostle
+sorely. Of so much account were the barrels of cider, and so highly were
+they prized by the ministers, that one honest soul did not hesitate to
+thank the Lord in the pulpit for the "many barrels of cider vouchsafed to
+us this year."
+
+Stronger liquors than cider were also manufactured by the ministers,--and
+by God-fearing, pious ministers also. They did not hesitate to own and
+operate distilleries. Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church of
+Hartford and author of the hymn "Swell the anthem, raise the song," was
+engaged in the distilling business and did not make a success of it either.
+Having become bankrupt, he did not dare show his head anywhere in public
+for some time, except on Sunday, for fear of arrest. This disreputable and
+most unclerical affair did not operate against him in the minds of the
+contemporaneous public, for ten years later he received the degree of
+Doctor of Divinity from Princeton College; and he did not hesitate to joke
+about his liquor manufacturing, saying to two of his brother-clergymen,
+"Oh, we are all three in the same boat together,--Brother Prime raises the
+grain, I distil it, and Brother Flint drinks it."
+
+Impostors there were--false parsons--in the early struggling days of New
+England (since "the devil was never weary and never ceasing in disturbing
+the peace of the new English church"), and they plagued the colonists
+sorely. The very first shepherd of the wandering flock--Mr. Lyford, who
+preached to the planters in 1624--was, as Bradford says, "most unsavory
+salt," a most agonizing and unbearable thorn in the flesh and spirit of the
+poor homesick Pilgrims; and he was finally banished to Virginia, where it
+was supposed that he would find congenial and un-Puritanlike companions.
+Another bold-faced cheat preached to the colonists a most impressive sermon
+on the text, "Let him that stole steal no more," while his own pockets were
+stuffed out with stolen money. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth
+speaketh."
+
+Dicky Swayn, "after a thousand rogueries," set up as a parson in Boston.
+But, unfortunately for him, he prayed too loud and too long on one
+occasion, and his prayer attracted the attention of a woman whose servant
+he had formerly been. She promptly exposed his false pretensions and past
+villanies, and he left Boston and an army of cheated creditors. In 1699
+two other attractive and plausible scamps--Kingsbury and May--garbed and
+curried themselves as ministers, and went through a course of unchecked
+villany, building only on their agreeable presence. Cotton Mather wrote
+pertinently of one of these charmers, "Fascination is a thing whereof
+mankind has more Experience than Comprehension;" and he also wrote very
+despitefully of the adventurer's scholarly attainments saying there were
+"eighteen horrid false spells and not one point in one very short note I
+received from him." As the population increased, so also did the list of
+dishonest impostors, who made a cloak of religion most effectively to
+aid them in deceiving the religious community; and sometimes, alas! the
+ordained clergymen became sad backsliders.
+
+Nor were the pious and godly Puritan divines above the follies and
+frailties of other men in other places and in other times. It can be said
+of them, as of the Jew, had they not "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions,
+senses, affections, passions?"--were they not as other men? It is recorded
+of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, that "once coming among a gay partie of
+yong people he kist all ye maides and said yt he felt all ye better for
+it." And who can doubt it? Even that extreme type, that highest pinnacle
+of American Puritanical bigotry,--solemn and learned Cotton Mather,--had,
+when he was a mourning widower, a most amusing amorous episode with a
+rather doubtful, a decidedly shady, young Boston woman, whom he styled an
+"Ingenious Child," but who was far from being an ingenuous child. "She," as
+he proudly stated, "became charmed with my person to such a degree that she
+could not but break in upon me with her most importunate requests." And a
+very handsome and thoroughly attractive person does his portrait show
+even to modern eyes. Poor Cotton resisted the wiles of the devil in this
+alluring form, though he had to fast and pray three consecutive nights ere
+the strong Puritan spirit conquered the weak flesh, and he could consent
+and resolve to give up the thought of marrying the siren. His self-denial
+and firmness deserved a better reward than the very trying matrimonial
+"venture" that he afterwards made.
+
+Many another Puritan parson has left record of his wooings that are warm
+to read. And well did the parsons' wives deserve their ardent wooings and
+their tender love-letters. Hard as was the minister's life, over-filled as
+was his time, highly taxed as were his resources, all these hardships were
+felt in double proportion by the minister's wife. The old Hebrew standard
+of praise quoted by Cotton Mather, "A woman worthy to be the wife of a
+priest," was keenly epigrammatic; and ample proof of the wise insight
+of the standard of comparison may be found in the lives of "the pious,
+prudent, and prayerful" wives of New England ministers. What wonder that
+their praises were sung in many loving though halting threnodies, in
+long-winded but tender eulogies, in labored anagrams, in quaintly spelled
+epitaphs?--for the ministers' wives were the saints of the Puritan
+calendar.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+The Ministers' Pay.
+
+
+
+The salaries of New England clergymen were not large in early days, but the
+L60 or L70 which they each were yearly voted was quite enough to suitably
+support them in that new country of plain ways and plain living, if they
+only received it, which was, alas! not always the case. The First Court of
+Massachusetts, in 1630, set the amount of the minister's annual stipend
+to be L20 or L30 according to the wealth of the community, and made it a
+public charge. In 1659 the highest salary paid in Suffolk County was L100
+to Mr. Thatcher, and the lowest was L40 to the clergyman at Hull. The
+minister of the Andover church was voted a salary of L60, and "when he
+shall have occacion to marry, L10 more." He was very glad, however, to take
+L42 in hard cash instead of L60 in corn and labor, which were at that time
+the most popular forms of ministerial remuneration; even though the "hard
+cash" were in the form of wampum, beaver-skins, or leaden bullets.
+
+Many congregations, though the members were so pious and godly, were pretty
+sharp in bargaining with their preachers; for instance, the church in New
+London made its new parson sign a contract that "in case he remove before
+the year is out, he returneth the L80 paid him." Often clergymen would
+"supply" (or "Sipploye," or "syploy" or "sipply," or "sciploy," as various
+records have it) from month to mouth without "settling." As they got the
+"keepe of a hors," and their own board for Saturday and Sunday, and on
+Monday morning a cash payment for preaching (though often the amount was
+only twelve shillings), they were richer than with a small yearly salary
+that was irregularly and inconveniently paid. Often too they entered by
+preference into a yearly contract with a church, without any wish for
+regular settlement or ordination.
+
+A large portion of the stipends in early parishes being paid in corn and
+labor, the amounts were established by fixed rate upon the inhabitants;
+and the amount of land owned and cultivated by each church-member was
+considered in reckoning his assessment. These amounts were called voluntary
+contributions. If, however, any citizen refused to "contribute," he
+was taxed; and if he refused to pay his church-tax he could be fined,
+imprisoned, or pilloried. For one hundred years the ministers' salaries
+in Boston were paid by these so-called "voluntary contributions." In one
+church it was voted that "the Deacons have liberty for a quarter of a yeare
+to git in every mans sume either in a Church way or in a Christian way."
+I would the process employed in the "Church way" were recorded, since it
+differed so from the Christian way.
+
+It is one of the Puritan paradoxes that abounded in New England, that the
+community of New Haven, a "State whose Desire was Religion," and religion
+alone, was particularly backward in paying the minister who had spiritual
+charge there. After much trouble in deciding about the form and quality
+of the currency which should be used in pay, since so much bad wampum was
+thrust upon the deacons at the public contributions, it was in 1651 enacted
+that "whereas it is taken notice of that Divers give not into the Treasury
+at all on the Lords Day, it is decreed that all such if they give not
+freely, of themselves be rated according to the Jurisdiction order for the
+Ministers Maintaynance." The delinquents were ordered to bring their "rate"
+to the Deacon's house at once. A presuming young man ventured to suggest
+that the recreant members who would not pay in the face of the whole
+congregation would hardly rush to the Deacon's door to give in their
+"rate." He was severely ordered to keep silence in the company of wiser and
+elder people; but time proved his simply wise supposition to be correct;
+and many and various were the devices and forces which the deacons were
+obliged to use to obtain the minister's rate in New Haven.
+
+Some few bold Puritan souls dared to protest against being forced to pay
+the church rate whether they wished to or not. Lieutenant Fuller, of
+Barnstable, was fined fifty shillings for "prophanely" saying "that the law
+enacted about the ministers maintenance was a wicked and devilish one, and
+that the devil sat at the helm when the law was made." Such courageous
+though profane expressions of revolt but little availed; for not only
+were members and attendants of the Puritan churches taxed, but Quakers,
+Baptists, and Church-of-England men were also "rated," and if they refused
+to pay to help support the church that they abhorred, they were fined and
+imprisoned. One man, of Watertown, named Briscoe, dared to write a book
+against the violent enforcement of "voluntary" subscriptions. He was fined
+L10 for his wickedness; and the printer of the book was also punished. A
+virago in New London, more openly courageous, threw scalding water on the
+head of the tithingman who came to collect the minister's rate. Old John
+Cotton preached long and earnestly upon the necessity and propriety of
+raising the money for the minister's salary, and for other expenses of the
+church, wholly by voluntary and eagerly given contributions,--the "Lord
+having directed him to make it clear by Scripture." He believed that tithes
+and church-taxes were productive of "pride, contention and sloth," and
+indicated a declining spiritual condition of the church. But it was a
+strange voluntary gift he wished, that was forced by dread of the pillory
+and cage!
+
+Since, as Higginson said, "New England was a plantation of Religion, not a
+plantation of Trade," the church and its support were of course the first
+thought in laying out a new town-settlement, and some of the best town-lots
+were always set aside for the "yuse of the minister." Sometimes these lots
+were a gift outright to the first settled preacher, in other townships they
+were set aside as glebes, or "ministry land" as it was called. It was a
+universal custom to build at once a house for the minister, and some very
+queer contracts and stipulations for the size, shape, and quality of the
+parson's home-edifice may be read in church-records. To the construction
+of this house all the town contributed, as also to the building of the
+meeting-house; some gave work; some, the use of a horse or ox-team; some,
+boards; some, stones or brick; some, logs; others, nails; and a few, a very
+few, money. At the house-raising a good dinner was provided, and of course,
+plenty of liquor. Some malcontents rebelled against being forced to work on
+the minister's house. Entries of fines are common enough for "refusing
+to dig on the Minister's Selor," for neglecting to send "the Minister's
+Nayles," for refusing to "contribute clay-boards," etc. As with the
+town-lot, the house sometimes was a gift outright to the clergyman, and
+ofttimes the ownership was retained by the church, and the free use only
+was given to each minister.
+
+It was a universal custom to allow free pasturage for the minister's
+horse, for which the village burial-ground was assigned as a favorite
+feeding-ground. Sometimes this privilege of free pasturage was abused. In
+Plymouth, in 1789, Rev. Chandler Robbins was requested "not to have more
+horses than shall be necessary, for his many horses that had been pastured
+on 'Burial Hill'" had sadly damaged and defaced the gravestones,--perhaps
+the very headstones placed over the bones of our Pilgrim Fathers.
+
+The "strangers' money," which was the money contributed by visitors who
+chanced to attend the services, and which was sometimes specified as "all
+the silver and black dogs given by strangers," was usually given to the
+minister. A "black dog" was a "dog dollar."
+
+Often a settlement or a sum of money was given outright to the clergyman
+when he was first ordained or settled in the parish. At a town meeting in
+Sharon, January 8, 1755, which was held with regard to procuring a new
+minister, it was voted "that a committe confer with Mr. Smith, and know
+which will be more acceptable to him, to have a larger settlement and a
+smaller salary, or a larger salary and a smaller settlement, and make
+report to this meeting." On Jan. 15th it was voted "that we give to said
+Mr. Smith 420 ounces of silver or equivalent in old Tenor bills, for a
+settlement, to be paid in three years after settlement. That we give to
+said Mr. Smith 220 Spanish dollars or an equivalent in old Tenor bills for
+his yearly salary." Mr. Smith was very generous to his new parish, for his
+acceptance of its call contains this clause: "As it will come heavy upon
+some perhaps to pay salary and settlement together I have thought of
+releasing part of the payment of the salary for a time to be paid to me
+again. The first year I shall allow you out of the salary you have voted me
+40 dollars, the 2nd 30 dollars, the 3rd 15, the 4th year 20 to be repaid
+to me again, the 5th year 20 more, the 6th year 20 more and the 25 dollars
+that remain, I am willing that the town should keep 'em for its own use."
+He was apparently "willing to live very low," as Parson Eliot humbly and
+pathetically wrote in a petition to his church.
+
+The Puritan ministers in New England in the eighteenth century were all
+good Whigs; they hated the English kings, fully believing that those stupid
+rulers, who really cared little for the Church of England, were burning
+with pious zeal to make Episcopacy the established church of the colonies,
+and knowing that were that deed accomplished they themselves would probably
+lose their homes and means of livelihood. They were the most eager of
+Republicans and patriots, and many of them were good and brave soldiers in
+the Revolution.
+
+When the minister acquired the independence he so longed and fought for,
+it was not all his fancy painted it. He found himself poor
+indeed,--practically penniless. He complained sadly that he was paid his
+salary in the worthless continental paper money, and he refused to take it.
+Often he cannily took merchandise of all kinds instead of the low-valued
+paper money, and he became a good and sharp trader, exchanging his various
+goods for whatever he needed--and could get. Merchandise was, indeed, far
+preferable to money. The petition of Rev. Mr. Barnes to his Willsborough
+people has been preserved, and he thus speaks of his salary: "In 1775 the
+war comenced & Paper money was emitted which soon began to depreciate and
+the depreciation was so rappid that in may 1777 your Pastor gave the whole
+of his years Salary for one sucking Calf, the next year he gave the whole
+for a small store pig. Your Pastor has not asked for any consideration
+being willing to try to Scrabble along with the people while they are in
+low circumstances." His neighbor, Rev. Mr. Sprague, of Dublin, formally
+petitioned his church not to increase his salary, "as I am plagued to death
+to get what is owing to me now," or to buy anything with it when he got it.
+The minister in Scarborough had to be paid L5,400 in paper money to make
+good his salary of L60 in gold which had been voted him.
+
+"Living low" and "scrabbling along" seems to have been the normal and
+universal condition of the New England minister for some time after the War
+of Independence. He was obliged to go without his pay, or to take it in
+whatever shape it might chance to be tendered. Indeed, from the earliest
+colonial days it was true that of whatever they had, the church-members
+gave; meal, maize, beans, cider, lumber, merchantable pork, apples,
+"English grains," pumpkins,--all were paid to the parson. Part of the
+stipend of a minister on Cape Cod was two hundred fish yearly from each
+parishioner, with which to fertilize his sandy corn-land. In Plymouth,
+in 1662, the following method of increasing the minister's income was
+suggested: "The Court Proposeth it as a thing that they judge would be very
+commendable and beneficiall to the townes where God's providence shall cast
+any whales, if they should agree to set aparte some p'te of every such fish
+or oyle for the Incouragement of an able and godly minister among them." In
+Sandwich, also, the parson had a part of every whale that came ashore.
+
+Various gifts, too, came to the preachers. In Newbury the first salmon
+caught each year in the weir was left by will to the parson. Judge Sewall
+records that he visited the minister and "carried him a Bushel of
+Turnips, cost me five shillings, and a Cabbage cost half a Crown." Such a
+high-priced cabbage!
+
+That New England country institution--the "donation party" to the
+minister--was evolved at a later date. At these donation parties the
+unfortunate shepherd of the flock often received much that neither he
+nor the wily donors could use, while more valuable and useful gifts were
+lacking.
+
+A very material plenishing of the minister's house was often furnished in
+the latter part of the eighteenth century by the annual "Spinning Bee." On
+a given day the women of the parish, each bearing her own spinning-wheel
+and flax, assembled at the minister's house and spun for his wife great
+"runs" of linen thread, which were afterward woven into linen for the use
+of the parson and his family. In Newbury, April 20,1768, "Young ladies met
+at the house of the Rev. Mr. Parsons, who preached to them a sermon from
+Proverbs 31-19. They spun and presented to Mrs. Parsons two hundred and
+seventy skeins of good yarn." They drank "liberty tea." This makeshift of
+a beverage was made of the four-leaved loosestrife. The herb was pulled
+up like flax, its stalks were stripped of the leaves and were boiled. The
+leaves were put in a kettle and basted with the liquor distilled from the
+stalks. After this the leaves were dried in an oven to use in the same
+manner as tea-leaves. Liberty tea sold readily for sixpence a pound. In
+1787 these same Newbury women spun two hundred and thirty-six skeins
+of thread and yarn for the wife of the Rev. Mr. Murray. Some were busy
+spinning, some reeling and carding, and some combing the flax, while the
+minister preached to them on the text from Exodus xxxv. 25: "And all
+the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands." These
+spinning-bees were everywhere in vogue, and formed a source of much profit
+to the parson, and of pleasure to the spinners, in spite of the sermons.
+
+Pieced patchwork bed-quilts for the minister's family were also given by
+the women of the congregation. Sometimes each woman furnished a neatly
+pieced square, and all met at the parsonage and joined and quilted the
+coverlet. At other times the minister's wife made the patchwork herself,
+but the women assembled and transformed it into quilts for her. The parson
+was helped also in his individual work. When the rye or wheat or grain on
+the minister's land was full grown and ready for reaping and mowing, the
+men in his parish gave him gladly a day's work in harvesting, and in turn
+he furnished them plenty of good rum to drink, else there were "great
+uneasyness." The New England men were not forced to drink liberty tea.
+
+One universal contribution to the support of the minister all over New
+England was cord-wood; and the "minister's wood" is an institution up to
+the present day in the few thickly wooded districts that remain. A load of
+wood was usually given by each male church-member, and he was expected to
+deliver the gift at the door of the parsonage. Sixty loads a year were a
+fair allowance, but the number sometimes ran up to one hundred, as was
+furnished to Parson Chauncey, of Durham. Rev. Mr. Parsons, of East Hadley,
+was the greatest wood-consumer among the old ministers of whom I have
+chanced to read. Good, cheerful, roaring fires must the Parsons family have
+kept; for in 1774 he had eighty loads of wood supplied to him; in 1751 he
+was furnished with one hundred loads; in 1763 the amount had increased to
+one hundred and twenty loads, when the parish was glad to make a compromise
+with their extravagant shepherd and pay him instead L13 6s 8d annually
+in addition to his regular salary, and let him buy or cut his own wood.
+Firewood at that time in that town was worth only the expense of cutting
+and hauling to the house. A "load" of wood contained about three quarters
+of a cord, and until after the Revolutionary War was worth in the vicinity
+of Hadley only three shillings a load. The minister's loads were expected
+to be always of good "hard-wood." One thrifty parson, while watching a
+farmer unload his yearly contribution, remarked, "Isn't that pretty soft
+wood?" "And don't we sometimes have pretty soft preaching?" was the answer.
+It was well that the witty retort was not made a century earlier; for the
+speaker would have been punished by a fine, since they fined so sharply
+anything that savored of "speaking against the minister." In some towns a
+day was appointed which was called a "wood-spell," when it was ordered that
+all the wood be delivered at the parson's door; and thus the farmers formed
+a cheerful gathering, at which the minister furnished plentiful flip, or
+grog, to the wood-givers. Rev. Stephen Williams, of Longmeadow, never
+failed to make a note of the "wood-sleddings" in his diary. He wrote on
+Jan. 25, 1757, "Neighbors sledded wood for me and shewed a Good Humour.
+I rejoice at it. The Lord bless them that are out of humour and brot no
+wood." In other towns the wood did not always come in when it was wanted or
+needed, and winter found the parsonage woodshed empty. Rev. Mr. French, of
+Andover, gave out this notice in his pulpit one Sunday in November: "I will
+write two discourses and deliver them in this meeting-house on Thanksgiving
+Day, _provided I can manage to write them without a fire_." We can be
+sure that Monday morning saw several loads of good hard wood deposited at
+the parson's door.
+
+Other ministers did not hesitate to demand their cord-wood most openly,
+while still others became adepts in hinting and begging, not only for wood,
+but for other supplies. It is told of a Newbury parson that he rode from
+house to house one winter afternoon, saying in each that he "wished he had
+a slice of their good cheese, for his wife expected company." On his way
+home his sleigh, unfortunately, upset, and the gathering darkness could not
+conceal from the eyes of the astonished townspeople, who ran to "right the
+minister," the nine great cheeses that rolled out into the snow.
+
+Another source of income to New England preachers was the sale of the
+gloves and rings which were given to them (and indeed to all persons of
+any importance) at weddings, funerals, and christenings. In reading Judge
+Sewall's diary one is amazed at the extraordinary number of gloves he thus
+received, and can but wonder what became of them all, since, had he had
+as many hands as Briareus, he could hardly have worn them. The manuscript
+account-book of the Rev. Mr. Elliot, who was ordained pastor of the New
+North Church of Boston in 1742, shows that he, having a frugal mind, sold
+both gloves and rings. He kept a full list of the gloves he received, the
+kid gloves, the lambswool gloves, and the long gloves,--which were for his
+wife. It seems incredible, but in thirty-two years he received two thousand
+and nine hundred and forty pairs of gloves. Of these, though dead men's
+gloves did not have a very good market, he sold through various salesmen
+and dealers about six hundred and forty dollars worth. One wonders that he
+did not "combine" with the undertaker or sexton who furnished the gloves to
+mourners, and thus do a very thrifty business.
+
+The parson, especially in a low-salaried, rural district, had to practise a
+thousand petty and great economies to eke out his income. He and his family
+wore homespun and patched clothing, which his wife had spun and wove and
+cut and made. She knitted woollen mittens and stockings by the score. She
+unfortunately could not make shoes, and to keep the large family shod was a
+serious drain on the clerical purse, one minister declaring vehemently
+that he should have died a rich man if he and his family could have gone
+barefoot. The pastors of seaboard and riverside parishes set nets, like the
+Apostles of old, and caught fish with which they fed their families until
+the over-phosphorized brains and stomachs rebelled. They set snares and
+traps and caught birds and squirrels and hare, to replenish their tables,
+and from the skins of the rabbits and woodchucks and squirrels, the
+parsons' wives made fur caps for the husbands and for the children.
+
+The whole family gathered in large quantities from roadsides and pastures
+the oily bayberries, and from them the thrifty and capable wife made scores
+of candles for winter use, patiently filling and refilling her few moulds,
+or "dipping" the candles again and again until large enough to use. These
+pale-green bayberry tallow candles, when lighted in the early winter
+evening, sent forth a faint spicy fragrance--a true New England
+incense--that fairly perfumed and Orientalized the atmosphere of the
+parsonage kitchen. They were very saving, however, even of these home-made
+candles, blowing them out during the long family prayers.
+
+Some parsons could not afford always to use candles. In the home of one
+well-known minister the wife always knitted, the children ciphered and
+studied, and the husband wrote his sermon by the flickering fire-light (for
+they always had wood in plenty), with his scraps of sermon paper placed on
+the side of the great leathern bellows as it lay in his lap; a pretty home
+scene that was more picturesque to behold than comfortable to take part in.
+
+Country ministers could scarcely afford paper to write on, as it was taxed
+and was high priced. They bought their sermon paper by the pound; but they
+made the first drafts of their addresses, in a fine, closely written hand,
+on wrapping-paper, on the backs of letters, on the margins of their few
+newspapers, and copied them when finished in their sermon-books with a
+keen regard for economy of space and paper. The manuscript sermons of New
+England divines are models of careful penmanship, and may be examined with
+interest by a student of chirography. The letters are cramped and crabbed,
+like the lives of many of the writers, but the penmanship is methodical,
+clear, and distinct, without wavering lines or uncertain touch.
+
+As every parsonage had some glebe land, the parson could raise at least a
+few vegetables to supply his table. One minister, prevented by illness from
+planting his garden, complained with bitterness that, save for a few rare
+gifts of vegetables from his parishioners, his family had no green thing
+all summer save "messes of dandelion greens" which he had dug by the
+roadside, and the summer's succession of wild berries and mushrooms. The
+children had gathered the berries and had sold them when they could, but of
+course no one would buy the mushrooms, hence they had been forced to eat
+them at the parsonage; and he spoke despitefully and disdainfully of the
+mean, unnourishing, and doubtfully healthful food.
+
+In winter the parson's family fared worse; one minister declared that he
+had had nothing but mush and milk with occasional "cracker johnny-cakes"
+all winter, and that he had not once tasted meat in that space of time,
+save at a funeral or ordination-supper, where I doubt not he gorged with
+the composure and capacity of a Sioux brave at a war feast.
+
+Often the low state of the parsonage larder was quite unknown to the
+unthinking members of the congregation, who were not very luxuriously fed
+themselves; and in the profession of preaching as in all other walks of
+life much depended on the way the parson's money was spent,--economy and
+good judgment in housekeeping worked wonders with the small salary. Dr.
+Dwight, in eulogizing Abijah Weld, pastor at Attleborough, declared that
+on a salary of two hundred and twenty dollars a year Mr. Weld brought up
+eleven children, kept a hospitable house, and gave liberally in charity to
+the poor. I fear if we were to ask some carnal-minded person, who knew not
+the probity of Dr. Dwight, how Mr. Weld could possibly manage to accomplish
+such wonderful results with so little money, that we should meet with
+scepticism as to the correctness of the facts alleged. Such cases were,
+however, too common to be doubted. My answer to the puzzling financial
+question would be this: examine and study the story of the home life, the
+work of _Mrs_. Weld, that unsalaried helper in clerical labor; therein
+the secret lies.
+
+In many cases, in spite of the never failing and never ceasing economy,
+care, and assistance of the hard-working, thrifty wife, in spite of
+tributes, tithes and windfalls--in country parishes especially--the
+minister, unless he fortunately had some private wealth, felt it incumbent
+upon him to follow some money-making vocation on week-days. Many were
+farmers on week-days. Many took into their families young men who wished
+to be taught, or fitted for college. Rev. Mr. Halleck in the course of his
+useful and laborious life educated over three hundred young Puritans in his
+own household. It is not recorded how Mrs. Halleck enjoyed the never ending
+cooking for this regiment of hungry young men. Some parsons learned to draw
+up wills and other legal documents, and thus became on a small scale the
+lawyers of the town. Others studied the mystery of medicine, and bought a
+small stock of the nauseous drugs of the times, which they retailed
+with accompanying advice to their parishioners. Some were coopers, some
+carpenters, rope-makers, millers, or cobblers. One cobbler clergyman in
+Andover, Vermont, worked at his shoe-mending all the week with his Bible
+open on his bench before him, and he marked the page containing any text
+which bore on the subject of his coming sermon, with a marker of waxed
+shoe-thread. Often the Bible, in his pulpit on Sunday, had thirty or forty
+of these shoe-thread guides hanging down from it.
+
+One minister, having been reproved for his worldliness in amassing a large
+enough fortune to buy a good farm, answered his complaining congregation
+thus: "I have obtained the money to buy this farm by neglecting to follow
+the maxim to 'mind my own business.' My business was to study the word of
+God and attend to my parish duties and preach good sermons. All this I
+acknowledge I have not done, for I have been meddling with your business.
+_That_ was to support me and my family; that _you_ have not done.
+But remember this: while I have performed your duties, you have not done
+mine, so I think you cannot complain."
+
+Some of the early ministers, in addition to preaching in the meeting-house,
+did not disdain to take care of the edifice. Parson Everitt of Sandwich was
+paid three dollars a year for sweeping out the meeting-house in which he
+preached; and after he resigned this position of profit, the duties were
+performed by the town physician "as often as there shalbe ocation to keepe
+it deesent." The thrifty Mr. Everitt had a pleasing variety of occupations;
+he was also a successful farmer, a good fence-builder, and he ran a
+fulling-mill.
+
+So, altogether, as they were wholly exempt from taxation, the New England
+parsons did not fare ill, though Mr. Cotton said that "ministers and milk
+were the only cheap things in New England," and he deemed various ills,
+such as attacks by fierce Indians, loss of cattle, earthquakes, and failure
+of crops, to be divine judgments for the small ministerial pay; while
+Cotton Mather, in one of his pompous and depressing jokes, called the
+minister's stipend "Synecdotical Pay." A search in a treatise on rhetoric
+or in a dictionary will discover the point of this witticism--if it be
+worth searching for.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit.
+
+
+
+One thing which always interests and can but amuse every reader of the
+old Puritan sermons is the astonishingly familiar way in which these New
+England divines publicly shared their domestic joys and sorrows with
+the members of their congregations; and we are equally surprised at the
+ingenuity which they displayed in finding texts that were suitable for
+the various occasions and events. The Reverend Mr. Turell was specially
+ingenious. Of him Dr. Holmes wrote,--
+
+  "You've heard, no doubt, of Parson Turell;
+  Over at Medford he used to dwell,--
+  Married one of the Mathers' folks."
+
+His wife, Jane Coleman, was a handsome brunette. The bridegroom preached
+his first sermon after his wedding on this text, "I am black but comely, O
+ye daughters of Jerusalem." When he married a second time he chose as his
+text, "He is altogether lovely, this is my beloved, and this my friend, O
+daughters of Jerusalem!" It is possible that each of Parson Turell's brides
+may have chosen the text from which he preached her honeymoon sermon. It
+was the universal custom for many years thoughout New England to allow a
+bride the privilege of selecting for the parson who had solemnized her
+marriage, or at whose church she first appeared after the wedding, the text
+from which he should preach on the bridal Sabbath. Thus when John Physick
+and Mary Prescott were married in Portland, on July 4, 1770, the bride gave
+to Rev. Mr. Deane this text: "Mary hath chosen that good part;" and from it
+Parson Deane preached the "wedding sermon." When Abby Smith, daughter of
+Parson Smith, married 'Squire John Adams, whom her father disliked and
+would not invite home to dinner, she chose this text for her wedding
+sermon: "John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he
+hath a devil." The high-spirited bride had the honor of living to be the
+wife of one President of the United States, and mother of another.
+
+Another ingenious clergyman gave out one morning as his text, "Unto us a
+son is born;" and thus notified the surprised congregation of an event
+which they had been awaiting for some weeks. Another preached on the text,
+"My servant lieth at home sick," which was literally true. Another, a
+bachelor, dared to announce this abbreviated text: "A wonder was seen in
+heaven--a woman." Dr. Mather Byles, of Boston, being disappointed through
+the non-appearance of a minister named Prince, who had been expected to
+deliver the sermon, preached himself upon the text, "Put not your trust
+in princes." But Dr. Byles was one who would always "court a grin when he
+should win a soul."
+
+One minister felt it necessary to reprove a money-making parishioner who
+had stored and was holding in reserve (with the hope of higher prices) a
+large quantity of corn which was sadly needed for consumption in the town.
+The parson preached from this appropriate text, Proverbs xi. 26. "He that
+withholdeth his corn, the people shall curse him; but blessings shall be
+upon the head of him that selleth it." As the minister grew warmer in his
+explanation and application of the text, the money-seeking corn-storer
+defiantly and unregenerately sat up stiff and unmoved, until at last the
+preacher, provoked out of prudence and patience, roared out, "Colonel
+Ingraham, Colonel Ingraham! you know I mean you; why don't you hang down
+your head?" In a similar case another stern parson employed the text,
+"Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone;" though the personalities
+of the sermon made unnecessary the open reference in the text to the
+offender's name.
+
+The ministers were such autocrats in the Puritan community that they never
+hesitated to show their authority in any manner in the pulpit. Judge Sewall
+records with much bitterness a libel which his pastor, Mr. Pemberton,
+launched at him in the meeting through the medium of the psalm which
+he gave out to be sung. They had differed over the adjustment of some
+church-matter and on the following Sunday the clergyman assigned to be sung
+the libellous and significant psalm. Such lines as these must have been
+hard indeed for Judge Sewall to endure:--
+
+  "Speak, oh ye Judges of the Earth
+    if just your Sentence be
+  Or must not Innocence appeal
+    to Heav'n from your decree
+
+  "Your Wicked Hearts and Judgments are
+    alike by Malice sway'd
+  Your griping Hands by mighty Bribes
+    to violence betrayed.
+
+  "No Serpent of parch'd Afric's breed
+    doth Ranker poison bear
+  The drowsy Adder will as soon
+    unlock his Sullen Ear
+
+  "Unmov'd by good Advice, and dead
+    As Adders they remain
+  From whom the skilful Charmer's voice
+    can no attention gain."
+
+Small wonder that Judge Sewall writhed under the infliction of these lines
+as they were doubly thrust upon him by the deacon's "lining" and the
+singing of the congregation; and the words, "The drowsy Adder will as soon
+unlock his Sullen Ear" seemed to particularly irritate him; doubtless he
+felt sure that no one could doubt his integrity, but feared that some might
+think him stupid and obstinate.
+
+Another arbitrary clergyman, having had an altercation with some unruly
+singers in the choir, gave out with much vehemence on the following Sunday
+the hymn beginning,--
+
+  "And are you wretches yet alive
+  And do you yet rebel?"
+
+with a very significant glower towards the singers' gallery. In a similar
+situation another minister gave out to the rebellious choir the hymn
+commencing,--
+
+  "Let those refuse to sing
+  Who never knew our God."
+
+A visiting clergyman, preaching in a small and shabby church built in a
+parish of barren and stony farm-land, very spitefully and sneeringly read
+out to be sung the hymn of Watts' beginning,--
+
+  "Lord, what a wretched land is this,
+  That yields us no supplies!"
+
+But his malicious intent was frustrated and the tables were adroitly turned
+by the quick-witted choir-master, who bawled out in a loud voice as if
+in answer, "Northfield,"--the name of the minister's own home and
+parish,--while he was really giving out to the choir, as was his wont, the
+name of the tune to which the hymn was to be sung.
+
+Nor did the parsons hesitate to be personal even in their prayers. Rev. Mr.
+Moody, who was ordained pastor at York in the year 1700, reproved in an
+extraordinary manner a young man who had called attention to some fine new
+clothing which he wore by coming in during prayer time and thus attracting
+the notice of the congregation. Mr. Moody, in an elevated tone of voice,
+at once exclaimed, "And O Lord! we pray Thee, cure Ned Ingraham of that
+ungodly strut," etc. Another time he prayed for a young lady in the
+congregation and ended his invocation thus, "She asked me not to pray for
+her in public, but I told her I would, and so I have, Amen."
+
+Rev. Mr. Miles, while praying for rain, is said to have used this
+extraordinary phraseology: "O Lord, Thou knowest we do not want Thee to
+send us a rain which shall pour down in fury and swell our streams and
+carry away our hay-cocks, fences, and bridges; but, Lord, we want it to
+come drizzle-drozzle, drizzle-drozzle, for about a week, Amen."
+
+They did not think it necessary always to give their congregations novel
+thoughts and ideas nor fresh sermons. One minister, after being newly
+ordained in his parish, preached the same sermon three Sundays in
+succession; and a deacon was sent to him mildly to suggest a change. "Why,
+no," he answered, "I can see no evidence yet that this one has produced any
+effect."
+
+Rev. Mr. Daggett, of Yale College, had an entire system of sermons which
+took him four years to preach throughout. And for three successive years he
+delivered once a year a sermon on the text, "Is Thy servant a dog that he
+should do this thing?" And the fourth year he varied it with, "And the dog
+did it."
+
+Dr. Coggswell, of Canterbury, Connecticut, had a sermon which he thrust
+upon his people every spring for many years as being suitable to the time
+when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. In it he soberly
+reproved the young church attendants for gazing so much at each other in
+the meeting. This annual anti-amatory advice never failed to raise a smile
+on the face of each father and son in the congregation as he listened to
+the familiar and oft-repeated words.
+
+The Puritan ministers gave advice in their sermons upon most personal and
+worldly matters. Roger Williams instructed the women of his parish to wear
+veils when they appeared in public; but John Cotton preached to them
+one Sunday morning and proved to them that veils were a sign of undue
+subjection to their husbands; and in the afternoon the fair Puritans
+appeared with bare faces and showed that women had even at that early day
+"rights."
+
+How the varieties of headgear did torment the parsons! They denounced
+from many a pulpit the wearing of wigs. Mr. Noyes preached long and often
+against the fashion. Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the
+Indians, found time even in the midst of his arduous and incessant duties
+to deliver many a blast against "prolix locks,"--"with boiling zeal," as
+Cotton Mather said,--and he labelled them a "luxurious feminine protexity;"
+but lamented late in life that "the lust for wigs is become insuperable."
+He thought the horrors in King Philip's War were a direct punishment from
+God for wig-wearing. Increase Mather preached warmly against wigs, saying
+that "such Apparel is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture," and that "Monstrous Perriwigs such as some of our church
+members indulge in make them resemble ye locusts that came out of ye
+Bottomless Pit." To learn how these "Horrid Bushes of Vanity" were
+despised by a real live Puritan wig-hater one needs only to read the
+many disparaging, regretful, and bitter references to wig-wearing and
+wig-wearers in Judge Sewall's diary, which reached a culmination when a
+widow whom he was courting suggested most warmly that he ought to wear,
+what his very soul abominated, a periwig.
+
+Eliot had also a strong aversion to tobacco, and denounced its use in
+severe terms; but his opposition in this case was as ineffectual as it was
+against wigs. Allen said, "In contempt of all his admonitions the head
+would be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and the pipe would send up
+volumes of smoke."
+
+Rev. Mr. Rogers preached against long natural hair,--the "disguisement of
+long ruffianly hair,"--as did also President Chauncey of Harvard College;
+while Mr. Wigglesworth's sermon on the subject has often been reprinted,
+and is full of logical arguments. This offence was named on the list of
+existing evils which was made by the General Court: that "the men wore long
+hair like women's hair," while the women were complained of for "cutting
+and curling and laying out of hair, especially among the younger sort."
+Still, the Puritan magistrates, omnipotent as they were, did not dare to
+force the be-curled citizens to cut their long love-locks, though they
+instructed and bribed them to do so. A Salem man was, in 1687, fined ten
+shillings for a misdemeanor, but "in case he shall cutt off his long har of
+his head into a sevill (civil?) frame in the mean time shall have abated
+five shillings of his fine." John Eliot hated long natural hair as well
+as false hair. Cotton Mather said of him, in a very unpleasant figure of
+speech, "The hair of them that professed religion grew too long for him to
+swallow." Other fashions and habits brought forth denunciations from the
+pulpit,--hooped petticoats, gold-laced coats (unless worn by gentlemen),
+pointed shoes, chaise-owning, health-drinking, tavern-visiting, gossiping,
+meddling, tale-bearing, and lying.
+
+Political and business and even medical and sanitary subjects were popular
+in the early New England pulpit. Mr. Peters preached many a long sermon
+to urge the formation of a stock company for fishing, and canvassed all
+through the commonwealth for the same purpose. Cotton Mather said plainly
+that ministers ought to instruct themselves and their congregations in
+politics; and in Connecticut it was ordered by law that each minister
+should give sound and orthodox advice to his congregation at the time of
+civil elections.
+
+Every natural phenomenon, every unusual event called forth a sermon, and
+the minister could find even in the common events of every-day life plain
+manifestations of Divine wrath and judgment. He preached with solemn
+delight upon comets, and earthquakes, and northern lights, and great storms
+and droughts, on deaths and diseases, and wonders and scandals (for there
+were scandals even in puritanical New England), on wars both at home and
+abroad, on shipwrecks, on safe voyages, on distinguished visitors, on noted
+criminals and crimes,--in fact, upon every subject that was of spiritual or
+temporal interest to his congregation or himself. And his people looked
+for his religious comment upon passing events just as now-a-days we read
+articles upon like subjects in the newspaper. Thus was the Puritan minister
+not only a preacher, but a teacher, adviser, and friend, and a pretty
+plain-spoken one too.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+The Early Congregations.
+
+
+
+On Sunday morning in New England in the olden time, the country
+church-members whose homes were near the meeting-house walked reverently
+and slowly across the green meadows or the snowy fields to meeting.
+Townspeople, at the sound of the bell or drum or horn, walked decorously
+and soberly along the irregular streets to the house of God. Farmers who
+lived at a greater distance were up betimes to leave their homes and ride
+across the fields and through the narrow bridle-paths, which were then the
+universal and almost the only country roads. These staid Puritan planters
+were mounted on sturdy farmhorses, and a pillion was strapped on behind
+each saddle, and on it was seated wife, daughter, or perhaps a young
+child--I should like to have seen the church-going dames perched up proudly
+in all their Sunday finery, masked in black velvet, a sober Puritan
+travesty of a gay carnival fashion. Riding-habits were hardly known until
+a century ago, and even after their introduction were never worn
+a-pillion-riding, so the Puritan women rode in their best attire.
+Sometimes, in unusually muddy or dusty weather, a very daintily dressed
+"nugiperous" dame would don a linen "weather skirt" to protect her fine
+silken petticoats.
+
+The wealthier Puritans were mounted on fine pacing horses, "once so highly
+prized, now so odious deemed;" for trotting horses were not in much demand
+or repute in America until after the Revolutionary War. There were, until
+that date, professional horse-trainers, whose duties were to teach horses
+to pace; though by far the best saddle-horses were the natural-gaited
+"Narragansett Pacers," the first distinctively American race of horses.
+These remarkably easy-paced animals were in such demand in the West Indies
+for the use of the wives and daughters of the wealthy sugar-planters, and
+in Philadelphia and New York for rich Dutch and Quaker colonists, that
+comparatively few of them were allowed to remain in New England, and they
+were, indeed too high-priced for poor New England colonists. The natural
+and singular pace of these Narragansett horses, which did not incline the
+rider from side to side, nor jolt him up and down, and their remarkable
+sureness of foot and their great endurance, rendered them of much value
+in those days of travel in the saddle. They were also phenomenally
+broad-backed,--shaped by nature for saddle and pillion.
+
+When trotting-horses became fashionable, the trainers placed logs of wood
+at regular intervals across the road, and by exercising the animals
+over this obstructed path forced them to raise their feet at the proper
+intervals, and thus learn to trot.
+
+Long distances did many of the pre-revolutionary farmers of New England
+have to ride to reach their churches, and long indeed must have been the
+time occupied in these Sunday trips, for a horse was too well-burdened with
+saddle and pillion and two riders to travel fast. The worshippers must
+often have started at daybreak. When we see now an ancient pillion--a relic
+of olden times--brought out in jest or curiosity, and strapped behind a
+saddle on a horse's back, and when we see the poor steed mounted by two
+riders, it seems impossible for the over-burdened animal to endure a long
+journey, and certainly impossible for him to make a rapid one.
+
+Horse-flesh, and human endurance also, was economized in early days by what
+was called the "ride and tie" system. A man and his wife would mount saddle
+and pillion, ride a couple of miles, dismount, tie the steed, and walk
+on. A second couple, who had walked the first two miles, soon mounted the
+rested horse, rode on past the riders for two or three miles, dismounted,
+and tied the animal again. In that way four persons could ride very
+comfortably and sociably half-way to meeting, though they must have had
+to make an early start to allow for the slow gait and long halts. At the
+church the disburdened horses were tied during the long services to palings
+and to trees near the meeting-house (except the favored animals that found
+shelter in the noon-houses) and the scene must have resembled the outskirts
+of a gypsy camp or an English horse-fair. Such obedience did the Puritans
+pay to the letter of the law that when the Newbury people were forbidden,
+in tying their horses outside the church paling, to leave them near enough
+to the footpath to be in the way of church pedestrians, it did not prevent
+the stupid or obstinate Newburyites from painstakingly bringing their
+steeds within the gates and tying them to the gate-posts where they were
+much more seriously and annoyingly in the way.
+
+It is usual to describe and to think of the Puritan congregations as like
+assemblies of Quakers, solemn, staid, and uniform and dull of dress; but
+I can discover in historical records nothing to indicate simplicity,
+soberness, or even uniformity of apparel, except the uniformity of fashion,
+which was powerful then as now. The forbidding rules and regulations
+relating to the varied and elaborate forms of women's dress--and of men's
+attire as well--would never have been issued unless such prohibited apparel
+had been common and universally longed-for, and unless much diversity and
+elegance of dress had abounded.
+
+Indeed the daughters of the Pilgrims were true "daughters of Zion, walking
+with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, and mincing as they go." Save
+for the "nose jewels," the complaining and exhaustive list of the prophet
+Isaiah might serve as well for New England as for Judah and Jerusalem:
+"their cauls and their round tires like moons; the chains and the bracelets
+and the mufflers; the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the head
+bands, and the tablets, and the ear-rings; the rings and nose jewels; the
+changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the
+crisping pins; the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods and the
+veils." Nor has the day yet come to pass in the nineteenth century when the
+bravery of the daughters has been taken away.
+
+Pleasant it is to think of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and
+goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have
+been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote,"
+a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with
+"Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and
+a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or
+ciffer" (New England French for coiffure) with "long wings" at the side,
+and a silk or tiffany hood on her drooping head,--Priscilla in this attire
+were pretty indeed.
+
+Nor did sober John Alden and doughty Miles Standish lack for variety in
+their dress; besides their soldier's garb, their sentinel's armor, they
+had a vast variety of other attire to choose from; they could select their
+head-wear from "redd knitt capps" or "monmouth capps" or "black hats lyned
+at the browes with leather." They could have a "sute" of "dublett and hose
+of leather lyned with oyled-skin-leather," fastened with hooks and eyes
+instead of buttons; or one of "hampshire kerseys lyned." They could have
+"mandillions" (whatever they may have been) "lyned with cotton," and
+"wast-coats of greene cotton bound about with red tape," and breeches of
+oiled leather and leathern drawers (I do not know whether these leathern
+drawers were under-garments or leathern draw-strings at the knees of the
+breeches). They could wear "gloves of sheeps or calfs leather" or of kid,
+and fine gold belts, and "points" at the knees. In fact, the invoices of
+goods to the earliest settlers show that they had a choice of various
+materials for garments, including "gilford and gedleyman, holland and
+lockerum and buckerum, fustian, canvass, linsey-woolsey, red ppetuna,
+cursey, cambrick, calico-stuff, loom-work, Dutch serges, and English
+jeans"--enough for diversity, surely. Sad-colored mantles the goodmen wore,
+but their doublets were scarlet, and with their green waistcoats and red
+caps, surely the Puritan men were sufficiently gayly dressed to suit any
+fancy save that of a cavalier. Later in the history of the colony, when
+hooped petticoats and laced hoods and mantles, and long, embroidered gloves
+fastened with horsehair "glove tightens," and when velvet coats and satin
+breeches and embroidered waistcoats, gold lace, sparkling buckles, and
+cocked hats with full bottomed wigs were worn, the gray, sombre old
+meeting-house blossomed like a tropical forest, and vied with the worldly
+Church of England in gay-garbed church attendants.
+
+Stern and severe of face were many of the members of these early New
+England congregations, else they had not been true Puritans in heart, and
+above all, they had not been Pilgrims. Long and thin of feature were they,
+rarely smiling, yet not devoid of humor. Some handsome countenances
+were seen,--austere, bigoted Cotton Mather being, strangely enough, the
+handsomest and most worldly looking of them all. What those brave, stern
+men and women were, as well as what they looked, is known to us all, and
+cannot be dwelt upon here, any more than can here be shown and explained
+the details of their religious faith and creed. Patient, frugal,
+God-fearing, and industrious, cruel and intolerant sometimes, but never
+cowardly, sternly obeying the word of God in the spirit and the letter, but
+erring sometimes in the interpretation thereof,--surely they had no traits
+to shame us, to keep us from thrilling with pride at the drop of their
+blood which runs in our backsliding veins. Nothing can more plainly show
+their distinguishing characteristics, nothing is so fully typical of the
+motive, the spirit of their lives, as their reverent observance of the
+Lord's day.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sabbath in Puritan New England, by
+Alice Morse Earle
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+Project Gutenberg's Sabbath in Puritan New England, by Alice Morse Earle
+
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+Title: Sabbath in Puritan New England
+
+Author: Alice Morse Earle
+
+Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8659]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on July 30, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar and
+spelling from that old time, the word "their" is spelled as "thier" 17 times.
+It has been left there as "thier".
+
+
+
+
+THE SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND
+
+by
+
+Alice Morse Earle
+
+Seventh Edition
+
+
+
+
+To the Memory of my Mother.
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+    I.  The New England Meeting-House
+   II.  The Church Militant
+  III.  By Drum and Horn and Shell
+   IV.  The Old-Fashioned Pews
+    V.  Seating the Meeting
+   VI.  The Tithingman and the Sleepers
+  VII.  The Length of the Service
+ VIII.  The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House
+   IX.  The Noon-House
+    X.  The Deacon's Office
+   XI.  The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims
+  XII.  The Bay Psalm-Book
+ XIII.  Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms
+  XIV.  Other Old Psalm-Books
+   XV.  The Church Music
+  XVI.  The Interruptions of the Services
+ XVII.  The Observance of the Day
+XVIII.  The Authority of the Church and the Ministers
+  XIX.  The Ordination of the Minister
+   XX.  The Ministers
+  XXI.  The Ministers' Pay
+ XXII.  The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit
+XXIII.  The Early Congregations
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Sabbath in Puritan New England.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The New England Meeting-House.
+
+
+
+When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord's
+Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong
+and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every
+Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they
+worshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.
+
+As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,
+the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein for
+the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton
+Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply
+such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the
+Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as
+bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the
+Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.
+
+The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these
+houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that
+theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England
+to create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slow
+or indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 that
+a meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if the
+people failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,
+and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of members
+necessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in the
+Platform of Church Discipline: "A church ought not to be of greater number
+than can ordinarilie meet convenientlie in one place, nor ordinarilie
+fewer than may convenientlie carry on church-work." Each church was quite
+independent in its work and government, and had absolute power to admit,
+expel, control, and censure its members.
+
+These first meeting-houses were simple buildings enough,--square log-houses
+with clay-filled chinks, surmounted by steep roofs thatched with long
+straw or grass, and often with only the beaten earth for a floor. It was
+considered a great advance and a matter of proper pride when the settlers
+had the meeting-house "lathed on the inside, and so daubed and whitened
+over workmanlike." The dimensions of many of these first essays at church
+architecture are known to us, and lowly little structures they were. One,
+indeed, is preserved for us under cover at Salem. The first meeting-house
+in Dedham was thirty-six feet long, twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high
+"in the stud;" the one in Medford was smaller still; and the Haverhill
+edifice was only twenty-six feet long and twenty wide, yet "none other than
+the house of God."
+
+As the colonists grew in wealth and numbers, they desired and built better
+sanctuaries, "good roomthy meeting-houses" they were called by Judge
+Sewall, the most valued and most interesting journal-keeper of the times.
+The rude early buildings were then converted into granaries or storehouses,
+or, as was the Pentucket meeting-house, into a "house of shelter or a house
+to sett horses in." As these meeting-houses had not been consecrated, and
+as they were town-halls, forts, or court-houses as well as meeting-houses,
+the humbler uses to which they were finally put were not regarded as
+profanations of holy places.
+
+The second form or type of American church architecture was a square wooden
+building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which
+was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or
+turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which
+was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this
+second style of architecture. These square meeting-houses, so much alike,
+soon abounded in New England; for a new church, in its contract for
+building, would often specify that the structure should be "like in every
+detaile to the Lynn meeting-house," or like the Hadley, Milford, Boston,
+Danvers, or New Haven meeting-house. This form of edifice was the prototype
+of the fine great First Church of Boston, a large square brick building,
+with three rows of windows and two galleries, which stood from the year
+1713 to 1808, and of which many pictures exist.
+
+The third form of the Puritan meeting-house, of which the Old South Church
+of Boston is a typical model, has too many representatives throughout New
+England to need any description, as have also the succeeding forms of New
+England church architecture.
+
+The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow
+lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the
+colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile
+of the meeting-house. Soon, however, the houses became too closely crowded
+for the most convenient uses of a farming community; pasturage for the
+cattle had to be obtained at too great a distance from the farmhouse;
+firewood had to be brought from too distant woods; nearness to water
+also had to be considered. Thus the law became a dead letter, and each
+new-coming settler built on outlying and remote land, since the Indians
+were no longer so deeply to be dreaded. Then the meeting-houses, having
+usually to accommodate a whole township of scattered farms, were placed on
+remote and often highly elevated locations; sometimes at the very top of a
+long, steep hill,--so long and so steep in some cases, especially in one
+Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down on horseback
+from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading
+their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The
+second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly
+pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England
+Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his
+dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he
+leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and
+surrounding): "This is very like the way to heaven; 'tis uphill. The Lord
+by His grace fetch us up."
+
+The location on a hilltop was chosen and favored for various reasons. The
+meeting-house was at first a watch-house, from which to keep vigilant
+lookout for any possible approach of hostile or sneaking Indians; it was
+also a landmark, whose high bell-turret, or steeple, though pointing to
+heaven, was likewise a guide on earth, for, thus stationed on a high
+elevation, it could be seen for miles around by travellers journeying
+through the woods, or in the narrow, tree-obscured bridle-paths which were
+then almost the only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for
+sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan
+ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb
+uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of
+having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of
+envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously
+remote and painfully inaccessible locations chosen for the site of many
+fine, roomy churches must astonish any observing traveller on the byroads
+of New England. Too often, alas! these churches are deserted, falling down,
+unopened from year to year, destitute alike of minister and congregation.
+Sometimes, too, on high hilltops, or on lonesome roads leading through a
+tall second growth of woods, deserted and neglected old graveyards--the
+most lonely and forlorn of all sad places--by their broken and fallen
+headstones, which surround a half-filled-in and uncovered cellar, show
+that once a meeting-house for New England Christians had stood there. Tall
+grass, and a tangle of blackberry brambles cover the forgotten graves,
+and perhaps a spire of orange tiger-lilies, a shrub of southernwood or of
+winter-killed and dying box, may struggle feebly for life under the shadow
+of the "plumed ranks of tall wild cherry," and prove that once these lonely
+graves were cared for and loved for the sake of those who lie buried in
+this now waste spot. No traces remain of the old meeting-house save the
+cellar and the narrow stone steps, sadly leading nowhere, which once were
+pressed by the feet of the children of the Pilgrims, but now are trodden
+only by the curious and infrequent passer-by, or the epitaph-seeking
+antiquary.
+
+It is difficult often to understand the details in the descriptions of
+these early meeting-houses, the colonial spelling is so widely varied,
+and so cleverly ingenious. Uniformity of spelling is a strictly modern
+accomplishment, a hampering innovation. "A square roofe without Dormans,
+with two Lucoms on each side," means, I think, without dormer windows, and
+with luthern windows. Another church paid a bill for the meeting-house roof
+and the "Suppolidge." They had "turritts" and "turetts" and "turits" and
+"turyts" and "feriats" and "tyrryts" and "toryttes" and "turiotts" and
+"chyrits," which were one and the same thing; and one church had orders
+for "juyces and rayles and nayles and bymes and tymber and gaybels and a
+pulpyt, and three payr of stayrs," in its meeting-house,--a liberal supply
+of the now fashionable _y_'s. We read of "pinakles" and "pyks" and
+"shuthers" and "scaffills" and "bimes" and "lynters" and "bathyns" and
+"chymbers" and "bellfers;" and often in one entry the same word will be
+spelt in three or four different ways. Here is a portion of a contract in
+the records of the Roxbury church: "Sayd John is to fence in the Buring
+Plas with a Fesy ston wall, sefighiattly don for Strenk and workmanship
+as also to mark a Doball gatt 6 or 8 fote wid and to hing it."
+_Sefighiattly_ is "sufficiently;" but who can translate "Fesy"? can it
+mean "facy" or faced smoothly?
+
+The church-raising was always a great event in the town. Each citizen was
+forced by law to take part in or contribute to "raring the Meeting hows."
+In early days nails were scarce,--so scarce that unprincipled persons set
+fire to any buildings which chanced to be temporarily empty, for the sake
+of obtaining the nails from the ruins; so each male inhabitant supplied
+to the new church a certain "amount of nayles." Not only were logs, and
+lumber, and the use of horses' and men's labor given, but a contribution
+was also levied for the inevitable barrel of rum and its unintoxicating
+accompaniments. "Rhum and Cacks" are frequent entries in the account books
+of early churches. No wonder that accidents were frequent, and that men
+fell from the scaffolding and were killed, as at the raising of the
+Dunstable meeting-house. When the Medford people built their second
+meeting-house, they provided for the workmen and bystanders, five barrels
+of rum, one barrel of good brown sugar, a box of fine lemons, and two
+loaves of sugar. As a natural consequence, two thirds of the frame fell,
+and many were injured. In Northampton, in 1738, ten gallons of rum were
+bought for L8 "to raise the meeting-house"--and the village doctor got "L3
+for setting his bone Jonathan Strong, and L3 10s. for setting Ebenezer
+Burt's thy" which had somehow through the rum or the raising, both gotten
+broken. Sometimes, as in Pittsfield in 1671, the sum of four shillings was
+raised on every acre of land in the town, and three shillings a day were
+paid to every man who came early to work, while one shilling a day was
+apportioned to each worker for his rum and sugar. At last no liquor was
+allowed to the workmen until after the day's work was over, and thus fatal
+accidents were prevented.
+
+The earliest meeting-houses had oiled paper in the windows to admit the
+light. A Pilgrim colonist wrote to an English friend about to emigrate,
+"Bring oiled paper for your windows." Higginson, however, writing in 1629,
+asks for "glasse for windowes." When glass was used it was not set in the
+windows as now. We find frequent entries of "glasse and nayles for it," and
+in Newbury, in 1665, the church ordered that the "Glasse in the windows
+be ... look't to if any should happen to be loosed with winde to be nailed
+close again." The glass was in lozenge-shaped panes, set in lead in the
+form of two long narrow sashes opening in the middle from top to bottom,
+and it was many years before oblong or square panes came into common use.
+
+These early churches were destitute of shade, for the trees in the
+immediate vicinity were always cut down on account of dread of the fierce
+fires which swept often through the forests and overwhelmed and destroyed
+the towns. The heat and blazing light in summer were as hard to bear in
+these unscreened meeting-houses as was the cold in winter.
+
+  "Old house of Puritanic wood,
+  Through whose unpainted windows streamed,
+  On seats as primitive and rude
+  As Jacob's pillow when he dreamed,
+  The white and undiluted day."
+
+We have all heard the theory advanced that it is impossible there should be
+any true religious feeling, any sense of sanctity, in a garish and bright
+light,--"the white and undiluted day,"--but I think no one can doubt that
+to the Puritans these seething, glaring, pine-smelling hothouses were truly
+God's dwelling-place, though there was no "dim, religious light" within.
+
+Curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and the sunlight streamed in with
+unobstructed and unbroken rays. Heavy shutters for protection were often
+used, but to close them at time of service would have been to plunge
+the church into utter darkness. Permission was sometimes given, as in
+Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of
+the sun there,"--a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As
+years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches
+became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and
+fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which
+was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked
+live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed
+abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great
+hemlock-tree back of the pulpit window." Another minister, Dr. Storrs,
+having struggled to read his sermon in an ill-lighted, gloomy church, said
+he would never speak in that building again while it was so overshadowed
+with trees. A few years later he was invited to preach to the same
+congregation; but when he approached the church, and saw the great
+umbrageous tree still standing, he rode away, and left the people
+sermonless in their darkness. The chill of these sunless, unheated
+buildings in winter can well be imagined.
+
+Strange and grotesque decorations did the outside of the earliest
+meeting-houses bear,--grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and
+by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped
+from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his
+destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear,
+which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough.
+The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September,
+twenty bears were killed within two miles of Boston. This bear story
+requires unlimited faith in Puritan probity, and confidence in Puritan
+records to credit it, but believe it, ye who can, as I do! In Salem and in
+Ipswich, in 1640, any man who brought a living wolf to the meeting-house
+was paid fifteen shillings by the town; if the wolf were dead, ten
+shillings. In 1664, if the wolf-killer wished to obtain the reward, he was
+ordered to bring the wolf's head and "nayle it to the meeting-house and
+give notis thereof." In Hampton, the inhabitants were ordered to "nayle the
+same to a little red oake tree at northeast end of the meeting-house." One
+man in Newbury, in 1665, killed seven wolves, and was paid the reward
+for so doing. This was a great number, for the wary wolf was not easily
+destroyed either by musket or wolf-hook. In 1723 wolves were so abundant
+in Ipswich that parents would not suffer their children to go to and from
+church and school without the attendance of some grown person. As late as
+1746 wolves made sad havoc in Woodbury, Connecticut; and a reward of five
+dollars for each wolf's head was offered by law in that township in 1853.
+
+In 1718 the last public reward was paid in Salem for a wolf's head, but
+so late as the year 1779 the howls of wolves were heard every night in
+Newbury, though trophies of shrivelled wolves' heads no longer graced the
+walls of the meeting-house.
+
+All kinds of notices and orders and regulations and "bills" were posted on
+the meeting-house, often on the door, where they would greet the eye of
+all who entered: prohibitions from selling guns and powder to the Indians,
+notices of town meetings, intentions of marriage, copies of the laws
+against Sabbath-breaking, messages from the Quakers, warnings of "vandoos"
+and sales, lists of the town officers, and sometimes scandalous and
+insulting libels, and libels in verse, which is worse, for our forefathers
+dearly loved to rhyme on all occasions. On the meeting-house green stood
+those Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, whipping-post,
+pillory, and cage; and on lecture days the stocks and pillory were
+often occupied by wicked or careless colonists, or those everlasting
+pillory-replenishers, the Quakers. It is one of the unintentionally comic
+features of absurd colonial laws and punishments in which the early legal
+records so delightfully abound, that the first man who was sentenced to and
+occupied the stocks in Boston was the carpenter who made them. He was thus
+fitly punished for his extortionate charge to the town for the lumber
+he used in their manufacture. This was rather better than "making the
+punishment fit the crime," since the Boston magistrates managed to force
+the criminal to furnish his own punishment. In Shrewsbury, also, the
+unhappy man who first tested the wearisome capacity and endured the public
+mortication of the town's stocks was the man who made them. He "builded
+better than he knew." Pillories were used as a means of punishment until
+a comparatively recent date,--in Salem until the year 1801, and in Boston
+till 1803.
+
+Great horse-blocks, rows of stepping-stones, or hewn logs further graced
+the meeting-house green; and occasionally one fine horse-block, such as the
+Concord women proudly erected, and paid for by a contribution of a pound of
+butter from each house-wife.
+
+The meeting-house not only was employed for the worship of God and for town
+meetings, but it was a storehouse as well. Until after the Revolutionary
+War it was universally used as a powder magazine; and indeed, as no fire in
+stove or fireplace was ever allowed within, it was a safe enough place for
+the explosive material. In Hanover, the powder room was in the steeple,
+while in Quincy the "powder-closite" was in the beams of the roof. Whenever
+there chanced to be a thunderstorm during the time of public worship, the
+people of Beverly ran out under the trees, and in other towns they left
+the meeting-house if the storm seemed severe or near; still they built no
+powder houses. Grain, too, was stored in the loft of the meeting-house for
+safety; hatches were built, and often the corn paid to the minister was
+placed there. "Leantos," or "linters," were sometimes built by the side of
+the building for use for storage. In Springfield, Mr. Pyncheon was allowed
+to place his corn in the roof chamber of the meeting-house; but as the
+people were afraid that the great weight might burst the floor, he was
+forbidden to store more than four hundred bushels at a time, unless he
+"underpropped the floor."
+
+In one church in the Connecticut valley, in a township where it was
+forbidden that tobacco be smoked upon the public streets, the church
+loft was used to dry and store the freshly cut tobacco-leaves which the
+inhabitants sold to the "ungodly Dutch." Thus did greed for gain lead even
+blue Connecticut Christians to profane the house of God.
+
+The early meeting-houses in country parishes were seldom painted, such
+outward show being thought vain and extravagant. In the middle of the
+eighteenth century paint became cheaper and more plentiful, and a gay
+rivalry in church-decoration sprang up. One meeting-house had to be as fine
+as its neighbor. Votes were taken, "rates were levied," gifts were asked
+in every town to buy "colour" for the meeting-house. For instance, the new
+meeting-house in Pomfret, Connecticut, was painted bright yellow; it proved
+a veritable golden apple of discord throughout the county. Windham town
+quickly voted that its meeting-house be "coloured something like the
+Pomfret meeting-house." Killingly soon ordered that the "cullering of the
+body of our meeting-house should be like the Pomfret meeting-house, and the
+Roff shal be cullered Read." Brooklyn church then, in 1762, ordered that
+the outside of its meeting-house be "culered" in the approved fashion.
+The body of the house was painted a bright orange; the doors and "bottom
+boards" a warm chocolate color; the "window-jets," corner-boards, and
+weather-boards white. What a bright nosegay of color! As a crowning glory
+Brooklyn people put up an "Eleclarick Rod" on the gorgeous edifice, and
+proudly boasted that--Brooklyn meeting-house was the "newest biggest and
+yallowest" in the county. One old writer, however, spoke scornfully of the
+spirit of envious emulation, extravagance, and bad taste that spread and
+prevailed from the example of the foolish and useless "colouring" of the
+Pomfret meeting-house.
+
+Within the meeting-house all was simple enough: raftered walls, sanded
+floors, rows of benches, a few pews, and the pulpit, or the "scaffold,"
+as John Cotton called it. The bare rafters were often profusely hung with
+dusty spiders' webs, and were the home also of countless swallows, that
+flew in and out of the open bell-turret. Sometimes, too, mischievous
+squirrels, attracted by the corn in the meeting-house loft, made their
+homes in the sanctuary; and they were so prolific and so omnivorous that
+the Bible and the pulpit cushions were not safe from their nibbling
+attacks. On every Sunday afternoon the Word of God and its sustaining
+cushion had to be removed to the safe shelter of a neighboring farmhouse or
+tavern, to prevent total annihilation by these Puritanical, Bible-loving
+squirrels.
+
+The pulpits were often pretentious, even in the plain and undecorated
+meeting-houses, and were usually high desks, to which a narrow flight of
+stairs led. In the churches of the third stage of architecture, these
+stairs were often inclosed in a towering hexagonal mahogany structure,
+which was ornamented with pillars and panels. Into this the minister
+walked, closed the door behind him, and invisibly ascended the stairs;
+while the children counted the seconds from the time he closed the door
+until his head appeared through the trap-door at the top of the pulpit. The
+form known as a tub-pulpit was very popular in the larger churches. The
+pulpit of one old, unpainted church retained until the middle of this
+century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring
+eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the
+great, all-seeing eye of God.
+
+As the ceiling and rafters were so open and reverberating, it was generally
+thought imperative to hang above the pulpit a great sounding-board, which
+threatened the minister like a giant extinguisher, and was really as devoid
+of utility as it was curious in ornamentation, "reflecting most part an
+empty ineffectual sound." This great sound-killer was decorated with carved
+and painted rosettes, as in the Shrewsbury meeting-house; with carved ivy
+leaves, as in Farmington; with a carved bunch of grapes or pomegranates, as
+in the Leicester church; with letters indicating a date, as, "M. R. H." for
+March, in the Hadley church; with appropriate mottoes and texts, such as
+the words, "Holiness is the Lords," in the Windham church; with cords and
+tassels, with hanging fringes, with panels and balls; and thus formed a
+great ornament to the church, and a source of honest pride to the church
+members. The clumsy sounding-board was usually hung by a slight iron rod,
+which looked smaller still as it stretched up to the high, raftered roof,
+and always appeared to be entirely insufficient to sustain the great weight
+of the heavy machine. In Danvers, one of these useless though ornamental
+structures hung within eighteen inches of the preacher's nose, on a slender
+bar thirty feet in length; and every Sunday the children gazed with
+fascinated anticipation at the slight rod and the great hexagonal
+extinguisher, thinking and hoping that on this day the sounding-board would
+surely drop, and "put out" the minister. In fact, it was regarded by many
+a child, though this idea was hardly formulated in the little brain, as
+a visible means of possible punishment for any false doctrine that might
+issue from the mouth of the preacher.
+
+Another pastime and source of interest to the children in many old churches
+was the study of the knots and veins in the unpainted wood of which the
+pews and galleries were made. Age had developed and darkened and rendered
+visible all the natural irregularities in the wood, just as it had brought
+out and strengthened the dry-woody, close, unaired, penetrating scent which
+permeated the meeting-house and gave it the distinctive "church smell." The
+children, and perhaps a few of the grown people, found in these clusters
+of knots queer similitudes of faces, strange figures and constellations,
+which, though conned Sunday after Sunday until known by heart, still seemed
+ever to show in their irregular groupings a puzzling possibility of the
+discovery of new configurations and monstrosities.
+
+The dangling, dusty spiders' webs afforded, too, an interesting sight and
+diversion for the sermon-hearing, but not sermon-listening, young Puritans,
+who watched the cobwebs swaying, trembling, forming strange maps of
+imaginary rivers with their many tributaries, or outlines of intersecting
+roads and lanes. And if little Yet-Once, Hate-Evil, or Shearjashub chanced,
+by good fortune, to be seated near a window where a crafty spider and a
+foolish buzzing fly could be watched through the dreary exposition and
+attempted reconciliation of predestination and free will, that indeed were
+a happy way of passing the weary hours.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The Church Militant.
+
+
+
+For many years after the settlement of New England the Puritans, even in
+outwardly tranquil times, went armed to meeting; and to sanctify the Sunday
+gun-loading they were expressly forbidden to fire off their charges at
+any object on that day save an Indian or a wolf, their two "greatest
+inconveniencies." Trumbull, in his "Mac Fingal," Avrites thus in jest of
+this custom of Sunday arm-bearing:--
+
+  "So once, for fear of Indian beating,
+  Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting,--
+  Each man equipped on Sunday morn
+  With psalm-book, shot, and powder-horn,
+  And looked in form, as all must grant,
+  Like the ancient true church militant."
+
+In 1640 it was ordered in Massachusetts that in every township the
+attendants at church should carry a "competent number of peeces, fixed
+and compleat with powder and shot and swords every Lords-day to the
+meeting-house;" one armed man from each household was then thought
+advisable and necessary for public safety. In 1642 six men with muskets and
+powder and shot were thought sufficient for protection for each church. In
+Connecticut similar mandates were issued, and as the orders were neglected
+"by divers persones," a law was passed in 1643 that each offender should
+forfeit twelve pence for each offence. In 1644 a fourth part of the
+"trayned hand" was obliged to come armed each Sabbath, and the sentinels
+were ordered to keep their matches constantly lighted for use in their
+match-locks. They were also commanded to wear armor, which consisted of
+"coats basted with cotton-wool, and thus made defensive against Indian
+arrows." In 1650 so much dread and fear were felt of Sunday attacks from
+the red men that the Sabbath-Day guard was doubled in number. In 1692, the
+Connecticut Legislature ordered one fifth of the soldiers in each town to
+come armed to each meeting, and that nowhere should be present as a guard
+at time of public worship fewer than eight soldiers and a sergeant. In
+Hadley the guard was allowed annually from the public treasury a pound of
+lead and a pound of powder to each soldier.
+
+No details that could add to safety on the Sabbath were forgotten or
+overlooked by the New Haven church; bullets were made common currency at
+the value of a farthing, in order that they might be plentiful and in every
+one's possession; the colonists were enjoined to determine in advance what
+to do with the women and children in case of attack, "that they do not hang
+about them and hinder them;" the men were ordered to bring at least six
+charges of powder and shot to meeting; the farmers were forbidden to "leave
+more arms at home than men to use them;" the half-pikes were to be headed
+and the whole ones mended, and the swords "and all piercing weapons
+furbished up and dressed;" wood was to be placed in the watch-house; it was
+ordered that the "door of the meeting-house next the soldiers' seat be kept
+clear from women and children sitting there, that if there be occasion
+for the soldiers to go suddenly forth, they may have free passage." The
+soldiers sat on either side of the main door, a sentinel was stationed
+in the meeting-house turret, and armed watchers paced the streets; three
+cannon were mounted by the side of this "church militant," which must
+strongly have resembled a garrison.
+
+Military duty and military discipline and regard for the Sabbath, and for
+the House of God as well, did not always make the well-equipped occupants
+of these soldiers' seats in New Haven behave with the dignity and decorum
+befitting such guardians of the peace and protectors in war. Serious
+disorders and disturbances among the guard were reported at the General
+Court on June 16, 1662. One belligerent son of Mars, as he sat in the
+meeting-house, threw lumps of lime--perhaps from the plastered chinks in
+the log wall--at a fellow-warrior, who in turn, very naturally, kicked his
+tormentor with much agility and force. There must have ensued quite a free
+fight all around in the meeting-house, for "Mrs. Goodyear's boy had his
+head broke that day in meeting, on account of which a woman said she
+doubted not the wrath of God was upon us." And well might she think so, for
+divers other unseemly incidents which occurred in the meeting-house at the
+same time were narrated in Court, examined into, and punished.
+
+In spite of these events in the New Haven church (which were certainly
+exceptional), the seemingly incongruous union of church and army was
+suitable enough in a community that always began and ended the military
+exercises on "training day" with solemn prayer and psalm-singing; and that
+used the army and encouraged a true soldier-like spirit not chiefly as aids
+in war, but to help to conquer and destroy the adversaries of truth, and to
+"achieve greater matters by this little handful of men than the world is
+aware of."
+
+The Salem sentinels wore doubtless some of the good English armor owned by
+the town,--corselets to cover the body; gorgets to guard the throat;
+tasses to protect the thighs; all varnished black, and costing each suit
+"twenty-four shillings a peece." The sentry also wore a bandileer, a large
+"neat's leather" belt thrown over the right shoulder, and hanging down
+under the left arm. This bandileer sustained twelve boxes of cartridges,
+and a well-filled bullet-bag. Each man bore either a "bastard musket with
+a snaphance," a "long fowling-piece with musket bore," a "full musket," a
+"barrell with a match-cock," or perhaps (for they were purchased by the
+town) a leather gun (though these leather guns may have been cannon).
+Other weapons there were to choose from, mysterious in name, "sakers,
+minions, ffaulcons, rabinets, murthers (or murderers, as they were
+sometimes appropriately called) chambers, harque-busses, carbins,"--all
+these and many other death-dealing machines did our forefathers bring and
+import from their war-loving fatherland to assist them in establishing
+God's Word, and exterminating the Indians, but not always, alas! to aid
+them in converting those poor heathen.
+
+The armed Salem watcher, besides his firearms and ammunition, had attached
+to his wrist by a cord a gun-rest, or gun-fork, which he placed upon
+the ground when he wished to fire his musket, and upon which that
+constitutional kicker rested when touched off. He also carried a sword and
+sometimes a pike, and thus heavily burdened with multitudinous arms and
+cumbersome armor, could never have run after or from an Indian with much
+agility or celerity; though he could stand at the church-door with his
+leather gun,--an awe-inspiring figure,--and he could shoot with his
+"harquebuss," or "carbin," as we well know.
+
+These armed "sentinells" are always regarded as a most picturesque
+accompaniment of Puritan religious worship, and the Salem and Plymouth
+armed men were imposing, though clumsy. But the New Haven soldiers, with
+their bulky garments wadded and stuffed out with thick layers of cotton
+wool, must have been more safety-assuring and comforting than they were
+romantic or heroic; but perhaps they too wore painted tin armor, "corselets
+and gorgets and tasses."
+
+In Concord, New Hampshire, the men, who all came armed to meeting, stacked
+their muskets around a post in the middle of the church, while the honored
+pastor, who was a good shot and owned the best gun in the settlement,
+preached with his treasured weapon in the pulpit by his side, ready from
+his post of vantage to blaze away at any red man whom he saw sneaking
+without, or to lead, if necessary, his congregation to battle. The church
+in York, Maine, until the year 1746, felt it necessary to retain the custom
+of carrying arms to the meeting-house, so plentiful and so aggressive were
+Maine Indians.
+
+Not only in the time of Indian wars were armed men seen in the
+meeting-house, but on June 17, 1775, the Provincial Congress recommended
+that the men "within twenty miles of the sea-coast carry their arms and
+ammunition with them to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they
+meet for public worship." And on many a Sabbath and Lecture Day, during the
+years of war that followed, were proved the wisdom and foresight of that
+suggestion.
+
+The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant
+dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and
+left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe
+exit of the latter. This custom prevailed from habit until a late date in
+many churches in New England, all the men, after the benediction and the
+exit of the parson, walking out in advance of the women. So also the custom
+of the men always sitting at the "head" or door of the pew arose from the
+early necessity of their always being ready to seize their arms and rush
+unobstructed to fight. In some New England village churches to this day,
+the man who would move down from his end of the pew and let a woman sit
+at the door, even if it were a more desirable seat from which to see the
+clergyman, would be thought a poor sort of a creature.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+By Drum and Horn and Shell.
+
+
+
+At about nine o'clock on the Sabbath morning the Puritan colonists
+assembled for the first public service of the holy day; they were gathered
+together by various warning sounds. The Haverhill settlers listened for the
+ringing toot of Abraham Tyler's horn. The Montague and South Hadley people
+were notified that the hour of assembling had arrived by the loud blowing
+of a conch-shell. John Lane, a resident of the latter town, was engaged
+in 1750 to "blow the Cunk" on the Sabbath as "a sign for meeting." In
+Stockbridge a strong-lunged "praying" Indian blew the enormous shell, which
+was safely preserved until modern times, and which, when relieved from
+Sunday use, was for many years sounded as a week-day signal in the
+hay-field. Even a conch-shell was enough of an expense to the poor colonial
+churches. The Montague people in 1759 paid L1 10s. for their "conk," and
+also on the purchase year gave Joseph Root 20 shillings for blowing the new
+shell. In 1785 the Whately church voted that "we will not improve anybody
+to blow the conch," and so the church-attendants straggled to Whately
+meeting each at his own time and pleasure.
+
+In East Hadley the inhabitant who "blew the kunk" (as phonetic East
+Hadleyites spelt it) and swept out the meeting-house was paid annually the
+munificent sum of three dollars for his services. Conch-blowing was not
+so difficult and consequently not so highly-paid an accomplishment as
+drum-beating. A verse of a simple old-fashioned hymn tells thus of the
+gathering of the Puritan saints:--
+
+  "New England's Sabbath day
+  Is heaven-like still and pure,
+  When Israel walks the way
+  Up to the temple's door.
+  The time we tell
+  When there to come
+  By beat of drum
+  Or sounding shell."
+
+The drum, as highly suitable for such a military people, was often used as
+a signal for gathering for public worship, and was plainly the favorite
+means of notification. In 1678 Robert Stuard, of Norwalk, "ingages yt his
+son James shall beate the Drumb, on the Sabbath and other ocations," and in
+Norwalk the "drumb," the "drumne," the "drumme," and at last the drum was
+beaten until 1704, when the Church got a bell. And the "Drumber" was paid,
+and well paid too for his "Cervices," fourteen shillings a year of the
+town's money, and he was furnished a "new strong drumme;" and the town
+supplied to him also the flax for the drum-cords which he wore out in the
+service of God. Johnson, in his "Wonder Working Providence," tells of the
+Cambridge Church: "Hearing the sound of a drum he was directed toward it by
+a broade beaten way; following this rode he demands of the next man he met
+what the signall of the drum ment; the reply was made they had as yet no
+Bell to call men to meeting and therefore made use of the drum." In 1638
+a platform was made upon the top of the Windsor meeting-house "from the
+Lanthornc to the ridge to walk conveniently to sound a trumpet or a drum to
+give warning to meeting."
+
+Sometimes three guns were fired as a signal for "church-time." The signal
+for religious gathering, and the signal for battle were always markedly
+different, in order to avoid unnecessary fright.
+
+In 1647 Robert Basset was appointed in New Haven to drum "twice upon Lordes
+Dayes and Lecture Dayes upon the meeting house that soe those who live farr
+off may heare the more distinkly." Robert may have been a good drummer, but
+he proved to be a most reprehensible and disreputable citizen; in the local
+Court Records of August 1, 1648, we find a full report of an astounding
+occurrence in which he played an important part. Ten men, who Avere nearly
+all sea-faring men,--gay, rollicking sailors,--went to Bassctt's house and
+asked for strong drink. The magistrates had endeavored zealously, and in
+the main successfully, to prevent all intoxication in the community,
+and had forbidden the sale of liquor save in very small quantities. The
+church-drummer, however, wickedly unmindful of his honored calling,
+furnished to the sailors six quarts of strong liquor, with which they all,
+host and visitors, got prodigiously drunk and correspondingly noisy. The
+Court Record says: "The miscarriage continued till betwixt tenn and eleven
+of the clock, to the great provocation of God, disturbance of the peace,
+and to such a height of disorder that strangers wondered at it." In the
+midst of the carousal the master of the pinnace called the boatswain
+"Brother Loggerheads." This must have been a particularly insulting
+epithet, which no respectable boatswain could have been expected quietly to
+endure, for "at once the two men fell fast to wrestling, then to blowes and
+theirin grew to that feircnes that the master of the pinnace thought the
+boatswain would have puled out his eies; and they toumbled on the ground
+down the hill into the creeke and mire shamefully wallowing theirin."
+In his pain and terror the master called out, "Hoe, the Watch! Hoe, the
+Watch!" "The Watch made hast and for the present stopped the disorder, but
+in his rage and distemper the boatswaine fell a-swearinge Wounds and Hart
+as if he were not only angry with men but would provoke the high
+and blessed God." The master of the pinnace, being freed from his
+fellow-combatant, returned to Basset's house--perhaps to tell his tale
+of woe, perhaps to get more liquor--and was assailed by the drummer with
+amazing words of "anger and distemper used by drunken companions;" in
+short, he was "verey offensive, his noyes and oathes being hearde to
+the other side of the creeke." For aiding and abetting this noisy and
+disgraceful spree, and also for partaking in it, Drummer Basset was fined
+L5, which must have been more than his yearly salary, and in disgrace, and
+possibly in disgust, quitted drumming the New Haven good people to meeting
+and moved his residence to Stamford, doubtless to the relief and delight of
+both magistrates and people of the former town.
+
+Another means of notification of the hour for religious service was by the
+use of a flag, often in addition to the sound of the drum or bell. Thus in
+Plymouth, in 1697, the selectmen were ordered to "procure a flagg to be put
+out at the ringing of the first bell, and taken in when the last bell was
+rung." In Sutherland also a flag was used as a means of announcement of
+"meeting-time," and an old goody was paid ten shillings a year for "tending
+the flagg."
+
+Mr. Gosse, in his "Early Bells of Massachusetts," gives a full and
+interesting account of the church-bells of the first colonial towns in that
+State. Lechford, in his "Plaine Dealing," wrote in 1641 that they came
+together in Boston on the Lord's Day by "the wringing of a bell," and it is
+thought that that bell was a hand-bell. The first bells, for the lack
+of bell-towers, were sometimes hung on trees by the side of the
+meeting-houses, to the great amazement and distress of the Indians, who
+regarded them with superstitious dread, thinking--to paraphrase Herbert's
+beautiful line--"when the bell did chime 't was devils' music;" but more
+frequently the bells were hung in a belfry or bell-turret or "bellcony,"
+and from this belfry depended a long bell-rope quite to the floor; and thus
+in the very centre of the church the sexton stood when he rung the summons
+for lire or for meeting. This rope was of course directly in front of the
+pulpit; and Jonathan Edwards, who was devoid of gestures and looked always
+straight before him when preaching, was jokingly said to have "looked-off"
+the bell-rope, when it fell with a crash in the middle of his church.
+
+At the first sound of the drum or horn or bell the town inhabitants issued
+from their houses in "desent order," man and wife walking first, and the
+children in quiet procession after them. Often a man-servant and a maid
+walked on either side of the heads of the family. In some communities the
+congregation waited outside the church door until the minister and his wife
+arrived and passed into the house; then the church-attendants followed, the
+loitering boys always contriving to scuffle noisily in from the horse-sheds
+at the last moment, making much scraping and clatter with their heavy boots
+on the sanded floor, and tumbling clumsily up the uucarpeted, creaking
+stairs.
+
+In other churches the members of the congregation seated themselves in
+their pews upon their arrival, but rose reverently when the parson, dressed
+in black skull-cap and Geneva cloak, entered the door; and they stood, in
+token of respect, until after he entered the pulpit and was seated.
+
+It was also the honor-giving and deferential custom in many New England
+churches, in the eighteenth century, for the entire congregation to remain
+respectfully standing within the pews at the end of the serice until the
+minister had descended from his lofty pulpit, opened the door of his wife's
+pew, and led her with stately dignity to the church-porch, where, were he
+and she genial and neighborly minded souls, they in turn stood and greeted
+with carefully adjusted degrees of warmth, interest, respect, or patronage,
+the different members of the congregation as they slowly passed out.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The Old-Fashioned Pews.
+
+
+
+In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow,
+uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks
+placed on legs like milking-stools. They were without any support or rest
+for the back; and perhaps the stiff-backed Pilgrims and Puritans required
+or wished no support. Quickly, as the colonies grew in wealth and the
+colonists in ambition and importance, "Spots for Pues" were sold (or
+"pitts" as they were sometimes called), at first to some few rich or
+influential men who wished to sit in a group together, and finally each
+family of dignity or wealth sat in its own family-pew. Often it was
+stipulated in the permission to build a pew that a separate entrance-door
+should be cut into it through the outside wall of the meeting-house, thus
+detracting grievously from the external symmetry of the edifice, but
+obviating the necessity of a space-occupying entrance aisle within the
+church, where there was little enough sitting-room for the quickly
+increasing and universally church-going population. As these pews were
+either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted,
+and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the
+kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style
+of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted. A man who had
+a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by
+the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were
+individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house
+destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was
+being razed, the old building materials to use in the construction of her
+new home. She was not allowed, however, to remove the wood which formed the
+pews, as they were adjudged to be the property of the members who had built
+them, and those owners only could sell or remove the materials of which
+they were built.
+
+Many of the pews in the old meeting-houses had towering partition walls,
+which extended up so high that only the tops of the tallest heads could be
+seen when the occupants were seated. Permissions to build were often given
+with modifying restrictions to the aspiring pew-builders, as for instance
+is recorded of the Haverhill church, "provided they would not build so high
+as to damnify and hinder the light of them windows," or of the Waterbury
+church, "if the pues will not progodish the hous." Often the floor of the
+pews was several inches and occasionally a foot higher than the floor of
+the "alleys," thus forming at the entrance-door of the pew one or two
+steps, which were great stumbling-blocks to clumsy and to childish feet,
+that tripped again when within the pew over the "crickets" and foot-benches
+which were, if the family were large, the accepted and lowly church-seats
+of the little children. Occasionally one long, low foot-rest stretched
+quite across one side of the pew-floor. I have seen these long benches
+with a tier of three shelves; the lower and broader shelf was used as a
+foot-rest, the second one was to hold the hats of the men, and the third
+and narrower shelf was for the hymn-books and Bibles. Such comfortable and
+luxurious pew-furnishings could never have been found in many churches.
+
+An old New Englander relates a funny story of his youth, in which one of
+these triple-tiered foot-benches played an important part. When he was
+a boy a travelling show visited his native town, and though he was not
+permitted to go within the mystic and alluring tent, he stood longingly at
+the gate, and was prodigiously diverted and astonished by an exhibition of
+tight-rope walking, which was given outside the tent-door as a bait to
+lure pleasure-loving and frivolous townspeople within, and also as a
+tantalization to the children of the saints who were not allowed to enter
+the tent of the wicked. Fired by that bewildering and amazing performance,
+he daily, after the wonderful sight, practised walking on rails, on fences,
+on fallen trees, and on every narrow foothold which he could find, as a
+careful preparation for a final feat and triumph of skill on his mother's
+clothes-line. In an evil hour, as he sat one Sunday in the corner of his
+father's pew, his eyes rested on the narrow ledge which formed the top of
+the long foot-bench. Satan can find mischief for idle boys within church as
+well as without, and the desire grew stronger to try to walk on that
+narrow foothold. He looked at his father and mother, they were peacefully
+sleeping; so also were the grown-up occupants of the neighboring pews;
+the pew walls were high, the minister seldom glanced to right or left; a
+thousand good reasons were whispered in his ear by the mischief-finder,
+and at last he willingly yielded, pulled off his heavy shoes, and softly
+mounted the foot-bench. He walked forward and back with great success
+twice, thrice, but when turning for a fourth tour he suddenly lost his
+balance, and over he went with a resounding crash--hats, psalm-books,
+heavy bench, and all. He crushed into hopeless shapelessness his father's
+gray beaver meeting-hat, a long-treasured and much-loved antique; he nearly
+smashed his mother's kid-slippered foot to jelly, and the fall elicited
+from her, in the surprise of the sudden awakening and intense pain, an
+ear-piercing shriek, which, with the noisy crash, electrified the entire
+meeting. All the grown people stood up to investigate, the children climbed
+on the seats to look at the guilty offender and his deeply mortified
+parents; while the minister paused in his sermon and said with cutting
+severity, "I have always regretted that the office of tithingman has been
+abolished in this community, as his presence and his watchful care
+are sadly needed by both the grown persons and the children in this
+congregation." The wretched boy who had caused all the commotion and
+disgrace was of course uninjured by his fall, but a final settlement at
+home between father and son on account of this sacrilegious piece of church
+disturbance made the unhappy would-be tight-rope walker wish that he had at
+least broken his arm instead of his father's hat and his mother's pride and
+the peace of the congregation.
+
+The seats were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three
+sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the
+minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian
+benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite
+justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in
+one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay,
+"What! must I be shut up in a closet and sit on a shelf?" Often elderly
+people petitioned to build separate small pens of pews with a single wider
+seat as "through the seats being so very narrow" they could not sit in
+comfort.
+
+The seats were, until well into this century, almost universally hung on
+hinges, and could be turned up against the walls of the pew, thus enabling
+the standing congregation to lean for support against the sides of the pews
+during the psalm-singing and the long, long prayers.
+
+  "And when at last the loud Amen
+  Fell from aloft, how quickly then
+  The seats came down with heavy rattle,
+  Like musketry in fiercest battle."
+
+This noise of slamming pew-seats could easily be heard over half a mile
+away from the meeting-house in the summer time, for the perverse boys
+contrived always in their salute of welcome to the Amen to give vent in
+a most tremendous bang to a little of their pent up and ill-repressed
+energies. In old church-orders such entries as this (of the Haverhill
+church) are frequently seen: "The people are to Let their Seats down
+without Such Nois." "The boyes are not to wickedly noise down there
+pew-seats." A gentleman attending the old church in Leicester heard at
+the beginning of the prayer, for the first time in his life, the noise of
+slamming pew-seats, as the seats were thrust up against the pew-walls. He
+jumped into the aisle at the first clatter, thinking instinctively that the
+gallery was cracking and falling. Another stranger, a Southerner, entering
+rather late at a morning service in an old church in New England, was
+greeted with the rattle of falling seats, and exclaimed in amazement, "Do
+you Northern people applaud in church?"
+
+In many meeting-houses the tops of the pews and of the high gallery
+railings were ornamented with little balustrades of turned wood, which were
+often worn quite bare of paint by childish fingers that had tried them all
+"to find which ones would turn," and which, alas! would also squeak. This
+fascinating occupation whiled away many a tedious hour in the dreary
+church, and in spite of weekly forbidding frowns and whispered reproofs for
+the shrill, ear-piercing squeaks elicited by turning the spindle-shaped
+balusters, was entirely too alluring a time-killer to be abandoned, and
+consequently descended, an hereditary church pastime, from generation to
+generation of the children of the Puritans; and indeed it remained so
+strong an instinct that many a grown person, visiting in after life a
+church whose pews bore balustrades like the ones of his childhood, could
+scarce keep his itching fingers from trying them each in succession "to see
+which ones would turn."
+
+These open balustrades also afforded fine peep-holes through which, by
+standing or kneeling upon "the shelf," a child might gaze at his neighbor;
+and also through which sly missiles--little balls of twisted paper--could
+be snapped, to the annoyance of some meek girl or retaliating boy, until
+the young marksman was ignominiously pulled down by his mother from his
+post of attack. And through these balustrades the same boy a few years
+later could thrust sly missives, also of twisted paper, to the girl whom he
+had once assailed and bombarded with his annoying paper bullets.
+
+Through the pillared top-rail a restless child in olden days often
+received, on a hot summer Sabbath from a farmer's wife or daughter in an
+adjoining pew, friendly and quieting gifts of sprigs of dill, or fennel,
+or caraway, famous anti-soporifics; and on this herbivorous food he would
+contentedly browse as long as it lasted. An uneasy, sermon-tired little
+girl was once given through the pew-rail several stalks of caraway, and
+with them a large bunch of aromatic southernwood, or "lad's-love" which had
+been brought to meeting by the matron in the next pew, with a crudely and
+unconsciously aesthetic sense that where eye and ear found so little to
+delight them, there the pungent and spicy fragrance of the southernwood
+would be doubly grateful to the nostrils. Little Missy sat down delightedly
+to nibble the caraway-seed, and her mother seeing her so quietly and
+absorbingly occupied, at once fell contentedly and placidly asleep in her
+corner of the pew. But five heads of caraway, though each contain many
+score of seeds, and the whole number be slowly nibbled and eaten one seed
+at a time, will not last through the child's eternity of a long doctrinal
+sermon; and when the umbels were all devoured, the young experimentalist
+began upon the stalks and stems, and they, too, slowly disappeared. She
+then attacked the sprays of southernwood, and in spite of its bitter,
+wormwoody flavor, having nothing else to do, she finished it, all but the
+tough stems, just as the long sermon was brought to a close. Her waking
+mother, discovering no signs of green verdure in the pew, quickly drew
+forth a whispered confession of the time-killing Nebuchadnezzar-like feast,
+and frightened and horrified, at once bore the leaf-gorged child from
+the church, signalling in her retreat to the village doctor, who quickly
+followed and administered to the omnivorous young New Englander a bolus
+which made her loathe to her dying day, through a sympathetic association
+and memory, the taste of caraway, and the scent of southernwood.
+
+An old gentleman, lamenting the razing of the church of his childhood,
+told the story of his youthful Sabbaths in rhyme, and thus refers with
+affectionate enthusiasm to the old custom of bringing bunches of esculent
+"sallet" herbs to meeting:--
+
+  "And when I tired and restless grew,
+  Our next pew neighbor, Mrs. True,
+  Reached her kind hand the top rail through
+  To hand me dill, and fennel too,
+  And sprigs of caraway.
+
+  "And as I munched the spicy seeds,
+  I dimly felt that kindly deeds
+  That thus supply our present needs,
+  Though only gifts of pungent weeds,
+  Show true religion.
+
+  "And often now through sermon trite
+  And operatic singer's flight,
+  I long for that old friendly sight,
+  The hand with herbs of value light,
+  To help to pass the time."
+
+Were the dill and "sweetest fennel" chosen Sabbath favorites for their
+old-time virtues and powers?
+
+  "Vervain and dill
+  Hinder witches of their ill."
+
+And of the charmed fennel Longfellow wrote:--
+
+  "The fennel with its yellow flowers
+  That, in an earlier age than ours,
+  Was gifted with the wondrous powers,
+      Lost vision to restore."
+
+And traditions of mysterious powers, dream-influencing, spirit-exorcising,
+virtue-awakening, health-giving properties, hung vaguely around the
+southernwood and made it specially fit to be a Sabbath-day posy. These
+traditions are softened by the influence of years into simply idealizing,
+in the mind of every country-bred New Englander, the peculiar refreshing
+scent of the southernwood as a typical Sabbath-day fragrance. Half a
+century ago, the pretty feathery pale-green shrub grew in every country
+door-yard, humble or great, throughout New England; and every church-going
+woman picked a branch or spray of it when she left her home on Sabbath
+morn. To this day, on hot summer Sundays, many a staid old daughter of
+the Puritans may be seen entering the village meeting-house, clad in
+a lilac-sprigged lawn or a green-striped barege,--a scanty-skirted,
+surplice-waisted relic of past summers,--with a lace-bordered silk cape
+or a delicate, time-yellowed, purple and white cashmere scarf on her bent
+shoulders, wearing on her gray head a shirred-silk or leghorn bonnet, and
+carrying in her lace-mitted hand a fresh handkerchief, her spectacle-case
+and well-worn Bible, and a great sprig of the sweet, old-fashioned
+"lad's-love." A rose, a bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy
+for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was
+ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing
+things,--southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is
+half so fresh, so countrified, so memory-sweet.
+
+The benches and the pew-seats in the old churches were never cushioned.
+Occasionally very old or feeble women brought cushions to meeting to sit
+upon. It is a matter of recent tradition that Colonel Greenleaf caused a
+nine days' talk in Newbury town at the beginning of this century when
+he cushioned his pew. The widow of Sir William Pepperell, who lived in
+imposing style, had her pew cushioned and lined and curtained with
+worsted stuff, and carpeted with a heavy bear-skin. This worn, faded, and
+moth-eaten furniture remained in the Kittery church until the year 1840,
+just as when Lady Pepperell furnished and occupied the pew. Nor were even
+the seats of the pulpit cushioned. The "cooshoons" of velvet or leather,
+which were given by will to the church, and which were kept in the pulpit,
+and were nibbled by the squirrels, were for the Bible, not the minister, to
+rest upon.
+
+In many churches--in Durham, Concord and Sandwich--the pews had
+swing-shelves, "leaning shelves," upon which a church attendant could rest
+his paper and his arm when taking notes from the sermon, as was at one time
+the universal custom, and in which even school-boys of a century ago had
+to take part. Funny stories are told of the ostentatious notes taken by
+pompous parishioners who could neither write nor read, but who could
+scribble, and thus cut a learned figure.
+
+The doors of the pews were usually cut down somewhat lower than the
+pew-walls, and frequently had no top-rails. They sometimes bore the name of
+the pew-owner painted in large white letters. They were secured when
+closed by clumsy wooden buttons. In many country congregations the elderly
+men--stiff old farmers--had a fashion of standing up in the middle of the
+sermon to stretch their cramped limbs, and they would lean against and hang
+over the pew door and stare up and down the aisle. In Andover, Vermont,
+old Deacon Puffer never let a summer Sunday pass without thus resting and
+diverting himself. One day, having ill-secured the wooden button at the
+door of his pew, the leaning-place gave way under his weight, and out he
+sprawled on all-fours, with a loud clatter, into the middle of the aisle,
+to the amusement of the children, and the mortification of his wife.
+
+Thus it may be seen, as an old autobiography phrases it, "diversions was
+frequent in meeting, and the more duller the sermon, the more likely it was
+that some accident or mischief would be done to help to pass the time."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Seating the Meeting.
+
+
+
+Perhaps no duty was more important and more difficult of satisfactory
+performance in the church work in early New England than "seating the
+meeting-house." Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all
+forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was
+the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the
+seat in which each person should sit during public worship. A committee of
+dignified and influential men was appointed to assign irrevocably to each
+person his or her place, according to rank and importance. Whittier wrote
+of this custom:--
+
+  "In the goodly house of worship, where in order due and fit,
+  As by public vote directed, classed and ranked the people sit;
+  Mistress first and goodwife after, clerkly squire before the clown,
+  From the brave coat, lace embroidered: to the gray frock shading down."
+
+In many cases the members of the committee were changed each year or at
+each fresh seating, in order to obviate any of the effects of partiality
+through kinship, friendship, personal esteem, or debt. A second committee
+was also appointed to seat the members of committee number one, in order
+that, as Haverhill people phrased it, "there may be no Grumbling at them
+for picking and placing themselves."
+
+This seating committee sent to the church the list of all the attendants
+and the seats assigned to them, and when the list had been twice or thrice
+read to the congregation, and nailed on the meeting-house door, it became a
+law. Then some such order as this of the church at Watertown, Connecticut,
+was passed: "It is ordered that the next Sabbath Day every person shall
+take his or her seat appointed to them, and not go to any other seat where
+others are placed: And if any one of the inhabitants shall act contrary, he
+shall for the first offence be reproved by the deacons, and for a second
+pay a fine of two shillings, and a like fine for each offence ever
+after." Or this of the Stratham church: "When the comety have Seatid the
+meeting-house every person that is Seatid shall set in those Seats or pay
+Five Shillings Pir Day for every day they set out of There seats in a
+Disorderly Manner to advance themselves Higher in the meeting-house." These
+two church-laws were very lenient. In many towns the punishments and fines
+were much more severe. Two men of Newbury were in 1669 fined L27 4s.
+each for "disorderly going and setting in seats belonging to others." They
+were dissatisfied with the seats assigned to them by the seating committee,
+and openly and defiantly rebelled. Other and more peaceable citizens
+"entred their Decents" to the first decision of the committee and asked for
+reconsideration of their special cases and for promotion to a higher pew
+before the final orders were "Jsued."
+
+In all the Puritan meetings, as then and now in Quaker meetings, the men
+sat on one side of the meeting-house and the women on the other; and they
+entered by separate doors. It was a great and much-contested change when
+men and women were ordered to sit together "promiscuoslie." In front,
+on either side of the pulpit (or very rarely in the foremost row in the
+gallery), was a seat of highest dignity, known as the "foreseat," in which
+only the persons of greatest importance in the community sat.
+
+Sometimes a row of square pews was built on three sides of the ground
+floor, and each pew occupied by separate families, while the pulpit was
+on the fourth side. If any man wished such a private pew for himself and
+family, he obtained permission from the church and town, and built it at
+his own expense. Immediately in front of the pulpit was either a long seat
+or a square inclosed pew for the deacons, who sat facing the congregation.
+This was usually a foot or two above the level of the other pews, and was
+reached by two or three steep, narrow steps. On a still higher plane was a
+pew for the ruling elders, when ruling elders there were. The magistrates
+also had a pew for their special use. What we now deem the best seats,
+those in the middle of the church, were in olden times the free seats.
+
+Usually, on one side of the pulpit was a square pew for the minister's
+family. When there were twenty-six children in the family, as at least one
+New England parson could boast, and when ministers' families of twelve
+or fourteen children were far from unusual, it is no wonder that we find
+frequent votes to "inlarge the ministers wives pew the breadth of the
+alley," or to "take in the next pue to the ministers wives pue into her
+pue." The seats in the gallery were universally regarded in the early
+churches as the most exalted, in every sense, in the house, with the
+exception, of course, of the dignity-bearing foreseat and the few private
+pews.
+
+It is easy to comprehend what a source of disappointed anticipation,
+heart-burning jealousy, offended dignity, unseemly pride, and bitter
+quarrelling this method of assigning scats, and ranking thereby, must have
+been in those little communities. How the goodwivcs must have hated the
+seating committee! Though it was expressly ordered, when the committee
+rendered their decision, that "the inhabitants are to rest silent and
+sett down satysfyed," who can still the tongue of an envious woman or an
+insulted man? Though they were Puritans, they were first of all men and
+women, and complaints and revolts were frequent. Judge Sewall records that
+one indignant dame "treated Captain Osgood very roughly on account of
+seating the meeting-house." To her the difference between a seat in the
+first and one in the second row was immeasurably great. It was not alone
+the Scribes and Pharisees who desired the highest seats in the synagogue.
+
+It was found necessary at a very early date to "dignify the meeting,"
+which was to make certain seats, though in different localities, equal in
+dignity; thus could peace and contented pride be partially restored. For
+instance, the seating committee in the Sutton church used their "best
+discresing," and voted that "the third seat below be equal in dignity with
+the foreseat in the front gallery, and the fourth seat below be equal in
+dignity with the foreseat in the side gallery," etc., thus making many
+seats of equal honor. Of course wives had to have seats of equal importance
+with those of their husbands, and each widow retained the dignity
+apportioned to her in her husband's lifetime. We can well believe that much
+"discresing" was necessary in dignifying as well as in seating. Often,
+after building a new meeting-house with all the painstaking and thoughtful
+judgment that could be shown, the dissensions over the seating lasted for
+years. The conciliatory fashion of "dignifying the seats" clung long in the
+Congregational churches of New England. In East Hartford and Windsor it was
+not abandoned until 1824.
+
+Many men were unwilling to serve on these seating committees, and refused
+to "medle with the seating," protesting against it on account of the odium
+that was incurred, but they were seldom "let off." Even so influential and
+upright a man as Judge Sewall felt a dread of the responsibility and of
+the personal spleen he might arouse. He also feared in one case lest his
+seat-decisions might, if disliked, work against the ministerial peace of
+his son, who had been recently ordained as pastor of the church. Sometimes
+the difficulty was settled in this way: the entire church (or rather the
+male members) voted who should occupy the foreseat, or the highest pew, and
+the voted-in occupants of this seat of honor formed a committee, who in
+turn seated the others of the congregation.
+
+In the town of Rowley, "age, office, and the amount paid toward building
+the meeting-house were considered when assigning seats." Other towns had
+very amusing and minute rules for seating. Each year of the age counted one
+degree. Military service counted eight degrees. The magistrate's office
+counted ten degrees. Every forty shillings paid in on the church rate
+counted one degree. We can imagine the ambitious Puritan adding up his
+degrees, and paying in forty shillings more in order to sit one seat above
+his neighbor who was a year or two older.
+
+In Pittsfield, as early as the year 1765, the pews were sold by "vandoo"
+to the highest bidder, in order to stop the unceasing quarrels over
+the seating. In Windham, Connecticut, in 1762, the adoption of this
+pacificatory measure only increased the dissension when it was discovered
+that some miserable "bachelors who never paid for more than one head and
+a horse" had bid in several of the best pews in the meeting-house. In New
+London, two women, sisters-in-law, were seated side by side. Each claimed
+the upper or more dignified seat, and they quarrelled so fiercely over the
+occupation of it that they had to be brought before the town meeting.
+
+In no way could honor and respect be shown more satisfactorily in the
+community than by the seat assigned in meeting. When Judge Sewall married
+his second wife, he writes with much pride: "Mr. Oliver in the names of the
+Overseers invites my Wife to sit in the foreseat. I thought to have brought
+her into my pue. I thankt him and the Overseers." His wife died in a few
+months, and he reproached himself for his pride in this honor, and left the
+seat which he had in the men's foreseat. "God in his holy Sovereignty put
+my wife out of the Fore Seat. I apprehended I had Cause to be ashamed of my
+Sin and loath myself for it, and retired into my Pue," which was of course
+less dignified than the foreseat.
+
+Often, in thriving communities, the "pues" and benches did not afford
+seating room enough for the large number who wished to attend public
+worship, and complaints were frequent that many were "obliged to sit
+squeased on the stairs." Persons were allowed to bring chairs and stools
+into the meeting-house, and place them in the "alleys." These extra seats
+became often such encumbering nuisances that in many towns laws were passed
+abolishing and excluding them, or, as in Hadley, ordering them "back of the
+women's seats." In 1759 it was ordered in that town to "clear the Alleys of
+the meeting-house of chairs and other Incumbrances." Where the chairless
+people went is not told; perhaps they sat in the doorway, or, in the summer
+time, listened outside the windows. One forward citizen of Hardwicke had
+gradually moved his chair down the church alley, step by step, Sunday after
+Sunday, from one position of dignity to another still higher, until at last
+he boldly invaded the deacons' seat. When, in the year 1700, this honored
+position was forbidden him, in his chagrin and mortification he committed
+suicide by hanging.
+
+The young men sat together in rows, and the young women in corresponding
+seats on the other side of the house. In 1677 the selectmen of Newbury
+gave permission to a few young women to build a pew in the gallery. It is
+impossible to understand why this should have roused the indignation of the
+bachelors of the town, but they were excited and angered to such a pitch
+that they broke a window, invaded the meeting-house, and "broke the pue in
+pessis." For this sacrilegious act they were fined L10 each, and sentenced
+to be whipped or pilloried. In consideration, however, of the fact that
+many of them had been brave soldiers, the punishment was omitted when they
+confessed and asked forgiveness. This episode is very comical; it exhibits
+the Puritan youth in such an ungallant and absurd light. When, ten years
+later, liberty was given to ten young men, who had sat in the "foure backer
+seats in the gallery," to build a pew in "the hindermost seat in the
+gallery behind the pulpit," it is not recorded that the Salem young women
+made any objection. In the Woburn church, the four daughters of one of the
+most respected families in the place received permission to build a pew in
+which to sit. Here also such indignant and violent protests were made by
+the young men that the selectmen were obliged to revoke the permission.
+It would be interesting to know the bachelors' discourteous objections to
+young women being allowed to own a pew, but no record of their reasons
+is given. Bachelors were so restricted and governed in the colonies that
+perhaps they resented the thought of any independence being allowed to
+single women. Single men could not live alone, but were forced to reside
+with some family to whom the court assigned them, and to do in all respects
+just what the court ordered. Thus, in olden times, a man had to marry to
+obtain his freedom. The only clue to a knowledge of the cause of the fierce
+and resentful objection of New England young men to permitting the young
+women of the various congregations to build and own a "maids pue" is
+contained in the record of the church of the town of Scotland, Connecticut.
+"An Hurlburt, Pashants and Mary Lazelle, Younes Bingham, prudenc Hurlburt
+and Jerusha meachem" were empowered to build a pew "provided they build
+within a year and raise ye pue no higher than the seat is on the Mens
+side." "Never ye Less," saith the chronicle, "ye above said have built said
+pue much higher than ye order, and if they do not lower the same within one
+month from this time the society comitte shall take said pue away." Do you
+wonder that the bachelors resented this towering "maids pue?" that they
+would not be scornfully looked down upon every Sabbath by women-folk,
+especially by a girl named "meachem"? Pashants and Younes and prudenc had
+to quickly come down from their unlawfully high church-perch and take a
+more humble seat, as befitted them; thus did their "vaulting ambition
+o'erleap itself and fall on the other side." Perhaps the Salem maids also
+built too high and imposing a pew. In Haverhill, in 1708, young women were
+permitted to build pews, provided they did not "damnify the Stairway." This
+somewhat profane-sounding restriction they heeded, and the Haverhill maids
+occupied their undamnifying "pue" unmolested. Medford young women, however,
+in 1701, when allowed only one side gallery for seats, while the young men
+were assigned one side and all the front gallery, made such an uproar that
+the town had to call a meeting, and restore to them their "woman's rights"
+in half the front gallery.
+
+Infants were brought to church in their mothers' arms, and on summer days
+the young mothers often sat at the meeting-house door or in the porch,--if
+porch there were,--where, listening to the word of God, they could attend
+also to the wants of their babes. I have heard, too, of a little cage, or
+frame, which was to be seen in the early meeting-houses, for the purpose
+of holding children who were too young to sit alone,--poor Puritan babies!
+Little girls sat with their mothers or elder sisters on "crickets" within
+the pews; or if the family were over-numerous, the children and crickets
+exundated into "the alley without the pues." Often a row of little
+daughters of Zion sat on three-legged stools and low seats the entire
+length of the aisle,--weary, sleepy, young sentinels "without the gates."
+
+The boys, the Puritan boys, those wild animals who were regarded with such
+suspicion, such intense disfavor, by all elderly Puritan eyes, and who were
+publicly stigmatized by the Duxbury elders as "ye wretched boys on ye Lords
+Day," were herded by themselves. They usually sat on the pulpit and gallery
+stairs, and constables or tithingmen were appointed to watch over them and
+control them. In Salem, in 1676, it was ordered that "all ye boyes of ye
+towne are and shall be appointed to sitt upon ye three pair of stairs in ye
+meeting-house on ye Lords Day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look after ye
+boyes yt sitte upon ye pulpit stairs. Reuben Guppy is to look and order soe
+many of ye boyes as may be convenient, and if any are unruly, to present
+their names, as the law directs." Nowadays we should hardly seat boys in a
+group if we wished them to be orderly and decorous, and I fear the man "by
+the name of Guppy" found it no easy task to preserve order and due gravity
+among the Puritan boys in Salem meeting. In fact, the rampant boys behaved
+thus badly for the very reason that they were seated together instead of
+with their respective families; and not until the fashion was universal of
+each family sitting in a pew or group by itself did the boys in meeting
+behave like human beings rather than like mischievous and unruly monkeys.
+
+In Stratford, in 1668, a tithingman was "appointed to watch over the youths
+of disorderly carriage, and see that they behave themselves comelie, and
+use such raps and blows as in his discretion meet."
+
+I like to think of those rows of sober-faced Puritan boys seated on the
+narrow, steep pulpit stairs, clad in knee-breeches and homespun flapped
+coats, and with round, cropped heads, miniature likenesses in dress and
+countenance (if not in deportment) of their grave, stern, God-fearing
+fathers. Though they were of the sedate Puritan blood, they were boys, and
+they wriggled and twisted, and scraped their feet noisily on the sanded
+floor; and I know full well that the square-toed shoes of one in whom
+"original sin" waxed powerful, thrust many a sly dig in the ribs and back
+of the luckless wight who chanced to sit in front of and below him on the
+pulpit stairs. Many a dried kernel of Indian corn was surreptitiously
+snapped at the head of an unwary neighbor, and many a sly word was
+whispered and many a furtive but audible "snicker" elicited when the dread
+tithingman was "having an eye-out" and administering "discreet raps and
+blows" elsewhere.
+
+One of these wicked youths in Andover was brought before the magistrate,
+and it was charged that he "Sported and played and by Indecent Gestures and
+Wry Faces caused laughter and misbehavior in the Beholders." The girls were
+not one whit better behaved. One of "ye tything men chosen of ye town of
+Norwich" reported that "Tabatha Morgus of s'd Norwich Did on ye 24th day
+February it being Sabbath on ye Lordes Day, prophane ye Lordes Day in ye
+meeting house of ye west society in ye time of ye forenoone service on s'd
+Day by her rude and Indecent Behaviour in Laughing and Playing in ye time
+of ye s'd Service which Doinges of ye s'd Tabatha is against ye peace of
+our Sovereign Lord ye King, his Crown and Dignity." Wanton Tabatha had to
+pay three shilings sixpence for her ill-timed mid-winter frolic. Perhaps
+she laughed to try to keep warm. Those who laughed at the misdemeanors of
+others were fined as well. Deborah Bangs, a young girl, in 1755 paid a fine
+of five shillings for "Larfing in the Wareham Meeting House in time of
+Public Worship," and a boy at the same time, for the same offence, paid a
+fine of ten shillings. He may have laughed louder and longer. In a law-book
+in which Jonathan Trumbull recorded the minor cases which he tried as
+justice of the peace, was found this entry: "His Majesties Tithing man
+entered complaint against Jona. and Susan Smith, that on the Lords Day
+during Divine Service, they did _smile_." They were found guilty, and
+each was fined five shillings and costs,--poor smiling Susan and Jonathan.
+
+Those wretched Puritan boys, those "sons of Belial," whittled, too, and cut
+the woodwork and benches of the meeting-house in those early days, just as
+their descendants have ever since hacked and cut the benches and desks in
+country schoolhouses,--though how they ever eluded the vigilant eye and ear
+of the ubiquitous tithingman long enough to whittle will ever remain an
+unsolved mystery of the past. This early forerunning evidence of what
+has become a characteristic Yankee trait and habit was so annoyingly and
+extensively exhibited in Medford, in 1729, that an order was passed to
+prosecute and punish "all who cut the seats in the meeting-house."
+
+Few towns were content to have one tithingman and one staff, but ordered
+that there should be a guardian set over the boys in every corner of the
+meeting-house. In Hanover it was ordered "That there be some sticks set up
+in various places in the meeting-house, and fit persons by them and _to
+use them_." I doubt not that the sticks were well used, and Hanover boys
+were well rapped in meeting.
+
+The Norwalk people come down through history shining with a halo of gentle
+lenity, for their tithingman was ordered to bear a short, small stick only,
+and he was "Desired to use it with clemency." However, if any boy proved
+"incoridgable," he could be "presented" before the elders; and perhaps he
+would rather have been treated as were Hartford boys by cruel Hartford
+church folk, who ordered that if "any boye shall be taken playing or
+misbehaving himself in the time of publick worship whether in the
+meeting-house or about the walls he shall be examined and punished at the
+present publickly before the assembly depart." Parson Chauncey, of Durham,
+when a boy misbehaved in meeting, and was "punched up" by the tithingman,
+often stopped in his sermon, called the godless young offender by name,
+and asked him to come to the parsonage the next day. Some very tender and
+beautiful lessons were taught to these Durham boys at these Monday morning
+interviews, and have descended to us in tradition; and the good Mr.
+Chauncey stands out a shining light of Christian patience and forbearance
+at a time when every other New England minister, from John Cotton down,
+preached and practised the stern repression and sharp correction of all
+children, and chanted together in solemn chorus, "Foolishness is bound up
+in the heart of a child."
+
+One vicious tithingman invented, and was allowed to exercise on the boys,
+a punishment which was the refinement of cruelty. He walked up to the
+laughing, sporting, or whittling boy, took him by the collar or the arm,
+led him ostentatiously across the meeting-house, and seated him by his
+shamefaced mother on the women's side. It was as if one grandly proud in
+kneebreeches should be forced to walk abroad in petticoats. Far rather
+would the disgraced boy have been whacked soundly with the heavy knob of
+the tithingman's staff; for bodily pain is soon forgotten, while mortifying
+abasement lingers long.
+
+The tithingman could also take any older youth who misbehaved or "acted
+unsivill" in meeting from his manly seat with the grown men, and force him
+to sit again with the boys; "if any over sixteen are disorderly, they shall
+be ordered to said seats." Not only could these men of authority keep the
+boys in order during meeting, but they also had full control during the
+nooning, and repressed and restrained and vigorously corrected the luckless
+boys during the midday hours. When seats in the galleries grew to be
+regarded as inferior to seats and pews on the ground floor, the boys, who
+of course must have the worst place in the house, were relegated from the
+pulpit stairs to pews in the gallery, and these square, shut-off pews grew
+to be what Dr. Porter called "the Devil's play-houses," and turbulent
+outbursts were frequent enough.
+
+The little boys still sat downstairs under their parents' watchful eyes.
+"No child under 10 alowed to go up Gailary." In the Sutherland church, if
+the big boys (who ought to have known better) "behaved unseemly," one of
+the tithing-men who "took turns to set in the Galary" was ordered "to bring
+Such Bois out of the Galary & set them before the Deacon's Seat" with the
+small boys. In Plainfield, Connecticut, the "pestigeous" boys managed to
+invent a new form of annoyance,--they "damnified the glass;" and a church
+regulation had to be passed to prevent, or rather to try to prevent them
+from "opening the windows or in any way damnifying the glass." It was
+doubtless hot work scuffling and wrestling in the close, shut-in pews high
+up under the roof, and they naturally wished to cool down by opening or
+breaking the windows. Grown persons could not inconsiderately open the
+church windows either. "The Constables are desired to _take notic_
+of the persons that open the windows in the tyme of publick worship." No
+rheumatic-y draughts, no bronchitis-y damps, no pure air was allowed to
+enter the New England meeting-house. The church doubtless took a vote
+before it allowed a single window to be opened.
+
+In Westfield, Massachusetts, the boys became so abominably rampant that the
+church formally decided "that if there is not a Reformation Respecting
+the Disorders in the Pews built on the Great Beam in the time of Publick
+Worship the comite can pul it down."
+
+The fashion of seating the boys in pews by themselves was slow of
+abolishment in many of the churches. In Windsor, Connecticut, "boys' pews"
+were a feature of the church until 1845. As years rolled on, the tithingmen
+became restricted in their authority: they could no longer administer "raps
+and blows;" they were forced to content themselves with loud rappings on
+the floor, and pointing with a staff or with a condemning finger at the
+misdemeanant. At last the deacons usurped these functions, and if rapping
+and pointing did not answer the purpose of establishing order (if the boy
+"psisted"), led the stubborn offender out of meeting; and they had full
+authority soundly to thrash the "wretched boy" on the horse-block. Rev. Dr.
+Dakin tells the story that, hearing a terrible noise and disturbance while
+he was praying in a church in Quincy, he felt constrained to open his eyes
+to ascertain the cause thereof; and he beheld a red-haired boy firmly
+clutching the railing on the front edge of the gallery, while a venerable
+deacon as firmly clutched the boy. The young rebel held fast, and the
+correcting deacon held fast also, until at last the balustrade gave way,
+and boy, deacon, and railing fell together with a resounding crash.
+Then, rising from the wooden debris, the thoroughly subdued boy and the
+triumphant deacon left the meeting-house to finish their little affair;
+and unmistakable swishing sounds, accompanied by loud wails and whining
+protestations, were soon heard from the region of the horse-sheds. Parents
+never resented such chastisings; it was expected, and even desired,
+that boys should be whipped freely by every school-master and person of
+authority who chose so to do.
+
+In some old church-orders for seating, boys were classed with negroes,
+and seated with them; but in nearly all towns the negroes had seats by
+themselves. The black women were all seated on a long bench or in an
+inclosed pew labelled "B.W.," and the negro men in one labelled "B.M." One
+William Mills, a jesting soul, being asked by a pompous stranger where he
+could sit in meeting, told the visitor that he was welcome to sit in Bill
+Mills's pew, and that it was marked "B.M." The man, who chanced to be
+ignorant of the local custom of marking the negro seats, accepted the kind
+invitation, and seated himself in the black men's pew, to the delight of
+Bill Mills, the amusement of the boys, the scandal of the elders, and his
+own disgust.
+
+Sometimes a little pew or short gallery was built high up among the beams
+and joists over the staircase which led to the first gallery, and was
+called the "swallows' nest," or the "roof pue," or the "second gallery." It
+was reached by a steep, ladder-like staircase, and was often assigned to
+the negroes and Indians of the congregation.
+
+Often "ye seat between ye Deacons seat and ye pulpit is for persons hard of
+hearing to sett in." In nearly every meeting a bench or pew full of aged
+men might be seen near the pulpit, and this seat was called, with Puritan
+plainness of speech, the "Deaf Pew." Some very deaf church members (when
+the boys were herded elsewhere) sat on the pulpit stairs, and even in the
+pulpit, alongside the preacher, where they disconcertingly upturned their
+great tin ear-trumpets directly in his face. The persistent joining in the
+psalm-singing by these deaf old soldiers and farmers was one of the bitter
+trials which the leader of the choir had to endure.
+
+The singers' seats were usually in the galleries; sometimes upon the ground
+floor, in the "hind-row on either side." Occasionally the choir sat in two
+rows of seats that extended quite across the floor of the house, in front
+of the deacons' seat and the pulpit. The men singers then sat facing the
+congregation, while the women singers faced the pulpit. Between them ran a
+long rack for the psalm-books. When they sang they stood up, and bawled and
+fugued in each other's faces. Often a square pew was built for the singers,
+and in the centre of this enclosure was a table, on which were laid, when
+at rest, the psalm-books. When they sang, the choir thus formed a hollow
+square, as does any determined band, for strength.
+
+One other seat in the old Puritan meeting-house, a seat of gloom,
+still throws its darksome shadow down through the years,--the stool of
+repentance. "Barbarous and cruel punishments" were forbidden by the
+statutes of the new colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking,
+sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat,
+crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long
+Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled
+and godly congregation, and the cold rebuke of the pious minister's averted
+face; bearing on the poor sinful head a deep-branding paper inscribed in
+"Capitall Letters" with the name of some dark or mysterious crime, or
+wearing on the sleeve some strange and dread symbol, or on the breast a
+scarlet letter.
+
+Let us thank God that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures--so
+degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,--these foul,
+in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never
+frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long time. In 1681
+two women were sentenced to sit during service on a high stool in the
+middle alley of the Salem meeting-house, having on their heads a paper
+bearing the name of their crime; and a woman in Agamenticus at about the
+same date was ordered "to stand in a white sheet publicly two several
+Sabbath-Days with the mark of her offence on her forehead." These are the
+latest records of this punishment that I have chanced to see.
+
+Thus, from old church and town records, we plainly discover that each laic,
+deacon, elder, criminal, singer, and even the ungodly boy had his alloted
+place as absolutely assigned to him in the old meeting-house as was the
+pulpit to the parson. Much has been said in semi-ridicule of this old
+custom of "seating" and "dignifying," yet it did not in reality differ much
+from our modern way of selling the best pews to whoever will pay the most.
+Perhaps the old way was the better, since, in the early churches, age,
+education, dignity, and reputation were considered as well as wealth.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The Tithingman and the Sleepers.
+
+
+
+The most grotesque, the most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure
+in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly
+burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of
+incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of
+monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early
+New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy,
+pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed
+with dangling foxtails,--creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the
+quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the
+drowsy sleepers; for they slept in country churches in the seventeenth
+century, notwithstanding dread of fierce correction, just as they nod
+and doze and softly puff, unawakened and unrebuked, in village churches
+throughout New England in the nineteenth century.
+
+This absurd and distorted type of the English church beadle, this colonial
+sleep banisher, was equipped with a long staff, heavily knobbed at one end,
+with which he severely and pitilessly rapped the heads of the too sleepy
+men, and the too wide-awake boys. From the other end of this wand of office
+depended a long foxtail, or a hare's-foot, which he softly thrust in the
+faces of the sleeping Priscillas, Charitys, and Hopestills, and which
+gently brushed and tickled them into reverent but startled wakefulness.
+
+One zealous but too impetuous tithingman in his pious ardor of office
+inadvertently applied the wrong end, the end with the heavy knob, the
+masculine end, to a drowsy matron's head; and for this severely ungallant
+mistake he was cautioned by the ruling elders to thereafter use "more
+discresing and less heist."
+
+Another over-watchful Newbury "awakener" rapped on the head a nodding man
+who protested indignantly that he was wide-awake, and was only bowing in
+solemn assent and approval of the minister's arguments. Roger Scott, of
+Lynn, in 1643 struck the tithingman who thus roughly and suddenly wakened
+him; and poor sleepy and bewildered Roger, who is branded through all time
+as "a common sleeper at the publick exercise," was, for this most naturally
+resentful act, but also most shockingly grave offence, soundly whipped, as
+a warning both to keep awake and not to strike back in meeting.
+
+Obadiah Turner, of Lynn, gives in his Journal a sad, sad disclosure of
+total depravity which was exposed by one of these sudden church-awakenings,
+and the story is best told in the journalist's own vivid words:--
+
+"June 3, 1616.--Allen Bridges hath bin chose to wake ye sleepers in
+meeting. And being much proude of his place, must needs have a fox taile
+fixed to ye ende of a long staff wherewith he may brush ye faces of them yt
+will have napps in time of discourse, likewise a sharpe thorne whereby he
+may pricke such as be most sound. On ye last Lord his day, as hee strutted
+about ye meeting-house, he did spy Mr. Tomlins sleeping with much comfort,
+hys head kept steadie by being in ye corner, and his hand grasping ye rail.
+And soe spying, Allen did quickly thrust his staff behind Dame Ballard and
+give him a grievous prick upon ye hand. Whereupon Mr. Tomlins did spring
+vpp mch above ye floore, and with terrible force strike hys hand against
+ye wall; and also, to ye great wonder of all, prophanlie exclaim in a loud
+voice, curse ye wood-chuck, he dreaming so it seemed yt a wood-chuck had
+seized and bit his hand. But on coming to know where he was, and ye greate
+scandall he had committed, he seemed much abashed, but did not speak. And I
+think he will not soon again goe to sleepe in meeting."
+
+How clear the picture! Can you not see it?--the warm June sunlight
+streaming in through the narrow, dusty windows of the old meeting-house;
+the armed watcher at the door; the Puritan men and women in their
+sad-colored mantles seated sternly upright on the hard narrow benches; the
+black-gowned minister, the droning murmur of whose sleepy voice mingles
+with the out-door sounds of the rustle of leafy branches, the song of
+summer birds, the hum of buzzing insects, and the muffled stamping of
+horses' feet; the restless boys on the pulpit-stairs; the tired, sleeping
+Puritan with his head thrown back in the corner of the pew; the vain,
+strutting, tithingman with his fantastic and thorned staff of office; and
+then--the sudden, electric wakening, and the consternation of the whole
+staid and pious congregation at such terrible profanity in the house of
+God. Ah!--it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the
+quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all
+well, just as I saw it last summer in June.
+
+Another catastrophe from too fierce zeal on the part of the tithingman
+is recorded. An old farmer, worn out with a hard Saturday's work at
+sheep-washing, fell asleep ere the hour-glass had once been turned. Though
+he was a man of dignity, for he sat in his own pew, he could not escape the
+rod of the pragmatical tithingman. Being rudely disturbed, but not wholly
+wakened, the bewildered sheep-farmer sprung to his feet, seized his
+astonished and mortified wife by the shoulders and shook her violently,
+shouting at the top of his voice, "Haw back! haw back! Stand still, will
+ye?" Poor goodman and goodwife! many years elapsed ere they recovered from
+that keen disgrace.
+
+The ministers encouraged and urged the tithingmen to faithfully perform
+their allotted work. One early minister "did not love sleepers in ye
+meeting-house, and would stop short in ye exercise and call pleasantlie to
+wake ye sleepers, and once of a warm Summer afternoon he did take hys hat
+off from ye pegg in ye beam, and put it on, saying he would go home and
+feed his fowles and come back again, and maybe their sleepe would be ended,
+and they readie to hear ye remainder of hys discourse." Another time he
+suggested that they might like better the Church of England service of
+sitting down and standing up, and we can be sure that this "was competent
+to keepe their eyes open for a twelvemonth."
+
+All this was in the church of Mr. Whiting, of Lynn, a somewhat jocose
+Puritan,--if jocularity in a Puritan is not too anomalous an attribute
+to have ever existed. We can be sure that there was neither sleeping nor
+jesting allusion to such an irreverence in Mr. Mather's, Mr. Welde's, or
+Mr. Cotton's meetings. In many rigidly severe towns, as in Portsmouth in
+1662 and in Boston in 1667, it was ordered by the selectmen as a proper
+means of punishment that a "cage be made or some other means invented for
+such as sleepe on the Lord's Daie." Perhaps they woke the offender up and
+rudely and summarily dragged him out and caged him at once and kept him
+thus prisoned throughout the nooning,--a veritable jail-bird.
+
+A rather unconventional and eccentric preacher in Newbury awoke one sleeper
+in a most novel manner. The first name of the sleeping man was Mark, and
+the preacher in his sermon made use of these Biblical words: "I say unto
+you, mark the perfect man and behold the upright." But in the midst of his
+low, monotonous sermon-voice he roared out the word "mark" in a loud shout
+that brought the dozing Mark to his feet, bewildered but wide awake.
+
+Mr. Moody, of York, Maine, employed a similar device to awaken and mortify
+the sleepers in meeting. He shouted "Fire, fire, fire!" and when the
+startled and blinking men jumped up, calling out "Where?" he roared back in
+turn, "In hell, for sleeping sinners." Rev. Mr. Phillips, of Andover, in
+1755, openly rebuked his congregation for "sleeping away a great part of
+the sermon;" and on the Sunday following an earthquake shock which was felt
+throughout New England, he said he hoped the "Glorious Lord of the Sabbath
+had given them such a shaking as would keep them awake through one
+sermon-time." Other and more autocratic parsons did not hesitate to call
+out their sleeping parishioners plainly by name, sternly telling them also
+to "Wake up!" A minister in Brunswick, Maine, thus pointedly wakened one of
+his sweet-sleeping church-attendants, a man of some dignity and standing
+in the community, and received the shocking and tautological answer, "Mind
+your own business, and go on with your sermon."
+
+The women would sometimes nap a little without being discovered. "Ye women
+may sometimes sleepe and none know by reason of their enormous bonnets. Mr.
+Whiting doth pleasantlie say from ye pulpit hee doth seeme to be preaching
+to stacks of straw with men among them."
+
+From this seventeenth-century comment upon the size of the women's bonnets,
+it may be seen that objections to women's overwhelming and obscuring
+headgear in public assemblies are not entirely complaining protests of
+modern growth. Other records refer to the annoyance from the exaggerated
+size of bonnets. In 1769 the church in Andover openly "put to vote whether
+the parish Disapprove of the Female sex sitting with their Hats on in the
+Meeting-house in time of Divine Service as being Indecent." The parish did
+Disapprove, with a capital D, for the vote passed in the affirmative. There
+is no record, however, to tell whether the Indecent fashion was abandoned,
+but I warrant no tithingman was powerful enough to make Andover women take
+off their proudly worn Sunday bonnets if they did not want to. Another town
+voted that it was the "Town's Mind" that the women should take off their
+bonnets and "hang them on the peggs," as did the men their headgear. But
+the Town's Mind was not a Woman's Mind; and the big-bonnet wearers, vain
+though they were Puritans, did as they pleased with their own bonnets.
+And indeed, in spite of votes and in spite of expostulations, the female
+descendants of the Puritans, through constantly recurring waves of fashion,
+have ever since been indecently wearing great obscuring hats and bonnets in
+public assemblies, even up to the present day.
+
+The tithingman had other duties than awakening the sleepers and looking
+after "the boyes that playes and rapping those boyes,"--in short, seeing
+that every one was attentive in meeting except himself,--and the duties
+and powers of the office varied in different communities. Several of these
+officers were appointed in each parish. In Newbury, in 1688, there were
+twenty tithingmen, and in Salem twenty-five. They were men of authority,
+not only on Sunday, but throughout the entire week. Each had several
+neighboring families (usually ten, as the word "tithing" would signify)
+under his charge to watch during the week, to enforce the learning of the
+catechism at home, especially by the children, and sometimes he heard them
+"Say their Chatachize." These families he also watched specially on the
+Sabbath, and reported whether all the members thereof attended public
+worship. Not content with mounting guard over the boys on Sundays, he also
+watched on weekdays to keep boys and "all persons from swimming in the
+water." Do you think his duties were light in July and August, when school
+was out, to watch the boys of ten families? One man watching one family
+cannot prevent such "violations of the peace" in country towns now-a-days.
+He sometimes inspected the "ordinaries" and made complaint of any disorders
+which he there discovered, and gave in the names of "idle tiplers and
+gamers," and he could warn the tavern-keeper to sell no more liquor to any
+toper whom he knew or fancied was drinking too heavily. Josselyn complained
+bitterly that during his visit to New England in 1663 at "houses of
+entertainment called ordinaries into which a stranger went, he was
+presently followed by one appointed to that office who would thrust himself
+into his company uninvited, and if he called for more drink than the
+officer thought in his judgment he could soberly bear away, he would
+presently countermand it, and appoint the proportion beyond which he could
+not get one drop." The tithingman had a "spetial eye-out" on all bachelors,
+who were also carefully spied upon by the constables, deacons, elders,
+and heads of families in general. He might, perhaps, help to collect the
+ministerial rate, though his principal duty was by no means the collecting
+of tithes. He "worned peple out of ye towne." This warning was not at all
+because the new-comers were objectionable or undesired, but was simply a
+legal form of precaution, so that the parish would never be liable for the
+keeping of the "worned" ones in case they thereafter became paupers. He
+administered the "oath of fidelity" to new inhabitants. The tithingman
+also watched to see that "no young people walked abroad on the eve of the
+Sabbath,"--that is, on a Saturday night. He also marked and reported all
+those "who lye at home," and others who "prophanely behaved, lingered
+without dores at meeting time on the Lordes Daie," all the "sons of Belial
+strutting about, setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the
+day." These last two classes of offenders were first admonished by the
+tithingman, then "Sett in stocks," and then cited before the Court. They
+were also confined in the cage on the meeting-house green, with the Lord's
+Day sleepers. The tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode at too
+fast a pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who "walked or
+rode unnecessarily on the Sabath." Great and small alike were under his
+control, as this notice from the "Columbian Centinel" of December, 1789,
+abundantly proves. It is entitled "The President and the Tything man:"--
+
+    "The President, on his return to New York from his late tour through
+    Connecticut, having missed his way on Saturday, was obliged to ride a
+    few miles on Sunday morning in order to gain the town at which he had
+    previously proposed to have attended divine service. Before he arrived
+    however he was met by a Tything man, who commanding him to stop,
+    demanded the occasion of his riding; and it was not until the President
+    had informed him of every circumstance and promised to go no further
+    than the town intended that the Tything man would permit him to proceed
+    on his journey."
+
+Various were the subterfuges to outwit the tithingman and elude his
+vigilance on the Sabbath. We all remember the amusing incident in "Oldtown
+Folks." A similar one really happened. Two gay young sparks driving through
+the town on the Sabbath were stopped by the tithingman; one offender said
+mournfully in excuse of his Sabbath travel, "My grandmother is lying dead
+in the next town." Being allowed to drive on, he stood up in his wagon when
+at a safe distance and impudently shouted back, "And she's been lying dead
+in the graveyard there for thirty years."
+
+Thus it may be seen that the ancient tithingman was pre-eminently a general
+_snook_, to use an old and expressive word,--an informer, both in and
+out of meeting,--a very necessary, but somewhat odious, and certainly at
+times very absurd officer. He was in a degree a constable, a selectman, a
+teacher, a tax-collector, an inspector, a sexton, a home-watcher, and above
+all, a Puritan Bumble, whose motto was _Hie et ubique_. He was, in
+fact, a general law-enforcer and order-keeper, whose various duties,
+wherever still necessary and still performed, are now apportioned to
+several individuals. The ecclesiastical functions and authority of the
+tithingman lingered long after the civil powers had been removed or had
+gradually passed away from his office. Persons are now living who in their
+early and unruly youth were rapped at and pointed at by a New England
+tithingman when they laughed or were noisy in meeting.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Length of the Service.
+
+
+Watches were unknown in the early colonial days of New England, and for a
+long time after their introduction both watches and clocks were costly and
+rare. John Davenport of New Haven, who died in 1670, left a clock to his
+heirs; and E. Needham, who died in 1677, left a "Striking clock, a watch,
+and a Larum that dus not Strike," worth L5; these are perhaps the first
+records of the ownership of clocks and watches in New England. The time of
+the day was indicated to our forefathers in their homes by "noon marks" on
+the floor or window-seats, and by picturesque sundials; and in the
+civil and religious meetings the passage of time was marked by a strong
+brass-bound hour-glass, which stood on a desk below or beside the pulpit,
+or which was raised on a slender iron rod and standard, so that all the
+members of the congregation could easily watch "the sands that ran i' the
+clock's behalf." By the side of the desk sat, on the Sabbath, a sexton,
+clerk, or tithingman, whose duty it was to turn the hour-glass as often
+as the sands ran out. This was a very ostentatious way of reminding the
+clergyman how long he had preached; but if it were a hint to bring the
+discourse to an end, it was never heeded; for contemporary historical
+registers tell of most painfully long sermons, reaching up through long
+sub-divisions and heads to "twenty-seventhly" and "twenty-eighthly."
+
+At the planting of the first church in Woburn, Massachusetts, the Rev.
+Mr. Symmes showed his godliness and endurance (and proved that of his
+parishioners also) by preaching between four and five hours. Sermons which
+occupied two or three hours were customary enough. One old Scotch clergyman
+in Vermont, in the early years of this century, bitterly and fiercely
+resented the "popish innovation and Sabbath profanation" of a Sunday-school
+for the children, which some daring and progressive parishioners proposed
+to hold at the "nooning." This canny Parson Whiteinch very craftily and
+somewhat maliciously prolonged his morning sermons until they each occupied
+three hours; thus he shortened the time between the two services to about
+half an hour, and victoriously crowded out the Sunday-school innovators,
+who had barely time to eat their cold lunch and care for their waiting
+horses, ere it was time for the afternoon service to begin. But one man
+cannot stop the tide, though he may keep it for a short time from one
+guarded and sheltered spot; and the rebellious Vermont congregation, after
+two or three years of tedious three-hour sermons, arose in a body and
+crowded out the purposely prolix preacher, and established the wished-for
+Sunday-school. The vanquished parson thereafter sullenly spent the noonings
+in the horse-shed, to which he ostentatiously carried the big church-Bible
+in order that it might not be at the service of the profaning teachers.
+
+An irreverent caricature of the colonial days represents a phenomenally
+long-preaching clergyman as turning the hour-glass by the side of his
+pulpit and addressing his congregation thus, "Come! you are all good
+fellows, we'll take another glass together!" It is recorded of Rev. Urian
+Oakes that often the hour-glass was turned four times during one of his
+sermons. The warning legend, "Be Short," which Cotton Mather inscribed over
+his study door was not written over his pulpit; for he wrote in his diary
+that at his own ordination he prayed for an hour and a quarter, and
+preached for an hour and three quarters. Added to the other ordination
+exercises these long Mather addresses must have been tiresome enough.
+Nathaniel Ward deplored at that time, "Wee have a strong weakness in New
+England that when wee are speaking, wee know not how to conclude: wee make
+many ends before wee make an end."
+
+Dr. Lord of Norwich always made a prayer which was one hour long; and an
+early Dutch traveller who visited New England asserted that he had heard
+there on Fast Day a prayer which was two hours long. These long prayers
+were universal and most highly esteemed,--a "poor gift in prayer" being a
+most deplored and even despised clerical short-coming. Had not the Puritans
+left the Church of England to escape "stinted prayers"? Whitefield prayed
+openly for Parson Barrett of Hopkinton, who could pray neither freely, nor
+well, that "God would open this dumb dog's mouth;" and everywhere in the
+Puritan Church, precatory eloquence as evinced in long prayers was felt to
+be the greatest glory of the minister, and the highest tribute to God.
+
+In nearly all the churches the assembled people stood during prayer-time
+(since kneeling and bowing the head savored of Romish idolatry) and in the
+middle of his petition the minister usually made a long pause in order that
+any who were infirm or ill might let down their slamming pew-seats and sit
+down; those who were merely weary stood patiently to the long and painfully
+deferred end. This custom of standing during prayer-time prevailed in the
+Congregational churches in New England until quite a recent date, and is
+not yet obsolete in isolated communities and in solitary cases. I have seen
+within a few years, in a country church, a feeble, white-haired old deacon
+rise tremblingly at the preacher's solemn words "Let us unite in prayer,"
+and stand with bowed head throughout the long prayer; thus pathetically
+clinging to the reverent custom of the olden time, he rendered tender
+tribute to vanished youth, gave equal tribute to eternal hope and faith,
+and formed a beautiful emblem of patient readiness for the last solemn
+summons.
+
+Sometimes tedious expounding of the Scriptures and long "prophesying"
+lengthened out the already too long service. Judge Sewall recorded that
+once when he addressed or expounded at the Plymouth Church, "being afraid
+to look at the glass, ignorantly and unwittingly I stood two hours and a
+half," which was doing pretty well for a layman.
+
+The members of the early churches did not dislike these long preachings and
+prophesyings; they would have regarded a short sermon as irreligious,
+and lacking in reverence, and besides, would have felt that they had not
+received in it their full due, their full money's worth. They often fell
+asleep and were fiercely awakened by the tithingman, and often they could
+not have understood the verbose and grandiose language of the preacher.
+They were in an icy-cold atmosphere in winter, and in glaring, unshaded
+heat in summer, and upon most uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at
+all seasons; but in every record and journal which I have read, throughout
+which ministers and laymen recorded all the annoyances and opposition which
+the preachers encountered, I have never seen one entry of any complaint or
+ill-criticism of too long praying or preaching. Indeed, when Rev. Samuel
+Torrey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, prayed two hours without stopping, upon
+a public Fast Day in 1696, it is recorded that his audience only wished
+that the prayer had been much longer.
+
+When we consider the training and exercise in prayer that the New England
+parsons had in their pulpits on Sundays, in their own homes on Saturday
+nights, on Lecture Days and Fast Days and Training Days, and indeed upon
+all times and occasions, can we wonder at Parson Boardman's prowess in New
+Milford in 1735? He visited a "praying" Indian's home wherein lay a sick
+papoose over whom a "pow-wow" was being held by a medicine-man at the
+request of the squaw-mother, who was still a heathen. The Christian warrior
+determined to fight the Indian witch-doctor on his own grounds, and while
+the medicine-man was screaming and yelling and dancing in order to cast the
+devil out ol the child, the parson began to pray with equal vigor and power
+of lungs to cast out the devil of a medicine-man. As the prayer and
+pow-wow proceeded the neighboring Indians gathered around, and soon became
+seriously alarmed for the success of their prophet. The battle raged for
+three hours, when the pow-wow ended, and the disgusted and exhausted Indian
+ran out of the wigwam and jumped into the Housatonic River to cool his
+heated blood, leaving the Puritan minister triumphant in the belief, and
+indeed with positive proof, that he could pray down any man or devil.
+
+The colonists could not leave the meeting-house before the long sen ices
+were ended, even had they wished, for the tithingman allowed no deserters.
+In Salem, in 1676, it was "ordered by ye Selectmen yt the three Constables
+doe attend att ye three greate doores of ye meeting-house every Lordes Day
+att ye end of ye sermon, both forenoone and afternoone, and to keep ye
+doores fast and suffer none to goe out before ye whole exercises bee
+ended." Thus Salem people had to listen to no end of praying and
+prophesying from their ministers and elders for they "couldn't get out."
+
+As the years passed on, the church attendants became less referential and
+much more impatient and fearless, and soon after the Revolutionary War one
+man in Medford made a bargain with his minister--Rev. Dr. Osgood--that he
+would attend regularly the church services every Sunday morning, provided
+he could always leave at twelve o'clock. On each Sabbath thereafter, as
+the obstinate preacher would not end his sermon one minute sooner than
+his habitual time, which was long after twelve, the equally stubborn
+limited-time worshipper arose at noon, as he had stipulated, and stalked
+noisily out of meeting.
+
+A minister about to preach in a neighboring parish was told of a custom
+which prevailed there of persons who lived at a distance rising and leaving
+the house ere the sermon was ended. He determined to teach them a lesson,
+and announced that he would preach the first part of his sermon to the
+sinners, and the latter part to the saints, and that the sinners would of
+course all leave as soon as their portion had been delivered. Every soul
+remained until the end of the service.
+
+At last, when other means of entertainment and recreation than church-going
+became common, and other forms of public addresses than sermons were
+frequently given, New England church-goers became so restless and
+rebellious under the regime of hour-long prayers and indefinitely
+protracted sermons that the long services were gradually condensed and
+curtailed, to the relief of both preacher and hearers.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House.
+
+
+
+In colonial days in New England the long and tedious services must have
+been hard to endure in the unheated churches in bitter winter weather, so
+bitter that, as Judge Sewall pathetically recorded, "The communion bread
+was frozen pretty hard and rattled sadly into the plates." Sadly down
+through the centuries is ringing in our ears the gloomy rattle of that
+frozen sacramental bread on the Church plate, telling to us the solemn
+story of the austere and comfortless church-life of our ancestors. Would
+that the sound could bring to our chilled hearts the same steadfast and
+pure Christian faith that made their gloomy, freezing services warm with
+God's loving presence!
+
+Again Judge Sewall wrote: "Extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow. Blows
+much more as coming home at Noon, and so holds on. Bread was frozen at
+Lord's Table. Though 't was so cold John Tuckerman was baptized. At six
+o'clock my ink freezes, so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my
+Wives chamber. Yet was very Comfortable at Meeting." In the penultimate
+sentence of this quotation may be found the clue and explanation of the
+seemingly incredible assertion in the last sentence. The reason why he was
+comfortable in church was that he was accustomed to sit in cold rooms; even
+with the great open-mouthed and open-chimneyed fireplaces full of blazing
+logs, so little heat entered the rooms of colonial dwelling-houses that one
+could not be warm unless fairly within the chimney-place; and thus, even
+while sitting by the fire, his ink froze. Another entry of Judge Sewall's
+tells of an exceeding cold day when there was "Great Coughing" in meeting,
+and yet a new-born baby was brought into the icy church to be baptized.
+Children were always carried to the meeting-house for baptism the first
+Sunday after birth, even in the most bitter weather. There are no entries
+in Judge Sewall's diary which exhibit him in so lovable and gentle a light
+as the records of the baptism of his fourteen children,--his pride when
+the child did not cry out or shrink from the water in the freezing winter
+weather, thus early showing true Puritan fortitude; and also his noble
+resolves and hopes for their future. On this especially cold day when a
+baby was baptized, the minister prayed for a mitigation of the weather,
+and on the same day in another town "Rev. Mr. Wigglesworth preached on the
+text, Who can stand before His Cold? Then by his own and people's sickness
+three Sabbaths passed without public Worship." February 20 he preached from
+these words: "He sends forth his word and thaws them." And the very next
+day a thaw set in which was regarded as a direct answer to his prayer and
+sermon. Sceptics now-a-days would suggest that he chose well the time to
+pray for milder weather.
+
+Many persons now living can remember the universal and noisy turning up
+of great-coat collars, the swinging of arms, and knocking together of the
+heavy-booted feet of the listeners towards the end of a long winter sermon.
+Dr. Hopkins used to say, when the noisy tintamarre began, "My hearers, have
+a little patience, and I will soon close."
+
+Another clergyman was irritated beyond endurance by the stamping,
+clattering feet, a _supplosio pedis_ that he regarded as an irreverent
+protest and complaint against the severity of the weather, rather than as a
+hint to him to conclude his long sermon. He suddenly and noisily closed his
+sermon-book, leaned forward out of his high pulpit, and thundered out these
+Biblical words of rebuke at his freezing congregation, whose startled faces
+stared up at him through dense clouds of vapor. "Out of whose womb came the
+ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are
+hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Knowest thou the
+ordinance of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?
+Great things doth God which we cannot comprehend. He saith to the snow, Be
+thou on the earth. By the breath of God frost is given. He causeth it to
+come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. Hearken unto
+this. _Stand still_, and consider the wondrous works of God." We can
+believe that he roared out the words "stand still," and that there was no
+more noise in that meeting-house on cold Sundays during the remainder of
+that winter.
+
+The ministers might well argue that no one suffered more from the freezing
+atmosphere than they did. In many records I find that they were forced to
+preach and pray with their hands cased in woollen or fur mittens or heavy
+knit gloves; and they wore long camlet cloaks in the pulpit and covered
+their heads with skull caps--as did Judge Sewall--and possibly wore, as he
+did also, a _hood_. Many a wig-hating minister must, in the Arctic
+meeting-house, have longed secretly for the grateful warmth to his head and
+neck of one of those "horrid Bushes of Vanity," a full-bottomed flowing
+wig.
+
+On bitter winter days Dr. Stevens of Kittery used to send a servant to the
+meeting-house to find out how many of his flock had braved the piercing
+blasts. If only seven persons were present, the servant asked them to
+return with him to the parsonage to listen to the sermon; but if there were
+eight members in the meeting-house he so reported to the Doctor, who then
+donned his long worsted cloak, tied it around his waist with a great
+handkerchief, and attired thus, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears,
+and with heavy mittens on his hands, ploughed through the deep snow to
+the church, and in the same dress preached his long, knotty sermon in
+his pulpit, while fierce wintry blasts rattled the windows and shook the
+turret, and the eight godly, shivering souls wished profoundly that one of
+their number had "lain at home in a slothfull, lazey, prophane way," and
+thus permitted the seven others and the minister to have the sermon in
+comfort in the parsonage kitchen before the great blazing logs in the open
+fireplace.
+
+Ah, it makes one shiver even to think of those gloomy churches, growing
+colder, and more congealed through weeks of heavy frost and fierce
+northwesters until they bore the chill of death itself. One can but
+wonder whether that fell scourge of New England, that hereditary
+curse--consumption--did not have its first germs evolved and nourished in
+our Puritan ancestors by the Spartan custom of sitting through the long
+winter services in the icy, death-like meeting-houses.
+
+Of the insufficient clothing of the church attendants of olden times it
+is unnecessary to speak with much detail. The goodmen with their heavy
+top-boots or jack-boots, their milled or frieze stockings, their warm
+periwigs surmounted by fur caps or beaver hats or hoods; and with their
+many-caped great-coats or full round cloaks were dressed with a sufficient
+degree of comfort, though they did not possess the warm woollen and silken
+underclothing which now make a man's winter attire so comfortable. They
+carried muffs too, as the advertisements of the times show. The "Boston
+News Letter" of 1716 offers a reward for a man's muff lost on the Sabbath
+day in the street. In 1725 Dr. Prince lost his black bearskin muff, and in
+1740 a "sableskin man's muff" was advertised as having been lost.
+
+But the Puritan goodwives and maidens were dressed in a meagre and scanty
+fashion that when now considered seems fairly appalling. As soon as
+the colonies grew in wealth and fashion, thin silk or cotton hose were
+frequently worn in midwinter by the wives and daughters of well-to-do
+colonists; and correspondingly thin cloth or kid or silk slippers,
+high-channelled pumps, or low shoes with paper soles and "cross-cut" or
+wooden heels were the holiday and Sabbath-day covering for the feet. In wet
+weather clogs and pattens formed an extra and much needed protection
+when the fair colonists walked. Linen underclothing formed the first
+superstructure of the feminine costume and threw its penetrating chill to
+the very marrow of the bones. Often in mid-winter the scant-skirted French
+calico gowns were made with short elbow sleeves and round, low necks, and
+the throat and shoulders were lightly covered with thin lawn neckerchiefs
+or dimity tuckers. The flaunting hooped-petticoat of another decade was
+worn with a silk or brocade sacque. A thin cloth cape or mantle or spencer,
+lined with sarcenet silk, was frequently the only covering for the
+shoulders. In examining the treasured contents of old wardrobes, trunks,
+and high-chests, and in reading the descriptions of women's winter attire
+worn throughout the eighteenth and half through the nineteenth century, I
+am convinced that the only portions of Puritan female anatomy that were
+clothed with anything approaching respectable regard for health in the
+inclement New England climate were the head and the hands. The hands of
+"New English dames" were carefully protected with embroidered kid or
+leather gloves (for the early New Englanders were great glove wearers) or
+with warm knit woollen mittens, though mittens for women's wear were
+always fingerless. The well-gloved hands were moreover warmly ensconced in
+enormous stuffed muffs of bearskin which were almost as large as a
+flour barrel, or in smaller muffs of rabbit-skin or mink or beaver. The
+goodwives' heads bore, besides the close caps so universally worn, mufflers
+and veils and hoods,--hoods of all kinds and descriptions, from the hoods
+of serge and camlet and gauze and black silk that Mistress Estabrook, wife
+of the Windham parson, proudly owned and wore, from the prohibited "silk
+and tiffany hoods" of the earliest planters down through the centuries'
+inflorescence of "hoods of crimson colored persian," "wild bore and hum-hum
+long hoods," "pointed velvet capuchins," "scarlet gipsys," "pinnered
+and tasselled hoods," "shirred lustring hoods," "hoods of rich pptuna,"
+"muskmelon hoods," to the warm quilted "punkin hoods" worn within this
+century in country churches. These "punkin-hoods" were quilted with great
+rolls of woollen wadding and drawn tight between the rolls with strong
+cords. They formed a deafening and heating head-covering which always had
+to be loosened and thrust back when the wearer was within doors. It
+was only equalled in shapeless clumsiness and unique ugliness by its
+summer-sister of the same date, the green silk calash,--that funniest and
+quaintest of all New England feminine headgear,--a great sunshade that
+could not be called a bonnet, always made of bright green silk shirred on
+strong lengths of rattan or whalebone, and extendible after the fashion of
+a chaise top. It could be drawn out over the face by a little green ribbon
+or "bridle" that was fastened to the extreme front at the top; or it could
+be pushed in a close-gathered mass on the back of the head These calashes
+were frequently a foot and a half in diameter, and thus stood well up from
+the head and did not disarrange the hair nor crush the headdress or cap.
+They formed a perfect and easily-adjusted shade from the sun. Masks, too,
+the fair Puritans wore to further protect their heads and faces,--masks of
+green silk or black vehet, with silver mouthpieces to place within the lips
+and thus enable the wearer to keep the mask firmly in place. Sometimes two
+little strings with a silver bead at one end were fastened to the mask, and
+seined as mouthpieces. With a string and bead at either corner of the
+mouth the mask-wearer could talk quite freely while still retaining her
+face-covering in its protecting position. These masks were never worn
+within doors. In the list of goods ordered by George Washington from Europe
+for his fair bride Martha were several of these riding-masks, and the kind
+step-father even ordered a supply of small masks for "Miss Custis," his
+little step-daughter.
+
+In bitter winter weather women carried to meeting little
+foot-stoves,--metal boxes which stood on legs and were filled with hot
+coals at home, and a second time during the morning from the hearthstone of
+a neighboring farm-house or a noon-house. These foot-warmers helped to make
+endurable to the goodwives the icy chill of the meeting-house; and round
+their mother's foot-stove the shivering little children sat on their low
+crickets, warming their half-frozen fingers.
+
+Some of these foot-stoves were really pretentious church-furnishings. I
+have seen one "brassen foot-stove" which had the owner's cipher cut out of
+the sheet metal, and from the side was hung a wrought brass chain. By this
+chain, a century ago, the shining polished brass stove was carried into
+church in the hands of a liveried black man, who held it ostentatiously at
+arms' length, that neither ash nor scorch might touch his scarlet velvet
+breeches. And after he had tucked it under my lady's tiny feet as she sat
+in her pew, he retired to his freezing loft high up among the beams,--the
+"Nigger Pew,"--where, I am sorry to record, he more than once solaced and
+warmed himself with a bottle of "kill-devil" which he had smuggled into
+church, until he fell ignominiously asleep and his drunken snores so
+disturbed the minister and the congregation, that two tithingmen were
+forced to climb the ladder-like staircase and pull him down and out of
+the church and to the neighboring tavern to sleep off the effects of the
+liquor. For being "a man and a brother" and, above all, in spite of his
+petty idiosyncrasies, a very good and cherished servant, he could not be
+thrust out into the snow to freeze to death.
+
+But with the extreme Puritan contempt of comfort even foot-stoves were
+not always allowed. The First Church of Roxbury, after having one church
+edifice destroyed by fire in 1747, prohibited the use of footstoves in
+meeting, and the Roxbury matrons sat with frozen toes in their fine new
+meeting-house. The Old South Church of Boston was not so rigid, though it
+felt the same dread of fire; for we find this entry on the records of the
+church under the date of January 10, 1771: "Whereas, danger is apprehended
+from the [foot] stoves that arc frequently left in the meeting-house after
+the publick worship is over; Voted, that the Saxton make diligent search on
+the Lord's Day evening and in the evening after a lecture, to see if any
+stoves are left in the house, and that if he find any there he take them
+to his own house; and it is expected that the owners of such stoves make
+reasonable satisfaction to the Saxton for his trouble before they take them
+away."
+
+In Hardwicke, in 1792, it was ordered that "no stows be carried into our
+new meeting-house with fire in them." The Hardwicke women may have found
+comfort in a contrivance which is thus described in by an "old inhabitant:"
+
+      "There to warm their feet
+  Was seen an article now obsolete,
+  A sort of basket tub of braided straw
+  Or husks, in which is placed a heated stone,
+  Which does half-frozen limbs superbly thaw.
+  And warms the marrow of the oldest bone."
+
+In some of the early, poorly built log meeting-houses, fur bags made of
+coarse skins, such as wolf-skin, were nailed or tied to the edges of the
+benches, and into these bags the worshippers thrust their feet for warmth.
+In some communities it was the custom for each family to bring on cold days
+its "dogg" to meeting; where, lying at or on his master's feet, he proved
+a source of grateful warmth. These animal stoves became such an abounding
+nuisance, however, that dog-whippers had to be appointed to serve on
+Sundays to drive out the dogs. All through the records of the early
+churches we find such entries as this: "Whatsoever doggs come into the
+meeting-house in time of public worship, their owners shall each pay
+sixpence." Sixpence seems little, but the thrifty and poor Puritans would
+rather freeze their toes than pay sixpence for their calorific dogs.
+
+The church members made many rules and regulations to keep the cold out of
+the meeting-house during service-time, or perhaps we should say to keep the
+wind out. Thus in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1725 it was ordered that the
+"several doors of the meeting-house be taken care of and kept shut in very
+cold and windy seasons according to the lying of the wind from time to
+time; and that people in such windy weather come in at the leeward doors
+only, and take care that they are easily shut both to prevent the breaking
+of the doors and the making of a noise." In other churches it was ordered
+that "no doors be opened to the windward and only one door to the leeward"
+during winter weather.
+
+The first church of Salem built a "cattied chimney twelve feet long" in its
+meeting-house in 1662, but five years later it was removed, perhaps through
+the colonists' dread lest the building be destroyed by a conflagration
+caused by the combustible nature of the materials of which the chimney was
+composed. Felt, in his "Annals of Salem," asserts that the First Church of
+Boston was the first New England congregation to have a stove for heating
+the meeting-house at the time of public worship; this was in 1773. This
+statement is incorrect. Mr. Judd says the Hadley church had an iron stove
+in their meeting-house as early as 1734--the Hadley people were such
+sybarites and novelty-lovers in those early days! The Old South Church of
+Boston followed in the luxurious fashion in 1783, and the "Evening Post"
+of January 25, 1783, contained a poem of which these four lines show the
+criticising and deprecating spirit:--
+
+  "Extinct the sacred fire of love,
+    Our zeal grown cold and dead,
+  In the house of God we fix a stove
+    To warm us in their stead."
+
+Other New England congregations piously froze during service-time well into
+this century. The Longmeadow church, early in the field, had a stove in
+1810; the Salem people in 1815; and the Medford meeting in 1820. The church
+in Brimfield in 1819 refused to pay for a stove, but ordered as some
+sacrifice to the desire for comfort, two extra doors placed on the
+gallery-stairs to keep out draughts; but when in that town, a few years
+later, a subscription was made to buy a church stove, one old member
+refused to contribute, saying "good preaching kept him hot enough without
+stoves."
+
+As all the church edifices were built without any thought of the
+possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best
+they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually
+placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters,
+there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous
+stove-pipes that too often spread, from every leaky and ill-fastened
+joint, smoke and sooty vapors, and sometimes pyroligneous drippings on the
+congregation. Often tin pails to catch the drippings were hung under the
+stove-pipes, forming a further chaste and elegant church-decoration. Many
+serious objections were made to the stoves besides the aesthetic ones.
+It was alleged that they would be the means of starting many destructive
+conflagrations; that they caused severe headaches in the church attendants;
+and worst of all, that the _heat warped the ladies' tortoise-shell
+back-combs_.
+
+The church reformers contended, on the other hand, that no one could
+properly receive spiritual comfort while enduring such decided bodily
+discomfort. They hoped that with increased physical warmth, fervor in
+religion would be equally augmented,--that, as Cowper wrote,--
+
+  "The churches warmed, they would no longer hold
+  Such frozen figures, stiff as they are cold."
+
+Many were the quarrels and discussions that arose in New England
+communities over the purchase and use of stoves, and many were the meetings
+held and votes taken upon the important subject.
+
+"Peter Parley"--Mr. Samuel Goodrich--gave, in his "Recollections," a very
+amusing account of the sufferings endured by the wife of an anti-stove
+deacon. She came to church with a look of perfect resignation on the
+Sabbath of the stove's introduction, and swept past the unwelcome intruder
+with averted head, and into her pew. She sat there through the service,
+growing paler with the unaccustomed heat, until the minister's words about
+"heaping coals of fire" brought too keen a sense of the overwhelming and
+unhealthful stove-heat to her mind, and she fainted. She was carried out of
+church, and upon recovering said languidly that it "was the heat from the
+stove." A most complete and sudden resuscitation was effected, however,
+when she was informed of the fact that no fire had as yet been lighted in
+the new church-furnishing.
+
+Similar chronicles exist about other New England churches, and bear a
+striking resemblance to each other. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in an address
+delivered in New York on December 20, 1853, the anniversary of the Landing
+of the Pilgrims, referred to the opposition made to the introduction of
+stoves into the old meeting-house in Litchfield, Connecticut, during the
+ministry of his father, and gave an amusing account of the results of the
+introgression. This allusion called up many reminiscences of anti-stove
+wars, and a writer in the "New York Enquirer" told the same story of the
+fainting woman in Litchfield meeting, who began to fan herself and at
+length swooned, saying when she recovered "that the heat of the horrid
+stove had caused her to faint." A correspondent of the "Cleveland Herald"
+confirmed the fact that the fainting episode occurred in the Litchfield
+meeting-house. The editor of the "Hartford Daily Courant" thus added his
+testimony:--
+
+    "Violent opposition had been made to the introduction of a stove in the
+    old meeting-house, and an attempt made in vain to induce the soc
+    to purchase one. The writer was one of seven young men who finally
+    purchased a stove and requested permission to put it up in the
+    meeting-house on trial. After much difficulty the committee consented.
+    It was all arranged on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday we took our
+    seats in the Bass, rather earlier than usual, to see the fun. It was a
+    warm November Sunday, in which the sun shone cheerfully and warmly on
+    the old south steps and into the naked windows. The stove stood in the
+    middle aisle, rather in front of the Tenor Gallery. People came in and
+    stared. Good old Deacon Trowbridge, one of the most simple-hearted and
+    worthy men of that generation, had, as Mr. Beecher says, been induced
+    to give up his opposition. He shook his head, however, as he felt the
+    heat reflected from it, and gathered up the skirts of his great
+    as he passed up the broad aisle to the deacon's seat. Old Uncle Noah
+    Stone, a wealthy farmer of the West End, who sat near, scowled and
+    muttered at the effects of the heat, but waited until noon to utter his
+    maledictions over his nut-cakes and cheese at the intermission. There
+    had in fact been _no fire in the stove_, the day being too warm.
+    We were too much upon the broad grin to be very devotional, and smiled
+    rather loudly at the funny things we saw. But when the editor of the
+    village paper, Mr. Bunce, came in (who was a believer in stoves in
+    churches) and with a most satisfactory air warmed his hands by the
+    stove, keeping the skirts of his great-coat carefully between his
+    knees, we could stand it no longer but dropped invisible behind the
+    breastwork. But the climax of the whole was (as the Cleveland man says)
+    when Mrs. Peck went out in the middle of the service. It was, however,
+    the means of reconciling the whole society; for after that first day we
+    heard no more opposition to the warm stove in the meeting-house."
+
+With all this corroborative evidence I think it is fully proved that the
+event really happened in Litchfield, and that the honor was stolen for
+other towns by unveracious chroniclers; otherwise we must believe in an
+amazing unanimity of church-joking and sham-fainting all over New England.
+
+The very nature, the stern, pleasure-hating and trial-glorying Puritan
+nature, which made our forefathers leave their English homes to come, for
+the love of God and the freedom of conscience, to these wild, barren, and
+unwelcoming shores, made them also endure with fortitude and almost with
+satisfaction all personal discomforts, and caused them to cling with
+persistent firmness to such outward symbols of austere contempt of
+luxury, and such narrow-minded signs of love of simplicity as the lack of
+comfortable warmth during the time of public worship. The religion which
+they had endured such bitter hardships to establish, did not, in their
+minds, need any shielding and coddling to keep it alive, but thrived far
+better on Spartan severity and simplicity; hence, it took two centuries of
+gradual and most tardy softening and modifying of character to prepare the
+Puritan mind for so advanced a reform and luxury as proper warmth in the
+meeting-houses in winter.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Noon-House.
+
+
+
+There might have been seen a hundred years ago, by the side of many an old
+meeting-house in New England, a long, low, mean, stable-like building, with
+a rough stone chimney at one end. This was the "noon-house," or "Sabba-day
+house," or "horse-hows," as it was variously called. It was a place of
+refuge in the winter time, at the noon interval between the two services,
+for the half-frozen members of the pious congregation, who found there the
+grateful warmth which the house of God denied. They built in the rude stone
+fireplace a great fire of logs, and in front of the blazing wood ate their
+noon-day meal of cold pie, of doughnuts, of pork and peas, or of brown
+bread with cheese, which they had brought safely packed in their capacious
+saddlebags. The dining-place smelt to heaven of horses, for often at the
+further end of the noon-house were stabled the patient steeds that, doubly
+burdened, had borne the Puritans and their wives to meeting; but this
+stable-odor did not hinder appetite, nor did the warm equine breaths that
+helped to temper the atmosphere of the noon-house offend the senses of the
+sturdy Puritans. From the blazing fire in this "life-saving station" the
+women replenished their little foot-stoves with fresh, hot coals, and thus
+helped to make endurable the icy rigor of the long afternoon service.
+
+If the winter Sabbath Day were specially severe, a "hired-man," or one of
+the grown sons of the family, was sent at an early hour to the noon-house
+in advance of the other church-attendants, and he started in the rough
+fireplace a fire for their welcome after their long, cold, morning ride;
+and before its cheerful blaze they thoroughly warmed themselves before
+entering the icy meeting-house. The embers were carefully covered over
+and left to start a second blaze at the nooning, covered again during the
+afternoon service, and kindled up still a third time to warm the chilled
+worshippers ere they started for their cold ride home in the winter
+twilight. And when the horses were saddled, or were harnessed and hitched
+into the great box-sleighs or "pungs," and when the good Puritans were well
+wrapped up, the dying coals were raked out for safety and the noon-house
+was left as quiet and as cold as the deserted meeting-house until the
+following Sabbath or Lecture day.
+
+If the meeting-house chanced to stand in the middle of the town (as was
+the universal custom in the earliest colonial days) of course a noon-house
+would be rarely built, for it would plainly not be needed. Nor was a
+"Sabba-day house" always seen in more lonely situations, if the sanctuary
+were placed near the substantial farm-house of a hospitable farmer; for to
+that friendly shelter the whole congregation would at noon-time repair and
+absorb to the fullest degree the welcome cider and warmth.
+
+In Lexington for many years after the Revolutionary War, the winter
+church-goers who came from any distance spent the nooning at the Dudley
+Tavern, where a roaring fire was built in the inn-parlor, and there the
+women and children ate their midday lunch. The men gathered in the bar-room
+and drank flip, and ate the tavern gingerbread and cheese, and talked over
+the horrors and glories of the war. In Haverhill, Derby, and many other
+towns, the school-house, which was built on the village green beside the
+church, was used for a noon-house by the church members, though not by
+their horses. The house of learning was never chimneyless and fireless, as
+was the house of God.
+
+As churches and towns multiplied, a meeting-house was often built to
+accommodate two little settlements or villages (and thus was convenient for
+neither), and was frequently placed in an isolated or inconvenient place,
+the top of a high hill being perhaps the most inconvenient and the most
+favored site. Thus a noon-house became an absolute necessity to Puritan
+health and existence, and often two or three were built near one
+meeting-house; while in some towns, as in Bristol, a whole row of
+disfiguring little "Sabba-day houses" stood on the meeting-house green,
+and in them the farmers (as they quaintly expressed in their petitions for
+permission to erect the buildings) "kept their duds and horses."
+
+In Derby, after several petitions had been granted to build noon-houses, it
+was found necessary, in 1764, to place some restrictions as to the location
+of the buildings, which had hitherto evidently been placed with the
+characteristically Puritanical indifference to general convenience or
+appearance. While the town still permitted the little log-huts to be
+erected, and though they could be placed on either side of the highway, it
+was ordered that the builders must not so locate them as to "incommode any
+highways." As early as 1690 the thoughtful Stonington people built a house
+"14 foot square and seven foot posts" with a chimney at one side, for the
+express purpose of having a place where their minister, Rev. Mr. Noyes,
+could thaw out between services. The New Canaan Church built on the green
+beside their meeting-house a fine "Society House," twenty-one feet long
+and sixteen feet wide, with a big chimney and fireplace. The horses were
+plainly "not in society" in New Canaan, for they were excluded from the
+occupancy and privileges of the Society House.
+
+"James June & all that lives at Larences" were allowed to build a
+"Sabbath-House" on the green near the New Britain meeting-house "as a
+Commodate for their conveniency of comeing to meeting on the Sabbath;" at
+the same time James Slason of the same village was given permission to "set
+yp a house for ye advantage of his having a place to go to" on the Sabbath.
+Frequently the petitions "to build a Sabbath Day House" or a "Housel for
+Shelter for Horss" were made in company by several farmers for their joint
+use and comfort, as shown by entries in the town and church records of
+Norwalk, New Milford, Durham, and Hartford.
+
+Noon-houses were much more frequent in Connecticut than in Massachusetts,
+and in several small towns in the former State they were used weekly
+between Sunday services until within the memory of persons now living;
+and some of the buildings still exist, though changed into granaries or
+stables. There was one also in use for many years and until recent years in
+Topsfield, in Massachusetts. We chanced upon one still standing on a lonely
+Narragansett road. A little enclosed burial-place, with moss-grown and
+weather-smoothed head-stones and neglected graves, was by the side of a
+filled-in cellar, upon which a church evidently had once stood. At a short
+distance from the church-site was a long, low, gray, weather-beaten wooden
+building, with a coarse stone-and-mortar chimney at one end, and a great
+door at the other. Two small windows, destitute of glass, permitted us
+to peer into the interior of this dilapidated old structure, and we saw
+within, a floor of beaten earth, a rough stone fireplace, and a few rude
+horse-stalls. We felt sure that this tumble-down building had been neither
+a dwelling-house nor a stable, but a noon-house; and the occupants of a
+neighboring farm-house confirmed our decision. Too worthless to destroy,
+too out of the way to be of any use to any person, that old noon-house,
+through neglect and isolation, has remained standing until to-day.
+
+It was not until the use of chaises and wagons became universal, and the
+new means of conveyance crowded out the old-fashioned saddle and pillion,
+and the trotting horse superseded the once fashionable but quickly despised
+pacer, that the great stretches of horse-sheds were built which now
+surround and disfigure all our country churches. These sheds protect,
+of course, both horse and carriage from wind and rain. Few churches had
+horse-sheds until after the War of the Revolution, and some not until after
+the War of 1812. In 1796 the Longmeadow Church had "liberty to erect a
+Horse House in the Meeting House Lane." This horse house was a horse-shed.
+
+The "wretched boys" were not permitted even in these noon-houses to talk,
+much less to "sporte and playe." In some parishes it was ordered by the
+minister and the deacons that the Bible should be read and expounded
+to them, or a sermon be read to keep them quiet during the nooning.
+Occasionally some old patriarch would explain to them the notes that he
+had taken during the morning sermon. More unbearable still, the boys were
+sometimes ordered to explain the notes which they had taken themselves. I
+would I had heard some of those explanations! Thus they literally, as was
+written in 1774, throve on the "Good Fare of Brown Bread and the Gospell."
+
+In Andover, Judge Phillips left in his will a silver flagon to the church
+as an expression of interest and hope that the "laudable practice of
+reading between services may be continued so long as even a small number
+shall be disposed to attend the exercise." Mr. Abbott left another silver
+flagon to the Andover Church to encourage reading between services; though
+how this piece of plate encouraged personally, since neither the deacons
+nor the boys got it as a prize, cannot be precisely understood. The
+noon-house in Andover was a large building with a great chimney and open
+fireplace at either end. It has always seemed to me a piece of gratuitous
+posthumous cruelty in Judge Phillips and Mr. Abbott to try to cheat those
+Andover boys of their noon-time rest and relaxation, and to expect them,
+wriggling and twisting with repressed vitality, to listen to a long extra
+sermon, read perhaps by some unskilled reader, or explained by some
+incapable expounder. The Sabbath-school did not then exist, and was not in
+general favor until the noon-houses had begun to disappear. The Reverend
+Jedediah Morse, father of the inventor of the electric telegraph, was
+almost the first New England clergyman who approved of Sabbath-schools and
+established them in his parish. In Salem they were opened in 1808, and the
+scholars came at half-past six on Sunday mornings. Fancy the chill and
+gloom of the unheated, ill-lighted churches at that hour on winter
+mornings. The "Salem Gazette" openly characterized Sunday-schools, when
+first suggested, as profanations of the Sabbath, and for years they were
+not allowed in many Congregational churches. When the Sabbath-schools
+were universally established, and thus the attention and interest of the
+children was gained during the noon interval (the time the schools were
+usually held in country churches), and when each family sat in its own pew,
+and thus the boys were separated, and each under his parents' guardianship,
+the "wretched boys" of the Puritan Sabbath disappeared, and well-behaved,
+quiet, orderly boys were seen instead in the New England churches.
+
+This fashion of sermon-reading at the nooning happily did not obtain in
+all parts of New England. In many villages the meetings in the society
+noon-houses were to the townspeople what a Sunday newspaper is to Sunday
+readers now-a-days, an advertisement and exposition of all the news of the
+past week, and also a suggestion of events to come. At noon they discussed
+and wondered at the announcements and publishings which were tacked on
+the door of the meeting-house or the notices that had been read from the
+pulpit. The men talked in loud voices of the points of the sermon, of the
+doctrines of predestination pedobaptism and antipedobaptism, of original
+sin, and that most fascinating mystery, the unpardonable sin, and in lower
+voices of wolf and bear killing, of the town-meeting, the taxes, the crops
+and cattle; and they examined with keen interest one another's horses,
+and many a sly bargain in horse-flesh or exchange of cows and pigs was
+suggested, bargained over, and clinched in the "Sabba'-day house." Many a
+piece of village electioneering was also discussed and "worked" between the
+services. The shivering women crowded around the blazing and welcome fire,
+and seated themselves on rude benches and log seats while they ate and
+exchanged doughnuts, slices of rusk, or pieces of "pumpkin and Indian mixt"
+pie, and also gave to each other receipts therefor; and they discoursed
+in low voices of their spinning and weaving, of their candle-dipping
+or candle-running, of their success or failure in that yearly trial of
+patience and skill--their soap-making, of their patterns in quilt-piecing,
+and sometimes they slyly exchanged quilt-patterns. A sentence in an old
+letter reads thus: "Anne Bradford gave to me last Sabbath in the Noon House
+a peecing of the Blazing Star; tis much Finer than the Irish Chain or the
+Twin Sisters. I want yelloe peeces for the first joins, small peeces will
+do. I will send some of my lilac flowered print for some peeces of Cicelys
+yelloe India bed vallants, new peeces not washed peeces." They gave one
+another medical advice and prescriptions of "roots and yarbs" for their
+"rheumatiz," "neuralgy," and "tissick;" and some took snuff together, while
+an ancient dame smoked a quiet pipe. And perhaps (since they were women as
+well as Puritans) they glanced with envy, admiration, or disapproval, or
+at any rate with close scrutiny, at one another's gowns and bonnets and
+cloaks, which the high-walled pews within the meeting-house had carefully
+concealed from any inquisitive, neighborly view.
+
+The wood for these beneficent noon-house fires was given by the farmers
+of the congregation, a load by each well-to-do land-owner, if it were a
+"society-house," and occasionally an apple-growing farmer gave a barrel of
+"cyder" to supply internal instead of external warmth. Cider sold in 1782
+for six shillings "Old Tenor" a barrel, so it was worth about the same
+as the wood both in money value and calorific qualities. A hundred years
+previously--in 1679--cider was worth ten shillings a barrel. In 1650, when
+first made in America, it was a costly luxury, selling for L4 4s. a barrel.
+That this thawed-out Sunday barrel of cider would prove invariably a source
+of much refreshment, inspiration, solace, tongue-loosing, and blood-warming
+to the chilled and shivering deacons, elders, and farmers who gathered in
+the noon-house, any one who has imbibed that all-potent and intoxicating
+beverage, oft-frozen "hard" cider, can fervently testify.
+
+Sometimes a very opulent farmer having built a noon-house for his own and
+his family's exclusive use, would keep in it as part of his "duds" a few
+simple cooking utensils in which his wife or daughters would re-heat or
+partially cook his noon-day Sabbath meal, and mix for him a hot toddy or
+punch, or a mug of that "most insinuating drink"--flip. Flip was made of
+home-brewed beer, sugar, and a liberal dash of Jamaica rum, and was mixed
+with a "logger-head"--a great iron "stirring-stick" which was heated in the
+fire until red hot and then thrust into the liquid. This seething iron made
+the flip boil and bubble and imparted to it a burnt, bitter taste which was
+its most attractive attribute. I doubt not that many a "loggerhead" was
+kept in New England noon-houses and left heating and gathering insinuating
+goodness in the glowing coals, while the pious owner sat freezing in the
+meeting-house, also gathering goodness, but internally keeping warm at the
+thought of the bitter nectar he should speedily brew and gladly imbibe at
+the close of the long service.
+
+The comfort of a hot midday dinner on the Sabbath was not regarded with
+much favor, though perhaps with secret envy, by the neighbors of the
+luxury-loving farmer, who saw in it too close an approach to "profanation
+of the Sabbath." The heating and boiling of the flip with the red hot
+"loggerhead" hardly came under the head of "unnecessary Sabbath cooking"
+even in the minds of the most straight-laced descendants of the Puritans.
+
+When stoves were placed and used in the New England meeting-houses, the
+noon-day lunches were eaten within the pews inside the sanctuary, and the
+noon-houses, no longer being needed, followed the law of cause and effect,
+and like many other institutions of the olden times quickly disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+The Deacon's Office.
+
+
+
+The deacons in the early New England churches had, besides their regular
+duties on the Lord's Day, and their special duties on communion Sabbaths,
+the charge of prudential concerns, and of providing for the poor of the
+church. They also "dispensed the word" on Sabbaths to the congregation
+during the absence of the ordained minister. Judge Sewall thus describes
+in his diary under the date of November, 1685, the method at that time of
+appointing or ordaining a deacon:--
+
+    "In afternoon Mr. Willard ordained our Brother Theophilus Frary to the
+    office of a Deacon. Declared his acceptance January 11th first
+    now again. Propounded him to the congregation at Noon. Then in even
+    propounded him if any of the church of other had to object they might
+    speak. Then took the Church's Vote, then call'd him up to the Pulpit,
+    laid his Hand on's head, and said I ordain Thee, etc., etc., gave him
+    his charge, then Prayed & sung 2nd Part of 84th Psalm."
+
+The deacons always sat near the pulpit in a pew, which was generally
+raised a foot or two above the level of the meeting-house floor, and which
+contained, usually, several high-backed chairs and a table or a broad
+swinging-shelf for use at the communion service. These venerable men were
+a group of awe-inspiring figures, who, next to the parson, received the
+respect of the community. In Bristol, Connecticut, the deacons wore
+starched white linen caps in the meeting-house to indicate their office,--a
+singular local custom. One of their duties in many communities was
+naturally to furnish the sacramental wines, and the money for the payment
+thereof was allowed to them from the church-rates, or was raised by special
+taxation. In Farmington, Connecticut, in 1669, each male inhabitant was
+ordered to pay a peck of wheat or one shilling to the deacons of the church
+to defray the expenses of the sacrament. In Groton church, in 1759, "4
+Coppers for every Sacrament for 1 year" was demanded from each communicant.
+In Springfield the "deacon's rate" was paid in "wampam,"--sixpence in
+"wampam" or a peck of Indian corn from each family in the town. This
+special tax was somewhat modified in case a man had no wife, or if he were
+not a church-member, but in the latter case he still had to pay some dues,
+though of course he could not take part in the communion service. In 1734
+the Milton church ordered the deacons to procure "good Canary Wine for
+the Communion Table." Abuses sometimes arose,--abominably poor wines were
+furnished, though full rates were paid for the purchase of wine of
+good quality; and in Newbury the man who was appointed to furnish the
+sacramental wines, sold, under that religious cover, wine and liquors at
+retail.
+
+The deacons also had charge of the vessels used in the communion service.
+These vessels were frequently stored, when not in use, under the pulpit in
+a little closet which opened into "the Ministers wives pue," and which was
+fabled to be at the disposal of the tithingmen and deacons for the darksome
+incarceration of unruly and Sabbath-breaking boys. The communion vessels
+were not always of valuable metal; John Cotton's first church had wooden
+chalices; the wealthier churches owned pieces of silver which had been
+given to them, one piece at a time, by members or friends of the church;
+but communion services of pewter were often seen.
+
+The church in Hanover, Massachusetts, bought a pewter service in 1728, and
+the record of the purchase still exists. It runs thus:--
+
+  3 Pewter Tankards marked C. T.    10 shillings.
+  5   "    Beakers    "    C. E.    6 sh. 6d. each.
+  2   "    Platters   "    C. P.    5 sh. each.
+  1   "    Basin for Baptisms.
+
+This pewter service is still owned by the Hanover church, a highly prized
+relic. Until 1753 the church in Andover used a pewter communion service,
+but when a silver service was given to it, the Andover church sent the
+vessels of baser metal to a sister church in Methuen. In Haverhill the will
+of a church-member named White gave to the church absolutely the pewter
+dishes which were used at the sacrament, and which had been his personal
+property. The "ffirst church" of Hartford had "one Puter fflagon, ffower
+pewter dishes, and a bason" left to it by the bequest of one of its
+members. When the Danvers church was burned in 1805, the pewter communion
+vessels were saved while the silver ones were either burnt or stolen. As
+pewter was, in the early days of New England, far from being a despised
+metal, and as pewter dishes and plates were seen on the tables of the
+wealthiest families, were left by will as precious possessions, were
+engraved with initials and stamped with coats of arms, and polished with
+as much care as were silver vessels, a communion service of pewter was
+doubtless felt to be a thoroughly satisfactory acquisition and appointment
+to a Puritan church.
+
+The deacons of course took charge of the church contributions. Lechford,
+in his "Plaine Dealing," thus describes the manner of giving in the Boston
+church in 1641:--
+
+    "Baptism being ended, follows the contribution, one of the deacons
+    saying, 'Brethren of the Congregation, now there is time left for
+    contribution, whereof as God has prospered you so freely offer.' The
+    Magistrates and chief gentlemen first, and then the Elders and all the
+    Congregation of them, and most of them that are not of the church, all
+    single persons, widows and women in absence of their husbands, came up
+    one after another one way, and bring their offering to the deacon at
+    his seat, and put it into a box of wood for the purpose, if it be money
+    or papers. If it be any other Chattel they set or lay it down before
+    the deacons; and so pass on another way to their seats again; which
+    money and goods the Deacons dispose towards the maintenance of the
+    Minister, and the poor of the Church, and the Churches occasions
+    without making account ordinarily."
+
+Lechford also said he saw a "faire gilt cup" given at the public
+contribution; and other gifts of value to the church and minister were
+often made. Libellous verses too were thrown into the contribution boxes,
+and warning and gloomy messages from the Quakers; and John Rogers,
+in derision of a pompous New London minister, threw in the insulting
+contribution of an old periwig. One Puritan goodwife, sternly unforgiving,
+never saw a contribution taken for proselyting the Indians without
+depositing in the contribution-box a number of leaden bullets, the only
+tokens she wished to see ever dispersed among the red men.
+
+Even our pious forefathers were not always quite honest in their church
+contributions, and had to be publicly warned, as the records show, that
+they must deposit "wampum without break or deforming spots," or "passable
+peage without breaches." The New Haven church was particularly tormented by
+canny Puritans who thus managed to dispose of their broken and worthless
+currency with apparent Christian generosity. In 1650 the New Haven "deacons
+informed the Court that the wampum which is putt into the Church Treasury
+is generally so bad that the Elders to whom they pay it cannot pay it
+away."
+
+In 1651, as the bad wampum was still paid in by the pious New Haven
+Puritans, it was ordered that "no money save silver or bills" be accepted
+by the deacons. After this order the deacons and elders found tremendous
+difficulty in getting any contributions at all, and many are the records of
+the actions and decisions of the church in regard to the perplexing matter.
+It should be said, in justice to the New Haven colonists, though they were
+the most opulent of the New England planters, save the wealthy settlers
+of Narragansett, that money of all kinds was scarce, and that the Indian
+money, wampum-peag, being made of a comparatively frail sea-shell, was more
+easily disfigured and broken than was metal coin; and that there was little
+transferable wealth in the community anyway, even in "Country Pay." The
+broken-wampum-giver of the seventeenth century, who contributed with intent
+to defraud and deceive the infant struggling church was the direct and
+lineal ancestor of the sanctimonious button-giver of nineteenth-century
+country churches.
+
+In Revolutionary times, after the divine service, special contributions
+were taken for the benefit of the Continental Army. In New England large
+quantities of valuable articles were thus collected. Not only money, but
+finger-rings, earrings, watches, and other jewelry, all kinds of male
+attire,--stockings, hats, coats, breeches, shoes,--produce and groceries of
+all kinds, were brought to the meeting-house to give to the soldiers. Even
+the leaden weights were taken out of the window-sashes, made into bullets,
+and brought to meeting. On one occasion Madam Faith Trumbull rose up in
+Lebanon meeting-house in Connecticut, when a collection was being made for
+the army, took from her shoulders a magnificent scarlet cloak, which had
+been a present to her from Count Rochambeau, the commander-in-chief of the
+French allied army, and advancing to the altar, gave it as her offering to
+the gallant men, who were fighting not only the British army, but terrible
+want and suffering. The fine cloak was cut into narrow strips and used as
+red trimmings for the uniforms of the soldiers. The romantic impressiveness
+of Madam Trumbull's patriotic act kindled warm enthusiasm in the
+congregation, and an enormous collection was taken, packed carefully, and
+sent to the army.
+
+One early duty of the deacons which was religiously and severely performed
+was to watch that no one but an accepted communicant should partake of the
+holy sacrament. One stern old Puritan, having been officially expelled from
+church-membership for some temporal rather than spiritual offence, though
+ignored by the all-powerful deacon, still refused to consider himself
+excommunicated, and calmly and doggedly attended the communion service
+bearing his own wine and bread, and in the solitude of his own pew communed
+with God, if not with his fellow-men. For nearly twenty years did this
+austere man rigidly go through this lonely and sad ceremonial, until he
+conquered by sheer obstinacy and determination, and was again admitted to
+church-fellowship.
+
+A very extraordinary custom prevailed in several New England churches.
+Through it the deacons were assigned a strange and serious duty which
+appeared to make them all-important and possibly self-important, and
+which must have weighed heavily upon them, were they truly godly, and
+conscientious in the performance of it. In the rocky little town of Pelham
+in the heart of Massachusetts, toward the close of the eighteenth century
+and during the pastorate of the notorious thief, counterfeiter, and forger,
+Rev. Stephen Burroughs, that remarkable rogue organized and introduced to
+his parishioners the custom of giving during the month a metal check to
+each worthy and truly virtuous church-member, on presentation of which the
+check-bearer was entitled to partake of the communion, and without which he
+was temporarily excommunicated. The duty of the deacon in this matter was
+to walk up and down the aisles of the church at the close of each service
+and deliver to the proper persons (proper in the deacon's halting human
+judgment) the significant checks. The deacon had also to see that this
+religionistic ticket was presented on the communion Sabbath. Great must
+have been the disgrace of one who found himself checkless at the end of the
+month, and greater even than the heart-burnings over seating the meeting
+must have been the jealousies and church quarrels that arose over the
+communion-checks. And yet no records of the protests or complaints of
+indignant or grieving parishioners can be found, and the existence of
+the too worldly, too business-like custom is known to us only through
+tradition.
+
+Many of the little chips called "Presbyterian checks" are, however, still
+in existence. They are oblong discs of pewter, about an inch and a half
+long, bearing the initials "P. P.," which stand, it is said, for "Pelham
+Presbyterian." I could not but reflect, as I looked at the simple little
+stamped slips of metal, that in a community so successful in the difficult
+work of counterfeiting coin, it would have been very easy to form a mould
+and cast from it spurious checks with which to circumvent the deacons and
+preserve due dignity in the meeting.
+
+The Presbyterian checks have never been attributed in Massachusetts to
+other than the Pelham church, and are usually found in towns in the
+vicinity of Pelham; and there the story of their purpose and use is
+universally and implicitly believed. A clergyman of the Pelham church gave
+to many of his friends these Presbyterian checks, which he had found among
+the disused and valueless church-properties, and the little relics of the
+old-time deacons and services have been carefully preserved.
+
+In New Hampshire, however, a similar custom prevailed in the churches of
+Londonderry and the neighboring towns.. The Londonderry settlers were
+Scotch-Irish Presbyterians (and the Pelham planters were an off-shoot of
+the Londonderry settlement), and they followed the custom of the Scotch
+Presbyterians in convening the churches twice a year to partake of the
+Lord's Supper. This assembly was always held in Londonderry, and ministers
+and congregations gathered from all the towns around. Preparatory services
+were held on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Long tables were placed in
+the aisles of the church on the Sabbath; and after a protracted and solemn
+address upon the deep meaning of the celebration and the duties of the
+church-members, the oldest members of the congregation were seated at the
+table and partook of the sacrament. Thin cakes of unleavened bread were
+specially prepared for this sacred service. Again and again were the tables
+refilled with communicants, for often seven hundred church-members were
+present. Thus the services were prolonged from early morning until
+nightfall. When so many were to partake of the Lord's Supper, it seemed
+necessary to take means to prevent any unworthy or improper person from
+presenting himself. Hence the tables were fenced off, and each communicant
+was obliged to present a "token." These tokens were similar to the
+"Presbyterian checks;" they were little strips of lead or pewter stamped
+with the initials "L. D.," which may have stood for "Londonderry" or
+"Lord's Day." They were presented during the year by the deacons and elders
+to worthy and pious church-members. This bi-annual celebration of the
+Lord's Supper--this gathering of old friends and neighbors from the rocky
+wilds of New Hampshire to join, in holy communion--was followed on Monday
+by cheerful thanksgiving and social intercourse, in which, as in every
+feast, our old friend, New England rum, played no unimportant part. The
+three days previous to the communion Sabbath were, however, solemnly
+devoted to the worship of God; a Londonderry man was reproved and
+prosecuted for spreading grain upon a Thursday preceding a communion
+Sunday, just as he would have been for doing similar work upon the Sabbath.
+The use of these "tokens" in the Londonderry church continued until the
+year 1830.
+
+In the coin collection of the American Antiquarian Society are little
+pewter communion-checks, or tokens, stamped with a heart. These were used
+in the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, and were delivered to pious
+church-members at the Friday evening prayer-meeting preceding the communion
+Sabbath. Long tables were set in the aisles, as at Londonderry. In
+practice, belief, and origin, the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania churches
+were sisters.
+
+The deacons had many minor duties to perform in the different parishes.
+Some of these duties they shared with the tithingman. They visited the
+homes of the church-members to hear the children say the catechism, they
+visited and prayed with the sick, and they also reported petty offences,
+though they were not accorded quite so powerful legal authority as the
+tithingmen and constables.
+
+It was much desired by several of the first-settled ministers that there
+should be deaconesses in the New England Puritan church, and many good
+reasons were given for making such appointments. It was believed that
+for the special duty of visiting the sick and afflicted in the community
+deaconesses would be more useful than deacons. There had been an aged
+deaconess in the Puritan church in Holland, who with a "little birchen
+rod" had kept the children in awe and order in meeting, and who had also
+exercised "her guifts" in speaking; but when she died no New England
+successor was appointed to fill her place.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims.
+
+
+We read in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," of the fair Priscilla, when
+John Alden came to woo her for his friend, the warlike little captain, that
+
+    "Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,
+    Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together; Rough-hewn,
+    angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and
+    overhung by the running vine of the verses. Such was the book from
+    whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem."
+
+One of these "well-worn psalm-books of Ainsworth" lies now before me,
+perhaps the very one from which the lonely Priscilla sang as she sat
+a-spinning.
+
+There is something especially dear to the lover and dreamer of the olden
+time, to the book-lover and antiquary as well, in an old, worn psalm or
+hymn book. It speaks quite as eloquently as does an old Bible of loving
+daily use, and adds the charm of interest in the quaint verse to reverence
+for the sacred word. A world of tender fancies springs into life as I turn
+over the pages of any old psalm-book "reading between the lines," and as
+I decipher the faded script on the titlepage. But this "psalm-book of
+Ainsworth," this book loved and used by the Pilgrims, brought over in one
+of those early ships, perhaps in the "Mayflower" itself, this book so
+symbolic of those early struggling days in New England, has a romance, a
+charm, an interest which thrills every drop of Puritan blood in my veins.
+
+It is pleasing, too, this "Ainsworth's Version," aside from any thought of
+its historic associations; its square pages of diversified type are well
+printed, and have a quaint unfamiliar look which is intensely attractive,
+and to which the odd, irregular notes of music, the curiously ornamented
+head and tail pieces, and the occasional Hebrew or Greek letters add their
+undefinable charm.
+
+It is a square quarto of three hundred and forty-eight closely printed
+pages, bound in time-stained but well-preserved parchment, and even the
+parchment itself is interesting, and lovely to the touch. The titlepage is
+missing, but I know that this is the edition printed, as was Priscilla's,
+in Amsterdam in 1612 (not "in England in 1600" as a note written in the
+last blank page states). The full title was "The Book of Psalms. Englished
+both in Prose and Metre. With annotations opening the words and sentences
+by conference with other Scriptures. Eph. v: 18,19. Bee yee filled with
+the Spirit speaking to yourselves in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual-Songs
+singing and making melodie in your hearts to the Lord." The book contains
+besides the Psalms and Annotations, on its first pages, a "Preface
+declaring the reason and use of the Book;" and at the last pages a "Table
+directing to some principal things observed in the Annotations of the
+Psalms," a list of "Hebrew phrases observed which are somewhat hard and
+figurative," and also some "General Observations touching the Psalms."
+
+I can well imagine what a pious delight this book was to our Pilgrim
+Fathers; and what a still greater delight it was to our Pilgrim Mothers,
+in that day and country of few books. They possessed in it, not only a
+wonderful new metrical version of the Psalms for singing, but a prose
+version for comparison as well; and the deeply learned and profoundly
+worded annotations placed at the end of each Psalm were doubtless of
+special interest to such "scripturists with all their hearts" as they were.
+
+There were also, "for the use and edification of the saints," printed above
+each psalm the airs of appropriate tunes. The "rough-hewn, angular notes"
+are irregularly lozenge-shaped, like the notes or "pricks" in Queen
+Elizabeth's "Virginal-Book," and are placed on the staff without bars.
+Ainsworth, in his preface, says, "Tunes for the Psalms I find none set of
+God: so that ech people is to use the most grave decent and comfortable
+manner that they know how, according to the general rule. The singing notes
+I have most taken from our Englished psalms when they will fit the mesure
+of the verse: and for the other long verses I have also taken (for the most
+part) the gravest and easiest tunes of the French and Dutch psalmes." Easy
+the tunes certainly are, to the utmost degree of simplicity.
+
+Great diversity too of type did the Pilgrims find in their Psalm-book:
+Roman type, Italics, black-letter, all were used; the verse was printed in
+Italics, the prose in Roman type, and the annotation in black-letter and
+small Roman text with close-spaced lines. This variety though picturesque
+makes the text rather difficult to read; for while one can decipher
+black-letter readily enough when reading whole pages of it, when it is
+interspersed with other type it makes the print somewhat confusing to the
+unaccustomed eye.
+
+One curious characteristic of the typography is the frequent use of the
+hyphen, compound words or rather compound phrases being formed apparently
+without English rule or reason. Such combinations as these are given as
+instances: "highly-him-preferre," "renowned-name," "repose-me-quietlie,"
+"in-mind-uplay," "turn-to-ashes," "my-alonely-soul," "beat-them-final,"
+"pouring-out-them-hard," "inveyers-mak-streight," and "condemn-thou-them-
+as-guilty,"--which certainly would make fit verses to be sung to the
+accompaniment of Master Mace's "excellent-large-plump-lusty-fullspeaking-
+organ."
+
+Ainsworth's Version when read proves to be a scholarly book, exhibiting far
+better grammar and punctuation and more uniformity of spelling than "The
+New England Psalm-book," which at a later date displaced Ainsworth in the
+affections and religious services of the New England Puritans and Pilgrims.
+Both versions are somewhat confused in sense, and of uncouth and grotesque
+versification; though the metre of Ainsworth is better than the rhyme. It
+is all written in "common metre," nearly all in lines of eight and six
+syllables alternately.
+
+The name of the author of this version was Henry Ainsworth; he was the
+greatest of all the Holland Separatists, a typical Elizabethan Puritan,
+who left the church in which he was educated and attached himself to the
+Separatists, or Brownists, as they were called. He went into exile in
+Amsterdam in 1593, and worked for some time as a porter in a book-seller's
+shop, living (as Roger Williams wrote) "upon ninepence in the weeke with
+roots boyled." He established, with the Reverend Mr. Johnson, the new
+church in Holland; and when it was divided by dissension, he became the
+pastor of the "Ainsworthian Brownists" and so remained for twelve years.
+He was a most accomplished scholar, and was called the "rabbi of his age."
+Governor Bradford, in his "Dialogue," written in 1648, says of Ainsworth,
+"He had not his better for the Hebrew tongue in the University nor scarce
+in Europe." Hence, naturally, he was constantly engaged upon some work of
+translating or commentating, and still so highly prized is some of his work
+that it has been reprinted during this century. He also, being a skilful
+disputant, wrote innumerable controversial pamphlets and books, many
+of which still exist. It is said that he once had a long and spirited
+controversy with a brother divine as to whether the ephod of Aaron were
+blue or green. I fear we of to-day have lost much that the final, decisive
+judgment from so learned scholars and students as to the correct color has
+not descended to us, and now, if we wish to know, we shall have to fight it
+all over again.
+
+In spite of his power of argument (or perhaps on account of it) the most
+prominent part which Ainsworth seemed to take in Amsterdam for many years
+was that of peacemaker, as many of his contemporaries testify: for they
+quarrelled fiercely among themselves in the exiled church, though they
+had such sore need of unity and good fellowship; and they had many church
+arguments and judgments and lawsuits. They quarrelled over the exercise of
+power in the church; over the true meaning of the text Matthew xviii. 17;
+whether the members of the congregation should be allowed to look on their
+Bibles during the preaching or on their Psalm-books during the singing;
+whether they should sing at all in their meetings; over the power of the
+office of ruling elder (a fruitful source of dissension and disruption in
+the New England congregations likewise) and above all, they quarrelled long
+and bitterly over the unseemly and gay dress of the parson's wife, Madam
+Johnson. These were the terrible accusations that were brought against that
+bedizened Puritan: that she wore "her bodies tied to the petticote with
+points as men do their doublets and hose; contrary to I Thess. v: 22,
+conferred with Deut. xx: 11;" that she also wore "lawn coives," and
+"busks," and "whalebones in the petticote bodies," and a "veluet hoode,"
+and a "long white brest;" and that she "stood gazing bracing and vaunting
+in the shop dores;" and that "men called her a bounceing girl" (as if
+she could help that!). And one of her worst and most bitterly condemned
+offences was that she wore "a topish hat." This her husband vehemently
+denied; and long discussions and explanations followed on the hat's
+topishness,--"Mr. Ainsworth dilating much upon a greeke worde" (as of
+course so learned a man would). For the benefit of unlearned modern
+children of the Puritans let me give the old Puritan's precise explanation
+and classification of topishness. "Though veluet in its nature were not
+topish, yet if common mariners should weare such it would be a sign of
+pride and topishness in them. Also a gilded raper and a feather are not
+topish in their nature, neither in a captain to weare them, and yet if a
+minister should weare them they would be signs of great vanity topishness
+and lightness." I wonder that topish hat had not undone the whole Puritan
+church in Holland.
+
+In settling all these and many other disputes, in translating,
+commentating, and versifying, did Henry Ainsworth pass his days; until,
+worn out by hard labor, and succumbing to long continued weakness, he died
+in 1623. This romantic story of his death is told by Neal. "It was sudden
+and not without suspicion of violence; for it is reported that, having
+found a diamond of very great value in the streets of Amsterdam, he
+advertised it in print; and when the owner, who was a Jew, came to demand
+it, he offered him any acknowledgment he would desire, but Ainsworth though
+poor would accept of nothing but conference with some of his rabbis upon
+the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the Messiah, which the
+other promised, but not having interest enough to obtain it he was
+poisoned." This rather ambiguous sentence means that Ainsworth was
+poisoned, not the Jew. Brooks's account of the story is that the conference
+took place, the Jews were vanquished, and in revenge poisoned the champion
+of Christianity afterwards. Dexter most unromantically throws cold water on
+this poisoning story, and adduces much circumstantial testimony to prove
+its improbability; but it could hardly have been invented in cold blood by
+the Puritan historians, and must have had some foundation in truth. And
+since he is dead, and the thought cannot harm him, I may acknowledge that I
+firmly believe and I like to believe that he died in so romantic a way.
+
+The Puritans were psalm-singers ever; and in Holland the Brownist division
+of the church came under strong influences from Geneva and Wittenberg, the
+birth-places of psalm-singing, that made them doubly fond of "worship in
+song." Hence the Pilgrim Fathers, Brewster, Bradford, Carver, and Standish,
+for love of music as well as in affectionate testimony to their old pastor
+and friend, brought to the New World copies of his version of the Psalms
+and sang from it with delight and profit to themselves, if not with ease
+and elegance.
+
+Dexter says very mildly of Ainsworth's literary work that "there are
+diversities of gifts, and it is no offence to his memory to conclude that
+he shone more as an exegete than as a poet." Poesy is a gift of the gods
+and cometh not from deep Hebrew study nor from vast learning, and we must
+accept Ainsworth's pious enthusiasm in the place of poetic fervor. Of the
+quality of his work, however, it is best to judge for one's self. Here is
+his rendition of the Nineteenth Psalm, so well known to us in verse by
+Addison's glorious "The spacious firmament on high." The prose version is
+printed in one column and the verse by its side.
+
+    1. To the Mayster of the Musik: A Psalm of David
+
+    2. The heavens, doo tel the glory of God: and the out-spred firmament
+    shevveth; the work of his hand.
+
+    3. Day unto day uttereth speech: and night unto night manifesteth
+    knowledge:
+
+    4. No speech, and no words: not heard is their voice
+
+    5. Through all the earth, gone-forth is their line: and unto the
+    utmost-end of the world their speakings: he hath put a tent in them for
+    the sun.
+
+    6. And he; as a bridegroom, going-forth out of his privy-chamber:
+    joyes as a mighty-man to run a race
+
+    7. From the utmost end of the heavens is his egress; and his
+    compassing-regress is unto the utmost-ends of them: and none _is_
+    hidd, from his heat.
+
+    2. The heav'ne, doo tel the glory of God and his firmament dooth
+    preach.
+
+    3. work of his hands. Day unto day dooth largely-utter speach and night
+    unto night dooth knowledge shew
+
+    4. No speach, and words are none.
+
+    5. thier voice it-is not heard. Thier line through all the earth is
+    gone: and to the worlds end, thier speakings: in them he did dispose,
+
+    6. tent for the Sun. Who-bride-groom-like out of his chamber goes:
+    joyes strong-man-like, to run a race
+
+    7. From heav'ns end, his egress: and his regress to the end of them
+    hidd from his heat, none is:
+
+In order to show the proportion of annotation in the book, and to indicate
+the mental traits of the author, let me state that this psalm, in both
+prose and metrical versions, occupies about one page; while the closely
+printed annotations fill over three pages; which is hardly "explaining with
+brevitie," as Ainsworth says in his preface. With this psalm the notes
+commence thus:--
+
+"2. (the out-spred-firmament) the whole cope of heaven, with the aier which
+though it be soft and liquid and spred over the Earth, yet it is fast and
+firm and therefore called of us according to the common Greek version a
+firmament: the holy Ghost expresseth it by another term Mid-heaven.
+This out-spred-firmament of expansion God made amidds the waters for a
+separation and named it Heaven, which of David is said to be stretched out
+as courtayn and elsewhere is said to be as firm as moulten glass. So under
+this name firmament be commised the orbs of the heav'ns and the aier and
+the whole spacious country above the earth."
+
+These annotations must have formed to the Pilgrims not only a dictionary
+but a perfect encyclopaedia of useful knowledge. Things spiritual and things
+temporal were explained therein. Scientific, historic, and religious
+information were dispensed impartially. Much and varied instruction was
+given in Natural History, though viewed of course from a strictly religious
+point of view. The little Pilgrims learned from their Psalm-Book that the
+"Leviathan is the great whalefish or seadragon, so called of the fast
+joyning together of his scales as he is described Job 40: 20, 41 and
+is used to resemble great tyrants." They also learned that "Lions of
+sundry-kinds have sundry-names. Tear-in-pieces like a lion. That he ravin
+not, make-a-prey; called a plueker Renter or Tearer, and elsewhere Laby
+that is, Harty and couragious; Kphir, this lurking, Couchant. The reason
+of thier names is shewed, as The renting-lion as greedy to tear, and the
+lurking-Lion as biding in covert places. Other names are also given to this
+kind as Shachal, of ramping, of fierce nature; and Lajith of subduing his
+prey. Psalm LVI Lions called here Lebain, harty, stowt couragious, Lions.
+Lions are mentioned in the Scriptures for the stowtness of thier hart,
+boldnes, and grimnes of thier countenance."
+
+Here are other annotations taken at hap-hazard. The lines,
+
+  "Al they that doo upon me look
+    a scoff at me doe make
+  they with the lip do make-a-mow
+    the head they scornful-shake,"
+
+Ainsworth thus explains: "Make-a-mow, making-an-opening with the lip
+which may be taken both for mowing and thrusting out of the lip and for
+licentious opening thereof to speak reproach." The expression "Keep thou me
+as the black of the apple of the eye" is thus annotated: "The black, that
+is, the sight in the midds of the eye wherein appeareth the resemblance of
+a little man, and thereupon seemeth to be called in Hebrew Ishon which is a
+man. And as that part is blackish so this word is also used for other black
+things as the blackness of night. The apple so we call that which the
+Hebrew here calleth bath and babath that is the babie or little image
+appearing in the eye." Anger receives this definition: "ire, outward in
+the face, grauue, grimnes or fiercenes of countenance. The original Aph
+signifieth both the nose by which one breatheth, and Anger which appeareth
+in the snuffing or breathing of the nose."
+
+Before the Holland exiles had this version of Ainsworth's to sing from,
+they used the book known as "Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms." They gave it
+up gladly to show honor to the work of their loved pastor, and perhaps also
+with a sense of pleasure in not having to sing any verses which had been
+used and authorized by the Church of England. In doing this they had to
+abandon, however, such spirited lines as Sternhold's--
+
+  "The earth did shake, for feare did quake
+    the hills their bases shook.
+  Removed they were, in place most fayre
+    at God's right fearfull looks.
+
+  "He rode on hye, and did soe flye
+    Upon the cherubins
+  He came in sight and made his flight
+    Upon the winges of windes."
+
+They sung instead,--
+
+  "And th' earth did shake and quake and styrred bee
+  grounds of the mount: & shook for wroth was hee
+  Smoke mounted, in his wrath, fyre did eat
+  out of his mouth: from it burned-with heat."
+
+Alas, poor Priscilla! how could she sing with ease or reverence such
+confused verses? The tune, too, set in the psalm-book seems absolutely
+unfitted to the metre. I fear when she sang from the pages "the old Puritan
+anthem" that she was forced to turn it into a chant, else the irregular
+lines could never have been brought within the compass of the melody; and
+yet, the metre is certainly better than the sense.
+
+It may be thought that these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for
+their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome
+that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the
+most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the
+reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot be hidden, even by
+the wording of the learned Puritan minister:--
+
+    1. Jehovah feedeth me: I shall not lack
+
+    2. In grassy fields, he downe dooth make me lye: he gently-leads mee,
+    quiet-Waters by.
+
+    3. He dooth return my soul: for his name-sake in paths of justice
+    leads-me-quietly.
+
+    4. Yea, though I walk in dale of deadly-shade ile fear none yll, for
+    with me thou wilt be thy rod, thy staff eke, they shall comfort mee.
+
+But few of these psalm-books of Ainsworth are now in existence; but few
+indeed came to New England. Elder Brewster owned one, as is shown by
+the inventory of the books in his library. Not every member of the
+congregation, not every family possessed one; many were too poor, many
+"lacked skill to read," and in some communities only one psalm-book was
+owned in the entire church. Hence arose the odious custom of "deaconing" or
+"lining" the psalm, by which each line was read separately by the deacon or
+elder and then sung by the congregation. There is no doubt, however,
+that this Ainsworth's Version was used in many of the early New England
+meetings. Reverend Thomas Symmes, in his "Joco-Serious Dialogue," printed
+in 1723, wrote: "Furthermore the Church of Plymouth made use of Ainsworths
+Version of the Psalms until the year 1692. For altho' our New England
+version of the Psalms was compiled by sundry hands and completed by
+President Dunster about the year 1640; yet that church did not use it, it
+seems, 'till two and fifty years after but stuck to Ainsworth; and until
+about 1682 their excellent custom was to sing without reading the lines."
+
+John Cotton's account of the Salem church written in 1760, says, "On June
+19, 1692, the pastor propounded to the church that seeing many of the
+psalms in Mr. Ainsworth's translation which had hitherto been sung in the
+congregation had such difficult tunes that none in the church could set,
+they would consider of some expedient that they might sing all the psalms.
+After some time of consideration on August 7 following, the church voted
+that when the tunes were difficult in the translation then used, they
+would make use of the New England psalm-book, long before received in
+the churches of the Massachusetts colony, not one brother opposing the
+conclusion. But finding it inconvenient to use two psalm-books, they at
+length, in June 1696 agreed wholly to lay aside Ainsworth and with general
+consent introduced the other which is used to this day, 1760. And here it
+will be proper to observe that it was their practice until the beginning of
+October, 1681 to sing the psalms without reading the lines; but then, at
+the motion of a brother who otherwise could not join in the ordinance [I
+suppose because he could not read] they altered the custom, and reading
+was introduced, the elder performing that service after the pastor had
+first expounded the psalm, which were usually sung in course."
+
+On the blank leaf of the copy of Ainsworth now lying before me are written
+these words, "This was used in Salem half-a-century from the first
+settlement." In a record of the Salem church is this entry of a church
+meeting: "4 of 5th month, 1667. The pastor having formerly propounded
+and given reason for the use of the Bay Psalm Book in regard to the
+_difficulty of the tunes_ and that we could not sing them so well
+as formerly and _that there was a singularity in our using Ainsworths
+tunes_: but especially because we had not the liberty of singing all the
+scripture Psalms according to Col. iii. 16. He did not again propound the
+same, and after several brethren had spoken, there was at last a unanimous
+consent with respect to the last reason mentioned, that the Bay Psalm Book
+should be used together with Ainsworth to supply the defects of it."
+
+It is significant enough of the "low state of the musik in the meetings"
+when we find that the simple tunes written in Ainsworth's Version were too
+difficult for the colonists to sing. To such a condition had church-music
+been reduced by "lining the psalm" and by the lack of musical instruments
+to guide and control the singers. It was not much better in old England;
+for we find in the preface of Rous' Psalms (which were published in
+1643 and authorized to be used in the English Church) references to the
+"difficulty of Ainsworth's tunes."
+
+Hood says, "There is almost a certainty that no other version than
+Ainsworth was ever used in the colonies until the New England Version was
+published. But if any one was used in one or two of the churches it was
+Sternhold and Hopkins." I cannot feel convinced of this, but believe that
+both Ravenscroft's and Sternhold and Hopkins' Versions were used at first
+in many of the Bay settlements. Salem church had a peculiar connection in
+its origin with the church of Plymouth, which would account, doubtless,
+for its protracted use of the version so loved by the Pilgrims; but the
+Puritans of the Bay, coming directly from England, must have brought with
+them the version which they had used in England, that of Sternhold and
+Hopkins; and they would hardly have wished, nor would it have been possible
+for them to acquire speedily in the new land the Ainsworth's Version used
+by the Pilgrims from Holland.
+
+The second edition of Ainsworth's Version was printed in 1617, a third
+in 1618; the fourth, in London in 1639, was a folio; and the sixth, in
+Amsterdam in 1644, was an octavo. A little 24mo copy is in the Essex
+Institute in Salem, and an octavo is in the Prince Library, now in the
+custody of the Public Library of the City of Boston. The latter copy has
+a note in it written by the Rev. Thomas Prince: "Plymouth, May 1, 1732. I
+have seen an edition of this version of 1618; and this version was sung
+in Plymouth Colony and I suppose in the rest of New England 'till the New
+England Version was printed."
+
+There is a copy of the first edition of Ainsworth in the Bodleian Library
+and one in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The American Antiquarian
+Society and the Lenox Library are the only public libraries in America that
+possess copies, so far as I know. The one in the library of the American
+Antiquarian Society was presented to it in 1815 by the Rev. William Bentley
+of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom also belonged the copy of the Bay Psalm
+Book now in the library at Worcester. He was a divine and a bibliophile and
+an antiquary, but there also ran in his veins blood of warmer flow. During
+the war of 1812, when the report came, in meeting-time, that the frigate
+"Constitution" was being chased into Marblehead harbor, the loyal parson
+Bentley locked up his church, and tucked up his gown, and sallied forth
+with his whole flock of parishioners to march to Marblehead with the
+soldiers, ready to "fight unto death" if necessary. Being short and fat,
+and the mercury standing at eighty-five degrees, the doctor's physical
+strength gave out, and he had to be hoisted up astride a cannon to ride to
+the scene of conflict,--martial in spirit though weak in the legs.
+
+But this association with the old book is comparatively of our own day; and
+the most pleasing fancy which the "psalm-book of Ainsworth" brings to my
+mind, the most sacred and reverenced thought, is of a far more remote, a
+more peaceful and quiet scene; though men of warlike blood and fighting
+stock were there present and took part therein. It is with that Sabbath Day
+before the Landing at Plymouth which was spent by the Pilgrims, as Mather
+says, "in the devout and pious exercises of a sacred rest." And though
+Matthew Arnold thought that the Mayflower voyagers would have been
+intolerable company for Shakespeare and Virgil, yet in that quiet day of
+devout prayer and praise they show a calm religious peace and trust that
+is, perhaps, the highest spiritual type of "sweetness and light." And from
+this quaint old book their lips found words and music to express in song
+their pure and holy faith.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The Bay Psalm-Book.
+
+
+
+It seems most proper that the first book printed in New England should be
+now its rarest one, and such is the case. It was also meet that the first
+book published by the Puritan theocracy should be a psalm-book. This New
+England psalm-book, being printed by the colony at Massachusetts Bay, is
+familiarly known as "The Bay Psalm-Book," and was published two hundred
+and fifty years ago with this wording on the titlepage: "The Whole Book of
+Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre. Whereunto is prefixed a
+discourse declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the
+Heavenly Ordinance of Singing Psalmes in the Churches of God.
+
+"Coll. III. Let the word of God dwell plenteously in you in all wisdome,
+teaching, and exhorting one another in Psalmes, Himnes, and spirituall
+Songs, singing to the Lord with grace in your hearts.
+
+"James V. If any be afflicted, let him pray; and if any be merry let him
+sing psalmes. Imprinted 1640."
+
+The words "For the Use, Edification, and Comfort of the Saints in Publick
+and Private especially in New England," though given in Thomas's "History
+of Printing," Lowndes's "Bibliographers Manual," Hood's "History of Music
+in New England," and many reliable books of reference, as part of the
+correct title, were in fact not printed upon the titlepage of this first
+edition, but appeared on subsequent ones. Mr. Thomas, at the time he wrote
+his history, knew of but one copy of the first edition; "an entire copy
+except the title-page is now in the possession of rev. mr. Bentley of
+Salem." The titlepage being missing, he probably fell into the error of
+copying the title of a later edition, and other cataloguers and manualists
+have blindly followed him.
+
+There were in 1638 thirty ministers in New England, all men of intelligence
+and education; and to three of them, Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John
+Eliot was entrusted the literary part of the pious work. They managed to
+produce one of the greatest literary curiosities in existence. The book
+was printed in the house of President Dunster of Harvard College upon a
+"printery," or printing-press, which had cost L50, and was the gift of
+friends in Holland to the new community in 1638, the name-year of Harvard
+College. Governor Winthrop in his journal tells us that the first sheet
+printed on this press was the Freeman's Oath, certainly a characteristic
+production; the second an almanac for New England, and the third, "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." Some, who deem an almanac a book, call this psalm-book the
+second book printed in British America.
+
+A printer named Steeven Daye was brought over from England to do the
+printing on this new press. Now Steeven must have been given entire charge
+of the matter, and could not have been a very literate fellow (as we
+know positively he was a most reprehensible one), or the three reverend
+versifiers must have been most uncommonly careless proof-readers, for
+certainly a worse piece of printer's work than "The Bay Psalm Book" could
+hardly have been struck off. Diversity and grotesqueness of spelling were
+of course to be expected, and paper might have been coarse without reproof,
+in that new and poor country; but the type was good and clear, the paper
+strong and firm, and with ordinary care a very presentable book might have
+been issued. The punctuation was horrible. A few commas and periods and
+a larger number of colons were "pepered and salted" _a la_ Timothy
+Dexter, apparently quite by chance, among the words. Periods were placed
+in the middle of sentences; words of one syllable were divided by hyphens;
+capitals and italics were used after the fashion of the time, apparently
+quite at random; and inverted letters were common enough. The pages were
+unnumbered, and on every left-hand page the word "Psalm" in the title was
+spelled correctly, while on the right-hand page it is uniformly spelled
+"Psalme." But after all, these typographical blemishes might be forgiven if
+the substance, the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification
+was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the
+sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with
+the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical
+construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct.
+Such amazing verses as these may be found:--
+
+  "And sayd He would not them waste: had not
+  Moses stood (whom He chose)
+  'fore him i' th' breach; to turne his wrath
+  lest that he should waste those."
+
+Cotton Mather, in his "Magnalia," gives thus the full story of the
+production of "The Bay Psalm-book":--
+
+    "About the year 1639, the New-English reformers, considering that their
+    churches enjoyed the other ordinances of Heaven in their scriptural
+    purity were willing that the 'The singing of Psalms' should be restored
+    among them unto a share of that _purity_. Though they blessed God
+    for the religious endeavours of them who translated the Psalms into the
+    _meetre _usually annexed at the end of the Bible, yet they beheld
+    in the translation so many _detractions _from, _additions
+    _to, and _variations _of, not only the text, but the very
+    _sense _of the psalmist, that it was an offense unto them.
+    Resolving then upon a new translation, the chief divines in the country
+    took each of them a portion to be translated; among whom were Mr. Welds
+    and Mr. Eliot of Eoxbury, and Mr. Mather of Dorchester. These like the
+    rest were so very different a _genius_ for their poetry that Mr.
+    Shephard, of Cambridge, on the occasion addressed them to this purpose:
+
+      You Roxb'ry poets keep clear of the crime
+      Of missing to give us very good rhime.
+      And you of Dorchester, your verses lengthen
+      And with the text's own words, you will them strengthen.
+
+    The Psalms thus turned into _meetre_ were printed at Cambridge, in
+    the year 1640. But afterwards it was thought that a little more of art
+    was to be employed upon them; and for that cause they were committed
+    unto Mr. Dunster, who revised and refined this translation; and (with
+    some assistance from Mr. Richard Lyon who being sent over by Sir Henry
+    Mildmay as an attendant unto his, son, then a student at Harvard
+    College, now resided in Mr. Dunster's house:) he brought it
+    the condition wherein our churches have since used it. Now though
+    I heartily join with those gentlemen who wish that the _poetry_
+    thereof were mended, yet I must confess, that the Psalms have never
+    yet seen a _translation_ that I know of nearer to the Hebrew
+    original; and I am willing to receive the excuse which our translators
+    themselves do offer us when they say: 'If the verses are not always so
+    elegant as some desire or expect, let them consider that God's
+    altar needs not our pollishings; we have respected rather a plain
+    translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any
+    paraphrase. We have attended conscience rather than elegance, fidelity
+    rather than ingenuity, that so we may sing in Zion the Lord's songs of
+    praise, according unto his own will, until he bid us enter into our
+    Master's joy to sing eternal hallelujahs.'"
+
+I have never liked Cotton Mather so well as after reading this calm
+and kindly account of the production of "The Bay-Psalm-Book." He was a
+scholarly man, and doubtless felt keenly and groaned inwardly at the
+inelegance, the appalling and unscholarly errors in the New England
+version; and yet all he mildly said was that "it was thought that a little
+more of art was to be employed upon them," and that he "wishes the poetry
+hereof was mended." Such justice, such self-repression, such fairness
+make me almost forgive him for riding around the scaffold on which his
+fellow-clergyman was being executed for witchcraft, and urging the crowd
+not to listen to the poor martyr's dying words. I can even almost overlook
+the mysterious fables, the outrageous yarns which he imposed upon us under
+the guise of history.
+
+The three reverend versifiers who turned out such questionable poetry are
+known to have been writers of clear, scholarly, and vigorous prose. They
+were all graduated at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the nursery of Puritans.
+Mr. Welde soon returned to England and published there two intelligent
+tracts vindicating the purity of the New England worship. Richard Mather
+was the general prose-scribe for the community; he drafted the "Cambridge
+Platform" and other important papers, and was clear and scholarly enough
+in all his work _except_ the "Bay Psalm-Book." From his pen came the
+tedious, prolix preface to the work; and the first draft of it in his own
+handwriting is preserved in the Prince Library. The other co-worker was
+John Eliot, that glory of New England Puritanism, the apostle to the
+Indians. His name heads my list of the saints of the Puritan calendar; but
+I confess that when I consider his work in "The Bay Psalm-Book," I have
+sad misgivings lest the hymns which he wrote and published in the Indian
+language may not have proved to the poor Massachusetts Indians all that our
+loving and venerating fancy has painted them. It is said also that Francis
+Quarles, the Puritan author of "Divine Emblems," sent across the Atlantic
+some of his metrical versions of the psalms as a pious contribution to the
+new version of the new church in the new land.
+
+The "little more of art" which was bestowed by the improving President
+Dunster left the psalms still improvable, as may be seen by opening at
+random at any page of the revised editions. Mr. Lyon conferred also upon
+the New England church the inestimable boon of a number of hymns or
+"Scripture-Songs placed in order as in the Bible." They were printed in
+that order from the third until at least the sixteenth edition, but in
+subsequent editions the hymns were all placed at the end of the book after
+the psalms. I doubt not that the Puritan youth, debarred of merry catches
+and roundelays, found keen delight in these rather astonishing renditions
+of the songs of Solomon, portions of Isaiah, etc. Those Scripture-Songs
+should be read quite through to be fully appreciated, as no modern
+Christian could be full enough of grace to sing them. Here is a portion of
+the song of Deborah and Barak:--
+
+  24. Jael the Kenite Hebers wife
+  'bove women blest shall be:
+  Above the women in the tent
+  a blessed one is she.
+  25. He water ask'd: she gave him milk
+  him butter forth she fetch'd
+  26. In lordly dish: then to the nail
+  she forth her left hand stretched.
+
+  Her right the workman's hammer held
+  and Sisera struck dead:
+  She pierced and struck his temple through
+  and then smote off his head.
+  27. He at her feet bow'd, fell, lay down
+  he at her feet bow'd, where
+  He fell: ev'n where he bowed down
+  he fell destroyed there.
+
+  28. Out of a window Sisera
+  his mother looked and said
+  The lattess through in coming why
+  so long his chariot staid?
+  His chariot wheels why tarry they?
+  29.   her wise dames, answered
+  Yea she turned answer to herself
+  30.   and what have they not sped?
+
+  31. The prey by poll; a maid or twain
+  what parted have not they?
+  Have they not parted, Sisera,
+  a party-colour'd prey
+  A party-colour'd neildwork prey
+  of neildwork on each side
+  That's party-colour'd meet for necks
+  of them that spoils divide?
+
+Our Pilgrim Fathers accepted these absurd, tautological verses gladly, and
+sang them gratefully; but we know the spirit of poesy could never have
+existed in them, else they would have fought hard against abandoning such
+majestic psalms as Sternhold's--
+
+  "The Lord descended from above
+    and bow'd the heavens hye
+  And underneath his feete he cast
+    the darkness of the skye.
+
+  "On cherubs and on cherubines
+    full royally he road
+  And on the winges of all the windes
+    came flying all abroad."
+
+They gave up these lines of simple grandeur, to which they were accustomed,
+for such wretched verses as these of the New England version:--
+
+  9.  Likewise the heavens he downe-bow'd and he descended, & there was
+      under his feet a gloomy cloud
+  10. And he on cherub rode and flew; yea, he flew on the wings of winde.
+  11. His secret place hee darkness made his covert that him round confide.
+
+I cannot understand why they did not sing the psalms of David just as
+they were printed in the English Bible; it would certainly be quite as
+practicable as to sing this latter selection.
+
+President Dunster's improving hand and brain evolved this rendition:--
+
+  "Likewise the heavens he down-bow'd
+    and he descended: also there
+  Was at his feet a gloomy cloud
+    and he on cherubs rode apace.
+  Yea on the wings of wind he flew
+    he darkness made his secret place
+  His covert round about him drew."
+
+Though the grotesque wording and droll errors of these old psalm-books can,
+after the lapse of centuries, be pointed out and must be smiled at, there
+is after all something so pathetic in the thought of those good, scholarly
+old New England saints, hampered by poverty, in dread of attack of Indians,
+burdened with hard work, harassed by "eighty-two pestilent heresies," still
+laboring faithfully and diligently in their strange new home at their
+unsuited work,--something so pathetic, so grand, so truly Christian, that
+when I point out any of the absurdities or failures in their work, I dread
+lest the shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather, of Eliot, brand me as of
+old, "in capitall letters," as "AN OPEN AND OBSTINATE CONTEMNER OF GOD'S
+HOLY ORDINANCES," or worse still, with that mysterious, that dread name, "A
+WANTON GOSPELLER."
+
+The second edition of the "New England Psalm-Book" was published in 1647;
+the one copy known to exist has sold for four hundred and thirty-five
+dollars. The third edition was the one revised by President Dunster and
+Mr. Lyon, and was printed in 1650. In 1691 the unfortunate book was again
+"pollished" by a committee of ministers, who thus altered the last two
+stanzas of the Song of Deborah and Barak:--
+
+  28. Out of a window Sisera
+        His mother look'd and said
+      The lattess through in coming why
+        So long's chariot staid?
+      His chariot-wheels why tarry they?
+        Her ladies wise reply'd
+  29. Yea to herself the answer made,
+  30.     Have they not speed? she cry'd.
+
+  31. The prey to each a maid or twain
+        Divided have not they?
+      To Sisera have they not shar'd
+        A divers-colour'd prey?
+      Of divers-colour'd needle-work
+        Wrought curious on each side
+      Of various colours meet for necks
+        Of those who spoils divide?
+
+Rev. Elias Nason wittily says of "The Bay Psalm-Book," "Welde, Eliot, and
+Mather mounted the restive steed Pegasus, Hebrew psalter in hand, and
+trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical
+psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and slashing,
+mending and patching, twisting and turning, finally produced what must ever
+remain the most unique specimen of poetical tinkering in our literature."
+
+Other editions quickly followed these "pollishings" until, in 1709, sixteen
+had been printed. Mr. Hood stated that at least seventy editions in all
+were brought out. Some of these were printed in England and Scotland, in
+exceedingly fine and illegible print, and were intended to be bound up with
+the Bible; and occasionally duodecimo Bibles were sent from Scotland to
+New England with "The Bay Psalm-Book" bound at the back part of the book.
+Strange as it may seem, the poor, halting New England version was used in
+some of the English dissenting congregations and Scotch kirks, instead of
+the smoother verses composed in England for the English churches.
+
+The Reverend Thomas Prince, after two years of careful work thereon,
+published in 1758 a revised edition of the much-published book, and it was
+adopted by his church, the Old South, of Boston, the week previous to his
+death. It was used by his congregation until 1786. He clung closely to the
+form of the old editions, changing only an occasional word. In his preface
+Dr. Prince says that "The Bay Psalm-Book" "had the honor of being the
+first book printed in North America, and as far as I can find, in this
+New World." We have fuller means of information now-a-days than had the
+reverend reviser, and we know that as early as 1535 a book called "The
+Book of St. John Climacus or The Spiritual Ladder" had been printed in the
+Spanish tongue, in Mexico; and no less than one hundred and sixteen other
+Spanish works in the sixteenth century, as the "Bibliografia Mexicana"
+testifies.
+
+If the printing of all these various editions was poor, and the diction
+worse, the binding certainly was good and could be copied in modern times
+to much advantage. No flimsy cloth or pasteboard covers, no weak paper
+backs, no ill-pasted leaves, no sham-work of any kind was given; securely
+sewed, firmly glued, with covers of good strong leather, parchment, kid, or
+calfskin, these psalm-books endured constant _daily_ (not weekly) use
+for years, for decades, for a century, and are still whole and firm.
+They were carried about in pockets, in saddle-bags, and were opened, and
+handled, and conned, as often as were the Puritan Bibles, and they bore the
+usage well. They were distinctively characteristic of the unornamental,
+sternly pious, eminently honest, and sturdily useful race that produced
+them.
+
+Judge Sewall makes frequent mention in his famous diary of "the New Psalm
+Book." He bought one "bound neatly in Kids Leather" for "3 shillings &
+sixpence" and gave it to a widow whom he was wooing. Rather a serious
+lover's gift, but characteristic of the giver, and not so gloomy as
+"Dr. Mathers Vials of Wrath," "Dr. Sibbs Bowels," "Dr. Preston's Church
+Carriage," and "Dr. Williard's Fountains opened," all of which he likewise
+presented to her.
+
+The Judge frequently gave a copy as a bridal gift, after singing from it
+"Myrrh aloes," to the gloomy tune of Windsor, at the wedding.
+
+  8. Myrrh Aloes and Cussias _smell_
+       all of thy garments _had_
+     Out of the yvory pallaces
+       whereby they made thee glad:
+
+  9. Amongst thine honourable maids
+       kings daughters present were
+     The Queen is set at thy right hand
+       in fine gold of Ophir.
+
+But his most frequent mention of the "new psalm-book" is in his "Humbell
+acknowledgement" made to God of the "great comfort and merciful kindness
+received through singing of His Psalmes;" and the pages of the diary bear
+ample testimony that whatever the book may appear to us now, it was to the
+early colonists the very Word of God.
+
+As years passed on, however, and singing-schools multiplied, it became much
+desired, and even imperative that there should be a better style and manner
+of singing, and open dissatisfaction arose with "The Bay Psalm-Book;" the
+younger members of the congregations wished to adopt the new and smoother
+versions of Tate and Brady, and of Watts. Petitions were frequently made in
+the churches to abolish the century-used book. Here is an opening sentence
+of one church-letter which is still in existence; it was presented to the
+ministers and elders of the Roxbury church September 11th, 1737, and was
+signed by many of the church members:--
+
+"The New England Version of Psalms however useful it may formerly have
+been, has now become through the natural variableness of Language, not only
+very uncouth but in many Places unintelligible; whereby the mind instead
+of being Raised and spirited in Singing The Praises of Almighty God and
+thereby being prepared to Attend to other Parts of Divine Service is Damped
+and made Spiritless in the Performance of the Duty at least such is the
+Tendency of the use of that Version," etc., etc.
+
+Great controversy arose over the abolition of the accustomed book, and
+church-quarrels were rife; but the end of the century saw the dearly loved
+old version consigned to desuetude, uever again to be opened, alas! but by
+critical or inquisitive readers.
+
+There is owned by the American Antiquarian Society, and kept carefully
+locked in the iron safe in the building of that Society in Worcester, a
+copy of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm Book." It is a quarto (not
+octavo, as Thomas described it in his "History of Printing") and is in very
+good condition, save that the titlepage is missing. It is in the original
+light-colored, time-stained parchment binding, and contains the autograph
+of Stephen Sewall. It also bears on the inside of the front cover the
+book-plate of Isaiah Thomas, and at the back, in the veteran printer's
+clear and beautiful handwriting, this statement: "After advertising for
+another copy of this book and making enquiry in many places in New England
+&c. I was not able to obtain or even hear of another. This copy is
+therefore invaluable and must be preserved with the greatest care. Isaiah
+Thomas, Sep. 20. 1820." His "History of Printing," was published in 1810,
+and the Society had acquired through the gift of "the rev. mr. Bentley" the
+copy which Thomas mentioned in his book.
+
+It is strange that Thomas should have been ignorant of the existence of
+other copies of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm-Book," for there were
+at that time six copies belonging to the Prince Library in the possession
+of the Old South Church of Boston. One would fancy that the Prince Library
+would have been one of his first objective points of search, save that a
+dense cloud of indifference had overshadowed that collection for so long
+a time. Five of those copies remained in the custody of the deacons and
+pastor of the Old South Church until 1860, and they were at one time all
+deposited in the Public Library of the City of Boston. Two still remain in
+that suitable place of deposit; they are almost complete in paging, but are
+in modern bindings. The other three copies were surrendered by Lieut-Gov.
+Samuel Armstrong (who, as one of the deacons of the Old South Church,
+had joint custody of the Prince Library), severally, to Mr. Edward
+Crowninshield of Boston, Dr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff of Boston, and Mr.
+George Livermore of Cambridge. Governor Armstrong surrendered these three
+books in consideration of certain modern books being given to the Prince
+Library, and of the modern bindings bestowed on the two other copies; which
+seems to us hardly a brilliant or judicious exchange.
+
+In Dr. Shurtleff "The Bay Psalm-Book" found a congenial and loving owner;
+and under his careful superintendence an exact reprint was published in
+1862 in the Riverside Press at Cambridge. He wrote for it a preface. It was
+published by subscription; one copy on India paper, fifteen on thick paper,
+and fifty on common paper. Copies on the last named paper have sold readily
+for thirty dollars each. All the typographical errors of the original were
+carefully reproduced in this reprint.
+
+At Dr. Shurtleffs death, his "Bay Psalm-Book" was catalogued with the rest
+of his library, which was to be sold on Dec. 2, 1875; but an injunction was
+obtained by the deacons of the Old South Church, to prevent the sale of the
+old psalm-book. They were rather late in the day however, to try to obtain
+again the too easily parted with book, and the ownership of it was adjudged
+to the estate. The book was sold Oct. 12, 1876, at the Library salesroom,
+Beacon Street, Boston, for one thousand and fifty dollars. It is now in the
+library of Mrs. John Carter Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island. Special
+interest attaches to this copy, because it was "Richard Mather, His Book"
+as several autographs in it testify; and the author's own copy is always of
+extra value. Cotton Mather, a grandson of Richard, was the close friend of
+the Reverend Thomas Prince, who founded the Prince Library, and who left it
+by will to the Old South Church in 1758. Mr. Prince's book-plate is on the
+reverse of the titlepage of this copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book," and is in
+itself a rarity. It reads thus:--
+
+     "This Book belongs to
+      The New England Library
+  Begun to be collected by Thomas Prince
+  upon his ent'ring Harvard-College July 6
+  1703, and was given by said Prince, to
+      remain therein forever."
+
+There was a sixth copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book" in the Prince Library in
+1830 when Dr. Wisner wrote his four sermons on the Old South Church of
+Boston,--a copy annotated by Dr. Prince and used by him while he was
+engaged on his revision. It has disappeared, together with many other
+important books and manuscripts belonging to the same library. The
+vicissitudes through which this most valuable collection has passed--lying
+neglected for years on shelves, in boxes, and in barrels in the
+steeple-room of the Old South Church, depleted to use for lighting fires,
+injured by British soldiery, but injured still more by the neglect and
+indifference of its custodians--are too painful to contemplate or relate.
+They contribute to the scholarly standing and honor of neither pastors nor
+congregations during those years. It is enough to state, however, that it
+is to the noble and ill-requited forethought of Dr. Prince that we owe all
+but three of the copies of the Bay Psalm-Book which are now known to be in
+existence.
+
+There is also a perfect copy of the first edition of the old book in the
+Lenox Library in New York, and the manner in which it was acquired (and
+also some further accounts of two of our old friends of the Prince Library,
+the acquisitions of Messrs. Crowninshield and Liverraore) is told so
+entertainingly by Henry Stevens, of Vermont, in his charming book,
+"Recollections of Mr. James Lenox" that it is best to quote his account in
+full:--
+
+    "For nearly ten years Mr. Lenox had entertained a longing de
+    to possess a perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book.' He gave me to
+    understand that if an opportunity occurred of securing a copy for him I
+    might go as far as one hundred guineas. Accordingly from 1847 till his
+    death, six years later, my good friend William Pickering and I put our
+    heads and book-hunting forces together to run down this rarity. The
+    only copy we knew of on this side the Atlantic was a spotless one in
+    the Bodleian Library, which had lain there unrecognized for ages, and
+    even in the printed catalogue of 1843 its title was recorded without
+    distinction among the common herd of Psalms in verse. I had handled it
+    several times with great reverence, and noted its many peculiar points,
+    but, as agreed with Mr. Pickering, without making any sign or imparting
+    any information to our good and obliging friend Dr. Bandinel, Bodley's
+    Librarian. We thought that when we had secured a copy for oursel
+    it would be time enough to acquaint the learned Doctor that he was
+    entertaining unawares this angel of the New World.
+
+    "Under these circumstances, therefore, only an experienced collector
+    can judge of my surprise and inward satisfaction, when on the 12
+    January, 1855, at Sotheby's, at one of the sales of Pickering's stock,
+    after untying parcel after parcel to see what I might chance to see,
+    and keeping ahead of the auctioneer, Mr. Wilkinson, on resolving to
+    prospect in one parcel more before he overtook me, my eye rested
+    an instant only on the long-lost Benjamin, clean and unspotted. I
+    instantly closed the parcel (which was described in the Catalogue as
+    Lot '531 Psalmes, other editions, 1630 to 1675 black letter, a parcel')
+    and tightened the string just as Alfred came to lay it on the table. A
+    cool-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing to the table behind Mr.
+    Lilly I quietly bid, in a perfectly natural tone, 'Sixpence,' and so
+    the bids went on increasing by sixpence until half a crown was reached,
+    and Mr. Lilly had loosened the string. Taking up this very volume he
+    turned to me and remarked that 'This looks a rare edition, Mr. Stevens,
+    don't you think so? I do not remember having seen it before,' and
+    raised the bid to five shillings. I replied that I had little doubt of
+    its rarity though comparatively a late edition of the Psalms,
+    at the same time gave Mr. Wilkinson a six-penny nod. Thenceforth a
+    'spirited competition' arose between Mr. Lilly and myself, until
+    finally the lot was knocked down to 'Stevens' for nineteen shillings. I
+    then called out with perhaps more energy than discretion, 'Delivered!'
+    On pocketing this volume, leaving the other seven to take the usual
+    course, Mr. Lilly and others inquired with some curiosity, 'What rarity
+    have you got now?' 'Oh, nothing,' said I, 'but the first English book
+    printed in America.' There was a pause in the sale, while all had a
+    good look at the little stranger. Some said jocularly, 'There has
+    evidently been a mistake; put up the lot again.' Mr. Stevens, with the
+    book again safely in his pocket, said, 'Nay, if Mr. Pickering, whose
+    cost mark of [3s] did not recognize the prize he had won, certainly the
+    cataloguer might be excused for throwing it away into the hands of the
+    right person to rescue, appreciate, and preserve it. I am now fully
+    rewarded for my long and silent hunt of seven years.'
+
+    "On reaching Morley's I eagerly collated the volume, and at first found
+    it right witli all the _usual_ signatures correct. The leaves were
+    not paged or folioed. But on further collation I missed sundry of the
+    Psalms, enough to fill four leaves. The puzzle was finally solved when
+    it was discovered that the inexperienced printer had marked the sheet
+    with the signature w after v, which is very unusual.
+
+    "This was a very disheartening disappointment, but I held my tongue,
+    and knowing that my old friend and correspondent, George Liverm
+    of Cambridge, N. E., possessed an imperfect copy, which he and Mr.
+    Crowninshield, after the noble example of the 'Lincoln Nosegay,' had
+    won from the Committee of the 'Old South' together with another and
+    perfect copy, I proposed an advantageous exchange and obtained
+    four missing leaves. Mr. Crowninshield strongly advised Mr. Livermore
+    against parting with his four leaves, because, as he said, 'They would
+    enable Stevens to complete his copy and to place it in the library of
+    Mr. Lenox, who would then crow over us because he also had a perfect
+    copy of "The Bay-Psalm Book."'
+
+    "Having thus completed my copy and had it bound by Francis Bedford in
+    his best style, I sent it to Mr. Lenox for L80. Five years later I
+    bought the Crowninshield Library in Boston for $10,000, mainly to
+    obtain his perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book,' and brought the whole
+    library to London. This second copy, after being held several months,
+    was at the suggestion of Mr. Thomas Watts, offered to the British
+    Museum for L150. The Keeper of the Printed Books, however, never had
+    the courage to send it before the Trustees for approval and payment; so
+    after waiting five or six years longer the volume was withdrawn, bound
+    by Bedford, taken to America in 1868, and sold to Mr. George Brinley
+    for 150 guineas. At the Brinley sale, in March, 1878, it was bought by
+    Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for $1200, or more than three times the cost
+    of my first copy to Mr. Lenox."
+
+We hear the expression of a book being "worth its weight in gold." "The Bay
+Psalm-Book," in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society, weighs
+nine ounces, hence Mr. Vanderbilt paid at least seven times its weight in
+gold for his precious book. Lowndes's "Bibliographers' Manual" says, "This
+volume, which is extremely rare and would at an auction in America produce
+from four to six thousand dollars, is familiarly termed 'The Bay Psalm
+Book.'" This must have been intended to be printed four to six hundred
+dollars, and is about as correct as the remainder of the description in
+that manual.
+
+The copy which is spoken of by Mr. Stevens as being in the Bodleian Library
+at Oxford was once the property of Bishop Tanner, the famous antiquary.
+Thus it is seen that there are seven copies at least of the first edition
+of "The Bay Psalm-Book" now in existence in America, instead of "five or
+at the most six," as a recent writer in "The Magazine of American History"
+states.
+
+And of all the manifold later editions of the New England Psalm-Book
+comparatively few copies now remain. Occasionally one is discovered in an
+old church library or seen in the collection of an antiquary. It is usually
+found to bear on its titlepage the name of its early owner, and often,
+also, in a different handwriting, the simple record and date of his death.
+Tender little memorial postils are frequently written on the margins of
+the pages: "Sung this the day Betty was baptized"--"This Psalm was sung at
+Mothers Funeral" "Gods Grace help me to heed this word." Sometimes we see
+on the blank pages, in a fine, cramped handwriting, the record of the
+births and deaths of an entire family. More frequently still we find the
+familiar and hackneyed verses of ancient titlepage lore, such as are
+usually seen on the blank leaves of old Bibles. This script was written in
+a "Bay Psalm-Book" of the sixteenth edition, and with the characteristic
+indifference of our New England forefathers for tiresome repetition, or
+possibly with their disdain of novelty, was seen on each and every blank
+page of the book:--
+
+  "Israel Balch, His Book,
+  God give him Grace theirin to look
+  And when the Bell for him doth toal
+  May God have mearcy on his Sole."
+
+What the diction lacked in variety is quite made up, however, in the
+spelling, which was painstakingly different on each page.
+
+Another Psalm-Book bore, inscribed in an elegant, minute handwriting, these
+lines, which were probably intended for verse, since the first word of each
+line commenced with a capital letter:--
+
+  "Abednego Prime His Book
+  When he withein these pages looks
+  May he find Grace to sing therein
+  Seventeen hundred and forty-seven."
+
+This is certainly pretty bad poetry,--bad enough to be worthy a place in
+"The Bay Psalm Book,"--but is also a most noble, laudable, and necessary
+aspiration; for power of Grace was plainly needed to enable Abednego or any
+one else to sing from those pages; and our pious New England forefathers
+must have been under special covenant of grace when they persevered against
+such obstacles and under such overwhelming disadvantages in having singing
+in their meetings.
+
+Another copy of the old New England Psalm-Book was thus inscribed:--
+
+      "Elam Noyes His Book
+  You children of the name of Noyes
+  Make Jesus Christ your only choyse."
+
+The early members of the Noyes family all seemed to be exceedingly and
+properly proud of this rhyming couplet; it formed a sort of patent of
+nobility. They wrote the pious injunction to their descendants in their
+Psalm-Books and their Bibles, in their wills, their letters; and they,
+with the greatest unanimity of feeling, had it cut upon their several
+tombstones. It was their own family motto,--their totem, so to speak.
+
+In a New England Psalm-Book in the possession of the American Antiquarian
+Society there is written in the distinct handwriting of Isaiah Thomas these
+explanatory words:--
+
+"This was the Pocket Psalm-book of John Symmons who died at Salem at
+100 years. He was born at North Salem went a-fishing in his youth was a
+prisoner with the Indians in Nova Scotia afterwards followed his labours in
+a Shipyard and till great old age laboured upon his lands and died
+without pain Aet 100. 31 October, 1791. He was a worthy conscientious and
+well-informed man and agreeable until the last hour of his life."
+
+I can think of no pleasanter tribute to be given to the character of any
+one than the simple words, "He was agreeable until the last hour of his
+life." What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and
+enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present
+influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant
+study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet
+agreeability which so characterized John Symmons.
+
+There lies now before me a copy of one of the early editions of "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." As I open the little dingy octavo volume, with its worn
+and torn edges, I am conscious of that distinctive, penetrating,
+_old-booky_ smell,--that ancient, that fairly _obsolete_ odor that
+never is exhaled save from some old, infrequently opened, leather-bound
+volume, which has once in years far past been much used and handled. A book
+which has never been familiarly used and loved cannot have quite the same
+antique perfume. The mouldering, rusty, flaky leather comes off in a
+yellow-brown powder on my fingers as I take up the book; and the cover
+nearly breaks off as I open it, though with tender, book-loving usage. The
+leather, though strong and honest, has rotted or disintegrated until it has
+almost fallen into dust. Across the yellow, ill-printed pages there runs,
+zig-zagging sideways and backwards crab-fashion on his crooked brown legs,
+one of those pigmy book-spiders,--those ugly little bibliophiles that seem
+flatter even than the close-pressed pages that form their home.
+
+Fair Puritan hands once held this dingy little book, honest Puritan eyes
+studied its ill-expressed words, and sweet Puritan lips sang haltingly but
+lovingly from its pages. This was "Cicely Morse Her Book" in the year 1710,
+and bears on many a page her name and the simple little couplet:--
+
+  "In youth I praise
+  And walk thy ways."
+
+And pretty it were to see Cicely in her praiseful and godly-walking youth,
+as she stood primly clad in her sad-colored gown and long apron, with a
+quoif or ciffer covering her smooth hair, and a red whittle on her slender
+shoulders, a-singing in the old New England meeting-house through the
+long, tedious psalms, which were made longer and more tedious still by the
+drawling singing and the deacons' "lining." Truly that were a pretty sight
+for our eyes, and for other eyes than ours, without doubt. Staid Puritan
+youth may have glanced soberly across the old meeting-house at the fair
+girl as she sung the Song of Solomon, with its ardent wording, without any
+very deep thought of its symbolic meaning:--
+
+  "Let him with kisses of his mouth
+    be pleased me to kiss,
+  Because much better than the wine
+    thy loving-kindness is.
+  To troops of horse in Pharoahs coach,
+    my love, I thee compare,
+  Thy neck with chains, with jewels new,
+    thy cheeks full comely are.
+  Borders of gold with silver studs
+    for thee make up we will,
+  Whilst that the king at's table sits
+    my spikenard yields her smell.
+
+  Like as of myrrh a bundle is
+    my well-belov'd to be,
+  Through all the night betwixt my breasts
+    his lodging-place shall be;
+  My love as in Engedis vines
+    like camphire-bunch to me,
+  So fair, my love, thou fair thou art
+    thine eyes as doves eyes be."
+
+Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school--that
+safety-valve of young New England life--had not then been established or
+even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical
+love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old
+meeting-house at Cicely as she sung.
+
+But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book. She may
+have been stately and prosperous and seated in the dignified "foreseat;"
+she may have been feeble and infirm in her place in the "Deaf Pue;" and she
+may have been careworn and sad, tired of fighting against poverty, worn
+with dread of fierce Indians, weary of the howls of the wolves in the dense
+forests so near, and home-sick and longing for the yonderland, her "faire
+Englishe home;" but were she sad or careworn or heartsick, in her treasured
+psalm-book she found comfort,--comfort in the halting verses as well as
+in the noble thoughts of the Psalmist. And the glamour of eternal,
+sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the
+inscription in the old psalm-book,--
+
+  "In youth I praise
+  And walk thy ways,"--
+
+the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole
+New World was young.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms.
+
+
+
+The metrical translation of the Psalms known as Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was doubtless used in the public worship of God in many of the
+early New England settlements, especially those of the Connecticut River
+Valley, though the old register of the town of Ipswich is the only local
+record that gives positive proof of its use in the Puritan church. In
+1693 an edition of Sternhold and Hopkins was printed in Cambridge,
+Massachusetts. It was not a day nor a land where a whole edition of such a
+book would be printed for reference or comparison only; and to thus publish
+the work of the English psalmists in the very teeth of the popularity of
+"The Bay Psalm Book" is to me a proof that Sternhold and Hopkins' Version
+was employed far more extensively in the colonial churches and homes than
+we now have records of, and than many of our church historians now fancy.
+Certainly the familiar English psalm-books must have been brought across
+the ocean and used temporarily until the newly landed colonists could
+acquire the version of Ainsworth or of the New England divines.
+
+An everlasting interest attaches to this metrical arrangement of the
+Psalms, to Americans as well as to Englishmen, because it was the earliest
+to be adopted in public worship in England. According to Strype, in his
+Memorial, the singing of psalms was allowed in England as early as 1548,
+but it was not until 1562 that the versified psalms of Sternhold and
+Hopkins were appended to the Book of Common Prayer. Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was also the first to give all the psalms of David in English verse
+to the English public.
+
+Very little is known of the authors of this version. Sternhold was educated
+at Oxford; was Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., was a
+"bold and busy Calvinist," and died in 1549. The little of interest told
+of John Hopkins is that he was a minister and schoolmaster, and that he
+assisted the work of Sternhold.
+
+The full reason for Sternhold's pious work is thus given by an old English
+author, Wood: "Being a most zealous reformer and a very strict liver he
+became so scandalyzed at the loose amorous songs used in the court that he
+forsooth turned into English metre fifty-one of Davids Psalms, and caused
+musical notes to be set to them, thinking thereby that the courtiers
+would sing them instead of their sonnets; but they did not, only some few
+excepted." The preface printed in the book stated Sternhold's wish and
+intention that the verses should be sung by Englishmen, not only in church,
+but "moreover in private houses for their godly solace and comfort; laying
+apart all ungodly Songs & Ballads which tend only to the nourishment of
+vice & corrupting of youth."
+
+The first edition contained nineteen psalms only, which were all versified
+by Sternhold. It was published in 1548 or 1549, under this title, "Certayn
+Psalmes chosen out of the Psalter of Daid and drawen into English Metre by
+Thomas Sternhold Groom of ye Kynges Maiesties Roobes." I believe no copy of
+this edition is now known to exist.
+
+The praise which Sternhold received for his pious rhymes had the same
+effect upon him as did similar encomiums upon his predecessor, the French
+psalm-writer Marot,--it encouraged him to write more psalm-verses.
+
+The second edition was printed in 1549, and contained thirty-seven psalms
+by Sternhold and seven by Hopkins. It bore this title, "Al such Psalmes of
+David as Thomas Sternehold late grome of his maiesties robes did in his
+lyfe tyme drawe into English metre." It was a well-printed book and copies
+are still preserved in the British Museum and the Public Library of
+Cambridge, England. This second and enlarged edition was dedicated, in a
+four-page preface, to King Edward VI., and a pretty story is told of the
+young king's interest in the verses. The delicate and gentle boy of twelve
+heard Sternhold when "singing them to his organ" as Strype says, and
+wandered in to hear the music and listen to the words. So great was his
+awakened interest in the sacred songs that Sternhold resolved to write in
+verse for him still further of the psalms. The dedication reads: "Seeing
+that your tender and godly zeale dooth more delight in the holye songs of
+veritie than in any fayncd rymes of vanytie, I am encouraged to travayle
+further in the said booke of Psalmes." This young king restored to the
+English people the free reading of the Bible, which his wicked father,
+Henry VIII., had forbidden them, and he was of a sincerely religious
+nature. He also was a music-lover, and encouraged the art as much as his
+short life and troubled reign permitted.
+
+Hopkins also wrote a preface for his share of the work, in which he spoke
+with much modesty of himself and much praise of Sternhold. He said his own
+verses were not "in any parte to bee compared with his [Sternhold's] most
+exquisite dooynges." He thinks, however, that his owne are "fruitfull
+though they bee not fyne."
+
+The third edition, in 1556, contained fifty-one psalms; the fourth, in
+1560, had sixty-seven psalms; the fifth, in 1561, increased the number to
+eighty-seven; and in 1562 or 1563 the whole book of psalms appeared. Other
+authors had some share in this work: Norton, Whyttyngham (a Puritan divine
+who married Calvin's sister), Kethe, who wrote the 100th Psalm, "All people
+that on earth do dwell," which is still seen in some of our hymn-books. Of
+all these men, sly old Thomas Fuller truthfully and quaintly said, "They
+were men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more
+of Jordan than of Helicon."
+
+For over one hundred years from the first publication there was a steady
+outpour of editions of these Psalms. Before the year 1600 there were
+seventy-four editions,--a most astonishing number for the times; and from
+1600 to 1700 two hundred and thirty-five editions. In 1868 six hundred and
+one editions were known, including twenty-one in this nineteenth century
+and doubtless there were still others uncatalogued and forgotten. Among
+other editions this version had in the time of Charles II. two in
+shorthand, one printed by "Thos. Cockerill at the Three Legs and Bible in
+the Poultry." Two copies of these editions are in the British Museum. They
+are tiny little 64mos, of which half a dozen could be laid side by side on
+the palm of the hand. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version had also in 1694 the
+honor of having arranged for it a Concordance.
+
+Upon no production of the religious Muse in the English tongue has greater
+diversity of criticism been displayed or more extraordinary or varied
+judgment been rendered than upon Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. A world of
+testimony could be adduced to fortify any view which one chose to take
+of them. At the time of their early publication they induced a swarm of
+stinging lampoons and sneering comments, that often evince most plainly
+that a difference in religious belief or scorn for an opposing sect brought
+them forth. The poetry of that and the succeeding century abounds in
+allusions to them. Phillips wrote:--
+
+      "Singing with woful noise
+  Like a crack'd saints bell jarring in the steeple,
+  Tom Sternhold's wretched prick-song for the people."
+
+Another poet, a courtier, wrote:--
+
+  "Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms
+  When they translated David's psalms."
+
+But I see no signs of qualmishness; they show to me rather a healthy
+sturdiness as one of their strongest characteristics.
+
+Pope at a later day wrote:--
+
+  "Not but there are who merit other palms
+    Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms.
+  The boys and girls whom charity maintains
+    Implore your help in these pathetic strains.
+  How could devotion touch the country pews
+    Unless the gods bestowed a proper muse."
+
+Wesley sneered at this version, saying, "When it is seasonable to sing
+praises to God we do it, not in the scandalous doggrel of Hopkins and
+Sternhold, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such
+as would provoke a _critic_ to turn _Christian_ rather than a
+_Christian_ to turn _critic_."
+
+The edition of 1562 was printed with the notes of melodies that were then
+called Church Tunes. They formed the basis of all future collections of
+psalm-music for over a century. They soon were published in harmony in four
+parts, "which may be sung to all musical instrumentes set forth for the
+encrease of vertue and abolyshing of other vayne and tryfling ballads." In
+1592 a very important collection of psalm-tunes was published to use with
+Sternhold and Hopkins' words. It is called "The Whole Booke of Psalmes:
+with their wonted tunes as they are sung in Churches composed into four
+parts." This book is noteworthy because in it the tunes are for the first
+time named after places, as is still the custom. The music contained square
+or oblong notes and also lozenge-shaped notes. The square note was a
+"semy-brave," the lozenge-shaped note was a "prycke" or a "mynymme," and
+"when there is a prycke by the square note, that prycke is half as much as
+the note that goeth before."
+
+Music at that time was said to be pricked, not printed,--the word being
+derived from the prick or dot which formed the head of the note. Any song
+which was printed in various parts was called a prick-song, to distinguish
+it from one sung extemporaneously or by ear. The word prick-song occurs not
+only in all the musical books, but in the literature of the time, and in
+Shakespeare. "Tom Sternhold's" songs were entitled to be called prick-songs
+because they had notes of music printed with them. Many of the tunes
+in this collection were taken from the Genevan Psalter and Luther's
+Psalm-Book, or from Marot and Beza's French Book of Psalms. Hence they were
+irreverently called "Genevan Jiggs," and "Beza's Ballets."
+
+There is much difference shown in the wording of these various editions of
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. The earlier ones were printed as Sternhold
+wrote them; but with the Genevan editions began great and astonishing
+alterations. Warton, who was no lover of Sternhold and Hopkins' verses,
+calling them "the disgrace of sacred poetry," said of these attempted
+improvements, with vehemence, that "many stanzas already too naked and weak
+like a plain old Gothic edifice stripped of its signatures of antiquity,
+have lost that little and almost only strength and support which they
+derived from ancient phrases." Other old critics thought that Sternhold,
+could he return to life, would hardly know his own verses.
+
+This is Sternhold's rendering of the Psalm in the edition of 1549:--
+
+  1.  The heavens & the fyrmamente
+        do wondersly declare
+      The glory of God omnipotent
+        his workes and what they are.
+
+  2.  Ech daye declareth by his course
+        an other daye to come
+      And By the night we know lykwise
+        a nightly course to run.
+
+  3.  There is no laguage tong or speche
+        where theyr sound is not heard,
+      In al the earth and coastes thereof
+        theyr knowledge is conferd.
+
+  4.  In them the lord made royally
+        a settle for the sunne
+      Where lyke a Gyant joyfully
+        he myght his iourney runne.
+
+  5.  And all the skye from ende to ende
+        he compast round about
+      No man can hyde hym from his heate
+        but he wll fynd hym out
+
+In order to show the liberties taken with the text we can compare with it
+the Genevan edition printed in 1556. The second verse of that presumptuous
+rendering reads,--
+
+  "The wonderous works of God appears
+    by every days success
+  The nyghts which likewise their race runne
+    the selfe same thinges expresse."
+
+The fourth,--
+
+  "In them the lorde made for the sunne
+    a place of great renoune
+  Who like a bridegrome rady-trimed
+    doth from his chamber come."
+
+The expression "rady-trimed," meaning close-shaven, is often instanced as
+one of the inelegancies of Sternhold, but he surely ought not to be held
+responsible for the "improvements" of the Genevan edition published after
+his death.
+
+The Genevan editors also invented and inserted an extra verse:--
+
+  "And as a valiant champion
+    who for to get a prize
+  With joye doth hast to take in hande
+    some noble enterprise."
+
+The fifth verse is thus altered:--
+
+  "And al the skye from ende to ende
+    he compasseth about,
+  Nothing can hyde it from his heate
+    but he wil finde it out."
+
+I cannot express the indignation with which I read these belittling and
+weakening alterations and interpolations; they are so unjust and
+so degrading to the reputation of Sternhold. It seems worse than
+forgery--worse than piracy; for instead of stealing from the defenceless
+dead poet, it foists upon him a spurious and degrading progeny; there is no
+word to express this tinkering libellous literary crime.
+
+Cromwell had a prime favorite among these psalms; it was the one hundred
+and ninth and is known as the "cursing psalm." Here are a few lines from
+it:--
+
+  "As he did cursing love, it shall
+    betide unto him so,
+  And as he did not blessing love
+    it shall be farre him fro,
+  As he with cursing clad himselfe
+    so it like water shall
+  Into his bowels and like oyl
+    Into his bones befall.
+  As garments let it be to him
+    to cover him for aye
+  And as a girdle wherewith he
+    may girded be alway."
+
+Another authority gives the "cursing psalm" as the nineteenth of King
+James's version; but there is nothing in "The heavens declare the glory of
+God," &c. to justify the nickname of "cursing."
+
+It is said when the tyrannical ruler Andros visited New Haven and attended
+church there that (Sternhold and Hopkins' Version being used) the fearless
+minister very inhospitably gave out the fifty-second psalm to be sung. The
+angry governor, who took it as a direct insult, had to listen to the lining
+and singing of these words, and I have no doubt they were roared out with a
+lusty will:--
+
+  1.  Why dost thou tyrant boast thyself
+        thy wicked deeds to praise
+      Dost thou not know there is a God
+        whose mercies last alwaies?
+
+  2.  Why doth thy mind yet still deuise
+        such wisked wiles to warp?
+      Thy tongue untrue, in forging lies
+        is like a razer sharp.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  4.  Thou dost delight in fraude & guilt
+        in mischief bloude and wrong:
+      Thy lips have learned the flattering stile
+        O false deceitful tongue.
+
+  5.  Therefore shall God for eye confounde
+        and pluck thee from thy place.
+      Thy seed and root from out the grounde
+        and so shall thee deface;
+
+  6.  The just when they behold thy fall
+        with feare will praise the Lord:
+      And in reproach of thee withall
+        cry out with one accord.
+
+When the unhappy King Charles fled from Oxford to a camp of troops he also
+was insulted by having the same psalm given out in his presence by the
+boorish chaplain of the troops. After the cruel words were ended the
+heartsick king rose and asked the soldiers to sing the fifty-sixth psalm.
+Whenever I read the beautiful and pathetic words, as peculiarly appropriate
+as if they had been written for that occasion only, I can see it all before
+me,--the great camp, the angry minister, the wretched but truly royal king;
+and I can hear the simple and noble song as it pours from the lips of
+hundreds of rude soldiers:
+
+  1.  Have mercy Lord on mee I pray
+        for man would mee devour.
+      He fighteth with me day by day
+        and troubleth me each hour.
+
+  2.  Mine enemies daily enterprise
+        to swallow mee outright
+      To fight against me many rise
+        O thou most high of might
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  5.  What things I either did or spake
+        they wrest them at thier wil:
+      And all the councel that they take
+        is how to work me il.
+
+  6.  They all consent themselves to hide
+        close watch for me to lay:
+      They spie my pathes, and snares have layd
+        to take my life away.
+
+  7.  Shall they thus scape on mischief set,
+        thou God on them wilt frowne:
+      For in his wrath he will not let
+        to throw whole kingdomes downe.
+
+It would perhaps be neither just nor conducive to proper judgment to gather
+only a florilege of noble verses from Sternhold and Hopkins' Version and
+point out none of the "weedy-trophies," the quaint and even uncouth lines
+which disfigure the work. We must, however, in considering and judging
+them, remember that many words and even phrases which at present
+seem rather ludicrous or undignified had, in the sixteenth century,
+significations which have now become obsolete, and which were then neither
+vulgar nor unpoetical. I also have been forced to take my selections from
+a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins printed in 1599, and bound up with a
+"Breeches Bible;" for I have access to no earlier edition. Sternhold
+and Hopkins themselves may not be in truth responsible for many of
+the crudities. Hopkins, in his rendition of the 12th verse of the
+seventy-fourth Psalm, thus addresses the Deity:--
+
+  "Why doost withdraw thy hand abacke
+    and hide it in thy lappe?
+  O pluck it out and bee not slacke
+    to give thy foes a rap."
+
+"Rap" may have meant a heavier, a mightier blow then than it does
+now-a-days.
+
+Here is another curious verse from the seventieth psalm,--
+
+  "Confounde them that apply
+    and seeke to make my shame
+  And at my harme doe laugh & crye
+    So So there goeth the game."
+
+The sixth verse of the fifty-eighth psalm is rendered thus:--
+
+  "O God breake thou thier teeth at once
+    within thier mouthes throughout;
+  The tuskes that in thier great jawbones
+    like Lions whelpes hang out."
+
+Another verse reads thus:--
+
+  "The earth did quake, the raine pourde down
+    Heard men great claps of thunder
+  And Mount Sinai shooke in such state
+    As it would cleeve in sunder."
+
+One verse of the thirty-fifth psalm reads thus:--
+
+  "The belly-gods and flattering traine
+    that all good things deride
+  At me doe grin with greate disdaine
+    and pluck thier mouths aside.
+  Lord when wilt thou amend this geare
+    why dost thou stay & pause?
+  O rid my soul, my onely deare,
+    out of these Lions clawes."
+
+The word tush occurs frequently and quaintly: "Tush I an sure to fail;"
+"Tush God forgetteth this."
+
+  "And with a blast doth puff against
+  such as would him correct
+  Tush Tush saith he I have no dread."
+
+Here are some of the curious expressions used:--
+
+  "Though gripes of grief and pangs full sore
+    shall lodge with us all night."
+
+  "For why their hearts were nothing lent
+    to Him nor to His trade."
+
+  "Our soul in God hath joy and game."
+
+  "They are so fed that even for fat
+    thier eyes oft-times out start."
+
+  "They grin they mow they nod thier heads."
+
+  "While they have war within thier hearts."
+    as butter are thier words."
+
+  "Divide them Lord & from them pul
+    thier devilish double-tongue."
+
+  "My silly soul uptake."
+
+  "And rained down Manna for them to eat
+    a food of mickle-wonder."
+
+  "For joy I have both gaped & breathed."
+
+But it is useless to multiply these selections, which, viewed individually,
+are certainly absurd and inelegant. They often indicate, however, the exact
+thought of the Psalmist, and are as well expressed as the desire to be
+literal as well as poetic will permit them to be. Sternhold's verses
+compare quite favorably, when looked at either as a whole or with regard to
+individual lines, with those of other poets of his day, for Chaucer was the
+only great poet who preceded him.
+
+I must acknowledge quite frankly in the face of critics of both this and
+the past century that I always read Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms with a
+delight, a satisfaction that I can hardly give reasons for. Many of the
+renderings, though unmelodious and uneven, have a rough vigor and a
+sweeping swing that is to me wonderfully impressive, far more so than many
+of the elegant and polished methods of modern versifiers. And they are so
+thoroughly antique, so devoid of any resemblance to modern poems, that I
+love them for their penetrating savor of the olden times; and they seem no
+more to be compared and contrasted with modern verses than should an old
+castle tower be compared with a fine new city house. We prefer the latter
+for a habitation, it is infinitely better in every way, but we can admire
+also the rough grandeur of the old ruin.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Other Old Psalm-Books.
+
+
+
+There are occasionally found in New England on the shelves of old
+libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old
+farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a
+pile of dusty books in a barrel,--there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered
+psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly
+used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed
+in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some
+colonist, in affectionate remembrance of the church of his youth, and sung
+from only with tender reminiscent longing in his own home. But when groups
+of settlers who were neighbors and friends in their old homes came to
+America and formed little segregated communities by themselves, there is no
+doubt that they sung for a time from the psalm-books that they brought with
+them.
+
+A rare copy is sometimes seen of Marot and Beza's French Psalm-book,
+brought to America doubtless by French Huguenot settlers, and used by them
+until (and perhaps after) the owners had learned the new tongue. Some of
+the Huguenots became members of the Puritan churches in America, others
+were Episcopalians. In Boston the Fancuils, Baudoins, Boutineaus,
+Sigourneys, and Johannots were all Huguenots, and attended the little brick
+church built on School Street in 1704, which was afterwards occupied by
+the Twelfth Congregational Society of Boston, and in 1788 became a Roman
+Catholic church.
+
+The pocket psalm-book of Gabriel Bernon, the builder of the old French Fort
+at Oxford, is one of Marot and Beza's Version, and is still preserved and
+owned by one of his descendants; other New England families of French
+lineage cherish as precious relics the French psalm-books of their Huguenot
+ancestors. There has been in France no such incessant production of new
+metrical versions of the psalms as in England. From the time of the
+publication of the first versified psalms in 1540, through nearly three
+centuries the psalm-book of all French Protestants has been that of Marot
+and Beza. This French version of the psalms is of special interest to all
+thoughtful students of the history of Protestantism, because it was the
+first metrical translation of the psalms ever sung and used by the people;
+and it was without doubt one of the most powerful influences that assisted
+in the religious awakening of the Reformation.
+
+Clement Marot was the "Valet of the Bed-chamber to King Francis I.," and
+was one of the greatest French poets of his time; in fact, he gave his
+name to a new school of poetry,--"Marotique." He had tried his hand at
+an immense variety of profane verse, he had written ballades, chansons,
+pastourelles, vers equivoques, eclogues, laments, complaints, epitaphs,
+chants-royals, blasons, contreblasons, dizains, huitains, envois; he had
+been, Warton says, "the inventor of the rondeau and the restorer of the
+madrigal;" and yet, in spite of his well-known ingenuity and versatility,
+it occasioned much surprise and even amusement when it was known that the
+gay poet had written psalm-songs and proposed to substitute them for the
+love-songs of the French court. I doubt if Marot thought very deeply of the
+religious influence of his new songs, in spite of Mr. Morley's belief in
+the versifier's serious intent. He was doubtless interested and perhaps
+somewhat infected by "Lutheranisme," though perhaps he was more of a
+free-thinker than a Protestant. He himself said of his faith:--
+
+              "I am not a Lutherist
+  Nor Zuinglian and less Anabaptist,
+  I am of God through his son Jesus Christ.
+  I am one who has many works devised
+  From which none could extract a single line
+  Opposing itself to the law divine."
+
+And again:--
+
+  "Luther did not come down from heaven for me
+  Luther was not nailed to the cross to be
+  My Saviour; for my sins to suffer shame,
+  And I was not baptized in Luther's name.
+  The name I was baptized in sounds so sweet
+  That at the sound of it, what we entreat
+  The Eternal Father gives."
+
+In the year 1540, at the instigation of King Francis, Marot presented a
+manuscript copy of his thirty new psalm-songs to Charles V., king of Spain,
+receiving therefor two hundred gold doubloons. Francis encouraged him by
+further gifts, and so praised his work that the author soon published the
+thirty in a book which he dedicated to the king; and to which he also
+prefixed a metrical address to the ladies of France, bidding these fair
+dames to place their
+
+    "doigts sur les espinettes
+  Pour dire sainctes chansonnettes."
+
+These "sainctes chansonnettes" became at once the rage; courtiers and
+princes, lords and ladies, ever ready for some new excitement, seized at
+once upon the novel psalm-songs, and having no special or serious music for
+them, cheerfully sang the sacred words to the ballad-tunes of the times,
+and to their gailliards and measures, without apparently any very deep
+thought of their religious meaning. Disraeli says that each of the royal
+family and each nobleman chose for his favorite song a psalm expressive of
+his own feeling or sentiments. The Dauphin, as became a brave huntsman,
+chose
+
+  "Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre,"
+
+  "As the hart panteth after the water-brook,"
+
+and he gayly and noisily sang it when he went to the chase. The Queen chose
+
+  "Ne vueilles pas, o sire,
+  Me reprendre en ton ire."
+
+  "Rebuke me not in thine indignation."
+
+Antony, king of Navarre, sung
+
+  "Revenge moy prens la querelle,"
+
+  "Stand up, O Lord! to revenge my quarrel,"
+
+to the air of a dance of Poitou. Diane de Poictiers chose
+
+  "Du fond de ma pensee."
+
+  "From the depth of my heart."
+
+But when from interest in her psalm-song she wished to further read and
+study the Bible, she was warned from the danger with horror by the Cardinal
+of Lorraine. This religious awakening and inquiry was of course deprecated
+and dreaded by the Romish Church; to the Sorbonne all this rage for
+psalm-singing was alarming enough. What right had the people to sing God's
+word, "I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall be continually
+in my mouth"? The new psalm-songs were soon added to the list of "Heretical
+Books" forbidden by the Church, and Marot fled to Geneva in 1543. He had
+ere this been under ban of the Church, even under condemnation of death;
+had been proclaimed a heretic at all the cross-ways throughout the kingdom,
+and had been imprisoned. But he had been too good a poet and courtier to be
+lost, and the king had then interested himself and obtained the release of
+the versatile song writer. The fickle king abandoned for a second time the
+psalm versifier, who never again returned to France.
+
+The austere and far-seeing Calvin at once adopted Marot's version of the
+Psalms, now enlarged to the number of fifty, and added them to the Genevan
+Confession of Faith,--recommending however that they be sung with the grave
+and suitable strains written, for them by Guillaume Frane.
+
+The collection was completed with the assistance of Theodore Beza, the
+great theologian, and the demand for the books was so great that the
+printers could not supply them quickly enough. Ten thousand copies were
+sold at once,--a vast number for the times.
+
+But Marot was not happy in Geneva with Calvin and the Calvinists, as we can
+well understand. Beza, in his "History of the French Reformed Churches"
+said, "He (Marot) had always been bred up in a very bad school, and could
+not live in subjection to the reformation of the Gospel, and therefore
+went and spent the rest of his days in Piedmont, which was then in the
+possession of the king, where he lived in some security under the favor of
+the governor." He lived less than a year, however, dying in 1544.
+
+These psalms of Marot's passed through a great number and variety of
+editions. In addition to the Genevan publications, an immense number were
+printed in England. Nearly all the early editions were elegant books;
+carefully printed on rich paper, beautifully bound in rich moroccos and
+leathers, often emblazoned with gold on the covers, and with corners and
+clasps of precious metals,--they show the wealth and fashion of the owners.
+When, however, it came to be held an infallible sign of "Lutheranisme" to
+be a singer of psalms, simpler and cheaper bindings appear; hence the dress
+of the French Psalm-Book found in New England is often dull enough, but
+invariably firm and substantial.
+
+These psalms of Marot's are written in a great variety of song-measures,
+which seem scarcely as solemn and religious as the more dignified and even
+metres used by the early English writers. Some are graceful and smooth,
+however, and are canorous though never sonorous. They are pleasing to read
+with their quaint old spelling and lettering.
+
+In the old Sigourney psalm-book the nineteenth psalm was thus rendered:--
+
+  "Les cieux en chaque lieu
+  La puissance de Dieu
+    Racourent aux humains
+  Ce grand entour espars
+  Publie en toutes parts
+    L'ouvrage de ses mains.
+
+  "Iour apres iour coulant
+  Du Saigneur va parlant
+    Par longue experience.
+  La nuict suivant la nuict,
+  Nous presche et nous instruicst
+    De sa grad sapience"
+
+Another much-employed metre was this, of the hundred and thirty-third
+psalm:--
+
+  "Asais aux bors do ce superbe fleuve
+  Que de Babel les campagnes abreuve,
+  Nos tristes coeurs ne pensoient qu' a Sion.
+  Chacun, helas, dans cette affliction
+  Les yeux en pleurs la morte peinte au visage
+  Pendit sa harpe aux saules du rivage."
+
+A third and favorite metre was this:--
+
+  "Mais sa montagne est un sainct lieu:
+  Qui viendra done au mont de Dieu?
+    Qui est-ce qui la tiendra place?
+  Le homine de mains et coeur lave,
+  En vanite non esleve
+    Et qui n'a jure en fallace."
+
+Marot wrote in his preface to the psalms:--
+
+  "Thrice happy they who shall behold
+  And listen in that age of gold
+  As by the plough the laborer strays
+  And carman 'mid the public ways
+  And tradesman in his shop shall swell
+  The voice in psalm and canticle,
+  Sing to solace toil; again
+  From woods shall come a sweeter strain,
+  Shepherd and shepherdess shall vie
+  In many a tender Psalmody,
+  And the Creator's name prolong
+  As rock and stream return their song."
+
+Though these words seem prophetic, the gay and volatile Marot could never
+have foreseen what has proved one of the most curious facts in religious
+history,--that from the airy and unsubstantial seed sown by the French
+courtier in such a careless, thoughtless manner, would spring the
+great-spreading and deep-rooted tree of sacred song.
+
+Little volumes of the metrical rendering of the Psalms, known as "Tate and
+Brady's Version," are frequently found in New England. It was the first
+English collection of psalms containing any smoothly flowing verses. Many
+of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal
+renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were
+"tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were
+certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate.
+It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able
+to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too
+modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write
+an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel.
+Brady--equally modest--translated the Aeneid in rivalry of Dryden. "This
+translation," says Johnson, "when dragged into the world did not live long
+enough to cry."
+
+Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a
+stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's
+hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them
+we owe, however, these noble lines, which were written thus:--
+
+  "Be thou, O God, exalted High,
+  And as thy glory fills the Skie
+  So let it be on Earth displaid
+  Till thou art here as There obeyed."
+
+The hymn commencing,--
+
+  "My soul for help on God relies,
+    From him alone my safety flows,"
+
+is also of their composition.
+
+The first edition of these psalms was printed in 1696, and bore this
+title, "The Book of Psalms, a new version in metre fitted to the tunes used
+in Churches. By N. Tate and N. Brady." It was dedicated to King William,
+and though its use was permitted in English churches, it never supplanted
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version. In New England Tate and Brady's Psalms
+became more universally popular,--not, however, without fierce opposing
+struggles from the older church-members at giving up the venerated "Bay
+Psalm-Book."
+
+Another version of Psalms which is occasionally found in New England is
+known as "Patrick's Version." The title is "The Psalms of David in Metre
+Fitted to the Tunes used in Parish Churches by John Patrick, D.D. Precentor
+to the Charter House London." A curious feature of this octavo edition of
+1701, which I have, is, "An Explication of Some Words of less Common
+Use For the Benefit of the Common People." Here are a few of the
+"explications:"--
+
+  "Celebrate--Make renown'd.
+  Climes--Countries differing in length of days.
+  Detracting--Lessening one's credit.
+  Fluid--Yielding.
+  Infest--Annoy.
+  Theam--Matter of Discourse.
+  Uncessant--Never ceasing.
+  Stupemlious--Astonishing."
+
+Baxter said of Patrick, "His holy affection and harmony hath so far
+reconciled the Nonconformists that diverse of them use his Psalms in
+their congregation." I doubt if the version were used in New England
+Nonconformist congregations. Some of his verses read thus:--
+
+  "Lord hear the pray'rs and mournfull cries
+    Of mine afflicted estate,
+  And with thy Comforts chear my soul,
+    Before it is too late.
+
+  "My days consume away like Smoak
+    Mine anguish is so great,
+  My bones are not unlike a hearth
+    Parched & dry with heat.
+
+  "Such is my grief I little else
+    Can do but sigh and groan.
+  So wasted is my flesh I'm left
+    Nothing but skin and bone.
+
+  "Like th' Owl and Pelican that dwell
+    In desarts out of sight,
+  I sadly do bemoan myself,
+    In solitude delight.
+
+  "The wakeful bird that on Housetops
+    Sits without company
+  And spends the night in mournful cries
+    Leads such a life as I.
+
+  "The Ashes I rowl in when I eat
+    Are tasted with my bread,
+  And with my Drink are mixed the tears
+    I plentifully shed."
+
+A version of the Psalms which seems to have demanded and deserved more
+attention than it received was written by Cotton Mather. He was doomed to
+disappointment in seeing his version adopted by the New England churches
+just as his ambitions and hopes were disappointed in many other ways. This
+book was published in 1718. It was called "Psalterium Americanum. A Book
+of Psalms in a translation exactly conformed unto the Original; but all
+in blank verse. Fitted unto the tunes commonly used in the Church." By a
+curious arrangement of brackets and the use of two kinds of print these
+psalms could be divided into two separate metres and could be sung to
+tunes of either long or short metre. After each psalm were introduced
+explanations written in Mather's characteristic manner,--a manner both
+scholarly and bombastic. I have read the "Psalterium Americanum" with care,
+and am impressed with its elegance, finish, and dignity. It is so popular,
+however, even now-a-days, to jibe at poor Cotton Mather, that his Psalter
+does not escape the thrusts of laughing critics. Mr. Glass, the English
+critic, holds up these lines as "one of the rich things:"--
+
+  "As the Hart makes a panting cry
+    For cooling streams of water,
+  So my soul makes a panting cry
+    For thee--O Mighty God."
+
+I have read these lines over and over again, and fail to see anything very
+ludicrous in them, though they might be slightly altered to advantage.
+Still they may be very absurd and laughable from an English point of view.
+
+So superior was Cotton Mather's version to the miserable verses given in
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" that one wonders it was not eagerly accepted by the
+New England churches. Doubtless they preferred rhyme--even the atrocious
+rhyme of "The Bay Psalm Book." And the fact that the "Psalterium
+Americanum" contained no musical notes or directions also militated against
+its use.
+
+Other American clergymen prepared metrical versions of the psalms that were
+much loved and loudly sung by the respective congregations of the writers.
+The work of those worthy, painstaking saints we will neither quote nor
+criticise,--saying only of each reverend versifier, "Truly, I would
+the gods had made thee poetical." Rev. John Barnard, who preached for
+fifty-four years in Marblehead, published at the age of seventy years a
+psalm-book for his people. Though it appeared in 1752, a time when "The Bay
+Psalm Book" was being shoved out of the New England churches, Barnard's
+Version of the Psalms was never used outside of Marblehead. Rev. Abijah
+Davis published another book of psalms in which he copied whole pages from
+Watts without a word of thanks or of due credit, which was apparently
+neither Christian, clerical nor manly behavior.
+
+Watts's monosyllabic Hymns, which were not universally used in America
+until after the Revolution, are too well known and are still too frequently
+seen to need more than mention. Within the last century a flood of new
+books of psalms of varying merit and existence has poured out upon the New
+England churches, and filled the church libraries and church, pews, the
+second-hand book shops, the missionary boxes, and the paper-mills.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+The Church Music.
+
+
+
+Of all the dismal accompaniments of public worship in the early days of New
+England, the music was the most hopelessly forlorn,--not alone from the
+confused versifications of the Psalms which were used, but from the
+mournful monotony of the few known tunes and the horrible manner in which
+those tunes were sung. It was not much better in old England. In 1676
+Master Mace wrote of the singing in English churches, "'T is sad to
+hear what whining, toling, yelling or shreaking there is in our country
+congregations."
+
+A few feeble efforts were made in America at the beginning of the
+eighteenth century to attempt to guide the singing. The edition of 1698 of
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" had "Some few Directions" regarding the singing added
+on the last pages of the book, and simple enough they were in matter if not
+in form. They commence, "_First_, observe how many note-compass the
+tune is next the place of your first note, and how many notes above and
+below that so as you may begin the tune of your first note, as the rest may
+be sung in the compass of your and the peoples voices without Squeaking
+above or Grumbling below."
+
+This "Squeaking above and Grumbling below" had become far too frequent in
+the churches; Judge Sewall writes often with much self-reproach of his
+failure in "setting the tune," and also records with pride when he "set the
+psalm well." Here is his pathetic record of one of his mistakes: "He spake
+to me to set the tune. I intended Windsor and fell into High Dutch, and
+then essaying to set another tune went into a Key much to high. So I pray'd
+to Mr. White to set it which he did well. Litchfield Tune. The Lord Humble
+me and Instruct me that I should be the occasion of any interruption in the
+worship of God."
+
+The singing at the time must have been bad beyond belief; how much of its
+atrocity was attributable to the use of "The Bay Psalm-Book," cannot now
+be known. The great length of many of the psalms in that book was a fatal
+barrier to any successful effort to have good singing. Some of them were
+one hundred and thirty lines long, and occupied, when lined and sung, a
+full half-hour, during which the patient congregation stood. It is told of
+Dr. West, who preached in Dartmouth in 1726, that he forgot one Sabbath Day
+to bring his sermon to meeting. He gave out a psalm, walked a quarter of a
+mile to his house, got his sermon, and was back in his pulpit long before
+the psalm was finished. The irregularity of the rhythm in "The Bay Psalm
+Book" must also have been a serious difficulty to overcome. Here is the
+rendering given of the 133d Psalm:--
+
+  1. How good and sweet to see
+       i'ts for bretheren to dwell
+       together in unitee:
+
+  2. Its like choice oyle that fell
+       the head upon
+       that down did flow
+       the beard unto
+       beard of Aron:
+       The skirts of his garment
+       that unto them went down:
+
+  3. Like Hermons dews descent
+       Sions mountains upon
+       for there to bee
+       the Lords blessing
+       life aye lasting
+       commandeth hee.
+
+How this contorted song could have been sung even to the simplest tune by
+unskilled singers who possessed no guiding notes of music is difficult
+to comprehend. Small wonder that Judge Sewall was forced to enter in his
+diary, "In the morning I set York tune and in the second going over, the
+gallery carried it irresistibly to St. Davids which discouraged me very
+much." We can fancy him stamping his foot, beating time, and roaring York
+at the top of his old lungs, and being overcome by the strong-voiced
+gallery, and at last sadly succumbing to St. David's. Again he writes: "I
+set York tune and the Congregation went out of it into St. Davids in the
+very 2nd going over. They did the same 3 weeks before. This is the 2nd
+Sign. It seems to me an intimation for me to resign the Praecentor's Place
+to a better Voice. I have through the Divine Long suffering and Favour done
+it for 24 years and now God in his Providence seems to call me off, my
+voice being enfeebled." Still a third time he "set Windsor tune;" they "ran
+over into Oxford do what I would." These unseemly "running overs" became
+so common that ere long each singer "set the tune" at his own will and the
+loudest-voiced carried the day. A writer of the time, Rev. Thomas Walter,
+says of this reign of _concordia discors_: "The tunes are now
+miserably tortured and twisted and quavered, in some Churches, into a
+horrid Medly of confused and disorderly Voices. Our tunes are left to the
+Mercy of every unskilful Throat to chop and alter, to twist and change,
+according to their infinitely divers and no less Odd Humours and Fancies.
+I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two Men in the
+Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good
+Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with
+perpetual Interfearings with one another."
+
+Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and
+unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they
+possessed,--a foretaste of heaven;
+
+      "for all we know
+  Of what the blessed do above
+  Is that they sing and that they love."
+
+And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous
+melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal.
+
+Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the
+early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering
+and holding the colonists together in love. And they reverenced their poor
+halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever
+a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a
+psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he
+doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must
+believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,--
+
+    "There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged,
+    I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune."
+
+Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved
+to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words.
+"The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears
+at the words, _bought with thy blood_." He also, with a vehemence of
+language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that
+he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of
+his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield,
+Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs.
+
+About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously
+prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing
+Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These
+thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound
+often with "The Bay Psalm-Book." They were reprinted from Playford's "Book
+of Psalms" and the notes of the staff were replaced with letters and dots,
+and the bars marking the measures were omitted. To the Puritans, this great
+number of new tunes appeared fairly monstrous, and formed the signal for
+bitter objections and fierce quarrels.
+
+In 1647 a tract had appeared on church-singing which had attracted much
+attention. It was written by Rev John Cotton to attempt to influence the
+adoption and universal use of "The Bay Psalm-Book." This tract thoroughly
+considered the duty of singing, the matter sung, the singers, and the
+manner of singing, and, like all the literature of the time, was full of
+Biblical allusion and quotation. It had been said that "man should sing
+onely and not the women. Because it is not permitted to a woman to speake
+in the Church, how then shall they sing? Much lesse is it permitted to them
+to prophecy in the church and singing of Psalms is a kind of Prophecying."
+Cotton fully answered and contradicted these false reasoners, who would
+have had to face a revolution had they attempted to keep the Puritan women
+from singing in meeting. The tract abounds in quaint expressions, such as,
+"they have scoffed at Puritan Ministers as calling the people to sing one
+of _Hopkins-Jiggs_ and so _hop_ into the pulpit." Though he wrote
+this tract to encourage good singing in meeting, his endorsement of "lining
+the Psalm" gave support to the very element that soon ruined the singing.
+His reasons, however, were temporarily good, "because many wanted books and
+skill to read." At that time, and for a century later, many congregations
+had but one or two psalm-books, one of which was often bound with the
+church Bible and from which the deacon lined the psalm.
+
+So villanous had church-singing at last become that the clergymen arose in
+a body and demanded better performances; while a desperate and disgusted
+party was also formed which was opposed to all singing. Still another band
+of old fogies was strong in force who wished to cling to the same way of
+singing that they were accustomed to; and they gave many objections to the
+new-fangled idea of singing by note, the chief item on the list being the
+everlasting objection of all such old fossils, that "the old way was good
+enough for our fathers," &c. They also asserted that "_the names of
+the notes were blasphemous_;" that it was "popish;" that it was a
+contrivance to get money; that it would bring musical instruments into the
+churches; and that "no one could learn the tunes any way." A writer in the
+"New England Chronicle" wrote in 1723, "Truly I have a great jealousy
+that if we begin to _sing_ by _rule_, the next thing will be
+to _pray_ by rule and _preach_ by rule and _then comes popery_."
+
+It is impossible to overestimate the excitement, the animosity, and the
+contention which arose in the New England colonies from these discussions
+over "singing by rule" or "singing by rote." Many prominent clergymen wrote
+essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of
+Regular Singing," also a "Joco-serious Dialogue on Singing," by Reverend
+Mr. Symmes; "Cases of Conscience," compiled by several ministers; "The
+Accomplished Singer," by Cotton Mather, were the most important. "Singing
+Lectures" also were given in many parts of New England by various prominent
+ministers. So high was party feud that a "Pacificatory Letter" was
+necessary, which was probably written by Cotton Mather, and which soothed
+the troubled waters. The people who thought the "old way was the best" were
+entirely satisfied when they were convinced that the oldest way of all was,
+of course, by note and not by rote.
+
+This naive extract from the records of the First Church of Windsor,
+Connecticut, will show the way in which the question of "singing by rule"
+was often settled in the churches, and it also gives a very amusing glimpse
+of the colonial manner of conducting a meeting:--
+
+"July 2. 1736. At a Society meeting at which Capt. Pelatiah Allyn
+Moderator. The business of the meeting proceeded in the following manner
+Viz. the Moderator proposed as to the consideration of the meeting in the
+1st Place what should be done respecting that part of publick Woiship
+called Singing viz. whether in their Publick meetings as on Sabbath day,
+Lectures &c they would sing the way that Deacon Marshall usually sung in
+his lifetime commonly called the 'Old Way' or whether they would sing the
+way taught by Mr. Beal commonly called 'Singing by Rule,' and when the
+Society had discoursed the matter the Moderator pioposed to vote for said
+two ways as followeth viz. that those that were for singing in publick in
+the way practiced by Deacon Marshall should hold up their hands and be
+counted, and then that those that were desirous to sing in Mr. Beals way
+called 'by Rule' would after show their minds by the same sign which method
+was proceeded upon accordingly. But when the vote was passed there being
+many voters it was difficult to take the exact number of votes in order to
+determine on which side the major vote was; whereupon the Moderator ordered
+all the voters to go out of the seats and stand in the alleys and then
+those that were for Deacon Marshalls way should go into the mens seats and
+those that were for Mr. Beals way should go into the womens seat and
+after much objections made against that way, which prevailed not with the
+Moderator, it was complied with, and then the Moderator desired that those
+that were of the mind that the way to be practiced for singing for the
+future on the Sabbath &c should be the way sung by Deacon Marshall as
+aforesaid would signify the same by holding up their hands and be counted,
+and then the Moderator and myself went and counted the voters and the
+Moderator asked me how many there was. I answered 42 and he said there was
+63 or 64 and then we both counted again and agreed the number being 43.
+Then the Moderator was about to count the number of votes for Mr. Beals
+way of Singing called 'by Rule' but it was offered whether it would not be
+better to order the voters to pass out of the Meeting House door and there
+be counted who did accordingly and their number was 44 or 45. Then the
+Moderator proceeded and desired that those who were for singing in Public
+the way that Mr. Beal taught would draw out of their seats and pass out of
+the door and be counted. They replied they were ready to show their minds
+in any proper way where they were if they might be directed thereto but
+would not go out of the door to do the same and desired that they might be
+led to a vote where they were and they were ready to show their minds which
+the Moderator refused to do and thereupon declared that it was voted that
+Deacon Marshalls way of singing called the 'Old Way' should be sung in
+Publick for the future and ordered me to record the same as the vote of the
+Said Society which I refused to do under the circumstances thereof and have
+recorded the facts and proceedings."
+
+Good old lining, droning Deacon Marshall! though you were dead and gone,
+you and your years of psalm-singings were not forgotten. You lived, an
+idealized memory of pure and pious harmony, in the hearts of your old
+church friends. Warmly did they fight for your "way of singing;" with
+most undeniable and open partiality, with most dubious ingenuousness and
+rectitude, did your old neighbor, Captain Pelatiah Allyn, conduct that hot
+July music-meeting, counting up boldly sixty-three votes in favor of your
+way, when there were only forty-three voters on your side of the alley, and
+crowding a final decision in your favor. It is sad to read that when icy
+winter chilled the blood, warm partisanship of old friends also cooled, and
+innovative Windsor youth carried the day and the music vote, and your good
+old way was abandoned for half the Sunday services, to allow the upstart
+new fashion to take control.
+
+One happy result arose throughout New England from the victory of the
+ardent advocates of the "singing by rule,"--the establishment of the New
+England "singing-school,"--that outlet for the pent-up, amusement-lacking
+lives of young people in colonial times. What that innocent and
+happy gathering was in the monotonous existence of our ancestors and
+ancestresses, we of the present pleasure-filled days can hardly comprehend.
+
+Extracts from the records of various colonial churches will show how soon
+the respective communities yielded to the march of improvement and "seated
+the taught singers" together, thus forming choirs. In 1762 the church
+at Rowley, Massachusetts, voted "that those who have learned the art of
+Singing may have liberty to sit in the front gallery." In 1780 the same
+parish "requested Jonathan Chaplin and Lieutenant Spefford to assist the
+deacons in Raising the tune in the meeting house." In Sutton, in 1791, the
+Company of Singers were allowed to sit together, and $13 was voted to pay
+for "larning to sing by Rule." The Roxbury "First Church" voted in 1770
+"three seats in the back gallery for those inclined to sit together for
+the purpose of singing" The church in Hanover, in 1742, took a vote to
+see whether the "church will sing in the new way" and appoint a tuner. In
+Woodbury, Connecticut, in 1750 the singers "may sitt up Galery all day if
+they please but to keep to there own seat & not to Infringe on the Women
+Pues." In 1763, in the Ipswich First Parish, the singers were allowed to
+sit "two back on each side of the front alley." Similar entries may be
+found in nearly every record of New England churches in the middle or
+latter part of that century.
+
+The musical battle was not finished, however, when the singing was at last
+taught by rule, and the singers were allowed to sit together and form a
+choir. There still existed the odious custom of "lining" or "deaconing"
+the psalm. To this fashion may be attributed the depraved condition of
+church-singing of which Walters so forcibly wrote, and while it continued
+the case seemed hopeless, in spite of singing-schools and singing-teachers.
+It would be trying to the continued uniformity of pitch of an ordinary
+church choir, even now-a-days, to have to stop for several seconds between
+each line to listen to a reading and sometimes to an explanation of the
+following line.
+
+The Westminster Assembly had suggested in 1664 the alternate reading and
+singing of each line of the psalm to those churches that were not well
+supplied with psalm-books. The suggestion had not been adopted without
+discussion, It was in 1680 much talked over in the church in Plymouth, and
+was adopted only after getting the opinion of each male church member.
+When once taken into general use the custom continued everywhere, through
+carelessness and obstinacy, long after the churches possessed plenty of
+psalm-books. An early complaint against it was made by Dr. Watts in the
+preface of his hymns, which were published by Benjamin Franklin in 1741. As
+Watts' Psalms and Hymns were not, however, in general use in New England
+until after the Revolution, this preface with its complaint was for a long
+time little seen and little heeded.
+
+It is said that the abolition came gradually; that the impetuous and
+well-trained singers at first cut off the last word only of the deacon's
+"lining;" they then encroached a word or two further, and finally sung
+boldly on without stopping at all to be "deaconed." This brought down
+a tempest of indignation from the older church-members, who protested,
+however, in vain. A vote in the church usually found the singers
+victorious, and whether the church voted for or against the "lining," the
+choir would always by stratagem vanquish the deacon. One old soldier took
+his revenge, however. Being sung down by the rampant choir, he still showed
+battle, and rose at the conclusion of the psalm and opened his psalm-book,
+saying calmly, "_Now_ let the _people of the Lord sing_."
+
+The Rowley church tried diplomacy in their struggle against "deaconing,"
+by instituting a gradual abolishing of the custom. In 1785 the choir was
+allowed "to sing once on the Lord's Day without reading by the Deacon." In
+five years the Rowley singers were wholly victorious, and "lining out" the
+psalm was entirely discontinued.
+
+In 1770, dissatisfaction at the singing in the church was rife in
+Wilbraham, and a vote was taken to see whether the town would be willing
+to have singing four times at each service; and it was voted to "take into
+consideration the Broken State of this Town with regard to singing on the
+Sabbath Day." Special and bitter objection was made against the leader
+beating time so ostentatiously. A list of singers was made and a
+singing-master appointed. The deacon was allowed to lead and line and beat
+time in the forenoon, while the new school was to have control in the
+afternoon; and "whoever leads the singing shall be at liberty to use the
+motion of his hand while singing for the space of three months only." It is
+needless to state who came off victorious in the end. The deacon left as a
+parting shot a request to "make Inquiry into the conduct of those who call
+themselves the Singers in this town."
+
+In Worcester, in 1779, a resolution adopted at the town meeting was "that
+the mode of singing in the congregation here be without reading the psalms
+line by line." "The Sabbath succeeding the adoption of this resolution,
+after the hymn had been read by the minister, the aged and venerable Deacon
+Chamberlain, unwilling to abandon the custom of his fathers and his own
+honorable prerogative, rose and read the first line according to his usual
+practice. The singers, previously prepared to carry the desired alteration
+into effect, proceeded in their singing without pausing at the conclusion
+of the line. The white-haired officer of the church with the full power
+of his voice read on through the second line, until the loud notes of the
+collected body of singers overpowered his attempt to resist the progress
+of improvement. The deacon, deeply mortified at the triumph of the musical
+reformation, then seized his hat and retired from the meeting-house in
+tears." His conduct was censured by the church, and he was for a time
+deprived of partaking in the communion, for "absenting himself from the
+public services of the Sabbath;" but in a few weeks the unhouselled deacon
+was forgiven, and never attempted to "line" again.
+
+Though the opponents of "lining" were victorious in the larger villages and
+towns, in smaller parishes, where there were few hymn-books, the lining
+of the psalms continued for many years. Mr. Hood wrote, in 1846, the
+astonishing statement that "the habit of lining prevails to this day over
+three-fourths of the United States." This I can hardly believe, though I
+know that at present the practice obtains in out of the way towns with poor
+and ignorant congregations. The separation of the lines often gives a very
+strange meaning to the words of a psalm; and one wonders what the Puritan
+children thought when they heard this lino of contradictions that Hood
+points out:--
+
+  "The Lord will come and He will not,"
+
+and after singing that line through heard the second line,--
+
+  "Keep silence, but speak out."
+
+Many new psalm-books appeared about the time of the Revolutionary War, and
+many church petitions have been preserved asking permission to use the
+new and more melodious psalm and hymn books. Books of instruction also
+abounded,--books in which the notes were not printed on the staff, and
+books in which there were staffs but no notes, only letters or other
+characters (these were called "dunce notes"); books, too, in which the
+notes were printed so thickly that they could scarcely be distinguished one
+from the other.
+
+  "A dotted tribe with ebon heads
+  That climb the slender fence along,
+  As black as ink, as thick as weeds,
+  Ye little Africans of song."
+
+One book--perhaps the worst, since it was the most pretentious--was "The
+Compleat Melody or Harmony of Sion," by William Tansur,--"Ingenious
+Tans'ur Skilled in Musicks Art." It was a most superficial, pedantic, and
+bewildering composition. The musical instruction was given in the form of a
+series of ill-spelled dialogues between a teacher and pupil, interspersed
+with occasional miserable rhymes. It was ill-expressed at best, and
+such musical terms as "Rations of Concords," "Trilloes," "Trifdiapasons,"
+"Leaps," "Binding cadences," "Disallowances," "Canons," "Prime Flower
+of Florid," "Consecutions of Perfects," and "Figurates," make the book
+exceedingly difficult of comprehension to the average reader, though
+possibly not to a student of obsolete musical phraseology.
+
+A side skirmish on the music field was at this time fought between the
+treble and the tenor parts. Ravenscroft's Psalms and Walter's book had
+given the melody, or plain-song, to the tenor. This had, of course, thrown
+additional difficulties in the way of good singing; but when once the
+trebles obtained the leading part, after the customary bitter opposition,
+the improved singing approved the victory.
+
+Many objections, too, were made to the introduction of "triple-time" tunes.
+It gave great offence to the older Puritans, who wished to drawl out all
+the notes of uniform length; and some persons thought that marking and
+accenting the measure was a step toward the "Scarlet Woman." The time was
+called derisively, "a long leg and a short one."
+
+These old bigots must have been paralyzed at the new style of psalm-singing
+which was invented and introduced by a Massachusetts tanner and
+singing-master named Billings, and which was suggested, doubtless, by the
+English anthems. It spread through the choirs of colonial villages and
+towns like wild-fire, and was called "fuguing." Mr. Billings' "Fuguing
+Psalm Singer" was published in 1770. It is a dingy, ill-printed book with
+a comically illustrated frontispiece, long pages of instruction, and this
+motto:--
+
+  "O, praise the Lord with one consent
+    And in this grand design
+  Let Britain and the Colonies
+    Unanimously join."
+
+The succeeding hymn-books, and the patriotic hymns of Billings in
+post-Revolutionary years have no hint of "Britain" in them. The names
+"Federal Harmony," "Columbian Harmony," "Continental Harmony," "Columbian
+Repository," and "United States Sacred Harmony" show the new nation.
+Billings also published the "Psalm Singer's Amusement," and other
+singing-books. The shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather must have groaned
+aloud at the suggestions, instructions, and actions of this unregenerate,
+daring, and "amusing" leader of church-singing.
+
+It seems astonishing that New England communities in those times of anxious
+and depressing warfare should have so delightedly seized and adopted this
+unusual and comparatively joyous style of singing, but perhaps the new
+spirit of liberty demanded more animated and spirited expression; and
+Billings' psalm-tunes were played with drum and fife on the battlefield to
+inspire the American soldiers. Billings wrote of his fuguing invention, "It
+has more than twenty times the power of the old slow tunes. Now the solemn
+bass demands their attention, next the manly tenor, now the lofty counter,
+now the volatile treble. Now here! Now there! Now here again! Oh ecstatic,
+push on, ye sons of harmony!" Dr. Mather Byles wrote thus of fuguing:--
+
+  "Down starts the Bass with Grave Majestic Air,
+  And up the Treble mounts with shrill Career,
+  With softer Sounds in mild melodious Maze
+  Warbling between, the Tenor gently plays
+  And, if th' inspiring Altos joins the Force
+  See! like the Lark it Wings its towering Course
+  Thro' Harmony's sublimest Sphere it flies
+  And to Angelic Accents seems to rise."
+
+A more modern poet in affectionate remembrance thus sings the fugue:--
+
+  "A fugue let loose cheers up the place,
+    With bass and tenor, alto, air,
+  The parts strike in with measured grace,
+    And something sweet is everywhere.
+
+  "As if some warbling brood should build
+    Of bits of tunes a singing nest;
+  Each bringing that with which it thrilled
+    And weaving it with all the rest."
+
+All public worshippers in the meetings one hundred years ago did not,
+however, regard fuguing as "something sweet everywhere," nor did they agree
+with Billings and Byles as to its angelic and ecstatic properties. Some
+thought it "heartless, tasteless, trivial, and irreverent jargon." Others
+thought the tunes were written more for the absurd inflation of the singers
+than for the glory of God; and many fully sympathized with the man who
+hung two cats over Billings's door to indicate his opinion of Billings's
+caterwauling. An old inhabitant of Roxbury remembered that when fuguing
+tunes were introduced into his church "they produced a literally fuguing
+effect on the older people, who went out of the church as soon as the first
+verse was sung." One scandalized and belligerent old clergyman, upon the
+Sabbath following the introduction of fuguing into his church, preached
+upon the prophecy of Amos, "The songs of the temple shall be turned
+into howling," while another took for his text the sixth verse of the
+seventeenth chapter of Acts, "Those that have turned the world upside down,
+are come hither also." One indignant and disgusted church attendant thus
+profanely recorded in church his views:--
+
+"Written out of temper on a Pannel in one of the Pues in Salem Church:--
+
+  "Could poor King David but for once
+    To Salem Church repair;
+  And hear his Psalms thus warbled out,
+    Good Lord, how he would swear
+
+  "But could St Paul but just pop in,
+    From higher scenes abstracted,
+  And hear his Gospel now explained,
+    By Heavens, he'd run distracted."
+
+These lines were reprinted in the "American Apollo" in 1792.
+
+The repetition of a word or syllable in fuguing often lead to some
+ridiculous variations in the meanings of the lines. Thus the words--
+
+  "With reverence let the saints appear
+  And bow before the Lord,"
+
+were forced to be sung, "And bow-wow-wow, And bow-ow-ow," and so on until
+bass, treble, alto, counter, and tenor had bow-wowed for about twenty
+seconds; yet I doubt if the simple hearts that sung ever saw the absurdity.
+
+It is impossible while speaking of fuguing to pass over an extraordinary
+element of the choir called "singing counter." The counter-tenor parts in
+European church-music were originally written for boys' voices. From
+thence followed the falsetto singing of the part by men; such was also
+the "counter" of New England. It was my fortune to hear once in a country
+church an aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and
+respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start
+of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and
+apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir,
+but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however
+chosen, would fail in attempting to describe the grotesque and uncanny
+sound.
+
+It is very evident, when once choirs of singers were established and
+attempts made for congregations to sing the same tune, and to keep
+together, and upon the same key, that in some way a decided pitch must be
+given to them to start upon. To this end pitch-pipes were brought into the
+singers' gallery, and the pitch was given sneakingly and shamefacedly to
+the singers. From these pitch-pipes the steps were gradual, but they led,
+as the Puritan divines foresaw, to the general introduction of musical
+instruments into the meetings.
+
+This seemed to be attacking the very foundations of their church; for the
+Puritans in England had, in 1557, expressly declared "concerning singing of
+psalms we allow of the people joining with one voice in a plain tune, but
+not in tossing the psalms from one side to the other with mingling of
+organs." The Round-heads had, in 1664, gone through England destroying the
+noble organs in the churches and cathedrals. They tore the pipes from the
+organ in Westminster Abbey, shouting, "Hark! how the organs go!" and, "Mark
+what musick that is, that is lawful for a Puritan to dance," and they sold
+the metal for pots of ale. Only four or five organs were left uninjured in
+all England. 'Twas not likely, then, that New England Puritans would take
+kindly to any musical instruments. Cotton Mather declared that there was
+not a word in the New Testament that authorized the use of such aids to
+devotion. The ministers preached often and long on the text from the
+prophecy of Amos, "I will not hear the melody of thy viols;" while,
+Puritan-fashion, they ignored the other half of the verse, "Take thou away
+from me the noise of thy songs." Disparaging comparisons were made with
+Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut,
+and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical
+knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players."
+
+Some of the first pitch-pipes were comical little apple-wood instruments
+that looked like mouse-traps, and great pains was taken to conceal them as
+they were passed surreptitiously from hand to hand in the choir. I have
+seen one which was carefully concealed in a box that had a leather binding
+like a book, and which was ostentatiously labelled in large gilt letters
+"Holy Bible;" a piece of barefaced and unnecessary deception on the part of
+some pious New England deacon or chorister.
+
+Little wooden fifes were also used, and then metal tuning-forks. A canny
+Scotchman, who abhorred the thought of all musical instruments anywhere,
+managed to have one fling at the pitch-pipe. The pitch had been given but
+was much too high, and before the first verse was ended the choir had to
+cease singing. The Scotchman stood up and pointed his long finger to the
+leader, saying in broad accents of scorn, "Ah, Johnny Smuth, now ye can
+have a chance to blaw yer braw whustle agaen." At a similar catastrophe
+owing to the mistake of the leader in Medford, old General Brooks rose in
+his pew and roared in an irritated voice of command, "Halt! Take another
+pitch, Bailey, take another pitch."
+
+In 1713 there was sent to America an English organ, "a pair of organs" it
+was called, which had chanced, by being at the manufacturers instead of in
+a church, to have escaped the general destruction by the Round-heads. It
+was given by Thomas Brattle to the Brattle Street Church in Boston. The
+congregation voted to refuse the gift, and it was then sent to King's
+Chapel, where it remained unpacked for several months for fear of hostile
+demonstrations, but was finally set up and used. In 1740 a Bostonian named
+Bromfield made an organ, and it was placed in a meeting-house and used
+weekly. In 1794 the church in Newbury obtained an organ, and many
+unpleasant and disparaging references were made by clergymen of other
+parishes to "our neighbor's box of whistles," "the tooting tub."
+
+Violoncellos, or bass-viols, as they were universally called, were almost
+the first musical instruments that were allowed in the New England
+churches. They were called, without intentional irreverence, "Lord's
+fiddles." Violins were widely opposed, they savored too much of low, tavern
+dance-music. After much consultation a satisfactory compromise was agreed
+upon by which violins were allowed in many meetings, if the performers
+"would play the fiddle wrong end up." Thus did our sanctimonious
+grandfathers cajole and persuade themselves that an inverted fiddle was
+not a fiddle at all, but a small bass-viol. An old lady, eighty years old,
+wrote thus in the middle of this century, of the church of her youth:
+"After awhile there was a bass-viol Introduced and brought into meeting and
+did not suit the Old people; one Old Gentleman got up, took his hat off
+the peg and marched off. Said they had begun fiddling and there would be
+dancing soon." Another church-member, in derisive opposition to a clarinet
+which had been "voted into the choir," brought into meeting a fish-horn,
+which he blew loud and long to the complete rout of the clarinet-player and
+the singers. When reproved for this astounding behavior he answered stoutly
+that "if one man could blow a horn in the Lord's House on the Sabbath day
+he guessed he could too," and he had to be bound over to keep the peace
+before the following Sunday. A venerable and hitherto decorous old deacon
+of Roxbury not only left the church when the hated bass-viol began its
+accompanying notes, but he stood for a long time outside the church door
+stridently "caterwauling" at the top of his lungs. When expostulated with
+for this unseemly and unchristianlike annoyance he explained that he was
+"only mocking the banjo." To such depths of rebellion were stirred the
+Puritan instincts of these religious souls.
+
+Many a minister said openly that he would like to walk out of his pulpit
+when the obnoxious and hated flutes, violins, bass-viols, and bassoons were
+played upon in the singing gallery. One clergyman contemptuously announced
+"We will now sing and fiddle the forty-fifth Psalm." Another complained of
+the indecorous dress of the fiddle-player. This had reference to the almost
+universal custom, in country churches in the summer time, of the bass-viol
+player removing his coat and playing "in his shirt sleeves." Others hated
+the noisy tuning of the bass-viol while the psalm was being read. Mr.
+Brown, of Westerly, sadly deplored that "now we have only catgut and resin
+religion."
+
+In 1804 the church in Quincy, being "advanced," granted the singers the
+sum of twenty-five dollars to buy a bass-viol to use in meeting, and a few
+other churches followed their lead. From the year 1794 till 1829 the
+church in Wareham, Massachusetts, was deeply agitated over the question of
+"Bass-Viol, or No Bass-Viol." They voted that a bass-viol was "expedient,"
+then they voted to expel the hated abomination; then was obtained "Leave
+for the Bass Viol to be brought into ye meeting house to be Played On every
+other Sabbath & to Play if chosen every Sabbath in the Intermission between
+meetings & not to Pitch the Tunes on the Sabbaths that it don't Play" Then,
+they tried to bribe the choir for fifty dollars not to use the "bars-vile,"
+but being unsuccessful, many members in open rebellion stayed away from
+church and were disciplined therefor. Then they voted that the bass-viol
+could not be used unless Capt. Gibbs were previously notified (so he and
+his family need not come to hear the hated sounds); but at last, after
+thirty years, the choir and the "fiddle-player" were triumphant in Wareham
+as they were in other towns.
+
+We were well into the present century before any cheerful and also simple
+music was heard in our churches; fuguing was more varied and surprising
+than cheerful. Of course, it was difficult as well as inappropriate to
+suggest pleasing tunes for such words as these:--
+
+  "Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+    The land of horror and despair,
+  Justice hath built a dismal hell,
+    And laid her stores of vengeance there:
+
+  "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+    Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+  And darts to inflict immortal pains,
+    Dyed in the blood of damned souls."
+
+But many of the words of the old hymns were smooth, lively, and
+encouraging; and the young singers and perhaps the singing-masters craved
+new and less sober tunes. Old dance tunes were at first adapted; "Sweet
+Anne Page," "Babbling Echo," "Little Pickle" were set to sacred words. The
+music of "Few Happy Matches" was sung to the hymn "Lo, on a narrow neck
+of land;" and that of "When I was brisk and young" was disguised with
+the sacred words of "Let sinners take their course." The jolly old tune,
+"Begone dull care," which began,--
+
+  "My wife shall dance, and I will sing,
+  And merrily pass the day."
+
+was strangely appropriated to the solemn words,--
+
+  "If this be death, I soon shall be
+  From every pain and sorrow free,"
+
+and did not seem ill-fitted either.
+
+"Sacred arrangements," "spiritual songs," "sacred airs," soon followed, and
+of course demanded singers of capacity and education to sing them. From
+this was but a step to a paid quartette, and the struggle over this last
+means of improvement and pleasure in church music is of too recent a date
+to be more than referred to.
+
+I attended a church service not many years ago in Worcester, where an old
+clergyman, the venerable "Father" Allen, of Shrewsbury, then too aged
+and feeble to preach, was seated in the front pew of the church. When a
+quartette of singers began to render a rather operatic arrangement of a
+sacred song he rose, erect and stately, to his full gaunt height, turned
+slowly around and glanced reproachfully over the frivolous, backsliding
+congregation, wrapped around his spare, lean figure his full cloak
+of quilted black silk, took his shovel hat and his cane, and stalked
+indignantly and sadly the whole length of the broad central aisle, out
+of the church, thus making a last but futile protest against modern
+innovations in church music. Many, in whom the Puritan instincts and blood
+are still strong, sympathize internally with him in this feeling; and all
+novelty-lovers must acknowledge that the sublime simplicity and deep piety
+in which the old Puritan psalm-tunes abound, has seldom been attained in
+the modern church-songs. Even persons of neither musical knowledge, taste,
+nor love, feel the power of such a tune as Old Hundred; and more modern and
+more difficult melodies, though they charm with their harmony and novelty,
+can never equal it in impressiveness nor in true religious influence.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+The Interruptions of the Services.
+
+
+
+Though the Puritans were such a decorous, orderly people, their religious
+meetings were not always quiet and uninterrupted. We know the torment they
+endured from the "wretched boys," and they were harassed by other
+annoying interruptions. For the preservation of peace and order they made
+characteristic laws, with characteristic punishments. "If any interrupt
+or oppose a preacher in season of worship, they shall be reproved by the
+Magistrate, and on repetition, shall pay L5, or stand two hours on a block
+four feet high, with this inscription in Capitalls, 'A WANTON GOSPELLER.'"
+As with other of their severe laws the rigid punishment provoked the crime,
+for Wanton Gospellers abounded. The Baptists did not hesitate to state
+their characteristic belief in the Puritan meetings, and the Quakers or
+"Foxians," as they were often called, interrupted and plagued them sorely.
+Judge Sewall wrote, in 1677, "A female quaker, Margaret Brewster, in
+sermon-time came in, in a canvass frock, her hair dishevelled loose like a
+Periwig, her face as black as ink, led by two other quakers, and two other
+quakers followed. It occasioned the greatest and most amazing uproar that I
+ever saw." More grievous irruptions still of scantily clad and even naked
+Quaker women were made into other Puritan meetings; and Quaker men shouted
+gloomily in through the church windows, "Woe! Woe! Woe to the people!"
+and, "The Lord will destroy thee!" and they broke glass bottles before
+the minister's very face, crying out, "Thus the Lord will break thee in
+pieces!" and they came into the meeting-house, in spite of the fierce
+tithingman, and sat down in other people's seats with their hats on their
+heads, in ash-covered coats, rocking to and fro and groaning dismally, as
+if in a mournful obsession. Quaker women managed to obtain admission to the
+churches, and they jumped up in the quiet Puritan assemblies screaming out,
+"Parson! thou art an old fool," and, "Parson! thy sermon is too long," and,
+"Parson! sit down! thee has already said more than thee knows how to say
+well," and other unpleasant, though perhaps truthful personalities. It is
+hard to believe that the poor, excited, screaming visionaries of those
+early days belonged to the same religious sect as do the serene,
+low-voiced, sweet-faced, and retiring Quakeresses of to-day. And there is
+no doubt that the astounding and meaningless freaks of these half-crazed
+fanatics were provoked by the cruel persecutions which they endured from
+our much loved and revered, but alas, intolerant and far from perfect
+Puritan Fathers. These poor Quakers were arrested, fined, robbed, stripped
+naked, imprisoned, laid neck and heels, chained to logs of wood, branded,
+maimed, whipped, pilloried, caged, set in the stocks, exiled, sold
+into slavery and hanged by our stern and cruel ancestors. Perhaps some
+gentle-hearted but timid Puritan souls may have inwardly felt that the
+Indian wars, and the destructive fires, and the earthquakes, and the dead
+cattle, blasted wheat, and wormy peas, were not judgments of God for small
+ministerial pay and periwig-wearing, but punishments for the heartrending
+woes of the persecuted Quakers.
+
+Others than the poor Quakers spoke out in colonial meetings. In Salem
+village and in other witch-hunting towns the crafty "victims" of the
+witches were frequently visited with their mock pains and sham fits in the
+meeting-houses, and they called out and interrupted the ministers most
+vexingly. Ann Putnam, the best and boldest actress among those cunning
+young Puritan witch-accusers, the protagonist of that New England tragedy
+known as the Salem Witchcraft, shouted out most embarrassingly, "There is
+a yellow-bird sitting on the minister's hat, as it hangs on the pin in the
+pulpit." Mr. Lawson, the minister, wrote with much simplicity that "these
+things occurring in the time of public worship did something interrupt me
+in my first prayer, being so unusual." But he braced himself up in spite
+of Ann and the demoniacal yellow-bird, and finished the service. These
+disorderly interruptions occurred on every Lord's Day, growing weekly
+more constant and more universal, and must have been unbearable. Some few
+disgusted members withdrew from the church, giving as reason that "the
+distracting and disturbing tumults and noises made by persons under
+diabolical power and delusions, preventing sometimes our hearing and
+understanding and profiting of the word preached; we having after many
+trials and experiences found no redress in this case, accounted ourselves
+under a necessity to go where we might hear the word in quiet." These
+withdrawing church-members were all of families that contained at least
+one person that had been accused of practising witchcraft. They were thus
+severely intolerant of the sacrilegious and lawless interruptions of the
+shy young "victims," who received in general only sympathy, pity, and even
+stimulating encouragement from their deluded and excited neighbors.
+
+One very pleasing interruption,--no, I cannot call it by so severe a
+name,--one very pleasing diversion of the attention of the congregation
+from the parson was caused by an innocent custom that prevailed in many a
+country community. Just fancy the flurry on a June Sabbath in Killingly, in
+1785, when Joseph Gay, clad in velvet coat, lace-frilled shirt, and white
+broadcloth knee-breeches, with his fair bride of a few days, gorgeous in a
+peach-colored silk gown and a bonnet trimmed "with sixteen yards of white
+ribbon," rose, in the middle of the sermon, from their front seat in the
+gallery and stood for several minutes, slowly turning around in order to
+show from every point of view their bridal finery to the eagerly gazing
+congregation of friends and neighbors. Such was the really delightful and
+thoughtful custom, in those fashion-plateless days, among persons of
+wealth in that and other churches; it was, in fact, part of the wedding
+celebration. Even in midwinter, in the icy church, the blushing bride would
+throw aside her broadcloth cape or camblet roquelo and stand up clad in a
+sprigged India muslin gown with only a thin lace tucker over her neck, warm
+with pride in her pretty gown, her white bonnet with ostrich feathers and
+embroidered veil, and in her new husband.
+
+The services in the meeting-house on the Sabbath and on Lecture days
+were sometimes painfully varied, though scarcely interrupted, by a very
+distressing and harrowing custom of public abasement and self-abnegation,
+which prevailed for many years in the nervously religious colonies. It was
+not an enforced punishment, but a voluntary one. Men and women who had
+committed crimes or misdemeanors, and who had sincerely repented of their
+sins, or who were filled with remorse for some violation of conscience, or
+even with regret for some neglect of religious ethics, rose in the Sabbath
+meeting before the assembled congregation and confessed their sins, and
+humbly asked forgiveness of God, and charity from their fellows. At
+other times they stood with downcast heads while the minister read their
+confession of guilt and plea for forgiveness. A most graphic account of one
+of those painful scenes is thus given by Governor Winthrop in his "History
+of New England:"--
+
+    "Captain Underhill being brought by the blessing of God in this
+    church's censure of excommunication, to remorse for his foul sins,
+    obtained, by means of the elders, and others of the church of Boston, a
+    safe conduct under the hand of the governor and one of the council to
+    repair to the church. He came at the time of the court of assistants,
+    and upon the lecture day, after sermon, the pastor called him forth and
+    declared the occasion, and then gave him leave to speak: and in
+    it was a spectacle winch caused many weeping eyes, though it afforded
+    matter of much rejoicing to behold the power of the Lord Jesus in his
+    ordinances, when they are dispensed in his own way, holding forth the
+    authority of his regal sceptre in the simplicity of the gospel
+    came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his
+    bravery and neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close
+    to his eyes; and standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs
+    and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his
+    hypocrisy, his persecution of God's people here, and especially his
+    pride (as the root of all which caused God to give him over to his
+    other sinful courses) and contempt of the magistrates.... He spake
+    well save that his blubbering &c interrupted him, and all along he
+    discovered a broken and melting heart and gave good exhortations to
+    take heed of such vanities and beginnings of evil as had occasioned his
+    fall; and in the end he earnestly and humbly besought the church to
+    have compassion of him and to deliver him out of the hands of Satan."
+
+What a picture! what a story! "Of all tales 'tis the saddest--and more sad
+because it makes us smile."
+
+Captain John Underhill was a brave though somewhat bumptious soldier, who
+had fought under the Prince of Orange in the War of the Netherlands, and
+had been employed as temporal drill-master in the church-militant in New
+England. He did good service for the colonists in the war with the Pequot
+Indians, and indeed wherever there was any fighting to be done. "He thrust
+about and justled into fame" He also managed to have apparently a very good
+time in the new land, both in sinning and repenting. When he stood up on
+the church-seat before the horrified, yet wide-open eyes of pious Boston
+folk, in his studiously and theatrically disarranged garments, and
+blubbered out his whining yet vain-glorious repentance, he doubtless acted
+his part well, for he had twice before been through the same performance,
+supplementing his second rehearsal by kneeling down before an injured
+husband in the congregation, and asking earthly forgiveness. I wish I
+could believe that this final repentance of the resilient captain were
+sincere--but I cannot. Nor did Boston people believe it either, though that
+noble and generous-minded man, Winthrop, thought he saw at the time of
+confession evidences of a truly contrite heart. The Puritans sternly and
+eagerly cast out the gay captain to the Dutch when he became an Antinomian,
+and he came to live and fight and gallant in a town on the western end of
+Long Island, where he perhaps found a church-home with members less severe
+and less sharp-eyed than those of his Boston place of martyrdom, and a
+people less inclined to resent and punish his frailties and his ways of
+amusing himself.
+
+In justice to Underhill (or perhaps to show his double-dealing) I will say
+that he left behind him a letter to Hanserd Knollys, complaining of the
+ill-treatment he had received; and in it he gives a very different account
+of this little affair with the Boston Church from that given us by Governor
+Winthrop. The offender says nothing about his hypocrisy, his public and
+self-abasing confession, nor of his sanctimonious blubbering and wishes for
+death. He explains that his offence was mild and purely mental, that in an
+infaust moment he glanced (doubtless stared soldier-fashion) at "Mistris
+Miriam Wildbore" as she sat in her "pue" at meeting. The elders, noting his
+admiring and amorous glances, thereupon accused him of sin in his heart,
+and severely asked him why he did not look instead at Mistress Newell or
+Mistress Upham. He replied very spiritedly and pertinently that these dames
+were "not desiryable women as to temporal graces," which was certainly
+sufficient and proper reason for any man to give, were he Puritan or
+Cavalier. Then acerb old John Cotton and some other Boston ascetics
+(perhaps Goodman Newell and Goodman Upham, resenting for their wives the
+_spretae injuria formae_) at once hunted up some plainly applicable
+verses from the Bible that clearly proved him guilty of the alleged
+sin--and summarily excommunicated him. He also wrote that the pious church
+complained that the attractive, the temporally graced Mistress Wildbore
+came vainly and over-bravely clad to meeting, with "wanton open-worked
+gloves slitt at the thumbs and fingers for the purpose of taking snuff,"
+and he resented this complaint against the fair one, saying no harm could
+surely come from indulging in the "good creature called tobacco." He would
+naturally feel that snuff-taking was a proper and suitable church-custom,
+since his own conversion,--dubious though it was,--his religious belief had
+come to him, "the spirit fell home upon his heart" while he was indulging
+in a quiet smoke.
+
+The story of his offences as told b his contemporaries does not assign to
+him so innocuous a diversion as staring across the meeting-house, but the
+account is quite as amusing as his own plaintive and deeply injured version
+of his arraignment.
+
+Other letters of his have been preserved to us,--letters blustering as
+was Ancient Pistol, and equally sanctimonious, letters fearfully and
+phonetically spelt. Here is the opening of a letter written while he
+was under sentence of excommunication from the Boston Church, and of
+banishment. It is to Governor Winthrop, his friend and fellow-emigrant:--
+
+"Honnored in the Lord,--
+
+"Your silenc one more admirse me. I Youse chrischan playnnes. I know you
+love it.... Silene can not reduce the hart of youer lovd brother: I would
+the rightchous would smite me espechah youerslfe & the honnered Depoti to
+whom I also dereckt this letter.... I would to God you would tender me
+soule so as to youse playnnes with me. I wrot to you both but now answer: &
+here I am dayli abused by malishous tongue. John Baker I here hath wrot to
+the honnored depoti how as I was drouck & like to be cild & both falc, upon
+okachon I delt with Wannerton for intrushon & finddmg them resolutli bent
+to rout all gud a mong us & advanc there superstischous ways & by boystrous
+words indeferd to fritten men to accomplish his end. & he abusing me to
+my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent & dastardli
+sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with
+intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered
+him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too
+month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let
+justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to soggest youer will to this
+barrer you will find him tracktabel."
+
+My sense of drollery is always most keenly tickled when I read Underhill's
+epistles, with their amazing and highly-varied letter concoctions, and
+remember that he also--wrote a book. What that seventeenth-century printer
+and proof-reader endured ere they presented his "edited" volume to the
+public must have been beyond expression by words. It was a pretty good book
+though, and in it, like many another man of his ilk, he tendered to his
+much-injured wife loud and diffuse praise, ending with these sententious
+words, "Let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife--though she be a
+woman."
+
+And yet, upon careful examination we find a method, a system, in
+Underhill's orthography, or rather in his cacography. He thinks a final
+tion should be spelt chon--and why not? "proposichon," "satisfackchon,"
+"oblegachon," "persekuchon," "dereckchon," "himelyachon"--thus he spells
+such words. And his plurals are plain when once you grasp his laws:
+"poseschouse" and "considderachonse," "facktse," and "respecktse." And
+his ly is alwajs li, "exacktli," "thorroli," "fidelliti," "charriti,"
+"falsciti." And why is not "indiered," as good as 'endeared,' "pregedic,"
+as 'prejudice,' "obstrucktter" as 'obstructer,' "pascheges," and
+"prouydentt," and "antyentt," just as clear as our own way of spelling
+these words? A "painful" speller you surely were, my gay Don Juan
+Underbill, as your pedantic "writtingse" all show, and the most dramatic
+and comic figure among all the early Puritans as well, though you scarcely
+deserve to be called a Puritan; we might rather say of you, as of Malvolio,
+"The devil a Puritan that he was, or anything constantly but a
+time-pleaser ... his ground of faith that all who looked on him loved him."
+
+In keen contrast to this sentimental excitement is the presence of noble
+Judge Sewall, white-haired and benignant, standing up calmly in Boston
+meeting, with dignified face and demeanor, but an aching and contrite
+heart, to ask through the voice of his minister humble forgiveness of God
+and man for his sad share as a judge in the unjust and awful condemnation
+and cruel sentencing to death of the poor murdered victims of that terrible
+delusion the Salem Witchcraft. Years of calm and unshrinking reflection, of
+pleading and constant communion with God had brought to him an overwhelming
+sense of his mistaken and over-influenced judgment, and a horror and
+remorse for the fatal results of his error. Then, like the steadfast and
+upright old Puritan that he was, he publicly acknowledged his terrible
+mistake. It is one of the finest instances of true nobility of soul and of
+absolute self-renunciation that the world affords. And the deep strain, the
+sharp wrench of the step is made more apparent still by the fact of the
+disapproval of his fellow-judges of his public confession and recantation.
+The yearly entries in his diary, simply expressed yet deeply speaking,
+entries of the prayerful fasts which he spent alone in his chamber when
+the anniversary of the fatal judgment-day returned, show that no half-vain
+bigotry, no emotional excitement filled and moved him to the open words of
+remorse. The lesson of his repentance is farther reaching than he
+dreamed, when the story of his confession can so move and affect this
+nineteenth-century generation, and fill more than one soul with a nobler
+idea of the Puritan nature, and with a higher and fuller conception of the
+absolute truth of the Puritan Christianity.
+
+Some very prosaic and earthly interruptions to the church services are
+recorded as being made, and possibly by the church-members themselves. In
+one church, in 1661, a fine of five shillings was imposed on any one "who
+shot off a gun or led a horse into the meeting-house." These seem to me
+quite as unseemly, irreverent, and disagreeable disturbances as shouting
+out, Quaker-fashion, "Parson, your sermon is too long;" but possibly the
+house of God was turned into a stable on week-days, not on the Sabbath.
+
+In many parishes church-attendants were fined who brought their "doggs"
+into the meeting-house. Dogs swarmed in the colony, for they had been
+imported from England, "sufficient mastive dogs, hounds and beagles," and
+also Irish wolf-hounds; and they caused an interruption in one afternoon
+service by chasing into the meeting-house one of those pungently offensive,
+though harmless, animals that abounded even in the earliest colonial
+days, and whose mephitic odor, in this case, had power to scatter the
+congregation as effectively as would have a score of armed Indian braves.
+Officially appointed "Dogg-whippers" and the never idle tithingman expelled
+the intruding and unwelcome canine attendants from the meeting-house with
+fierce blows and fiercer yelps. The swarming dogs, though they were trained
+to hunt the Indians and wolves and tear them in pieces, were much fonder of
+hunting and tearing the peaceful sheep, and thus became such unmitigated
+nuisances, out of meeting as well as in, that they had to be muzzled and
+hobbled, and killed, and land was granted (as in Newbury in 1703) on
+condition that no dog was ever kept thereon. As late as the year 1820, it
+was ordered in the town of Brewster that any dog that came into meeting
+should be killed unless the owner promised to thenceforth keep the intruder
+out.
+
+Alarms of fire in the neighborhood frequently disturbed the quiet of
+the early colonial services; for the combustible catted chimneys were
+a constant source of conflagration, especially on Sundays, when the
+fireplaces with their roaring fires were left unwatched; and all the men
+rushed out of the meeting at sound of the alarm to aid in quenching the
+flames, which could however be ill-fought with the scanty supply of
+water that could be brought in a few leathern fire-buckets and
+milk-pails,--though at a very early date as an aid in extinguishing
+fires each New England family was ordered by law to own a fire-ladder.
+Occasionally the town's ladder and poles and hooks and cedar-buckets were
+kept in the meeting-house, and thus were handy for Sunday fires.
+
+Sometimes armed men, bearing rumors of wars and of hostile attacks, rode
+clattering up to the church-door, and strode with jingling spurs and
+rattling swords into the excited assembly with appeal for more soldiers to
+bear arms, or for more help for those already in the army, and the whole
+congregation felt it no interruption but a high religious privilege and
+duty, to which they responded in word and deed. On some happy Sabbaths the
+armed riders bore good news of great victories, and great was the rejoicing
+thereat in prayer and praise in the old meeting-house.
+
+But usually through the Sabbath services, though the quiet was not that
+of our modern carpeted, cushioned, orderly churches, but few interrupting
+sounds were heard. The cry of a waking infant, the scraping of restless
+feet on the sanded floor, the lumbering noise of the motions of a cramped
+farmer as he stood up to lean over the pew-door or gallery-rail, the
+clatter of an overturned cricket, the twittering of swallows in the
+rafters, and in the summer-time the bumping and buzzing of an invading
+bumble-bee as he soared through the air and against the walls, were
+the only sounds within the meeting-house that broke the monotonous
+"thirteenthly" and "fourteenthly" of the minister's sermon.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+The Observances of the Day.
+
+
+
+The so-called "False Blue Laws" of Connecticut, which were foisted upon the
+public by the Reverend Samuel Peter, have caused much indignation among all
+thoughtful descendants and all lovers of New England Puritans. Three of
+his most bitterly resented false laws which refer to the observance of the
+Sabbath read thus:--
+
+"No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or
+shave on the Sabbath Day.
+
+"No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.
+
+"No one shall ride on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere
+except reverently to and from meeting."
+
+Though these laws were worded by Dr. Peters, and though we are disgusted to
+hear them so often quoted as historical facts, still we must acknowledge
+that though in detail not correct, they are in spirit true records of the
+old Puritan laws which were enacted to enforce the strict and decorous
+observance of the Sabbath, and which were valid not only in Connecticut and
+Massachusetts, but in other New England States. Even a careless glance at
+the historical record of any old town or church will give plenty of details
+to prove this.
+
+Thus in New London we find in the latter part of the seventeenth century a
+wicked fisherman presented before the Court and fined for catching eels on
+Sunday; another "fined twenty shillings for sailing a boat on the Lord's
+Day;" while in 1670 two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused
+of and tried for "sitting together on the Lord's Day under an apple tree in
+Goodman Chapman's Orchard,"--so harmless and so natural an act. In Plymouth
+a man was "sharply whipped" for shooting fowl on Sunday; another was fined
+for carrying a grist of corn home on the Lord's Day, and the miller who
+allowed him to take it was also fined. Elizabeth Eddy of the same town was
+fined, in 1652, "ten shillings for wringing and hanging out clothes." A
+Plymouth man, for attending to his tar-pits on the Sabbath, was set in the
+stocks. James Watt, in 1658, was publicly reproved "for writing a note
+about common business on the Lord's Day, _at least in the evening
+somewhat too soon._" A Plymouth man who drove a yoke of oxen was
+"presented" before the Court, as was also another offender, who drove some
+cows a short distance "without need" on the Sabbath.
+
+In Newbury, in 1646, Aquila Chase and his wife were presented and fined for
+gathering peas from their garden on the Sabbath, but upon investigation the
+fines were remitted, and the offenders were only admonished. In Wareham,
+in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the
+Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham
+citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five
+shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put
+in his shoe" to protect his foot--for doing this piece of heavy work on the
+Lord's Day, was fined, and paid forty shillings.
+
+Captain Kemble of Boston was in 1656 set for two hours in the public stocks
+for his "lewd and unseemly behavior," which, consisted in his kissing his
+wife "publicquely" on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, when
+he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years. The lewd
+offender was a man of wealth and influence, the father of Madam Sarah
+Knights, the "fearfull female travailler" whose diary of a journey from
+Boston to New York and return, written in 1704, rivals in quality if not in
+quantity Judge Sewall's much-quoted diary. A traveller named Burnaby tells
+of a similar offence of an English sea-captain who was soundly whipped for
+kissing his wife on the street of a New England town on Sunday, and of his
+retaliation in kind, by a clever trick upon his chastisers; but Burnaby's
+narrative always seemed to me of dubious credibility.
+
+Abundant proof can be given that the act of the legislature in 1649 was not
+a dead letter which ordered that "whosoever shall prophane the Lords daye
+by doeing any seruill worke or such like abusses shall forfeite for euery
+such default ten shillings or be whipt."
+
+The Vermont "Blue Book" contained equally sharp "Sunday laws." Whoever was
+guilty of any rude, profane, or unlawful conduct on the Lord's Day, in
+words or action, by clamorous discourses, shouting, hallooing, screaming,
+running, riding, dancing, jumping, was to be fined forty shillings and
+whipped upon the naked back not to exceed ten stripes. The New Haven code
+of laws, more severe still, ordered that "Profanation of the Lord's Day
+shall be punished by fine, imprisonment, or corporeal punishment; and
+if proudly, and with a high hand against the authority of God--_with
+death_."
+
+Lists of arrests and fines for walking and travelling unnecessarily on the
+Sabbath might be given in great numbers, and it was specially ordered
+that none should "ride violently to and from meeting." Many a pious New
+Englander, in olden days, was fined for his ungodly pride, and his desire
+to "show off" his "new colt" as he "rode violently" up to the meeting-house
+green on Sabbath morn. One offender explained in excuse of his unnecessary
+driving on the Sabbath that he had been to visit a sick relative, but
+his excuse was not accepted. A Maine man who was rebuked and fined for
+"unseemly walking" on the Lord's Day protested that he ran to save a man
+from drowning. The Court made him pay his fine, but ordered that the money
+should be returned to him when he could prove by witnesses that he had
+been on that errand of mercy and duty. As late as the year 1831, in
+Lebanon, Connecticut, a lady journeying to her father's home was arrested
+within sight of her father's house for unnecessary travelling on the
+Sabbath; and a long and fiercely contested lawsuit was the result, and
+damages were finally given for false imprisonment. In 1720 Samuel Sabin
+complained of himself before a justice in Norwich that he visited on
+Sabbath night some relatives at a neighbor's house. His morbidly tender
+conscience smote him and made him "fear he had transgressed the law,"
+though he felt sure no harm had been done thereby. In 1659 Sam Clarke, for
+"Hankering about on men's gates on Sabbath evening to draw company out
+to him," was reproved and warned not to "harden his neck" and be "wholly
+destrojed." Poor stiff-necked, lonely, "hankering" Sam! to be so harshly
+reproved for his harmlessly sociable intents. Perhaps he "hankered" after
+the Puritan maids, and if so, deserved his reproof and the threat of
+annihilation.
+
+Sabbath-breaking by visiting abounded in staid Worcester town to a most
+base extent, but was severely punished, as local records show. In Belfast,
+Maine, in 1776, a meeting was held to get the "Towns Mind" with regard to
+a plan to restrain visiting on the Sabbath. The time had passed when such
+offences could be punished either by fine or imprisonment, so it was voted
+"that if any person makes unnecessary Vizits on the Sabeth, They shall be
+Look't on with Contempt." This was the universal expression throughout the
+Puritan colonies; and looked on with contempt are Sabbath-breakers and
+Sabbath-slighters in New England to the present day. Even if they committed
+no active offence, the colonists could not passively neglect the Church
+and its duties. As late as 1774 the First Church of Roxbury fined
+non-attendance at public worship. In 1651 Thomas Scott "was fyned ten
+shillings unless he have learned Mr. Norton's 'Chatacise' by the next
+court" In 1760 the legislature of Massachusetts passed the law that "any
+person able of Body who shall absent themselves from publick worship of God
+on the Lord's Day shall pay ten shillings fine." By the Connecticut code
+ten shillings was the fine, and the law was not suspended until the year
+1770. By the New Haven code five shillings was the fine for non-attendance
+at church, and the offender was often punished as well. Captain Dennison,
+one of New Haven's most popular and respected citizens, was fined fifteen
+shillings for absence from church. William Blagden, who lived in New Haven
+in 1647, was "brought up" for absence from meeting. He pleaded that he had
+fallen into the water late on Saturday, could light no fire on Sunday to
+dry his clothes, and so had lain in bed to keep warm while his only suit of
+garments was drying. In spite of this seemingly fair excuse, Blagden was
+found guilty of "sloathefuluess" and sentenced to be "publiquely whipped."
+Of course the Quakers contributed liberally to the support of the Court,
+and were fined in great numbers for refusing to attend the church which
+they hated, and which also warmly abhorred them; and they were zealously
+set in the stocks, and whipped and caged and pilloried as well,--whipped
+if they came and expressed any dissatisfaction, and whipped if they stayed
+away.
+
+Severe and explicit were the orders with regard to the use of the "Creature
+called Tobacko" on the Sabbath. In the very earliest days of the colony
+means had been taken to present the planting of the pernicious weed
+except in very small quantities "for meere necessitie, for phisick, for
+preseruaceon of health, and that the same be taken privatly by auncient
+men." In Connecticut a man could by permission of the law smoke once if
+he went on a journey of ten miles (as some slight solace for the arduous
+trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house.
+Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the
+law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a
+long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor
+buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men
+love it now, they somehow invoked or spirited it into their pipes, though
+they never could smoke it in public unfined and unpunished. The shrewd and
+thrifty New Haven people permitted the raising of it for purposes of trade,
+though not for use, thus supplying the "devil's weed" to others, chiefly
+the godless Dutch, but piously spurning it themselves--in public. Its use
+was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on the Sabbath within two
+miles of the meeting-house, which (since at that date all the homes were
+clustered around the church-green) was equivalent to not smoking it at all
+on the Lord's Day, if the lav were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed,
+poor slaves of habit, who were in Duxbury fined ten shillings for each
+offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it
+told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston
+the fine for "drinking tobacco in the meeting-house" was five shillings for
+each drink, which I take to mean chewing tobacco rather than smoking it;
+many men were fined for thus drinking, and solacing the weary hours, though
+doubtless they were as sly and kept themselves as unobserved as possible.
+Four Yarmouth men--old sea-dogs, perhaps, who loved their pipe--were, in
+1687, fined four shillings each for smoking tobacco around the end of the
+meeting-house. Silly, ostrich-brained Yarmouth men! to fancy to escape
+detection by hiding around the corner of the church; and to think that the
+tithingman had no nose when he was so Argus-eyed. Some few of the ministers
+used the "tobacco weed." Mr. Baily wrote with distress of mind and
+abasement of soul in his diary of his "exceeding in tobacco." The hatred of
+the public use of tobacco lingered long in New England, even in large towns
+such as Providence, though chiefly on account of universal dread lest
+sparks from the burning weed should start conflagrations in the towns.
+Until within a few years, in small towns in western Massachusetts,
+Easthampton and neighboring villages, tobacco-smoking on the street was not
+permitted either on weekdays or Sundays.
+
+Not content with strict observance of the Sabbathday alone, the Puritans
+included Saturday evening in their holy day, and in the first colonial
+years these instructions were given to Governor Endicott by the New England
+Plantation Company: "And to the end that the Sabeth may be celebrated in
+a religious man ner wee appoint that all may surcease their labor every
+Satterday throughout the yeare at three of the clock in the afternoone, and
+that they spend the rest of the day in chatechizing and preparacoon for
+the Sabeth as the ministers shall direct." Cotton Mather wrote thus of his
+grandfather, old John Cotton: "The Sabbath he begun the evening before, for
+which keeping from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming
+to New England, and I suppose 't was from his reason and practice that the
+Christians of New England have generally done so too." He then tells of the
+protracted religious services held in the Cotton household every Saturday
+night,--services so long that the Sabbath-day exercises must have seemed in
+comparison like a light interlude.
+
+John Norton described these Cotton Sabbaths more briefly thus: "He [John
+Cotton] began the Sabbath at evening; therefore then performed family-duty
+after supper, being longer than ordinary in Exposition. After which he
+catechized his children and servants and then returned unto his study. The
+morning following, family-worship being ended, he retired into his study
+until the bell called him away. Upon his return from meeting he returned
+again into his study (the place of his labor and prayer) unto his private
+devotion; where, having a small repast carried him up for his dinner, he
+continued until the tolling of the bell. The public service being over, he
+withdrew for a space to his pre-mentioned oratory for his sacred addresses
+to God, as in the forenoon, then came down, _repeated the sermon in the
+family_, prayed, after supper sang a Psalm, and towards bedtime betaking
+himself again to his study he closed the day with prayer. Thus he spent the
+Sabbath continually." Just fancy the Cotton children and servants listening
+to his long afternoon sermon a second time!
+
+All the New England clergymen were rigid in the prolonged observance of
+Sunday. From sunset on Saturday until Sunday night they would not shave,
+have rooms swept, nor beds made, have food prepared, nor cooking utensils
+and table-ware washed. As soon as their Sabbath began they gathered their
+families and servants around them, as did Cotton, and read the Bible and
+exhorted and prayed and recited the catechism until nine o'clock, usually
+by the light of one small "dip candle" only; on long winter Saturdays it
+must have been gloomy and tedious indeed. Small wonder that one minister
+wrote back to England that he found it difficult in the new colony to get a
+servant who "_enjoyed catechizing and family duties_." Many clergymen
+deplored sadly the custom which grew in later years of driving, and even
+transacting business, on Saturday night. Mr. Bushnell used to call it
+"stealing the time of the Sabbath," and refused to countenance it in any
+way.
+
+It was very generally believed in the early days of New England that
+special judgments befell those who worked on the eve of the Sabbath.
+Winthrop gives the case of a man who, having hired help to repair a
+milldam, worked an hour on Saturday after sunset to finish what he had
+intended for the day's labor. The next day his little child, being left
+alone for some hours, was drowned in an uncovered well in the cellar of his
+house. "The father freely, in open congregation, did acknowledge it the
+righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day."
+
+Visitors and travellers from other countries were forced to obey the rigid
+laws with regard to Saturday-night observance. Archibald Henderson, the
+master of a vessel which entered the port of Boston, complained to the
+Council for Foreign Plantations in London that while he was in sober Boston
+town, being ignorant of the laws of the land, and having walked half an
+hour after sunset on Saturday night, as punishment for this unintentional
+and trivial offence, a constable entered his lodgings, seized him by the
+hair of his head, and dragged him to prison. Henderson claimed L800 damages
+for the detention of his vessel during his prosecution. I have always
+suspected that the gay captain may have misbehaved himself in Boston
+on that Saturday night in some other way than simply by walking in
+the streets, and that the Puritan law-enforcers took advantage of the
+Sabbath-day laws in order to prosecute and punish him. We know of
+Bradford's complaint of the times; that while sailors brought "a greate
+deale" of money from foreign parts to New England to spend, they also
+brought evil ways of spending it--"more sine I feare than money."
+
+The Puritans found in Scripture support for this observance of Saturday
+night, in these words, "The evening and the morning were the first day,"
+and they had many followers in their belief. In New England country towns
+to this day, descendants of the Puritans regard Saturday night, though in
+a modified way, as almost Sunday, and that evening is never chosen for any
+kind of gay gathering or visiting. As late as 1855 the shops in Hartford
+were never open for customers upon Saturday night.
+
+Much satire was directed against this Saturday night observance both by
+English and by American authors. In the "American Museum" for February,
+1787, appeared a poem entitled, "The Connecticut Sabbath." After saying at
+some length that God had thought one day in seven sufficient for rest, but
+New England Christians had improved his law by setting apart a day and a
+half, the poet thus runs on derisively:--
+
+  "And let it be enacted further still
+  That all our people strict observe our will;
+  Five days and a half shall men, and women, too,
+  Attend their bus'ness and their mirth pursue,
+  But after that no man without a fine
+  Shall walk the streets or at a tavern dine.
+  One day and half 'tis requisite to rest
+  From toilsome labor and a tempting feast.
+  Henceforth let none on peril of their lives
+  Attempt a journey or embrace their wives;
+  No barber, foreign or domestic bred,
+  Shall e'er presume to dress a lady's head;
+  No shop shall spare (half the preceding day)
+  A yard of riband or an ounce of tea."
+
+And many similar rhymes might be given.
+
+Sunday night, being shut out of the Sabbath hours, became in the eighteenth
+century a time of general cheerfulness and often merry-making. This sudden
+transition from the religious calm and quiet of the afternoon to the noisy
+gayety of the evening was very trying to many of the clergymen, especially
+to Jonathan Edwards, who preached often and sadly against "Sabbath evening
+dissipations and mirth-making." In some communities singing-schools were
+held on Sunday nights, which afforded a comparatively decorous and orderly
+manner of spending the close of the day.
+
+Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm
+Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath,--sign and token to them,
+not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal
+rest to come. The universal quiet and peace of the community showed the
+primitive instinct of a pure, simple devotion, the sincere religion which
+knew no compromise in spiritual things, no half-way obedience to God's
+Word, but rested absolutely on the Lord's Day--as was commanded. No work,
+no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was
+seen except the necessary care of the patient cattle and other dumb beasts,
+the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the nooning,
+a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead. This
+absolute obedience to the letter as well as to the spirit of God's Word
+was one of the most typical traits of the character of the Puritans, and
+appeared to them to be one of the most vital points of their religion.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The Authority of the Church and the Ministers.
+
+
+
+Severely were the early colonists punished if they ventured to criticise
+or disparage either the ministers or their teachings, or indeed any of the
+religious exercises of the church. In Sandwich a man was publicly whipped
+for speaking deridingly of God's words and ordinances as taught by the
+Sandwich minister. Mistress Oliver was forced to stand in public with a
+cleft stick on her tongue for "reproaching the elders." A New Haven man was
+severely whipped and fined for declaring that he received no profit from
+the minister's sermons. We also know the terrible shock given the Windham
+church in 1729 by the "vile and slanderous expressions" of one unregenerate
+Windhamite who said, "I had rather hear my dog bark than Mr. Bellamy
+preach." He was warned that he would be "shakenoff and givenup," and
+terrified at the prospect of so dire a fate he read a confession of his
+sorrow and repentance, and promised to "keep a guard over his tongue," and
+also to listen to Mr. Bellamy's preaching, which may have been a still more
+difficult task. Mr. Edward Tomlins, of Boston, upon retracting his opinion
+which he had expressed openly against the singing in the churches, was
+discharged without a fine. William Howes and his son were in 1744 fined
+fifty shillings "apeece for deriding such as sing in the congregation,
+tearming them fooles." The church music was as sacred to the Puritans as
+were the prayers, but it must have been a sore trial to many to keep still
+about the vile manner and method of singing. In 1631 Phillip Ratcliffe,
+for "speaking against the churches," had his ears cut off, was whipped and
+banished. We know also the consternation caused in New Haven in 1646 by
+Madam Brewster's saying that the custom of carrying contributions to
+the Deacons' table was popish--was "like going to the High Alter,"
+and "savored of the Mass." She answered her accusers in such a bold,
+highhanded, and defiant manner that her heinous offence was considered
+worthy of trial in a higher court, whose decision is now lost.
+
+The colonists could not let their affection and zeal for an individual
+minister cause them to show any disrespect or indifference to the Puritan
+Church in general. When the question of the settlement of the Reverend Mr.
+Lenthal in the church of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was under discussion, the
+tyranny of the Puritan Church over any who dared oppose or question it was
+shown in a marked manner, and may be cited as a typical case. Mr. Lenthal
+was suspected of being poisoned with the Anne Hutchinson heresies, and he
+also "opposed the way of gathering churches." Hence his ordination over the
+church in the new settlement was bitterly opposed by the Boston divines,
+though apparently desired by the Weymouth congregation. One Britton, who
+was friendly towards Lenthal and who spoke "reproachfully" and slurringly
+of a book which defended the course of the Boston churches, was whipped
+with eleven stripes, as he had no money to pay the imposed fine. John
+Smythe, who "got hands to a blank" (which was either canvassing for
+signatures to a proxy vote in favor of Lenthal or obtaining signatures
+to an instrument declaring against the design of the churches), for thus
+"combining to hinder the orderly gathering" of the Weymouth church at this
+time, was fined L2. Edward Sylvester for the same offence was fined and
+disfranchised. Ambrose Martin, another friend of Lenthal's, for calling
+the church covenant of the Boston divines "a stinking carrion and a human
+invention," was fined L10, while Thomas Makepeace, another Weymouth
+malcontent, was informed by those in power that "they were weary of him,"
+or, in modern slang, that "he made them tired." Parson Lenthal himself,
+being sent for by the convention, weakened at once in a way his church
+followers must have bitterly despised; he was "quickly convinced of his
+error and evil." His conviction was followed with his confession, and in
+open court he gave under his hand a laudable retraction, which retraction
+he was ordered also to "utter in the assembly at Weymouth, and so no
+further censure was passed on him." Thus the chief offender got the
+lightest punishment, and thus did the omnipotent Church rule the whole
+community.
+
+The names of loquacious, babbling Quakers and Baptists who spoke
+disrespectfully of some or all of the ordinances of the Puritan church
+might be given, and would swell the list indefinitely; they were fined and
+punished without mercy or even toleration.
+
+All profanity or blaspheming against God was severely punished. One very
+wicked man in Hartford for his "fillthy and prophane expressions," namely,
+that "hee hoped to meet some of the members of the Church in Hell before
+long, and he did not question but hee should," was "committed to prison,
+there to be kept in safe custody till the sermon, and then to stand the
+time thereof in the pillory, and after sermon to be severely whipped." What
+a severe punishment for so purely verbal an offence! New England ideas of
+profanity were very rigid, and New England men had reason to guard well
+their temper and tongue, else that latter member might be bored with a
+hot iron; for such was the penalty for profanity. We know what horror Mr.
+Tomlins's wicked profanity, "Curse ye woodchuck!" caused in Lynn meeting,
+and Mr. Dexter was "putt in ye billboes ffor prophane saying dam ye cowe."
+The Newbury doctor was sharply fined also for wickedly cursing. When
+drinking at the tavern he raised his glass and said,--
+
+  "I'll pledge my friends, and for my foes
+  A plague for their heels, and a poxe for their toes."
+
+He acknowledged his wickedness and foolishness in using the "olde proverb,"
+and penitently promised to curse no more.
+
+Sad to tell, Puritan women sometimes lost their temper and their
+good-breeding and their godliness. Two wicked Wells women were punished in
+1669 "for using profane speeches in their common talk; as in making answer
+to several questions their answer is, The Devil a bit." In 1640, in
+Springfield, Goody Gregory, being grievously angered, profanely abused an
+annoying neighbor, saying, "Before God I coulde breake thy heade!" But she
+acknowledged her "great sine and faulte" like a woman, and paid her fine
+and sat in the stocks like a man, since she swore like the members of that
+profane sex.
+
+Sometimes the sins of the fathers were visited on the children in a most
+extraordinary manner. One man, "for abusing N. Parker at the tavern," was
+deprived of the privilege of bringing his children to be baptized, and was
+thus spiritually punished for a very worldly offence. For some offences,
+such as "speaking deridingly of the minister's powers," as was done in
+Plymouth, "casting uncharitable reflexions on the minister," as did an
+Andover man; and also for absenting one's self from church services; for
+"sloathefulness," for "walking prophanely," for spoiling hides when tanning
+and refusing explanation thereof; for selling short weight in grain,
+for being "given too much to Jearings," for "Slanndering," for being a
+"Makebayte," for "ronging naibors," for "being too Proude," for "suspitions
+of stealing pinnes," for "pnishouse Squerilouse Odyouse wordes," and for
+"lyeing," church-members were not only fined and punished but were deprived
+of partaking of the sacrament. In the matter of lying great distinction was
+made as to the character and effect of the offence. George Crispe's wife,
+who "told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly," was simply
+admonished and remonstrated with. Will Randall, who told a "plain lie," was
+fined ten shillings. While Ralph Smith, who "lied about seeing a whale,"
+was fined twenty shillings and excommunicated.
+
+In some communities, of which Lechford tells us New Haven was one, these
+unhouselled Puritans were allowed, if they so desired, to stand outside the
+meeting-house door at the time of public worship and catch what few words
+of the service they could. This humble waiting for crumbs of God's word was
+doubtless regarded as a sign of repentance for past deeds, for it was often
+followed by full forgiveness. As excommunicated persons were regarded with
+high disfavor and even abhorrence by the entire pious and godly walking
+community, this apparently spiritual punishment was more severe in its
+temporal effects than at first sight appears. From the Cambridge Platform,
+which was drawn up and adopted by the New England Synod in 1648, we learn
+that "while the offender remains excommunicated the church is to refrain
+from all communion with him in civil things," and the members were
+specially "to forbear to eat and drink with him;" so his daily and even his
+family life was made wretched. And as it was not necessary to wait for the
+action of the church to pronounce excommunication, but the "pastor of a
+church might by himself and authoritatively suspend from the Lord's table
+a brother _suspected_ of scandal" until there was time for full
+examination, we can see what an absolute power the church and even the
+minister had over church-members in a New England community.
+
+Nor could the poor excommunicate go to neighboring towns and settlements to
+start afresh. No one wished him or would tolerate him. Lancaster, in 1653,
+voted not to receive into its plantation "any excommunicat or notoriously
+erring agt the Docktrin & Discipline of churches of this Commonwealth."
+Other towns passed similar votes. Fortunately, Rhode Island--the island of
+"Aquidnay" and the Providence Plantations--opened wide its arms as a place
+of refuge for outcast Puritans. Universal freedom and religious toleration
+were in Rhode Island the foundations of the State. Josiah Quincy said that
+liberty of conscience would have produced anarchy if it had been permitted
+in the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century, but the
+flourishing Narragansett, Providence, and Newport plantations seem to prove
+the absurdity of that statement. Liberty of conscience was there allowed,
+as Dr. MacSparran, the first clergyman of the Narragansett Church,
+complained in his "America Dissected," "to the extent of no religion at
+all." The Gortonians, the Foxians, and Hutchinsonians, the Anabaptists, the
+Six Principle Baptists, the Church of England, apparently all the followers
+of the eighty-two "pestilent heresies" so sadly enumerated and so bitterly
+hated and "cast out to Satan" by the Massachusetts Puritan divines,--all
+the excommunicants and exiles found in Rhode Island a home and
+friends--other friends than the Devil to whom they had been consigned.
+
+Though the early Puritan ministers had such powerful influence in every
+other respect, they were not permitted to perform the marriage-service
+nor to raise their voices in prayer or exhortation at a funeral. Sewall
+jealously notes when the English burial-service began to be read at
+burials, saying, "the office for Burial is a Lying very bad office makes no
+difference between the precious and the vile." The office of marriage was
+denied the parson, and was generally relegated to the magistrate. In this,
+Governor Bradford states, they followed "ye laudable custome of ye Low
+Countries." Not rulers and magistrates only were empowered to perform the
+marriage ceremony; squires, tavern-keepers, captains, various authorized
+persons might wed Puritan lovers; any man of dignity or prominence in the
+community could apparently receive authority to perform that office except
+the otherwise all-powerful parson.
+
+As years rolled on, though the New Englanders still felt great reverence
+and pride for their church and its ordinances, the minister was no longer
+the just man made perfect, the oracle of divine will. The church-members
+escaped somewhat from ecclesiastical power, and some of them found fault
+with and openly disparaged their ministers in a way that would in early
+days have caused them to be pilloried, whipped, caged, or fined; and often
+the derogatory comments were elicited by the most trivial offences. One
+parson was bitterly condemned because he managed to amass eight hundred
+dollars by selling the produce of his farm. Another shocking and severely
+criticised offence was a game of bowls which one minister played and
+enjoyed. Still another minister, in Hanover, Massachusetts, was reproved
+for his lack of dignity, which was shown in his wearing stockings "footed
+up with another color;" that is, knit stockings in which the feet were
+colored differently from the legs. He also was found guilty of having
+jumped over the fence instead of decorously and clerically walking through
+the gate when going to call on one of his parishioners. Rev. Joseph Metcalf
+of the Old Colony was complained of in 1720 for wearing too worldly a wig.
+He mildly reproved and shamed the meddlesome women of his church by asking
+them to come to him and each cut off a lock of hair from the obnoxious
+wig until all the complainers were satisfied that it had been rendered
+sufficiently unworldly. Some Newbury church-members, in 1742, asserted that
+their minister unclerically wore a colored kerchief instead of a band. This
+he indignantly denied, saying that he "had never buried a babe even in most
+tempestuous weather," when he rode several miles, but he always wore a
+band, and he complained in turn that members of his congregation turned
+away from him on the street, and "glowered" at him and "sneered at him."
+Still more unseemly demonstrations of dislike were sometimes shown, as in
+South Hadley, in 1741, when a committee of disaffected parishioners
+pulled the Rev. Mr Rawsom out of the pulpit and marched him out of the
+meeting-house because they did not fancy his preaching. But all such
+actions were as offensive to the general community then as open expressions
+of dissatisfaction and contempt are now.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The Ordination of the Minister.
+
+
+
+The minister's ordination was, of course, an important social as well as
+spiritual event in such a religious community as was a New England colonial
+town. It was always celebrated by a great gathering of people from far and
+near, including all the ministers from every town for many miles around;
+and though a deeply serious service, was also an excuse for much
+merriment. In Connecticut, and by tradition also in Massachusetts, an
+"ordination-ball" was frequently given. It is popularly supposed that at
+this ball the ministers did not dance, nor even appear, nor to it in any
+way give their countenance; that it was only a ball given at the time of
+the ordination because so many people would then be in the town to take
+part in the festivity. That this was not always the case is proved by
+a letter of invitation still in existence written by Reverend Timothy
+Edwards, who was ordained in Windsor in 1694; it was written to Mr. and
+Mrs. Stoughton, asking them to attend the ordination-ball which was to be
+given in his, the minister's house. But whether the parsons approved and
+attended, or whether they strongly discountenanced it, the ordination-ball
+was always a great success. It is recorded that at one in Danvers a young
+man danced so vigorously and long on the sanded floor that he entirely wore
+out a new pair of shoes. The fashion of giving ordination-balls did not die
+out with colonial times. In Federal days it still continued, a specially
+gay ball being given in the town of Wolcott at an ordination in 1811.
+
+There was always given an ordination supper,--a plentiful feast, at which
+visiting ministers and the new pastor were always present and partook with
+true clerical appetite. This ordination feast consisted of all kinds of New
+England fare, all the mysterious compounds and concoctions of Indian corn
+and "pompions," all sorts of roast meats, "turces" cooked in various ways,
+gingerbread and "cacks," and--an inevitable feature at the time of every
+gathering of people, from a corn-husking or apple-bee to a funeral--a
+liberal amount of cider, punch, and grog was also supplied, which latter
+compound beverages were often mixed on the meeting-house green or even in
+punch-bowls on the very door-steps of the church. Beer, too, was specially
+brewed to honor the feast. Rev. Mr. Thatcher, of Boston, wrote in his diary
+on the twentieth of May, 1681, "This daye the Ordination Beare was brewed."
+Portable bars were sometimes established at the church-door, and strong
+drinks were distributed free of charge to the entire assemblage. As late
+as 1825, at the installation of Dr. Leonard Bacon over the First
+Congregational Church in New Haven, free drinks were furnished at an
+adjacent bar to all who chose to order them, and were "settled for" by the
+generous and hospitable society. In considering the extravagant amount of
+moneys often recorded as having been paid out for liquor at ordinations,
+one must not fail to remember that the seemingly large sums were often
+spent in Revolutionary times during the great depreciation of Continental
+money. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars were disbursed for the
+entertainment of the council at the ordination of Mr. Kilbourn, of
+Chesterfield; but the items were really few and the total amount of liquor
+was not great,--thirty-eight mugs of flip at twelve dollars per mug; eleven
+gills of rum bitters at six dollars per gill, and two mugs of sling at
+twenty-four dollars per mug. The church in one town sent the Continental
+money in payment for the drinks of the church-council in a wheelbarrow to
+the tavern-keeper, and he was not very well paid either.
+
+It gives one a strange sense of the customs and habits of the olden times
+to read an "ordination-bill" from a tavern-keeper which is thus endorsed,
+"This all Paid for exsept the Minister's Rum." To give some idea of the
+expense of "keeping the ministers" at an ordination in Hartford in 1784,
+let me give the items of the bill:--
+
+                          L  s. d.
+  To keeping Ministers    0  2  4
+  2 Mugs tody             0  5 10
+  5 Segars                0  3  0
+  1 Pint wine             0  0  9
+  3 lodgings              0  9  0
+  3 bitters               0  0  9
+  3 breakfasts            0  3  6
+  15 boles Punch          1 10  0
+  24 dinners              1 16  0
+  11 bottles wine         0  3  6
+  5 mugs flip             0  5 10
+  3 boles punch           0  6  0
+  3 boles tody            0  3  6
+
+One might say with Falstaff, "O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread
+to this intolerable deal of sack!" I sadly fear me that at that Hartford
+ordination our parson ancestors got grievsously "gilded," to use a choice
+"red-lattice phrase."
+
+Many accounts of gay ordination parties have been preserved in diaries for
+us. Reverend Mr. Smith, who was settled in Portland in the early part of
+the eighteenth century, wrote thus in his journal of an ordination which
+he attended: "Mr. Foxcroft ordained at New Gloucester. We had a pleasant
+journey home. Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry. A _jolly ordination_.
+We lost all sight of decorum." The Mr. L. referred to was Mr. Stephen
+Longfellow, greatgrandfather of the poet.
+
+Bills for ordination-expenses abound in items of barrels of rum and cider
+and metheglin, of bowls of flip and punch and toddy, of boxes of lemons and
+loaves of sugar, in punches, and sometimes broken punchbowls, and in one
+case a large amount of Malaga and Canary wine, spices and "ross water,"
+from which was brewed doubtless an appetizing ordination-cup which may have
+rivalled Josselyn's New England nectar of "cyder, Maligo raisins, spices,
+and sirup of clove-gillyflowers."
+
+In Massachusetts, in January, 1759, the subject of the frequent disorders
+and irregularities in connection with ordination-services, especially in
+country towns, came before the council of the province, who referred
+its consideration to a convention of ministers. The ministers at that
+convention were recommended to each give instruction, exhortation, and
+advice against excesses to the members of his congregation whenever an
+ordination was about to take place in the vicinity of his church. In this
+way it was hoped that the reformation would be aided, and temperance,
+order, and decorum established. The newspapers were free in their
+condemnation of the feasting and roistering at ordination-services. When
+Dr. Cummings was ordained over the Old South Church of Boston in February,
+1761, a feast took place at the Rev. Dr. Sewall's house which occasioned
+much comment. A four-column letter of criticism appeared in the Boston
+Gazette of March 9, 1761, over the signature of "Countryman," which
+provoked several answers and much newspaper controversy. As Dr. Sewall had
+been moderator of the meeting of ministers held only two years previously
+with the hope, and for the purpose of abolishing ordination revelries, it
+is not strange that the circumstance of the feast being given in his house
+should cause public comment and criticism.
+
+"Countryman" complained that "the price of provisions was raised a quarter
+cart in Boston for several days before the instalment by reason of the
+great preparations therefor, and the readiness of the ecclesiastical
+caterers to give almost any price that was demanded. Many Boston people
+complained the town had, by this means, in a few days lost a large sum of
+money; which was, as it were, levied on and extorted from them. If the
+poor were the _better for what remained of so plentiful and splendid a
+feast_ I am very glad but yet think it is a pity the charity were not
+better timed." He reprovingly enumerates, "There were six tables that held
+one with another eighteen persons each, upon each table a good rich plumb
+pudding, a dish of boil'd pork and fowls, and a corn'd leg of pork with
+sauce proper for it, a leg of bacon, a piece of alamode beef, a leg of
+mutton with caper sauce, a roast line of veal, a roast turkey, a venison
+pastee, besides chess cakes and tarts, cheese and butter. Half a dozen
+cooks were employed upon this occasion, upwards of twenty tenders to wait
+upon the tables; they had the best of old cyder, one barrel of Lisbon wine,
+punch in plenty before and after dinner, made of old Barbados spirit. The
+cost of this moderate dinner was upwards of fifty pounds lawful money."
+This special ordination-feast, even as detailed by the complaining
+"Countryman," does not seem to me very reprehensible. The standing of the
+church, the wealth of the congregation, the character of the guests (among
+whom were the Governor and the judges of the Superior Court) all make
+this repast appear neither ostentatious nor extravagant. Fifty pounds was
+certainly not an enormous sum to spend for a dinner with wine for over one
+hundred persons, and such a good dinner too. Nor is it probable that a city
+as large as was Boston at that date could through that dinner have been
+swept of provisions to such an extent that prices would be raised a quarter
+part. I suspect some personal malice caused "Countryman's" attacks, for he
+certainly could have found in other towns more flagrant cases to complain
+of and condemn.
+
+Though no record exists to prove that "the poor were the better for
+what remained" after this Boston feast, in other towns letters
+and church-entries show that any fragments remaining after the
+ordination-dinner were well disposed of. Sometimes they furnished forth the
+new minister's table. In one case they were given to "a widowed family"
+("widowed" here being used in the old tender sense of bereaved). In
+Killingly "the overplush of provisions" was sold to help pay the arrearages
+of the salary of the outgoing minister, thus showing a laudable desire to
+"settle up and start square."
+
+If the church were dedicated at the time of the ordination, that would
+naturally be cause for additional gayety. A very interesting and graphic
+account of the feast at the dedication of the Old Tunnel Meeting-House of
+Lynn in the year 1682 has been preserved. It thus describes the scene:--
+
+"Ye Deddication Dinner was had in ye greate barne of Mr. Hoode which by
+reason of its goodly size was deemed ye most fit place. It was neatly
+adorned with green bows and other hangings and made very faire to look
+upon, ye wreaths being mostly wrought by ye young folk, they meeting
+together, both maides and young men, and having a merry time in doing ye
+work. Ye rough stalls and unbowed posts being gaily begirt and all ye
+corners and cubbies being clean swept and well aired, it truly did appear
+a meet banquetting hall. Ye scaffolds too from which ye provinder had been
+removed were swept cleane as broome could make them. Some seats were put up
+on ye scaffoldes whereon might sitt such of ye antient women as would see &
+ye maides and children. Ye greate floor was all held for ye company which
+was to partake of ye feast of fat things, none others being admitted there
+save them that were to wait upon ye same. Ye kine that were wont to be
+there were forced to keep holiday in the field."
+
+Then follows a minute account of how the fowls persisted in flying in
+and roosting over the table, scattering feathers and hay on the parsons
+beneath.
+
+"Mr. Shepard's face did turn very red and he catched up an apple and hurled
+it at ye birds. But he thereby made a bad matter worse for ye fruit being
+well aimed it hit ye legs of a fowl and brought him floundering and
+flopping down on ye table, scattering gravy, sauce and divers things upon
+our garments and in our faces. But this did not well please some, yet with
+most it was a happening that made great merryment. Dainty meats were on ye
+table in great plenty, bear-stake, deer-meat, rabbit, and fowle, both wild
+and from ye barnyard. Luscious puddings we likewise had in abundance,
+mostly apple and berry, but some of corn meal with small bits of sewet
+baked therein; also pyes and tarts. We had some pleasant fruits, as apples,
+nuts and wild grapes, and to crown all, we had plenty of good cider and ye
+inspiring Barbadoes drink. Mr. Shepard and most of ye ministers were
+grave and prudent at table, discoursing much upon ye great points of ye
+deddication sermon and in silence laboring upon ye food before them. But I
+will not risque to say on which they dwelt with most relish, ye discourse
+or ye dinner. Most of ye young members of ye Council would fain make a
+jolly time of it. Mr. Gerrish, ye Wenham minister, tho prudent in his
+meat and drinks, was yet in right merry mood. And he did once grievously
+scandalize Mr. Shepard, who on suddenly looking up from his dish did spy
+him, as he thot, winking in an unbecoming way to one of ye pretty damsels
+on ye scaffold. And thereupon bidding ye godly Mr. Rogers to labor with him
+aside for his misbehavior, it turned out that ye winking was occasioned by
+some of ye hay seeds that were blowing about, lodging in his eye; whereat
+Mr. Shepard felt greatly releaved.
+
+"Ye new Meeting house was much discoursed upon at ye table. And most thot
+it as comely a house of worship as can be found in the whole Collony save
+only three or four. Mr. Gerrish was in such merry mood that he kept ye end
+of ye table whereby he sat in right jovial humour. Some did loudly laugh
+and clap their hands. But in ye middest of ye merryment a strange disaster
+did happen unto him. Not having his thots about him he endeavored ye
+dangerous performance of gaping and laughing at the same time which he must
+now feel is not so easy or safe a thing. In doing this he set his jaws open
+in such wise that it was beyond all his power to bring them together again.
+His agonie was very great, and his joyful laugh soon turned to grievous
+gioaning. Ye women in ye scaffolds became much distressed for him. We did
+our utmost to stay ye anguish of Mr. Gerrish, but could make out little
+till Mr. Rogers who knoweth somewhat of anatomy did bid ye sufferer to sit
+down on ye floor, which being done Mr. Rogers took ye head atween his legs,
+turning ye face as much upward as possible and then gave a powerful blow
+and then sudden press which brot ye jaws into working order. But Mr.
+Geirish did not gape or laugh much more on that occasion, neither did he
+talk much for that matter.
+
+"No other weighty mishap occurred save that one of ye Salem delegates, in
+boastfully essaying to crack a walnut atween his teeth did crack, instead
+of ye nut, a most usefull double tooth and was thereby forced to appear at
+ye evening with a bandaged face."
+
+This ended this most amusing chapter of disasters to the ministers, though
+the banquet was diversified by interrupting crows from invading roosters,
+fierce and undignified counter-attacks with nuts and apples by the
+clergymen, a few mortifyingly "mawdlin songs and much roistering laughter,"
+and the account ends, "so noble and savoury a banquet was never before
+spread in this noble town, God be praised." What a picture of the good old
+times! Different times make different manners; the early Puritan ministers
+did not, as a rule, drink to excess, any more than do our modern clergymen;
+but it is not strange that though they were of Puritan blood and belief,
+they should have fallen into the universal custom of the day, and should
+have "gone to their graves full of years, honor, simplicity, and rum." The
+only wonder is, when the ministers had the best places at every table, at
+every feast, at every merry-making in New England, that stories of their
+roistering excesses should not have come down to us as there have of the
+intemperate clergy of Virginia.
+
+The ordination services within the meeting-houses were not always decorous
+and quiet scenes. In spite of the reverence which our forefathers had for
+their church and their ministers, it did not prevent them from bitterly
+opposing the settlement of an unwished-for clergyman over them, and many
+towns were racked and divided, then as now, over the important question.
+As years passed on the church members grew bold enough to dare to offer
+personal and bodily opposition. At the ordination of the Rev. Peter
+Thatcher in the New North Church in Boston, in 1720, there were two
+parties. The members who did not wish him to be settled over the church
+went into the meeting-house and made a great disorder and clamor. They
+forbade the proceedings, and went into the gallery, and threw from thence
+water and missiles on the friends of the clergymen who were gathered around
+him at the altar. Perhaps they obtained courage for these sacrilegious acts
+from the barrels of rum and the bowls of strong punch. And this was in
+Puritanical Boston, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of the landing
+of the Mayflower. Thus had one century changed the absolute reverence and
+affectionate regard of the Pilgrims for their church, their ministers,
+and their meeting-houses, to irreverent and obstinate desire for personal
+satisfaction. No wonder that the ministers at that date preached and
+believed that Satan was making fresh and increasing efforts to destroy the
+Puritan church. The hour was ready for Whitefield, for Edwards, for any
+new awakening; and was above all fast approaching for the sadly needed
+temperance reform.
+
+In the seventeenth century a minister was ordained and re-ordained at
+each church over which he had charge; but after some years the name of
+installation was given to each appointment after the first ordination, and
+the ceremony was correspondingly changed.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+The Ministers.
+
+
+
+The picture which Colonel Higginson has drawn of the Puritan minister is so
+well known and so graphic that any attempt to add to it would be futile.
+All the succeeding New England parsons, as years rolled by, were not,
+however, like the black-gowned, black-gloved, stately, and solemn man whom
+he has so clearly shown us. Men of rigid decorum, and grave ceremony there
+were, such as Dr. Emmons and Jonathan Edwards; but there were parsons also
+of another type,--eccentric, unconventional, and undignified in demeanor
+and dress. Parson Robinson, of Duxbury, persisted in wearing in the pulpit,
+as part of his clerical attire, a round jacket instead of the suitable
+gown or Geneva cloak, and he was known thereby as "Master Jack." With
+astonishing inconsistency this Master Jack objected to the village
+blacksmith's wearing his leathern apron into the church, and he assailed
+the offender again and again with words and hints from his pulpit. He was
+at last worsted by the grimaces of the victorious smith (where was the
+Duxbury tithingman?), and indignantly left the pulpit, ejaculating, "I'll
+not preach while that man sits before me." A remonstrating parishioner
+said afterward to Master Jack, "I'd not have left if the Devil sat there."
+"Neither would I", was the quick answer.
+
+Another singular article of attire was worn in the pulpit by Father Mills,
+of Torrington, though neither in irreverence nor indifference. When his
+dearly loved wife died he pondered how he, who always wore black, could
+express to the world that he was wearing mourning; and his simple heart hit
+upon this grotesque device: he left off his full-flowing wig, and tied
+up his head in a black silk handkerchief, which he wore thereafter as a
+trapping of woe.
+
+Parson Judson, of Taunton, was so lazy that he used to preach while sitting
+down in the pulpit; and was so contemptibly fond of comfort that he would
+on summer Sundays give out to the sweltering members of his congregation
+the longest psalm in the psalm-book, and then desert them--piously
+perspiring and fuguing--and lie under a tree enjoying the cool outdoor
+breezes until the long psalm was ended, escaping thus not only the heat but
+the singing; and when we consider the quantity and quality of both, and
+that he condemned his good people to an extra amount of each, it seems
+a piece of clerical inhumanity that would be hard to equal. Surely this
+selfish Taunton sybarite was the prosaic ideal of Hamlet's words:--
+
+  "Some ungracious pastors do
+  Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven,
+  Whilst like a puff'd and reckless libertine
+  Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
+  And recks not his own rede."
+
+But lazy and slothful ministers were fortunately rare in New England. No
+primrose path of dalliance was theirs; industrious and hard-working were
+nearly all the early parsons, preaching and praying twice on the Sabbath,
+and preaching again on Lecture days; visiting the sick and often giving
+medical and "chyrurgycal" advice; called upon for legal counsel and
+adjudication; occupied in spare moments in teaching and preparing young
+men for college; working on their farms; hearing the children say their
+catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,--truly
+they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded
+on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan
+vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John
+Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher,"
+while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a
+contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious
+epithets and descriptions were applied to the parsons; they were called
+"holy-heavenly," "sweet-affecting," "soul-ravishing," "heaven-piercing,"
+"angel-rivalling," "subtil," "irrefragable," "angelical," "septemfluous,"
+"holy-savoured," "princely," "soul-appetizing," "full of antic tastes"
+(meaning having the tastes of an antiquary), "God-bearing." Of two of the
+New England saints it was written:--
+
+  "Thier Temper far from Injucundity,
+  Thier tongues and pens from Infecundity."
+
+Many other fulsome, turgid, and even whimsical expressious of praise might
+be named, for the Puritans were rich in classic sesquipedalian adjectives,
+and their active linguistic consciences made them equally fertile in
+producing new ones.
+
+Ready and unexpected were the solemn Puritans in repartee. A party of gay
+young sparks, meeting austere old John Cotton, determined to guy him. One
+of the young reprobates sent up to him and whispered in his ear, "Cotton,
+thou art an old fool." "I am, I am," was the unexpected answer; "the Lord
+make both thee and me wiser than we are." Two young men of like intent met
+Mr. Haynes, of Vermont, and said with mock sad faces, "Have you heard the
+news? the Devil is dead." Quick came the answer, "Oh, poor, fatherless
+children! what will become of you?"
+
+Gloomy and depressed of spirits they were often. The good Warham, who could
+take faithful and brave charge of his flock in the uncivilized wilds
+of Connecticut among ferocious savages, was tortured by doubts and
+"blasphemous suggestions," and overwhelmed by unbelief, enduring specially
+agonizing scruples about administering and partaking of the Lord's Supper,
+and was thus perplexed and buffeted until the hour of his sad death. The
+ministers went through various stages of uncertainty and gloom, from the
+physical terror of Dr. Cogswell in a thunderstorm, through vacillating and
+harassing convictions about the Half Way Covenant, through doubt of God,
+of salvation, of heaven, of eternite, particularly distressing suspicions
+about the reality of hell and the personality of the Devil, to the stage
+of deep melancholy which was shown in its highest type in "Handkerchief
+Moody," who preached and prayed and always appeared in public with a
+handkerchief over his face, and gave to Hawthorne the inspiration for his
+story of "The Black Veil." Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of
+Charlestown, was so hypochondriacal that he was afraid to preach in the
+pulpit, feeling sure that he would die if he entered therein; so he always
+delivered his sermons to his patient congregation from the deacons' pew.
+Mr. Bradstreet was unconventional in many other respects, and was far from
+being a typical Puritan minister. He seldom wore a coat, but generally
+appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth,--a
+most disreputable addition to the clerical toilet at that date, or, in
+truth, at any date. He was a learned and pious man, however, and was thus
+introduced to a fellow clergyman, "Here is a man who can whistle Greek."
+
+Scarcely one of the early Puritan ministers was free from the sad shadow of
+doubt and fear. No "rose-pink or dirty-drab views of humanity" were theirs;
+all was inky-black. And it is impossible to express the gloom and the
+depression of spirit which fall on one now, after these centuries of
+prosperous and cheerful years, when one considers thoughtfully the deep and
+despairing agony of mind endured by these good, brave, steadfast, godly
+Puritan ministers. Read, for instance, the sentences from the diary of the
+Rev. John Baily, or of Nathaniel Mather, as given by Cotton Mather in his
+"Magnalia." Mather says that poor, sad, heart-sick Baily was filled with
+"desponding jealousies," "disconsolate uneasinesses," gloomy fears, and
+thinks the words from his diary "may be profitable to some discouraged
+minds." Profitable! Ah, no; far from it! The overwhelming blackness
+of despair, the woful doubts and fears about destruction and utter
+annihilation which he felt so deeply and so continually, fall in a heavy,
+impenetrable cloud upon us as we read, until we feel that we too are in the
+"Suburbs of hell" and are "eternally damned."
+
+But in succeeding years they were not always gloomy and not always staid,
+as we know from the stories of the cheerful parties at ordination-times;
+and I doubt not the reverend Assembly of Elders at Cambridge enjoyed to the
+full degree the twelve gallons of sack and six gallons of white wine sent
+to them by the Court as a testimony of deep respect. And the group of
+clergymen who were painted over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of
+Newbury, must have been far from gloom, as the punch-bowl and drinking-cups
+and tobacco and pipes would testify, and their cheerful motto likewise: "In
+essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." And
+the Rev. Mr. ---- no, I will not tell his name--kept an account with
+one Jerome Ripley, a storekeeper, and on one page of this account-book,
+containing thirty-nine entries, twenty-one were for New England rum.
+It somewhat lessens in our notions the personal responsibility, or the
+personal potatory capability of the parson, to discover that there was
+an ordination in town during that rum-paged week, and that the visiting
+ministers probably drank the greater portion of Jerome Ripley's liquor.
+But I wish the store-keeper had--to save this parson's reputation among
+succeeding generations--called and entered the rum as hay, or tea, or
+nails, or anything innocent and virtuous and clerical. When we read of all
+these doings and drinkings of the old New England ministers,--"if ancient
+tales say true, nor wrong these ancient men"--we feel that we cannot so
+fiercely resent nor wonder at the degrading coupling in Byron's sneering
+lines:--
+
+  "There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms,
+  As rum and true religion."
+
+All the cider made by the New England elders did not tend to gloom,
+and they were celebrated for their fine cider. The best cider in
+Massachusetts--that which brought the highest price--was known as the
+Arminian cider, because the minister who furnished it to the market was
+suspected of having Arminian tendencies. A very telling compliment to the
+cider of one of the first New England ministers is thus recorded: "Mr.
+Whiting had a score of appill-trees from which he made delicious cyder.
+And it hath been said yt an Indyan once coming to hys house and Mistress
+Whiting giving him a drink of ye cyder, he did sett down ye pot and smaking
+his lips say yt Adam and Eve were rightlie damned for eating ye appills in
+ye garden of Eden, they should have made them into cyder." This perverse
+application of good John Eliot's teaching would have vexed the apostle
+sorely. Of so much account were the barrels of cider, and so highly were
+they prized by the ministers, that one honest soul did not hesitate to
+thank the Lord in the pulpit for the "many barrels of cider vouchsafed to
+us this year."
+
+Stronger liquors than cider were also manufactured by the ministers,--and
+by God-fearing, pious ministers also. They did not hesitate to own and
+operate distilleries. Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church of
+Hartford and author of the hymn "Swell the anthem, raise the song," was
+engaged in the distilling business and did not make a success of it either.
+Having become bankrupt, he did not dare show his head anywhere in public
+for some time, except on Sunday, for fear of arrest. This disreputable and
+most unclerical affair did not operate against him in the minds of the
+contemporaneous public, for ten years later he received the degree of
+Doctor of Divinity from Princeton College; and he did not hesitate to joke
+about his liquor manufacturing, saying to two of his brother-clergymen,
+"Oh, we are all three in the same boat together,--Brother Prime raises the
+grain, I distil it, and Brother Flint drinks it."
+
+Impostors there were--false parsons--in the early struggling days of New
+England (since "the devil was never weary and never ceasing in disturbing
+the peace of the new English church"), and they plagued the colonists
+sorely. The very first shepherd of the wandering flock--Mr. Lyford, who
+preached to the planters in 1624--was, as Bradford says, "most unsavory
+salt," a most agonizing and unbearable thorn in the flesh and spirit of the
+poor homesick Pilgrims; and he was finally banished to Virginia, where it
+was supposed that he would find congenial and un-Puritanlike companions.
+Another bold-faced cheat preached to the colonists a most impressive sermon
+on the text, "Let him that stole steal no more," while his own pockets were
+stuffed out with stolen money. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth
+speaketh."
+
+Dicky Swayn, "after a thousand rogueries," set up as a parson in Boston.
+But, unfortunately for him, he prayed too loud and too long on one
+occasion, and his prayer attracted the attention of a woman whose servant
+he had formerly been. She promptly exposed his false pretensions and past
+villanies, and he left Boston and an army of cheated creditors. In 1699
+two other attractive and plausible scamps--Kingsbury and May--garbed and
+curried themselves as ministers, and went through a course of unchecked
+villany, building only on their agreeable presence. Cotton Mather wrote
+pertinently of one of these charmers, "Fascination is a thing whereof
+mankind has more Experience than Comprehension;" and he also wrote very
+despitefully of the adventurer's scholarly attainments saying there were
+"eighteen horrid false spells and not one point in one very short note I
+received from him." As the population increased, so also did the list of
+dishonest impostors, who made a cloak of religion most effectively to
+aid them in deceiving the religious community; and sometimes, alas! the
+ordained clergymen became sad backsliders.
+
+Nor were the pious and godly Puritan divines above the follies and
+frailties of other men in other places and in other times. It can be said
+of them, as of the Jew, had they not "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions,
+senses, affections, passions?"--were they not as other men? It is recorded
+of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, that "once coming among a gay partie of
+yong people he kist all ye maides and said yt he felt all ye better for
+it." And who can doubt it? Even that extreme type, that highest pinnacle
+of American Puritanical bigotry,--solemn and learned Cotton Mather,--had,
+when he was a mourning widower, a most amusing amorous episode with a
+rather doubtful, a decidedly shady, young Boston woman, whom he styled an
+"Ingenious Child," but who was far from being an ingenuous child. "She," as
+he proudly stated, "became charmed with my person to such a degree that she
+could not but break in upon me with her most importunate requests." And a
+very handsome and thoroughly attractive person does his portrait show
+even to modern eyes. Poor Cotton resisted the wiles of the devil in this
+alluring form, though he had to fast and pray three consecutive nights ere
+the strong Puritan spirit conquered the weak flesh, and he could consent
+and resolve to give up the thought of marrying the siren. His self-denial
+and firmness deserved a better reward than the very trying matrimonial
+"venture" that he afterwards made.
+
+Many another Puritan parson has left record of his wooings that are warm
+to read. And well did the parsons' wives deserve their ardent wooings and
+their tender love-letters. Hard as was the minister's life, over-filled as
+was his time, highly taxed as were his resources, all these hardships were
+felt in double proportion by the minister's wife. The old Hebrew standard
+of praise quoted by Cotton Mather, "A woman worthy to be the wife of a
+priest," was keenly epigrammatic; and ample proof of the wise insight
+of the standard of comparison may be found in the lives of "the pious,
+prudent, and prayerful" wives of New England ministers. What wonder that
+their praises were sung in many loving though halting threnodies, in
+long-winded but tender eulogies, in labored anagrams, in quaintly spelled
+epitaphs?--for the ministers' wives were the saints of the Puritan
+calendar.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+The Ministers' Pay.
+
+
+
+The salaries of New England clergymen were not large in early days, but the
+L60 or L70 which they each were yearly voted was quite enough to suitably
+support them in that new country of plain ways and plain living, if they
+only received it, which was, alas! not always the case. The First Court of
+Massachusetts, in 1630, set the amount of the minister's annual stipend
+to be L20 or L30 according to the wealth of the community, and made it a
+public charge. In 1659 the highest salary paid in Suffolk County was L100
+to Mr. Thatcher, and the lowest was L40 to the clergyman at Hull. The
+minister of the Andover church was voted a salary of L60, and "when he
+shall have occacion to marry, L10 more." He was very glad, however, to take
+L42 in hard cash instead of L60 in corn and labor, which were at that time
+the most popular forms of ministerial remuneration; even though the "hard
+cash" were in the form of wampum, beaver-skins, or leaden bullets.
+
+Many congregations, though the members were so pious and godly, were pretty
+sharp in bargaining with their preachers; for instance, the church in New
+London made its new parson sign a contract that "in case he remove before
+the year is out, he returneth the L80 paid him." Often clergymen would
+"supply" (or "Sipploye," or "syploy" or "sipply," or "sciploy," as various
+records have it) from month to mouth without "settling." As they got the
+"keepe of a hors," and their own board for Saturday and Sunday, and on
+Monday morning a cash payment for preaching (though often the amount was
+only twelve shillings), they were richer than with a small yearly salary
+that was irregularly and inconveniently paid. Often too they entered by
+preference into a yearly contract with a church, without any wish for
+regular settlement or ordination.
+
+A large portion of the stipends in early parishes being paid in corn and
+labor, the amounts were established by fixed rate upon the inhabitants;
+and the amount of land owned and cultivated by each church-member was
+considered in reckoning his assessment. These amounts were called voluntary
+contributions. If, however, any citizen refused to "contribute," he
+was taxed; and if he refused to pay his church-tax he could be fined,
+imprisoned, or pilloried. For one hundred years the ministers' salaries
+in Boston were paid by these so-called "voluntary contributions." In one
+church it was voted that "the Deacons have liberty for a quarter of a yeare
+to git in every mans sume either in a Church way or in a Christian way."
+I would the process employed in the "Church way" were recorded, since it
+differed so from the Christian way.
+
+It is one of the Puritan paradoxes that abounded in New England, that the
+community of New Haven, a "State whose Desire was Religion," and religion
+alone, was particularly backward in paying the minister who had spiritual
+charge there. After much trouble in deciding about the form and quality
+of the currency which should be used in pay, since so much bad wampum was
+thrust upon the deacons at the public contributions, it was in 1651 enacted
+that "whereas it is taken notice of that Divers give not into the Treasury
+at all on the Lords Day, it is decreed that all such if they give not
+freely, of themselves be rated according to the Jurisdiction order for the
+Ministers Maintaynance." The delinquents were ordered to bring their "rate"
+to the Deacon's house at once. A presuming young man ventured to suggest
+that the recreant members who would not pay in the face of the whole
+congregation would hardly rush to the Deacon's door to give in their
+"rate." He was severely ordered to keep silence in the company of wiser and
+elder people; but time proved his simply wise supposition to be correct;
+and many and various were the devices and forces which the deacons were
+obliged to use to obtain the minister's rate in New Haven.
+
+Some few bold Puritan souls dared to protest against being forced to pay
+the church rate whether they wished to or not. Lieutenant Fuller, of
+Barnstable, was fined fifty shillings for "prophanely" saying "that the law
+enacted about the ministers maintenance was a wicked and devilish one, and
+that the devil sat at the helm when the law was made." Such courageous
+though profane expressions of revolt but little availed; for not only
+were members and attendants of the Puritan churches taxed, but Quakers,
+Baptists, and Church-of-England men were also "rated," and if they refused
+to pay to help support the church that they abhorred, they were fined and
+imprisoned. One man, of Watertown, named Briscoe, dared to write a book
+against the violent enforcement of "voluntary" subscriptions. He was fined
+L10 for his wickedness; and the printer of the book was also punished. A
+virago in New London, more openly courageous, threw scalding water on the
+head of the tithingman who came to collect the minister's rate. Old John
+Cotton preached long and earnestly upon the necessity and propriety of
+raising the money for the minister's salary, and for other expenses of the
+church, wholly by voluntary and eagerly given contributions,--the "Lord
+having directed him to make it clear by Scripture." He believed that tithes
+and church-taxes were productive of "pride, contention and sloth," and
+indicated a declining spiritual condition of the church. But it was a
+strange voluntary gift he wished, that was forced by dread of the pillory
+and cage!
+
+Since, as Higginson said, "New England was a plantation of Religion, not a
+plantation of Trade," the church and its support were of course the first
+thought in laying out a new town-settlement, and some of the best town-lots
+were always set aside for the "yuse of the minister." Sometimes these lots
+were a gift outright to the first settled preacher, in other townships they
+were set aside as glebes, or "ministry land" as it was called. It was a
+universal custom to build at once a house for the minister, and some very
+queer contracts and stipulations for the size, shape, and quality of the
+parson's home-edifice may be read in church-records. To the construction
+of this house all the town contributed, as also to the building of the
+meeting-house; some gave work; some, the use of a horse or ox-team; some,
+boards; some, stones or brick; some, logs; others, nails; and a few, a very
+few, money. At the house-raising a good dinner was provided, and of course,
+plenty of liquor. Some malcontents rebelled against being forced to work on
+the minister's house. Entries of fines are common enough for "refusing
+to dig on the Minister's Selor," for neglecting to send "the Minister's
+Nayles," for refusing to "contribute clay-boards," etc. As with the
+town-lot, the house sometimes was a gift outright to the clergyman, and
+ofttimes the ownership was retained by the church, and the free use only
+was given to each minister.
+
+It was a universal custom to allow free pasturage for the minister's
+horse, for which the village burial-ground was assigned as a favorite
+feeding-ground. Sometimes this privilege of free pasturage was abused. In
+Plymouth, in 1789, Rev. Chandler Robbins was requested "not to have more
+horses than shall be necessary, for his many horses that had been pastured
+on 'Burial Hill'" had sadly damaged and defaced the gravestones,--perhaps
+the very headstones placed over the bones of our Pilgrim Fathers.
+
+The "strangers' money," which was the money contributed by visitors who
+chanced to attend the services, and which was sometimes specified as "all
+the silver and black dogs given by strangers," was usually given to the
+minister. A "black dog" was a "dog dollar."
+
+Often a settlement or a sum of money was given outright to the clergyman
+when he was first ordained or settled in the parish. At a town meeting in
+Sharon, January 8, 1755, which was held with regard to procuring a new
+minister, it was voted "that a committe confer with Mr. Smith, and know
+which will be more acceptable to him, to have a larger settlement and a
+smaller salary, or a larger salary and a smaller settlement, and make
+report to this meeting." On Jan. 15th it was voted "that we give to said
+Mr. Smith 420 ounces of silver or equivalent in old Tenor bills, for a
+settlement, to be paid in three years after settlement. That we give to
+said Mr. Smith 220 Spanish dollars or an equivalent in old Tenor bills for
+his yearly salary." Mr. Smith was very generous to his new parish, for his
+acceptance of its call contains this clause: "As it will come heavy upon
+some perhaps to pay salary and settlement together I have thought of
+releasing part of the payment of the salary for a time to be paid to me
+again. The first year I shall allow you out of the salary you have voted me
+40 dollars, the 2nd 30 dollars, the 3rd 15, the 4th year 20 to be repaid
+to me again, the 5th year 20 more, the 6th year 20 more and the 25 dollars
+that remain, I am willing that the town should keep 'em for its own use."
+He was apparently "willing to live very low," as Parson Eliot humbly and
+pathetically wrote in a petition to his church.
+
+The Puritan ministers in New England in the eighteenth century were all
+good Whigs; they hated the English kings, fully believing that those stupid
+rulers, who really cared little for the Church of England, were burning
+with pious zeal to make Episcopacy the established church of the colonies,
+and knowing that were that deed accomplished they themselves would probably
+lose their homes and means of livelihood. They were the most eager of
+Republicans and patriots, and many of them were good and brave soldiers in
+the Revolution.
+
+When the minister acquired the independence he so longed and fought for,
+it was not all his fancy painted it. He found himself poor
+indeed,--practically penniless. He complained sadly that he was paid his
+salary in the worthless continental paper money, and he refused to take it.
+Often he cannily took merchandise of all kinds instead of the low-valued
+paper money, and he became a good and sharp trader, exchanging his various
+goods for whatever he needed--and could get. Merchandise was, indeed, far
+preferable to money. The petition of Rev. Mr. Barnes to his Willsborough
+people has been preserved, and he thus speaks of his salary: "In 1775 the
+war comenced & Paper money was emitted which soon began to depreciate and
+the depreciation was so rappid that in may 1777 your Pastor gave the whole
+of his years Salary for one sucking Calf, the next year he gave the whole
+for a small store pig. Your Pastor has not asked for any consideration
+being willing to try to Scrabble along with the people while they are in
+low circumstances." His neighbor, Rev. Mr. Sprague, of Dublin, formally
+petitioned his church not to increase his salary, "as I am plagued to death
+to get what is owing to me now," or to buy anything with it when he got it.
+The minister in Scarborough had to be paid L5,400 in paper money to make
+good his salary of L60 in gold which had been voted him.
+
+"Living low" and "scrabbling along" seems to have been the normal and
+universal condition of the New England minister for some time after the War
+of Independence. He was obliged to go without his pay, or to take it in
+whatever shape it might chance to be tendered. Indeed, from the earliest
+colonial days it was true that of whatever they had, the church-members
+gave; meal, maize, beans, cider, lumber, merchantable pork, apples,
+"English grains," pumpkins,--all were paid to the parson. Part of the
+stipend of a minister on Cape Cod was two hundred fish yearly from each
+parishioner, with which to fertilize his sandy corn-land. In Plymouth,
+in 1662, the following method of increasing the minister's income was
+suggested: "The Court Proposeth it as a thing that they judge would be very
+commendable and beneficiall to the townes where God's providence shall cast
+any whales, if they should agree to set aparte some p'te of every such fish
+or oyle for the Incouragement of an able and godly minister among them." In
+Sandwich, also, the parson had a part of every whale that came ashore.
+
+Various gifts, too, came to the preachers. In Newbury the first salmon
+caught each year in the weir was left by will to the parson. Judge Sewall
+records that he visited the minister and "carried him a Bushel of
+Turnips, cost me five shillings, and a Cabbage cost half a Crown." Such a
+high-priced cabbage!
+
+That New England country institution--the "donation party" to the
+minister--was evolved at a later date. At these donation parties the
+unfortunate shepherd of the flock often received much that neither he
+nor the wily donors could use, while more valuable and useful gifts were
+lacking.
+
+A very material plenishing of the minister's house was often furnished in
+the latter part of the eighteenth century by the annual "Spinning Bee." On
+a given day the women of the parish, each bearing her own spinning-wheel
+and flax, assembled at the minister's house and spun for his wife great
+"runs" of linen thread, which were afterward woven into linen for the use
+of the parson and his family. In Newbury, April 20,1768, "Young ladies met
+at the house of the Rev. Mr. Parsons, who preached to them a sermon from
+Proverbs 31-19. They spun and presented to Mrs. Parsons two hundred and
+seventy skeins of good yarn." They drank "liberty tea." This makeshift of
+a beverage was made of the four-leaved loosestrife. The herb was pulled
+up like flax, its stalks were stripped of the leaves and were boiled. The
+leaves were put in a kettle and basted with the liquor distilled from the
+stalks. After this the leaves were dried in an oven to use in the same
+manner as tea-leaves. Liberty tea sold readily for sixpence a pound. In
+1787 these same Newbury women spun two hundred and thirty-six skeins
+of thread and yarn for the wife of the Rev. Mr. Murray. Some were busy
+spinning, some reeling and carding, and some combing the flax, while the
+minister preached to them on the text from Exodus xxxv. 25: "And all
+the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands." These
+spinning-bees were everywhere in vogue, and formed a source of much profit
+to the parson, and of pleasure to the spinners, in spite of the sermons.
+
+Pieced patchwork bed-quilts for the minister's family were also given by
+the women of the congregation. Sometimes each woman furnished a neatly
+pieced square, and all met at the parsonage and joined and quilted the
+coverlet. At other times the minister's wife made the patchwork herself,
+but the women assembled and transformed it into quilts for her. The parson
+was helped also in his individual work. When the rye or wheat or grain on
+the minister's land was full grown and ready for reaping and mowing, the
+men in his parish gave him gladly a day's work in harvesting, and in turn
+he furnished them plenty of good rum to drink, else there were "great
+uneasyness." The New England men were not forced to drink liberty tea.
+
+One universal contribution to the support of the minister all over New
+England was cord-wood; and the "minister's wood" is an institution up to
+the present day in the few thickly wooded districts that remain. A load of
+wood was usually given by each male church-member, and he was expected to
+deliver the gift at the door of the parsonage. Sixty loads a year were a
+fair allowance, but the number sometimes ran up to one hundred, as was
+furnished to Parson Chauncey, of Durham. Rev. Mr. Parsons, of East Hadley,
+was the greatest wood-consumer among the old ministers of whom I have
+chanced to read. Good, cheerful, roaring fires must the Parsons family have
+kept; for in 1774 he had eighty loads of wood supplied to him; in 1751 he
+was furnished with one hundred loads; in 1763 the amount had increased to
+one hundred and twenty loads, when the parish was glad to make a compromise
+with their extravagant shepherd and pay him instead L13 6s 8d annually
+in addition to his regular salary, and let him buy or cut his own wood.
+Firewood at that time in that town was worth only the expense of cutting
+and hauling to the house. A "load" of wood contained about three quarters
+of a cord, and until after the Revolutionary War was worth in the vicinity
+of Hadley only three shillings a load. The minister's loads were expected
+to be always of good "hard-wood." One thrifty parson, while watching a
+farmer unload his yearly contribution, remarked, "Isn't that pretty soft
+wood?" "And don't we sometimes have pretty soft preaching?" was the answer.
+It was well that the witty retort was not made a century earlier; for the
+speaker would have been punished by a fine, since they fined so sharply
+anything that savored of "speaking against the minister." In some towns a
+day was appointed which was called a "wood-spell," when it was ordered that
+all the wood be delivered at the parson's door; and thus the farmers formed
+a cheerful gathering, at which the minister furnished plentiful flip, or
+grog, to the wood-givers. Rev. Stephen Williams, of Longmeadow, never
+failed to make a note of the "wood-sleddings" in his diary. He wrote on
+Jan. 25, 1757, "Neighbors sledded wood for me and shewed a Good Humour.
+I rejoice at it. The Lord bless them that are out of humour and brot no
+wood." In other towns the wood did not always come in when it was wanted or
+needed, and winter found the parsonage woodshed empty. Rev. Mr. French, of
+Andover, gave out this notice in his pulpit one Sunday in November: "I will
+write two discourses and deliver them in this meeting-house on Thanksgiving
+Day, _provided I can manage to write them without a fire_." We can be
+sure that Monday morning saw several loads of good hard wood deposited at
+the parson's door.
+
+Other ministers did not hesitate to demand their cord-wood most openly,
+while still others became adepts in hinting and begging, not only for wood,
+but for other supplies. It is told of a Newbury parson that he rode from
+house to house one winter afternoon, saying in each that he "wished he had
+a slice of their good cheese, for his wife expected company." On his way
+home his sleigh, unfortunately, upset, and the gathering darkness could not
+conceal from the eyes of the astonished townspeople, who ran to "right the
+minister," the nine great cheeses that rolled out into the snow.
+
+Another source of income to New England preachers was the sale of the
+gloves and rings which were given to them (and indeed to all persons of
+any importance) at weddings, funerals, and christenings. In reading Judge
+Sewall's diary one is amazed at the extraordinary number of gloves he thus
+received, and can but wonder what became of them all, since, had he had
+as many hands as Briareus, he could hardly have worn them. The manuscript
+account-book of the Rev. Mr. Elliot, who was ordained pastor of the New
+North Church of Boston in 1742, shows that he, having a frugal mind, sold
+both gloves and rings. He kept a full list of the gloves he received, the
+kid gloves, the lambswool gloves, and the long gloves,--which were for his
+wife. It seems incredible, but in thirty-two years he received two thousand
+and nine hundred and forty pairs of gloves. Of these, though dead men's
+gloves did not have a very good market, he sold through various salesmen
+and dealers about six hundred and forty dollars worth. One wonders that he
+did not "combine" with the undertaker or sexton who furnished the gloves to
+mourners, and thus do a very thrifty business.
+
+The parson, especially in a low-salaried, rural district, had to practise a
+thousand petty and great economies to eke out his income. He and his family
+wore homespun and patched clothing, which his wife had spun and wove and
+cut and made. She knitted woollen mittens and stockings by the score. She
+unfortunately could not make shoes, and to keep the large family shod was a
+serious drain on the clerical purse, one minister declaring vehemently
+that he should have died a rich man if he and his family could have gone
+barefoot. The pastors of seaboard and riverside parishes set nets, like the
+Apostles of old, and caught fish with which they fed their families until
+the over-phosphorized brains and stomachs rebelled. They set snares and
+traps and caught birds and squirrels and hare, to replenish their tables,
+and from the skins of the rabbits and woodchucks and squirrels, the
+parsons' wives made fur caps for the husbands and for the children.
+
+The whole family gathered in large quantities from roadsides and pastures
+the oily bayberries, and from them the thrifty and capable wife made scores
+of candles for winter use, patiently filling and refilling her few moulds,
+or "dipping" the candles again and again until large enough to use. These
+pale-green bayberry tallow candles, when lighted in the early winter
+evening, sent forth a faint spicy fragrance--a true New England
+incense--that fairly perfumed and Orientalized the atmosphere of the
+parsonage kitchen. They were very saving, however, even of these home-made
+candles, blowing them out during the long family prayers.
+
+Some parsons could not afford always to use candles. In the home of one
+well-known minister the wife always knitted, the children ciphered and
+studied, and the husband wrote his sermon by the flickering fire-light (for
+they always had wood in plenty), with his scraps of sermon paper placed on
+the side of the great leathern bellows as it lay in his lap; a pretty home
+scene that was more picturesque to behold than comfortable to take part in.
+
+Country ministers could scarcely afford paper to write on, as it was taxed
+and was high priced. They bought their sermon paper by the pound; but they
+made the first drafts of their addresses, in a fine, closely written hand,
+on wrapping-paper, on the backs of letters, on the margins of their few
+newspapers, and copied them when finished in their sermon-books with a
+keen regard for economy of space and paper. The manuscript sermons of New
+England divines are models of careful penmanship, and may be examined with
+interest by a student of chirography. The letters are cramped and crabbed,
+like the lives of many of the writers, but the penmanship is methodical,
+clear, and distinct, without wavering lines or uncertain touch.
+
+As every parsonage had some glebe land, the parson could raise at least a
+few vegetables to supply his table. One minister, prevented by illness from
+planting his garden, complained with bitterness that, save for a few rare
+gifts of vegetables from his parishioners, his family had no green thing
+all summer save "messes of dandelion greens" which he had dug by the
+roadside, and the summer's succession of wild berries and mushrooms. The
+children had gathered the berries and had sold them when they could, but of
+course no one would buy the mushrooms, hence they had been forced to eat
+them at the parsonage; and he spoke despitefully and disdainfully of the
+mean, unnourishing, and doubtfully healthful food.
+
+In winter the parson's family fared worse; one minister declared that he
+had had nothing but mush and milk with occasional "cracker johnny-cakes"
+all winter, and that he had not once tasted meat in that space of time,
+save at a funeral or ordination-supper, where I doubt not he gorged with
+the composure and capacity of a Sioux brave at a war feast.
+
+Often the low state of the parsonage larder was quite unknown to the
+unthinking members of the congregation, who were not very luxuriously fed
+themselves; and in the profession of preaching as in all other walks of
+life much depended on the way the parson's money was spent,--economy and
+good judgment in housekeeping worked wonders with the small salary. Dr.
+Dwight, in eulogizing Abijah Weld, pastor at Attleborough, declared that
+on a salary of two hundred and twenty dollars a year Mr. Weld brought up
+eleven children, kept a hospitable house, and gave liberally in charity to
+the poor. I fear if we were to ask some carnal-minded person, who knew not
+the probity of Dr. Dwight, how Mr. Weld could possibly manage to accomplish
+such wonderful results with so little money, that we should meet with
+scepticism as to the correctness of the facts alleged. Such cases were,
+however, too common to be doubted. My answer to the puzzling financial
+question would be this: examine and study the story of the home life, the
+work of _Mrs_. Weld, that unsalaried helper in clerical labor; therein
+the secret lies.
+
+In many cases, in spite of the never failing and never ceasing economy,
+care, and assistance of the hard-working, thrifty wife, in spite of
+tributes, tithes and windfalls--in country parishes especially--the
+minister, unless he fortunately had some private wealth, felt it incumbent
+upon him to follow some money-making vocation on week-days. Many were
+farmers on week-days. Many took into their families young men who wished
+to be taught, or fitted for college. Rev. Mr. Halleck in the course of his
+useful and laborious life educated over three hundred young Puritans in his
+own household. It is not recorded how Mrs. Halleck enjoyed the never ending
+cooking for this regiment of hungry young men. Some parsons learned to draw
+up wills and other legal documents, and thus became on a small scale the
+lawyers of the town. Others studied the mystery of medicine, and bought a
+small stock of the nauseous drugs of the times, which they retailed
+with accompanying advice to their parishioners. Some were coopers, some
+carpenters, rope-makers, millers, or cobblers. One cobbler clergyman in
+Andover, Vermont, worked at his shoe-mending all the week with his Bible
+open on his bench before him, and he marked the page containing any text
+which bore on the subject of his coming sermon, with a marker of waxed
+shoe-thread. Often the Bible, in his pulpit on Sunday, had thirty or forty
+of these shoe-thread guides hanging down from it.
+
+One minister, having been reproved for his worldliness in amassing a large
+enough fortune to buy a good farm, answered his complaining congregation
+thus: "I have obtained the money to buy this farm by neglecting to follow
+the maxim to 'mind my own business.' My business was to study the word of
+God and attend to my parish duties and preach good sermons. All this I
+acknowledge I have not done, for I have been meddling with your business.
+_That_ was to support me and my family; that _you_ have not done.
+But remember this: while I have performed your duties, you have not done
+mine, so I think you cannot complain."
+
+Some of the early ministers, in addition to preaching in the meeting-house,
+did not disdain to take care of the edifice. Parson Everitt of Sandwich was
+paid three dollars a year for sweeping out the meeting-house in which he
+preached; and after he resigned this position of profit, the duties were
+performed by the town physician "as often as there shalbe ocation to keepe
+it deesent." The thrifty Mr. Everitt had a pleasing variety of occupations;
+he was also a successful farmer, a good fence-builder, and he ran a
+fulling-mill.
+
+So, altogether, as they were wholly exempt from taxation, the New England
+parsons did not fare ill, though Mr. Cotton said that "ministers and milk
+were the only cheap things in New England," and he deemed various ills,
+such as attacks by fierce Indians, loss of cattle, earthquakes, and failure
+of crops, to be divine judgments for the small ministerial pay; while
+Cotton Mather, in one of his pompous and depressing jokes, called the
+minister's stipend "Synecdotical Pay." A search in a treatise on rhetoric
+or in a dictionary will discover the point of this witticism--if it be
+worth searching for.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit.
+
+
+
+One thing which always interests and can but amuse every reader of the
+old Puritan sermons is the astonishingly familiar way in which these New
+England divines publicly shared their domestic joys and sorrows with
+the members of their congregations; and we are equally surprised at the
+ingenuity which they displayed in finding texts that were suitable for
+the various occasions and events. The Reverend Mr. Turell was specially
+ingenious. Of him Dr. Holmes wrote,--
+
+  "You've heard, no doubt, of Parson Turell;
+  Over at Medford he used to dwell,--
+  Married one of the Mathers' folks."
+
+His wife, Jane Coleman, was a handsome brunette. The bridegroom preached
+his first sermon after his wedding on this text, "I am black but comely, O
+ye daughters of Jerusalem." When he married a second time he chose as his
+text, "He is altogether lovely, this is my beloved, and this my friend, O
+daughters of Jerusalem!" It is possible that each of Parson Turell's brides
+may have chosen the text from which he preached her honeymoon sermon. It
+was the universal custom for many years thoughout New England to allow a
+bride the privilege of selecting for the parson who had solemnized her
+marriage, or at whose church she first appeared after the wedding, the text
+from which he should preach on the bridal Sabbath. Thus when John Physick
+and Mary Prescott were married in Portland, on July 4, 1770, the bride gave
+to Rev. Mr. Deane this text: "Mary hath chosen that good part;" and from it
+Parson Deane preached the "wedding sermon." When Abby Smith, daughter of
+Parson Smith, married 'Squire John Adams, whom her father disliked and
+would not invite home to dinner, she chose this text for her wedding
+sermon: "John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he
+hath a devil." The high-spirited bride had the honor of living to be the
+wife of one President of the United States, and mother of another.
+
+Another ingenious clergyman gave out one morning as his text, "Unto us a
+son is born;" and thus notified the surprised congregation of an event
+which they had been awaiting for some weeks. Another preached on the text,
+"My servant lieth at home sick," which was literally true. Another, a
+bachelor, dared to announce this abbreviated text: "A wonder was seen in
+heaven--a woman." Dr. Mather Byles, of Boston, being disappointed through
+the non-appearance of a minister named Prince, who had been expected to
+deliver the sermon, preached himself upon the text, "Put not your trust
+in princes." But Dr. Byles was one who would always "court a grin when he
+should win a soul."
+
+One minister felt it necessary to reprove a money-making parishioner who
+had stored and was holding in reserve (with the hope of higher prices) a
+large quantity of corn which was sadly needed for consumption in the town.
+The parson preached from this appropriate text, Proverbs xi. 26. "He that
+withholdeth his corn, the people shall curse him; but blessings shall be
+upon the head of him that selleth it." As the minister grew warmer in his
+explanation and application of the text, the money-seeking corn-storer
+defiantly and unregenerately sat up stiff and unmoved, until at last the
+preacher, provoked out of prudence and patience, roared out, "Colonel
+Ingraham, Colonel Ingraham! you know I mean you; why don't you hang down
+your head?" In a similar case another stern parson employed the text,
+"Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone;" though the personalities
+of the sermon made unnecessary the open reference in the text to the
+offender's name.
+
+The ministers were such autocrats in the Puritan community that they never
+hesitated to show their authority in any manner in the pulpit. Judge Sewall
+records with much bitterness a libel which his pastor, Mr. Pemberton,
+launched at him in the meeting through the medium of the psalm which
+he gave out to be sung. They had differed over the adjustment of some
+church-matter and on the following Sunday the clergyman assigned to be sung
+the libellous and significant psalm. Such lines as these must have been
+hard indeed for Judge Sewall to endure:--
+
+  "Speak, oh ye Judges of the Earth
+    if just your Sentence be
+  Or must not Innocence appeal
+    to Heav'n from your decree
+
+  "Your Wicked Hearts and Judgments are
+    alike by Malice sway'd
+  Your griping Hands by mighty Bribes
+    to violence betrayed.
+
+  "No Serpent of parch'd Afric's breed
+    doth Ranker poison bear
+  The drowsy Adder will as soon
+    unlock his Sullen Ear
+
+  "Unmov'd by good Advice, and dead
+    As Adders they remain
+  From whom the skilful Charmer's voice
+    can no attention gain."
+
+Small wonder that Judge Sewall writhed under the infliction of these lines
+as they were doubly thrust upon him by the deacon's "lining" and the
+singing of the congregation; and the words, "The drowsy Adder will as soon
+unlock his Sullen Ear" seemed to particularly irritate him; doubtless he
+felt sure that no one could doubt his integrity, but feared that some might
+think him stupid and obstinate.
+
+Another arbitrary clergyman, having had an altercation with some unruly
+singers in the choir, gave out with much vehemence on the following Sunday
+the hymn beginning,--
+
+  "And are you wretches yet alive
+  And do you yet rebel?"
+
+with a very significant glower towards the singers' gallery. In a similar
+situation another minister gave out to the rebellious choir the hymn
+commencing,--
+
+  "Let those refuse to sing
+  Who never knew our God."
+
+A visiting clergyman, preaching in a small and shabby church built in a
+parish of barren and stony farm-land, very spitefully and sneeringly read
+out to be sung the hymn of Watts' beginning,--
+
+  "Lord, what a wretched land is this,
+  That yields us no supplies!"
+
+But his malicious intent was frustrated and the tables were adroitly turned
+by the quick-witted choir-master, who bawled out in a loud voice as if
+in answer, "Northfield,"--the name of the minister's own home and
+parish,--while he was really giving out to the choir, as was his wont, the
+name of the tune to which the hymn was to be sung.
+
+Nor did the parsons hesitate to be personal even in their prayers. Rev. Mr.
+Moody, who was ordained pastor at York in the year 1700, reproved in an
+extraordinary manner a young man who had called attention to some fine new
+clothing which he wore by coming in during prayer time and thus attracting
+the notice of the congregation. Mr. Moody, in an elevated tone of voice,
+at once exclaimed, "And O Lord! we pray Thee, cure Ned Ingraham of that
+ungodly strut," etc. Another time he prayed for a young lady in the
+congregation and ended his invocation thus, "She asked me not to pray for
+her in public, but I told her I would, and so I have, Amen."
+
+Rev. Mr. Miles, while praying for rain, is said to have used this
+extraordinary phraseology: "O Lord, Thou knowest we do not want Thee to
+send us a rain which shall pour down in fury and swell our streams and
+carry away our hay-cocks, fences, and bridges; but, Lord, we want it to
+come drizzle-drozzle, drizzle-drozzle, for about a week, Amen."
+
+They did not think it necessary always to give their congregations novel
+thoughts and ideas nor fresh sermons. One minister, after being newly
+ordained in his parish, preached the same sermon three Sundays in
+succession; and a deacon was sent to him mildly to suggest a change. "Why,
+no," he answered, "I can see no evidence yet that this one has produced any
+effect."
+
+Rev. Mr. Daggett, of Yale College, had an entire system of sermons which
+took him four years to preach throughout. And for three successive years he
+delivered once a year a sermon on the text, "Is Thy servant a dog that he
+should do this thing?" And the fourth year he varied it with, "And the dog
+did it."
+
+Dr. Coggswell, of Canterbury, Connecticut, had a sermon which he thrust
+upon his people every spring for many years as being suitable to the time
+when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. In it he soberly
+reproved the young church attendants for gazing so much at each other in
+the meeting. This annual anti-amatory advice never failed to raise a smile
+on the face of each father and son in the congregation as he listened to
+the familiar and oft-repeated words.
+
+The Puritan ministers gave advice in their sermons upon most personal and
+worldly matters. Roger Williams instructed the women of his parish to wear
+veils when they appeared in public; but John Cotton preached to them
+one Sunday morning and proved to them that veils were a sign of undue
+subjection to their husbands; and in the afternoon the fair Puritans
+appeared with bare faces and showed that women had even at that early day
+"rights."
+
+How the varieties of headgear did torment the parsons! They denounced
+from many a pulpit the wearing of wigs. Mr. Noyes preached long and often
+against the fashion. Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the
+Indians, found time even in the midst of his arduous and incessant duties
+to deliver many a blast against "prolix locks,"--"with boiling zeal," as
+Cotton Mather said,--and he labelled them a "luxurious feminine protexity;"
+but lamented late in life that "the lust for wigs is become insuperable."
+He thought the horrors in King Philip's War were a direct punishment from
+God for wig-wearing. Increase Mather preached warmly against wigs, saying
+that "such Apparel is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture," and that "Monstrous Perriwigs such as some of our church
+members indulge in make them resemble ye locusts that came out of ye
+Bottomless Pit." To learn how these "Horrid Bushes of Vanity" were
+despised by a real live Puritan wig-hater one needs only to read the
+many disparaging, regretful, and bitter references to wig-wearing and
+wig-wearers in Judge Sewall's diary, which reached a culmination when a
+widow whom he was courting suggested most warmly that he ought to wear,
+what his very soul abominated, a periwig.
+
+Eliot had also a strong aversion to tobacco, and denounced its use in
+severe terms; but his opposition in this case was as ineffectual as it was
+against wigs. Allen said, "In contempt of all his admonitions the head
+would be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and the pipe would send up
+volumes of smoke."
+
+Rev. Mr. Rogers preached against long natural hair,--the "disguisement of
+long ruffianly hair,"--as did also President Chauncey of Harvard College;
+while Mr. Wigglesworth's sermon on the subject has often been reprinted,
+and is full of logical arguments. This offence was named on the list of
+existing evils which was made by the General Court: that "the men wore long
+hair like women's hair," while the women were complained of for "cutting
+and curling and laying out of hair, especially among the younger sort."
+Still, the Puritan magistrates, omnipotent as they were, did not dare to
+force the be-curled citizens to cut their long love-locks, though they
+instructed and bribed them to do so. A Salem man was, in 1687, fined ten
+shillings for a misdemeanor, but "in case he shall cutt off his long har of
+his head into a sevill (civil?) frame in the mean time shall have abated
+five shillings of his fine." John Eliot hated long natural hair as well
+as false hair. Cotton Mather said of him, in a very unpleasant figure of
+speech, "The hair of them that professed religion grew too long for him to
+swallow." Other fashions and habits brought forth denunciations from the
+pulpit,--hooped petticoats, gold-laced coats (unless worn by gentlemen),
+pointed shoes, chaise-owning, health-drinking, tavern-visiting, gossiping,
+meddling, tale-bearing, and lying.
+
+Political and business and even medical and sanitary subjects were popular
+in the early New England pulpit. Mr. Peters preached many a long sermon
+to urge the formation of a stock company for fishing, and canvassed all
+through the commonwealth for the same purpose. Cotton Mather said plainly
+that ministers ought to instruct themselves and their congregations in
+politics; and in Connecticut it was ordered by law that each minister
+should give sound and orthodox advice to his congregation at the time of
+civil elections.
+
+Every natural phenomenon, every unusual event called forth a sermon, and
+the minister could find even in the common events of every-day life plain
+manifestations of Divine wrath and judgment. He preached with solemn
+delight upon comets, and earthquakes, and northern lights, and great storms
+and droughts, on deaths and diseases, and wonders and scandals (for there
+were scandals even in puritanical New England), on wars both at home and
+abroad, on shipwrecks, on safe voyages, on distinguished visitors, on noted
+criminals and crimes,--in fact, upon every subject that was of spiritual or
+temporal interest to his congregation or himself. And his people looked
+for his religious comment upon passing events just as now-a-days we read
+articles upon like subjects in the newspaper. Thus was the Puritan minister
+not only a preacher, but a teacher, adviser, and friend, and a pretty
+plain-spoken one too.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+The Early Congregations.
+
+
+
+On Sunday morning in New England in the olden time, the country
+church-members whose homes were near the meeting-house walked reverently
+and slowly across the green meadows or the snowy fields to meeting.
+Townspeople, at the sound of the bell or drum or horn, walked decorously
+and soberly along the irregular streets to the house of God. Farmers who
+lived at a greater distance were up betimes to leave their homes and ride
+across the fields and through the narrow bridle-paths, which were then the
+universal and almost the only country roads. These staid Puritan planters
+were mounted on sturdy farmhorses, and a pillion was strapped on behind
+each saddle, and on it was seated wife, daughter, or perhaps a young
+child--I should like to have seen the church-going dames perched up proudly
+in all their Sunday finery, masked in black velvet, a sober Puritan
+travesty of a gay carnival fashion. Riding-habits were hardly known until
+a century ago, and even after their introduction were never worn
+a-pillion-riding, so the Puritan women rode in their best attire.
+Sometimes, in unusually muddy or dusty weather, a very daintily dressed
+"nugiperous" dame would don a linen "weather skirt" to protect her fine
+silken petticoats.
+
+The wealthier Puritans were mounted on fine pacing horses, "once so highly
+prized, now so odious deemed;" for trotting horses were not in much demand
+or repute in America until after the Revolutionary War. There were, until
+that date, professional horse-trainers, whose duties were to teach horses
+to pace; though by far the best saddle-horses were the natural-gaited
+"Narragansett Pacers," the first distinctively American race of horses.
+These remarkably easy-paced animals were in such demand in the West Indies
+for the use of the wives and daughters of the wealthy sugar-planters, and
+in Philadelphia and New York for rich Dutch and Quaker colonists, that
+comparatively few of them were allowed to remain in New England, and they
+were, indeed too high-priced for poor New England colonists. The natural
+and singular pace of these Narragansett horses, which did not incline the
+rider from side to side, nor jolt him up and down, and their remarkable
+sureness of foot and their great endurance, rendered them of much value
+in those days of travel in the saddle. They were also phenomenally
+broad-backed,--shaped by nature for saddle and pillion.
+
+When trotting-horses became fashionable, the trainers placed logs of wood
+at regular intervals across the road, and by exercising the animals
+over this obstructed path forced them to raise their feet at the proper
+intervals, and thus learn to trot.
+
+Long distances did many of the pre-revolutionary farmers of New England
+have to ride to reach their churches, and long indeed must have been the
+time occupied in these Sunday trips, for a horse was too well-burdened with
+saddle and pillion and two riders to travel fast. The worshippers must
+often have started at daybreak. When we see now an ancient pillion--a relic
+of olden times--brought out in jest or curiosity, and strapped behind a
+saddle on a horse's back, and when we see the poor steed mounted by two
+riders, it seems impossible for the over-burdened animal to endure a long
+journey, and certainly impossible for him to make a rapid one.
+
+Horse-flesh, and human endurance also, was economized in early days by what
+was called the "ride and tie" system. A man and his wife would mount saddle
+and pillion, ride a couple of miles, dismount, tie the steed, and walk
+on. A second couple, who had walked the first two miles, soon mounted the
+rested horse, rode on past the riders for two or three miles, dismounted,
+and tied the animal again. In that way four persons could ride very
+comfortably and sociably half-way to meeting, though they must have had
+to make an early start to allow for the slow gait and long halts. At the
+church the disburdened horses were tied during the long services to palings
+and to trees near the meeting-house (except the favored animals that found
+shelter in the noon-houses) and the scene must have resembled the outskirts
+of a gypsy camp or an English horse-fair. Such obedience did the Puritans
+pay to the letter of the law that when the Newbury people were forbidden,
+in tying their horses outside the church paling, to leave them near enough
+to the footpath to be in the way of church pedestrians, it did not prevent
+the stupid or obstinate Newburyites from painstakingly bringing their
+steeds within the gates and tying them to the gate-posts where they were
+much more seriously and annoyingly in the way.
+
+It is usual to describe and to think of the Puritan congregations as like
+assemblies of Quakers, solemn, staid, and uniform and dull of dress; but
+I can discover in historical records nothing to indicate simplicity,
+soberness, or even uniformity of apparel, except the uniformity of fashion,
+which was powerful then as now. The forbidding rules and regulations
+relating to the varied and elaborate forms of women's dress--and of men's
+attire as well--would never have been issued unless such prohibited apparel
+had been common and universally longed-for, and unless much diversity and
+elegance of dress had abounded.
+
+Indeed the daughters of the Pilgrims were true "daughters of Zion, walking
+with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, and mincing as they go." Save
+for the "nose jewels," the complaining and exhaustive list of the prophet
+Isaiah might serve as well for New England as for Judah and Jerusalem:
+"their cauls and their round tires like moons; the chains and the bracelets
+and the mufflers; the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the head
+bands, and the tablets, and the ear-rings; the rings and nose jewels; the
+changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the
+crisping pins; the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods and the
+veils." Nor has the day yet come to pass in the nineteenth century when the
+bravery of the daughters has been taken away.
+
+Pleasant it is to think of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and
+goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have
+been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote,"
+a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with
+"Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and
+a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or
+ciffer" (New England French for coiffure) with "long wings" at the side,
+and a silk or tiffany hood on her drooping head,--Priscilla in this attire
+were pretty indeed.
+
+Nor did sober John Alden and doughty Miles Standish lack for variety in
+their dress; besides their soldier's garb, their sentinel's armor, they
+had a vast variety of other attire to choose from; they could select their
+head-wear from "redd knitt capps" or "monmouth capps" or "black hats lyned
+at the browes with leather." They could have a "sute" of "dublett and hose
+of leather lyned with oyled-skin-leather," fastened with hooks and eyes
+instead of buttons; or one of "hampshire kerseys lyned." They could have
+"mandillions" (whatever they may have been) "lyned with cotton," and
+"wast-coats of greene cotton bound about with red tape," and breeches of
+oiled leather and leathern drawers (I do not know whether these leathern
+drawers were under-garments or leathern draw-strings at the knees of the
+breeches). They could wear "gloves of sheeps or calfs leather" or of kid,
+and fine gold belts, and "points" at the knees. In fact, the invoices of
+goods to the earliest settlers show that they had a choice of various
+materials for garments, including "gilford and gedleyman, holland and
+lockerum and buckerum, fustian, canvass, linsey-woolsey, red ppetuna,
+cursey, cambrick, calico-stuff, loom-work, Dutch serges, and English
+jeans"--enough for diversity, surely. Sad-colored mantles the goodmen wore,
+but their doublets were scarlet, and with their green waistcoats and red
+caps, surely the Puritan men were sufficiently gayly dressed to suit any
+fancy save that of a cavalier. Later in the history of the colony, when
+hooped petticoats and laced hoods and mantles, and long, embroidered gloves
+fastened with horsehair "glove tightens," and when velvet coats and satin
+breeches and embroidered waistcoats, gold lace, sparkling buckles, and
+cocked hats with full bottomed wigs were worn, the gray, sombre old
+meeting-house blossomed like a tropical forest, and vied with the worldly
+Church of England in gay-garbed church attendants.
+
+Stern and severe of face were many of the members of these early New
+England congregations, else they had not been true Puritans in heart, and
+above all, they had not been Pilgrims. Long and thin of feature were they,
+rarely smiling, yet not devoid of humor. Some handsome countenances
+were seen,--austere, bigoted Cotton Mather being, strangely enough, the
+handsomest and most worldly looking of them all. What those brave, stern
+men and women were, as well as what they looked, is known to us all, and
+cannot be dwelt upon here, any more than can here be shown and explained
+the details of their religious faith and creed. Patient, frugal,
+God-fearing, and industrious, cruel and intolerant sometimes, but never
+cowardly, sternly obeying the word of God in the spirit and the letter, but
+erring sometimes in the interpretation thereof,--surely they had no traits
+to shame us, to keep us from thrilling with pride at the drop of their
+blood which runs in our backsliding veins. Nothing can more plainly show
+their distinguishing characteristics, nothing is so fully typical of the
+motive, the spirit of their lives, as their reverent observance of the
+Lord's day.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sabbath in Puritan New England
+by Alice Morse Earle
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Sabbath in Puritan New England, by Alice Morse Earle
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+Title: Sabbath in Puritan New England
+
+Author: Alice Morse Earle
+
+Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8659]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on July 30, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar and 
+spelling from that old time, the word "their" is spelled as "thier" 17 times.
+It has been left there as "thier".
+
+
+
+
+THE SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND
+
+by
+
+Alice Morse Earle
+
+Seventh Edition
+
+
+
+
+To the Memory of my Mother.
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+
+    I.  The New England Meeting-House
+   II.  The Church Militant
+  III.  By Drum and Horn and Shell
+   IV.  The Old-Fashioned Pews
+    V.  Seating the Meeting
+   VI.  The Tithingman and the Sleepers
+  VII.  The Length of the Service
+ VIII.  The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House
+   IX.  The Noon-House
+    X.  The Deacon's Office
+   XI.  The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims
+  XII.  The Bay Psalm-Book
+ XIII.  Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms
+  XIV.  Other Old Psalm-Books
+   XV.  The Church Music
+  XVI.  The Interruptions of the Services
+ XVII.  The Observance of the Day
+XVIII.  The Authority of the Church and the Ministers
+  XIX.  The Ordination of the Minister
+   XX.  The Ministers
+  XXI.  The Ministers' Pay
+ XXII.  The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit
+XXIII.  The Early Congregations
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Sabbath in Puritan New England.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The New England Meeting-House.
+
+
+
+When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord's
+Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong
+and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every
+Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they
+worshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.
+
+As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,
+the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein for
+the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton
+Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply
+such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the
+Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as
+bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the
+Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.
+
+The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these
+houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that
+theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England
+to create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slow
+or indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 that
+a meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if the
+people failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,
+and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of members
+necessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in the
+Platform of Church Discipline: "A church ought not to be of greater number
+than can ordinarilie meet convenientlie in one place, nor ordinarilie
+fewer than may convenientlie carry on church-work." Each church was quite
+independent in its work and government, and had absolute power to admit,
+expel, control, and censure its members.
+
+These first meeting-houses were simple buildings enough,--square log-houses
+with clay-filled chinks, surmounted by steep roofs thatched with long
+straw or grass, and often with only the beaten earth for a floor. It was
+considered a great advance and a matter of proper pride when the settlers
+had the meeting-house "lathed on the inside, and so daubed and whitened
+over workmanlike." The dimensions of many of these first essays at church
+architecture are known to us, and lowly little structures they were. One,
+indeed, is preserved for us under cover at Salem. The first meeting-house
+in Dedham was thirty-six feet long, twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high
+"in the stud;" the one in Medford was smaller still; and the Haverhill
+edifice was only twenty-six feet long and twenty wide, yet "none other than
+the house of God."
+
+As the colonists grew in wealth and numbers, they desired and built better
+sanctuaries, "good roomthy meeting-houses" they were called by Judge
+Sewall, the most valued and most interesting journal-keeper of the times.
+The rude early buildings were then converted into granaries or storehouses,
+or, as was the Pentucket meeting-house, into a "house of shelter or a house
+to sett horses in." As these meeting-houses had not been consecrated, and
+as they were town-halls, forts, or court-houses as well as meeting-houses,
+the humbler uses to which they were finally put were not regarded as
+profanations of holy places.
+
+The second form or type of American church architecture was a square wooden
+building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which
+was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or
+turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which
+was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this
+second style of architecture. These square meeting-houses, so much alike,
+soon abounded in New England; for a new church, in its contract for
+building, would often specify that the structure should be "like in every
+detaile to the Lynn meeting-house," or like the Hadley, Milford, Boston,
+Danvers, or New Haven meeting-house. This form of edifice was the prototype
+of the fine great First Church of Boston, a large square brick building,
+with three rows of windows and two galleries, which stood from the year
+1713 to 1808, and of which many pictures exist.
+
+The third form of the Puritan meeting-house, of which the Old South Church
+of Boston is a typical model, has too many representatives throughout New
+England to need any description, as have also the succeeding forms of New
+England church architecture.
+
+The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow
+lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the
+colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile
+of the meeting-house. Soon, however, the houses became too closely crowded
+for the most convenient uses of a farming community; pasturage for the
+cattle had to be obtained at too great a distance from the farmhouse;
+firewood had to be brought from too distant woods; nearness to water
+also had to be considered. Thus the law became a dead letter, and each
+new-coming settler built on outlying and remote land, since the Indians
+were no longer so deeply to be dreaded. Then the meeting-houses, having
+usually to accommodate a whole township of scattered farms, were placed on
+remote and often highly elevated locations; sometimes at the very top of a
+long, steep hill,--so long and so steep in some cases, especially in one
+Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down on horseback
+from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading
+their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The
+second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly
+pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England
+Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his
+dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he
+leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and
+surrounding): "This is very like the way to heaven; 'tis uphill. The Lord
+by His grace fetch us up."
+
+The location on a hilltop was chosen and favored for various reasons. The
+meeting-house was at first a watch-house, from which to keep vigilant
+lookout for any possible approach of hostile or sneaking Indians; it was
+also a landmark, whose high bell-turret, or steeple, though pointing to
+heaven, was likewise a guide on earth, for, thus stationed on a high
+elevation, it could be seen for miles around by travellers journeying
+through the woods, or in the narrow, tree-obscured bridle-paths which were
+then almost the only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for
+sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan
+ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb
+uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of
+having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of
+envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously
+remote and painfully inaccessible locations chosen for the site of many
+fine, roomy churches must astonish any observing traveller on the byroads
+of New England. Too often, alas! these churches are deserted, falling down,
+unopened from year to year, destitute alike of minister and congregation.
+Sometimes, too, on high hilltops, or on lonesome roads leading through a
+tall second growth of woods, deserted and neglected old graveyards--the
+most lonely and forlorn of all sad places--by their broken and fallen
+headstones, which surround a half-filled-in and uncovered cellar, show
+that once a meeting-house for New England Christians had stood there. Tall
+grass, and a tangle of blackberry brambles cover the forgotten graves,
+and perhaps a spire of orange tiger-lilies, a shrub of southernwood or of
+winter-killed and dying box, may struggle feebly for life under the shadow
+of the "plumed ranks of tall wild cherry," and prove that once these lonely
+graves were cared for and loved for the sake of those who lie buried in
+this now waste spot. No traces remain of the old meeting-house save the
+cellar and the narrow stone steps, sadly leading nowhere, which once were
+pressed by the feet of the children of the Pilgrims, but now are trodden
+only by the curious and infrequent passer-by, or the epitaph-seeking
+antiquary.
+
+It is difficult often to understand the details in the descriptions of
+these early meeting-houses, the colonial spelling is so widely varied,
+and so cleverly ingenious. Uniformity of spelling is a strictly modern
+accomplishment, a hampering innovation. "A square roofe without Dormans,
+with two Lucoms on each side," means, I think, without dormer windows, and
+with luthern windows. Another church paid a bill for the meeting-house roof
+and the "Suppolidge." They had "turritts" and "turetts" and "turits" and
+"turyts" and "feriats" and "tyrryts" and "toryttes" and "turiotts" and
+"chyrits," which were one and the same thing; and one church had orders
+for "juyces and rayles and nayles and bymes and tymber and gaybels and a
+pulpyt, and three payr of stayrs," in its meeting-house,--a liberal supply
+of the now fashionable _y_'s. We read of "pinakles" and "pyks" and
+"shuthers" and "scaffills" and "bimes" and "lynters" and "bathyns" and
+"chymbers" and "bellfers;" and often in one entry the same word will be
+spelt in three or four different ways. Here is a portion of a contract in
+the records of the Roxbury church: "Sayd John is to fence in the Buring
+Plas with a Fesy ston wall, sefighiattly don for Strenk and workmanship
+as also to mark a Doball gatt 6 or 8 fote wid and to hing it."
+_Sefighiattly_ is "sufficiently;" but who can translate "Fesy"? can it
+mean "facy" or faced smoothly?
+
+The church-raising was always a great event in the town. Each citizen was
+forced by law to take part in or contribute to "raring the Meeting hows."
+In early days nails were scarce,--so scarce that unprincipled persons set
+fire to any buildings which chanced to be temporarily empty, for the sake
+of obtaining the nails from the ruins; so each male inhabitant supplied
+to the new church a certain "amount of nayles." Not only were logs, and
+lumber, and the use of horses' and men's labor given, but a contribution
+was also levied for the inevitable barrel of rum and its unintoxicating
+accompaniments. "Rhum and Cacks" are frequent entries in the account books
+of early churches. No wonder that accidents were frequent, and that men
+fell from the scaffolding and were killed, as at the raising of the
+Dunstable meeting-house. When the Medford people built their second
+meeting-house, they provided for the workmen and bystanders, five barrels
+of rum, one barrel of good brown sugar, a box of fine lemons, and two
+loaves of sugar. As a natural consequence, two thirds of the frame fell,
+and many were injured. In Northampton, in 1738, ten gallons of rum were
+bought for £8 "to raise the meeting-house"--and the village doctor got "£3
+for setting his bone Jonathan Strong, and £3 10s. for setting Ebenezer
+Burt's thy" which had somehow through the rum or the raising, both gotten
+broken. Sometimes, as in Pittsfield in 1671, the sum of four shillings was
+raised on every acre of land in the town, and three shillings a day were
+paid to every man who came early to work, while one shilling a day was
+apportioned to each worker for his rum and sugar. At last no liquor was
+allowed to the workmen until after the day's work was over, and thus fatal
+accidents were prevented.
+
+The earliest meeting-houses had oiled paper in the windows to admit the
+light. A Pilgrim colonist wrote to an English friend about to emigrate,
+"Bring oiled paper for your windows." Higginson, however, writing in 1629,
+asks for "glasse for windowes." When glass was used it was not set in the
+windows as now. We find frequent entries of "glasse and nayles for it," and
+in Newbury, in 1665, the church ordered that the "Glasse in the windows
+be ... look't to if any should happen to be loosed with winde to be nailed
+close again." The glass was in lozenge-shaped panes, set in lead in the
+form of two long narrow sashes opening in the middle from top to bottom,
+and it was many years before oblong or square panes came into common use.
+
+These early churches were destitute of shade, for the trees in the
+immediate vicinity were always cut down on account of dread of the fierce
+fires which swept often through the forests and overwhelmed and destroyed
+the towns. The heat and blazing light in summer were as hard to bear in
+these unscreened meeting-houses as was the cold in winter.
+
+  "Old house of Puritanic wood,
+  Through whose unpainted windows streamed,
+  On seats as primitive and rude
+  As Jacob's pillow when he dreamed,
+  The white and undiluted day."
+
+We have all heard the theory advanced that it is impossible there should be
+any true religious feeling, any sense of sanctity, in a garish and bright
+light,--"the white and undiluted day,"--but I think no one can doubt that
+to the Puritans these seething, glaring, pine-smelling hothouses were truly
+God's dwelling-place, though there was no "dim, religious light" within.
+
+Curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and the sunlight streamed in with
+unobstructed and unbroken rays. Heavy shutters for protection were often
+used, but to close them at time of service would have been to plunge
+the church into utter darkness. Permission was sometimes given, as in
+Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of
+the sun there,"--a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As
+years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches
+became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and
+fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which
+was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked
+live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed
+abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great
+hemlock-tree back of the pulpit window." Another minister, Dr. Storrs,
+having struggled to read his sermon in an ill-lighted, gloomy church, said
+he would never speak in that building again while it was so overshadowed
+with trees. A few years later he was invited to preach to the same
+congregation; but when he approached the church, and saw the great
+umbrageous tree still standing, he rode away, and left the people
+sermonless in their darkness. The chill of these sunless, unheated
+buildings in winter can well be imagined.
+
+Strange and grotesque decorations did the outside of the earliest
+meeting-houses bear,--grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and
+by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped
+from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his
+destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear,
+which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough.
+The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September,
+twenty bears were killed within two miles of Boston. This bear story
+requires unlimited faith in Puritan probity, and confidence in Puritan
+records to credit it, but believe it, ye who can, as I do! In Salem and in
+Ipswich, in 1640, any man who brought a living wolf to the meeting-house
+was paid fifteen shillings by the town; if the wolf were dead, ten
+shillings. In 1664, if the wolf-killer wished to obtain the reward, he was
+ordered to bring the wolf's head and "nayle it to the meeting-house and
+give notis thereof." In Hampton, the inhabitants were ordered to "nayle the
+same to a little red oake tree at northeast end of the meeting-house." One
+man in Newbury, in 1665, killed seven wolves, and was paid the reward
+for so doing. This was a great number, for the wary wolf was not easily
+destroyed either by musket or wolf-hook. In 1723 wolves were so abundant
+in Ipswich that parents would not suffer their children to go to and from
+church and school without the attendance of some grown person. As late as
+1746 wolves made sad havoc in Woodbury, Connecticut; and a reward of five
+dollars for each wolf's head was offered by law in that township in 1853.
+
+In 1718 the last public reward was paid in Salem for a wolf's head, but
+so late as the year 1779 the howls of wolves were heard every night in
+Newbury, though trophies of shrivelled wolves' heads no longer graced the
+walls of the meeting-house.
+
+All kinds of notices and orders and regulations and "bills" were posted on
+the meeting-house, often on the door, where they would greet the eye of
+all who entered: prohibitions from selling guns and powder to the Indians,
+notices of town meetings, intentions of marriage, copies of the laws
+against Sabbath-breaking, messages from the Quakers, warnings of "vandoos"
+and sales, lists of the town officers, and sometimes scandalous and
+insulting libels, and libels in verse, which is worse, for our forefathers
+dearly loved to rhyme on all occasions. On the meeting-house green stood
+those Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, whipping-post,
+pillory, and cage; and on lecture days the stocks and pillory were
+often occupied by wicked or careless colonists, or those everlasting
+pillory-replenishers, the Quakers. It is one of the unintentionally comic
+features of absurd colonial laws and punishments in which the early legal
+records so delightfully abound, that the first man who was sentenced to and
+occupied the stocks in Boston was the carpenter who made them. He was thus
+fitly punished for his extortionate charge to the town for the lumber
+he used in their manufacture. This was rather better than "making the
+punishment fit the crime," since the Boston magistrates managed to force
+the criminal to furnish his own punishment. In Shrewsbury, also, the
+unhappy man who first tested the wearisome capacity and endured the public
+mortication of the town's stocks was the man who made them. He "builded
+better than he knew." Pillories were used as a means of punishment until
+a comparatively recent date,--in Salem until the year 1801, and in Boston
+till 1803.
+
+Great horse-blocks, rows of stepping-stones, or hewn logs further graced
+the meeting-house green; and occasionally one fine horse-block, such as the
+Concord women proudly erected, and paid for by a contribution of a pound of
+butter from each house-wife.
+
+The meeting-house not only was employed for the worship of God and for town
+meetings, but it was a storehouse as well. Until after the Revolutionary
+War it was universally used as a powder magazine; and indeed, as no fire in
+stove or fireplace was ever allowed within, it was a safe enough place for
+the explosive material. In Hanover, the powder room was in the steeple,
+while in Quincy the "powder-closite" was in the beams of the roof. Whenever
+there chanced to be a thunderstorm during the time of public worship, the
+people of Beverly ran out under the trees, and in other towns they left
+the meeting-house if the storm seemed severe or near; still they built no
+powder houses. Grain, too, was stored in the loft of the meeting-house for
+safety; hatches were built, and often the corn paid to the minister was
+placed there. "Leantos," or "linters," were sometimes built by the side of
+the building for use for storage. In Springfield, Mr. Pyncheon was allowed
+to place his corn in the roof chamber of the meeting-house; but as the
+people were afraid that the great weight might burst the floor, he was
+forbidden to store more than four hundred bushels at a time, unless he
+"underpropped the floor."
+
+In one church in the Connecticut valley, in a township where it was
+forbidden that tobacco be smoked upon the public streets, the church
+loft was used to dry and store the freshly cut tobacco-leaves which the
+inhabitants sold to the "ungodly Dutch." Thus did greed for gain lead even
+blue Connecticut Christians to profane the house of God.
+
+The early meeting-houses in country parishes were seldom painted, such
+outward show being thought vain and extravagant. In the middle of the
+eighteenth century paint became cheaper and more plentiful, and a gay
+rivalry in church-decoration sprang up. One meeting-house had to be as fine
+as its neighbor. Votes were taken, "rates were levied," gifts were asked
+in every town to buy "colour" for the meeting-house. For instance, the new
+meeting-house in Pomfret, Connecticut, was painted bright yellow; it proved
+a veritable golden apple of discord throughout the county. Windham town
+quickly voted that its meeting-house be "coloured something like the
+Pomfret meeting-house." Killingly soon ordered that the "cullering of the
+body of our meeting-house should be like the Pomfret meeting-house, and the
+Roff shal be cullered Read." Brooklyn church then, in 1762, ordered that
+the outside of its meeting-house be "culered" in the approved fashion.
+The body of the house was painted a bright orange; the doors and "bottom
+boards" a warm chocolate color; the "window-jets," corner-boards, and
+weather-boards white. What a bright nosegay of color! As a crowning glory
+Brooklyn people put up an "Eleclarick Rod" on the gorgeous edifice, and
+proudly boasted that--Brooklyn meeting-house was the "newest biggest and
+yallowest" in the county. One old writer, however, spoke scornfully of the
+spirit of envious emulation, extravagance, and bad taste that spread and
+prevailed from the example of the foolish and useless "colouring" of the
+Pomfret meeting-house.
+
+Within the meeting-house all was simple enough: raftered walls, sanded
+floors, rows of benches, a few pews, and the pulpit, or the "scaffold,"
+as John Cotton called it. The bare rafters were often profusely hung with
+dusty spiders' webs, and were the home also of countless swallows, that
+flew in and out of the open bell-turret. Sometimes, too, mischievous
+squirrels, attracted by the corn in the meeting-house loft, made their
+homes in the sanctuary; and they were so prolific and so omnivorous that
+the Bible and the pulpit cushions were not safe from their nibbling
+attacks. On every Sunday afternoon the Word of God and its sustaining
+cushion had to be removed to the safe shelter of a neighboring farmhouse or
+tavern, to prevent total annihilation by these Puritanical, Bible-loving
+squirrels.
+
+The pulpits were often pretentious, even in the plain and undecorated
+meeting-houses, and were usually high desks, to which a narrow flight of
+stairs led. In the churches of the third stage of architecture, these
+stairs were often inclosed in a towering hexagonal mahogany structure,
+which was ornamented with pillars and panels. Into this the minister
+walked, closed the door behind him, and invisibly ascended the stairs;
+while the children counted the seconds from the time he closed the door
+until his head appeared through the trap-door at the top of the pulpit. The
+form known as a tub-pulpit was very popular in the larger churches. The
+pulpit of one old, unpainted church retained until the middle of this
+century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring
+eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the
+great, all-seeing eye of God.
+
+As the ceiling and rafters were so open and reverberating, it was generally
+thought imperative to hang above the pulpit a great sounding-board, which
+threatened the minister like a giant extinguisher, and was really as devoid
+of utility as it was curious in ornamentation, "reflecting most part an
+empty ineffectual sound." This great sound-killer was decorated with carved
+and painted rosettes, as in the Shrewsbury meeting-house; with carved ivy
+leaves, as in Farmington; with a carved bunch of grapes or pomegranates, as
+in the Leicester church; with letters indicating a date, as, "M. R. H." for
+March, in the Hadley church; with appropriate mottoes and texts, such as
+the words, "Holiness is the Lords," in the Windham church; with cords and
+tassels, with hanging fringes, with panels and balls; and thus formed a
+great ornament to the church, and a source of honest pride to the church
+members. The clumsy sounding-board was usually hung by a slight iron rod,
+which looked smaller still as it stretched up to the high, raftered roof,
+and always appeared to be entirely insufficient to sustain the great weight
+of the heavy machine. In Danvers, one of these useless though ornamental
+structures hung within eighteen inches of the preacher's nose, on a slender
+bar thirty feet in length; and every Sunday the children gazed with
+fascinated anticipation at the slight rod and the great hexagonal
+extinguisher, thinking and hoping that on this day the sounding-board would
+surely drop, and "put out" the minister. In fact, it was regarded by many
+a child, though this idea was hardly formulated in the little brain, as
+a visible means of possible punishment for any false doctrine that might
+issue from the mouth of the preacher.
+
+Another pastime and source of interest to the children in many old churches
+was the study of the knots and veins in the unpainted wood of which the
+pews and galleries were made. Age had developed and darkened and rendered
+visible all the natural irregularities in the wood, just as it had brought
+out and strengthened the dry-woody, close, unaired, penetrating scent which
+permeated the meeting-house and gave it the distinctive "church smell." The
+children, and perhaps a few of the grown people, found in these clusters
+of knots queer similitudes of faces, strange figures and constellations,
+which, though conned Sunday after Sunday until known by heart, still seemed
+ever to show in their irregular groupings a puzzling possibility of the
+discovery of new configurations and monstrosities.
+
+The dangling, dusty spiders' webs afforded, too, an interesting sight and
+diversion for the sermon-hearing, but not sermon-listening, young Puritans,
+who watched the cobwebs swaying, trembling, forming strange maps of
+imaginary rivers with their many tributaries, or outlines of intersecting
+roads and lanes. And if little Yet-Once, Hate-Evil, or Shearjashub chanced,
+by good fortune, to be seated near a window where a crafty spider and a
+foolish buzzing fly could be watched through the dreary exposition and
+attempted reconciliation of predestination and free will, that indeed were
+a happy way of passing the weary hours.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The Church Militant.
+
+
+
+For many years after the settlement of New England the Puritans, even in
+outwardly tranquil times, went armed to meeting; and to sanctify the Sunday
+gun-loading they were expressly forbidden to fire off their charges at
+any object on that day save an Indian or a wolf, their two "greatest
+inconveniencies." Trumbull, in his "Mac Fingal," Avrites thus in jest of
+this custom of Sunday arm-bearing:--
+
+  "So once, for fear of Indian beating,
+  Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting,--
+  Each man equipped on Sunday morn
+  With psalm-book, shot, and powder-horn,
+  And looked in form, as all must grant,
+  Like the ancient true church militant."
+
+In 1640 it was ordered in Massachusetts that in every township the
+attendants at church should carry a "competent number of peeces, fixed
+and compleat with powder and shot and swords every Lords-day to the
+meeting-house;" one armed man from each household was then thought
+advisable and necessary for public safety. In 1642 six men with muskets and
+powder and shot were thought sufficient for protection for each church. In
+Connecticut similar mandates were issued, and as the orders were neglected
+"by divers persones," a law was passed in 1643 that each offender should
+forfeit twelve pence for each offence. In 1644 a fourth part of the
+"trayned hand" was obliged to come armed each Sabbath, and the sentinels
+were ordered to keep their matches constantly lighted for use in their
+match-locks. They were also commanded to wear armor, which consisted of
+"coats basted with cotton-wool, and thus made defensive against Indian
+arrows." In 1650 so much dread and fear were felt of Sunday attacks from
+the red men that the Sabbath-Day guard was doubled in number. In 1692, the
+Connecticut Legislature ordered one fifth of the soldiers in each town to
+come armed to each meeting, and that nowhere should be present as a guard
+at time of public worship fewer than eight soldiers and a sergeant. In
+Hadley the guard was allowed annually from the public treasury a pound of
+lead and a pound of powder to each soldier.
+
+No details that could add to safety on the Sabbath were forgotten or
+overlooked by the New Haven church; bullets were made common currency at
+the value of a farthing, in order that they might be plentiful and in every
+one's possession; the colonists were enjoined to determine in advance what
+to do with the women and children in case of attack, "that they do not hang
+about them and hinder them;" the men were ordered to bring at least six
+charges of powder and shot to meeting; the farmers were forbidden to "leave
+more arms at home than men to use them;" the half-pikes were to be headed
+and the whole ones mended, and the swords "and all piercing weapons
+furbished up and dressed;" wood was to be placed in the watch-house; it was
+ordered that the "door of the meeting-house next the soldiers' seat be kept
+clear from women and children sitting there, that if there be occasion
+for the soldiers to go suddenly forth, they may have free passage." The
+soldiers sat on either side of the main door, a sentinel was stationed
+in the meeting-house turret, and armed watchers paced the streets; three
+cannon were mounted by the side of this "church militant," which must
+strongly have resembled a garrison.
+
+Military duty and military discipline and regard for the Sabbath, and for
+the House of God as well, did not always make the well-equipped occupants
+of these soldiers' seats in New Haven behave with the dignity and decorum
+befitting such guardians of the peace and protectors in war. Serious
+disorders and disturbances among the guard were reported at the General
+Court on June 16, 1662. One belligerent son of Mars, as he sat in the
+meeting-house, threw lumps of lime--perhaps from the plastered chinks in
+the log wall--at a fellow-warrior, who in turn, very naturally, kicked his
+tormentor with much agility and force. There must have ensued quite a free
+fight all around in the meeting-house, for "Mrs. Goodyear's boy had his
+head broke that day in meeting, on account of which a woman said she
+doubted not the wrath of God was upon us." And well might she think so, for
+divers other unseemly incidents which occurred in the meeting-house at the
+same time were narrated in Court, examined into, and punished.
+
+In spite of these events in the New Haven church (which were certainly
+exceptional), the seemingly incongruous union of church and army was
+suitable enough in a community that always began and ended the military
+exercises on "training day" with solemn prayer and psalm-singing; and that
+used the army and encouraged a true soldier-like spirit not chiefly as aids
+in war, but to help to conquer and destroy the adversaries of truth, and to
+"achieve greater matters by this little handful of men than the world is
+aware of."
+
+The Salem sentinels wore doubtless some of the good English armor owned by
+the town,--corselets to cover the body; gorgets to guard the throat;
+tasses to protect the thighs; all varnished black, and costing each suit
+"twenty-four shillings a peece." The sentry also wore a bandileer, a large
+"neat's leather" belt thrown over the right shoulder, and hanging down
+under the left arm. This bandileer sustained twelve boxes of cartridges,
+and a well-filled bullet-bag. Each man bore either a "bastard musket with
+a snaphance," a "long fowling-piece with musket bore," a "full musket," a
+"barrell with a match-cock," or perhaps (for they were purchased by the
+town) a leather gun (though these leather guns may have been cannon).
+Other weapons there were to choose from, mysterious in name, "sakers,
+minions, ffaulcons, rabinets, murthers (or murderers, as they were
+sometimes appropriately called) chambers, harque-busses, carbins,"--all
+these and many other death-dealing machines did our forefathers bring and
+import from their war-loving fatherland to assist them in establishing
+God's Word, and exterminating the Indians, but not always, alas! to aid
+them in converting those poor heathen.
+
+The armed Salem watcher, besides his firearms and ammunition, had attached
+to his wrist by a cord a gun-rest, or gun-fork, which he placed upon
+the ground when he wished to fire his musket, and upon which that
+constitutional kicker rested when touched off. He also carried a sword and
+sometimes a pike, and thus heavily burdened with multitudinous arms and
+cumbersome armor, could never have run after or from an Indian with much
+agility or celerity; though he could stand at the church-door with his
+leather gun,--an awe-inspiring figure,--and he could shoot with his
+"harquebuss," or "carbin," as we well know.
+
+These armed "sentinells" are always regarded as a most picturesque
+accompaniment of Puritan religious worship, and the Salem and Plymouth
+armed men were imposing, though clumsy. But the New Haven soldiers, with
+their bulky garments wadded and stuffed out with thick layers of cotton
+wool, must have been more safety-assuring and comforting than they were
+romantic or heroic; but perhaps they too wore painted tin armor, "corselets
+and gorgets and tasses."
+
+In Concord, New Hampshire, the men, who all came armed to meeting, stacked
+their muskets around a post in the middle of the church, while the honored
+pastor, who was a good shot and owned the best gun in the settlement,
+preached with his treasured weapon in the pulpit by his side, ready from
+his post of vantage to blaze away at any red man whom he saw sneaking
+without, or to lead, if necessary, his congregation to battle. The church
+in York, Maine, until the year 1746, felt it necessary to retain the custom
+of carrying arms to the meeting-house, so plentiful and so aggressive were
+Maine Indians.
+
+Not only in the time of Indian wars were armed men seen in the
+meeting-house, but on June 17, 1775, the Provincial Congress recommended
+that the men "within twenty miles of the sea-coast carry their arms and
+ammunition with them to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they
+meet for public worship." And on many a Sabbath and Lecture Day, during the
+years of war that followed, were proved the wisdom and foresight of that
+suggestion.
+
+The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant
+dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and
+left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe
+exit of the latter. This custom prevailed from habit until a late date in
+many churches in New England, all the men, after the benediction and the
+exit of the parson, walking out in advance of the women. So also the custom
+of the men always sitting at the "head" or door of the pew arose from the
+early necessity of their always being ready to seize their arms and rush
+unobstructed to fight. In some New England village churches to this day,
+the man who would move down from his end of the pew and let a woman sit
+at the door, even if it were a more desirable seat from which to see the
+clergyman, would be thought a poor sort of a creature.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+By Drum and Horn and Shell.
+
+
+
+At about nine o'clock on the Sabbath morning the Puritan colonists
+assembled for the first public service of the holy day; they were gathered
+together by various warning sounds. The Haverhill settlers listened for the
+ringing toot of Abraham Tyler's horn. The Montague and South Hadley people
+were notified that the hour of assembling had arrived by the loud blowing
+of a conch-shell. John Lane, a resident of the latter town, was engaged
+in 1750 to "blow the Cunk" on the Sabbath as "a sign for meeting." In
+Stockbridge a strong-lunged "praying" Indian blew the enormous shell, which
+was safely preserved until modern times, and which, when relieved from
+Sunday use, was for many years sounded as a week-day signal in the
+hay-field. Even a conch-shell was enough of an expense to the poor colonial
+churches. The Montague people in 1759 paid £1 10s. for their "conk," and
+also on the purchase year gave Joseph Root 20 shillings for blowing the new
+shell. In 1785 the Whately church voted that "we will not improve anybody
+to blow the conch," and so the church-attendants straggled to Whately
+meeting each at his own time and pleasure.
+
+In East Hadley the inhabitant who "blew the kunk" (as phonetic East
+Hadleyites spelt it) and swept out the meeting-house was paid annually the
+munificent sum of three dollars for his services. Conch-blowing was not
+so difficult and consequently not so highly-paid an accomplishment as
+drum-beating. A verse of a simple old-fashioned hymn tells thus of the
+gathering of the Puritan saints:--
+
+  "New England's Sabbath day
+  Is heaven-like still and pure,
+  When Israel walks the way
+  Up to the temple's door.
+  The time we tell
+  When there to come
+  By beat of drum
+  Or sounding shell."
+
+The drum, as highly suitable for such a military people, was often used as
+a signal for gathering for public worship, and was plainly the favorite
+means of notification. In 1678 Robert Stuard, of Norwalk, "ingages yt his
+son James shall beate the Drumb, on the Sabbath and other ocations," and in
+Norwalk the "drumb," the "drumne," the "drumme," and at last the drum was
+beaten until 1704, when the Church got a bell. And the "Drumber" was paid,
+and well paid too for his "Cervices," fourteen shillings a year of the
+town's money, and he was furnished a "new strong drumme;" and the town
+supplied to him also the flax for the drum-cords which he wore out in the
+service of God. Johnson, in his "Wonder Working Providence," tells of the
+Cambridge Church: "Hearing the sound of a drum he was directed toward it by
+a broade beaten way; following this rode he demands of the next man he met
+what the signall of the drum ment; the reply was made they had as yet no
+Bell to call men to meeting and therefore made use of the drum." In 1638
+a platform was made upon the top of the Windsor meeting-house "from the
+Lanthornc to the ridge to walk conveniently to sound a trumpet or a drum to
+give warning to meeting."
+
+Sometimes three guns were fired as a signal for "church-time." The signal
+for religious gathering, and the signal for battle were always markedly
+different, in order to avoid unnecessary fright.
+
+In 1647 Robert Basset was appointed in New Haven to drum "twice upon Lordes
+Dayes and Lecture Dayes upon the meeting house that soe those who live farr
+off may heare the more distinkly." Robert may have been a good drummer, but
+he proved to be a most reprehensible and disreputable citizen; in the local
+Court Records of August 1, 1648, we find a full report of an astounding
+occurrence in which he played an important part. Ten men, who Avere nearly
+all sea-faring men,--gay, rollicking sailors,--went to Bassctt's house and
+asked for strong drink. The magistrates had endeavored zealously, and in
+the main successfully, to prevent all intoxication in the community,
+and had forbidden the sale of liquor save in very small quantities. The
+church-drummer, however, wickedly unmindful of his honored calling,
+furnished to the sailors six quarts of strong liquor, with which they all,
+host and visitors, got prodigiously drunk and correspondingly noisy. The
+Court Record says: "The miscarriage continued till betwixt tenn and eleven
+of the clock, to the great provocation of God, disturbance of the peace,
+and to such a height of disorder that strangers wondered at it." In the
+midst of the carousal the master of the pinnace called the boatswain
+"Brother Loggerheads." This must have been a particularly insulting
+epithet, which no respectable boatswain could have been expected quietly to
+endure, for "at once the two men fell fast to wrestling, then to blowes and
+theirin grew to that feircnes that the master of the pinnace thought the
+boatswain would have puled out his eies; and they toumbled on the ground
+down the hill into the creeke and mire shamefully wallowing theirin."
+In his pain and terror the master called out, "Hoe, the Watch! Hoe, the
+Watch!" "The Watch made hast and for the present stopped the disorder, but
+in his rage and distemper the boatswaine fell a-swearinge Wounds and Hart
+as if he were not only angry with men but would provoke the high
+and blessed God." The master of the pinnace, being freed from his
+fellow-combatant, returned to Basset's house--perhaps to tell his tale
+of woe, perhaps to get more liquor--and was assailed by the drummer with
+amazing words of "anger and distemper used by drunken companions;" in
+short, he was "verey offensive, his noyes and oathes being hearde to
+the other side of the creeke." For aiding and abetting this noisy and
+disgraceful spree, and also for partaking in it, Drummer Basset was fined
+£5, which must have been more than his yearly salary, and in disgrace, and
+possibly in disgust, quitted drumming the New Haven good people to meeting
+and moved his residence to Stamford, doubtless to the relief and delight of
+both magistrates and people of the former town.
+
+Another means of notification of the hour for religious service was by the
+use of a flag, often in addition to the sound of the drum or bell. Thus in
+Plymouth, in 1697, the selectmen were ordered to "procure a flagg to be put
+out at the ringing of the first bell, and taken in when the last bell was
+rung." In Sutherland also a flag was used as a means of announcement of
+"meeting-time," and an old goody was paid ten shillings a year for "tending
+the flagg."
+
+Mr. Gosse, in his "Early Bells of Massachusetts," gives a full and
+interesting account of the church-bells of the first colonial towns in that
+State. Lechford, in his "Plaine Dealing," wrote in 1641 that they came
+together in Boston on the Lord's Day by "the wringing of a bell," and it is
+thought that that bell was a hand-bell. The first bells, for the lack
+of bell-towers, were sometimes hung on trees by the side of the
+meeting-houses, to the great amazement and distress of the Indians, who
+regarded them with superstitious dread, thinking--to paraphrase Herbert's
+beautiful line--"when the bell did chime 't was devils' music;" but more
+frequently the bells were hung in a belfry or bell-turret or "bellcony,"
+and from this belfry depended a long bell-rope quite to the floor; and thus
+in the very centre of the church the sexton stood when he rung the summons
+for lire or for meeting. This rope was of course directly in front of the
+pulpit; and Jonathan Edwards, who was devoid of gestures and looked always
+straight before him when preaching, was jokingly said to have "looked-off"
+the bell-rope, when it fell with a crash in the middle of his church.
+
+At the first sound of the drum or horn or bell the town inhabitants issued
+from their houses in "desent order," man and wife walking first, and the
+children in quiet procession after them. Often a man-servant and a maid
+walked on either side of the heads of the family. In some communities the
+congregation waited outside the church door until the minister and his wife
+arrived and passed into the house; then the church-attendants followed, the
+loitering boys always contriving to scuffle noisily in from the horse-sheds
+at the last moment, making much scraping and clatter with their heavy boots
+on the sanded floor, and tumbling clumsily up the uucarpeted, creaking
+stairs.
+
+In other churches the members of the congregation seated themselves in
+their pews upon their arrival, but rose reverently when the parson, dressed
+in black skull-cap and Geneva cloak, entered the door; and they stood, in
+token of respect, until after he entered the pulpit and was seated.
+
+It was also the honor-giving and deferential custom in many New England
+churches, in the eighteenth century, for the entire congregation to remain
+respectfully standing within the pews at the end of the serice until the
+minister had descended from his lofty pulpit, opened the door of his wife's
+pew, and led her with stately dignity to the church-porch, where, were he
+and she genial and neighborly minded souls, they in turn stood and greeted
+with carefully adjusted degrees of warmth, interest, respect, or patronage,
+the different members of the congregation as they slowly passed out.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The Old-Fashioned Pews.
+
+
+
+In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow,
+uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks
+placed on legs like milking-stools. They were without any support or rest
+for the back; and perhaps the stiff-backed Pilgrims and Puritans required
+or wished no support. Quickly, as the colonies grew in wealth and the
+colonists in ambition and importance, "Spots for Pues" were sold (or
+"pitts" as they were sometimes called), at first to some few rich or
+influential men who wished to sit in a group together, and finally each
+family of dignity or wealth sat in its own family-pew. Often it was
+stipulated in the permission to build a pew that a separate entrance-door
+should be cut into it through the outside wall of the meeting-house, thus
+detracting grievously from the external symmetry of the edifice, but
+obviating the necessity of a space-occupying entrance aisle within the
+church, where there was little enough sitting-room for the quickly
+increasing and universally church-going population. As these pews were
+either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted,
+and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the
+kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style
+of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted. A man who had
+a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by
+the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were
+individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house
+destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was
+being razed, the old building materials to use in the construction of her
+new home. She was not allowed, however, to remove the wood which formed the
+pews, as they were adjudged to be the property of the members who had built
+them, and those owners only could sell or remove the materials of which
+they were built.
+
+Many of the pews in the old meeting-houses had towering partition walls,
+which extended up so high that only the tops of the tallest heads could be
+seen when the occupants were seated. Permissions to build were often given
+with modifying restrictions to the aspiring pew-builders, as for instance
+is recorded of the Haverhill church, "provided they would not build so high
+as to damnify and hinder the light of them windows," or of the Waterbury
+church, "if the pues will not progodish the hous." Often the floor of the
+pews was several inches and occasionally a foot higher than the floor of
+the "alleys," thus forming at the entrance-door of the pew one or two
+steps, which were great stumbling-blocks to clumsy and to childish feet,
+that tripped again when within the pew over the "crickets" and foot-benches
+which were, if the family were large, the accepted and lowly church-seats
+of the little children. Occasionally one long, low foot-rest stretched
+quite across one side of the pew-floor. I have seen these long benches
+with a tier of three shelves; the lower and broader shelf was used as a
+foot-rest, the second one was to hold the hats of the men, and the third
+and narrower shelf was for the hymn-books and Bibles. Such comfortable and
+luxurious pew-furnishings could never have been found in many churches.
+
+An old New Englander relates a funny story of his youth, in which one of
+these triple-tiered foot-benches played an important part. When he was
+a boy a travelling show visited his native town, and though he was not
+permitted to go within the mystic and alluring tent, he stood longingly at
+the gate, and was prodigiously diverted and astonished by an exhibition of
+tight-rope walking, which was given outside the tent-door as a bait to
+lure pleasure-loving and frivolous townspeople within, and also as a
+tantalization to the children of the saints who were not allowed to enter
+the tent of the wicked. Fired by that bewildering and amazing performance,
+he daily, after the wonderful sight, practised walking on rails, on fences,
+on fallen trees, and on every narrow foothold which he could find, as a
+careful preparation for a final feat and triumph of skill on his mother's
+clothes-line. In an evil hour, as he sat one Sunday in the corner of his
+father's pew, his eyes rested on the narrow ledge which formed the top of
+the long foot-bench. Satan can find mischief for idle boys within church as
+well as without, and the desire grew stronger to try to walk on that
+narrow foothold. He looked at his father and mother, they were peacefully
+sleeping; so also were the grown-up occupants of the neighboring pews;
+the pew walls were high, the minister seldom glanced to right or left; a
+thousand good reasons were whispered in his ear by the mischief-finder,
+and at last he willingly yielded, pulled off his heavy shoes, and softly
+mounted the foot-bench. He walked forward and back with great success
+twice, thrice, but when turning for a fourth tour he suddenly lost his
+balance, and over he went with a resounding crash--hats, psalm-books,
+heavy bench, and all. He crushed into hopeless shapelessness his father's
+gray beaver meeting-hat, a long-treasured and much-loved antique; he nearly
+smashed his mother's kid-slippered foot to jelly, and the fall elicited
+from her, in the surprise of the sudden awakening and intense pain, an
+ear-piercing shriek, which, with the noisy crash, electrified the entire
+meeting. All the grown people stood up to investigate, the children climbed
+on the seats to look at the guilty offender and his deeply mortified
+parents; while the minister paused in his sermon and said with cutting
+severity, "I have always regretted that the office of tithingman has been
+abolished in this community, as his presence and his watchful care
+are sadly needed by both the grown persons and the children in this
+congregation." The wretched boy who had caused all the commotion and
+disgrace was of course uninjured by his fall, but a final settlement at
+home between father and son on account of this sacrilegious piece of church
+disturbance made the unhappy would-be tight-rope walker wish that he had at
+least broken his arm instead of his father's hat and his mother's pride and
+the peace of the congregation.
+
+The seats were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three
+sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the
+minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian
+benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite
+justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in
+one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay,
+"What! must I be shut up in a closet and sit on a shelf?" Often elderly
+people petitioned to build separate small pens of pews with a single wider
+seat as "through the seats being so very narrow" they could not sit in
+comfort.
+
+The seats were, until well into this century, almost universally hung on
+hinges, and could be turned up against the walls of the pew, thus enabling
+the standing congregation to lean for support against the sides of the pews
+during the psalm-singing and the long, long prayers.
+
+  "And when at last the loud Amen
+  Fell from aloft, how quickly then
+  The seats came down with heavy rattle,
+  Like musketry in fiercest battle."
+
+This noise of slamming pew-seats could easily be heard over half a mile
+away from the meeting-house in the summer time, for the perverse boys
+contrived always in their salute of welcome to the Amen to give vent in
+a most tremendous bang to a little of their pent up and ill-repressed
+energies. In old church-orders such entries as this (of the Haverhill
+church) are frequently seen: "The people are to Let their Seats down
+without Such Nois." "The boyes are not to wickedly noise down there
+pew-seats." A gentleman attending the old church in Leicester heard at
+the beginning of the prayer, for the first time in his life, the noise of
+slamming pew-seats, as the seats were thrust up against the pew-walls. He
+jumped into the aisle at the first clatter, thinking instinctively that the
+gallery was cracking and falling. Another stranger, a Southerner, entering
+rather late at a morning service in an old church in New England, was
+greeted with the rattle of falling seats, and exclaimed in amazement, "Do
+you Northern people applaud in church?"
+
+In many meeting-houses the tops of the pews and of the high gallery
+railings were ornamented with little balustrades of turned wood, which were
+often worn quite bare of paint by childish fingers that had tried them all
+"to find which ones would turn," and which, alas! would also squeak. This
+fascinating occupation whiled away many a tedious hour in the dreary
+church, and in spite of weekly forbidding frowns and whispered reproofs for
+the shrill, ear-piercing squeaks elicited by turning the spindle-shaped
+balusters, was entirely too alluring a time-killer to be abandoned, and
+consequently descended, an hereditary church pastime, from generation to
+generation of the children of the Puritans; and indeed it remained so
+strong an instinct that many a grown person, visiting in after life a
+church whose pews bore balustrades like the ones of his childhood, could
+scarce keep his itching fingers from trying them each in succession "to see
+which ones would turn."
+
+These open balustrades also afforded fine peep-holes through which, by
+standing or kneeling upon "the shelf," a child might gaze at his neighbor;
+and also through which sly missiles--little balls of twisted paper--could
+be snapped, to the annoyance of some meek girl or retaliating boy, until
+the young marksman was ignominiously pulled down by his mother from his
+post of attack. And through these balustrades the same boy a few years
+later could thrust sly missives, also of twisted paper, to the girl whom he
+had once assailed and bombarded with his annoying paper bullets.
+
+Through the pillared top-rail a restless child in olden days often
+received, on a hot summer Sabbath from a farmer's wife or daughter in an
+adjoining pew, friendly and quieting gifts of sprigs of dill, or fennel,
+or caraway, famous anti-soporifics; and on this herbivorous food he would
+contentedly browse as long as it lasted. An uneasy, sermon-tired little
+girl was once given through the pew-rail several stalks of caraway, and
+with them a large bunch of aromatic southernwood, or "lad's-love" which had
+been brought to meeting by the matron in the next pew, with a crudely and
+unconsciously aesthetic sense that where eye and ear found so little to
+delight them, there the pungent and spicy fragrance of the southernwood
+would be doubly grateful to the nostrils. Little Missy sat down delightedly
+to nibble the caraway-seed, and her mother seeing her so quietly and
+absorbingly occupied, at once fell contentedly and placidly asleep in her
+corner of the pew. But five heads of caraway, though each contain many
+score of seeds, and the whole number be slowly nibbled and eaten one seed
+at a time, will not last through the child's eternity of a long doctrinal
+sermon; and when the umbels were all devoured, the young experimentalist
+began upon the stalks and stems, and they, too, slowly disappeared. She
+then attacked the sprays of southernwood, and in spite of its bitter,
+wormwoody flavor, having nothing else to do, she finished it, all but the
+tough stems, just as the long sermon was brought to a close. Her waking
+mother, discovering no signs of green verdure in the pew, quickly drew
+forth a whispered confession of the time-killing Nebuchadnezzar-like feast,
+and frightened and horrified, at once bore the leaf-gorged child from
+the church, signalling in her retreat to the village doctor, who quickly
+followed and administered to the omnivorous young New Englander a bolus
+which made her loathe to her dying day, through a sympathetic association
+and memory, the taste of caraway, and the scent of southernwood.
+
+An old gentleman, lamenting the razing of the church of his childhood,
+told the story of his youthful Sabbaths in rhyme, and thus refers with
+affectionate enthusiasm to the old custom of bringing bunches of esculent
+"sallet" herbs to meeting:--
+
+  "And when I tired and restless grew,
+  Our next pew neighbor, Mrs. True,
+  Reached her kind hand the top rail through
+  To hand me dill, and fennel too,
+  And sprigs of caraway.
+
+  "And as I munched the spicy seeds,
+  I dimly felt that kindly deeds
+  That thus supply our present needs,
+  Though only gifts of pungent weeds,
+  Show true religion.
+
+  "And often now through sermon trite
+  And operatic singer's flight,
+  I long for that old friendly sight,
+  The hand with herbs of value light,
+  To help to pass the time."
+
+Were the dill and "sweetest fennel" chosen Sabbath favorites for their
+old-time virtues and powers?
+
+  "Vervain and dill
+  Hinder witches of their ill."
+
+And of the charmed fennel Longfellow wrote:--
+
+  "The fennel with its yellow flowers
+  That, in an earlier age than ours,
+  Was gifted with the wondrous powers,
+      Lost vision to restore."
+
+And traditions of mysterious powers, dream-influencing, spirit-exorcising,
+virtue-awakening, health-giving properties, hung vaguely around the
+southernwood and made it specially fit to be a Sabbath-day posy. These
+traditions are softened by the influence of years into simply idealizing,
+in the mind of every country-bred New Englander, the peculiar refreshing
+scent of the southernwood as a typical Sabbath-day fragrance. Half a
+century ago, the pretty feathery pale-green shrub grew in every country
+door-yard, humble or great, throughout New England; and every church-going
+woman picked a branch or spray of it when she left her home on Sabbath
+morn. To this day, on hot summer Sundays, many a staid old daughter of
+the Puritans may be seen entering the village meeting-house, clad in
+a lilac-sprigged lawn or a green-striped barège,--a scanty-skirted,
+surplice-waisted relic of past summers,--with a lace-bordered silk cape
+or a delicate, time-yellowed, purple and white cashmere scarf on her bent
+shoulders, wearing on her gray head a shirred-silk or leghorn bonnet, and
+carrying in her lace-mitted hand a fresh handkerchief, her spectacle-case
+and well-worn Bible, and a great sprig of the sweet, old-fashioned
+"lad's-love." A rose, a bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy
+for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was
+ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing
+things,--southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is
+half so fresh, so countrified, so memory-sweet.
+
+The benches and the pew-seats in the old churches were never cushioned.
+Occasionally very old or feeble women brought cushions to meeting to sit
+upon. It is a matter of recent tradition that Colonel Greenleaf caused a
+nine days' talk in Newbury town at the beginning of this century when
+he cushioned his pew. The widow of Sir William Pepperell, who lived in
+imposing style, had her pew cushioned and lined and curtained with
+worsted stuff, and carpeted with a heavy bear-skin. This worn, faded, and
+moth-eaten furniture remained in the Kittery church until the year 1840,
+just as when Lady Pepperell furnished and occupied the pew. Nor were even
+the seats of the pulpit cushioned. The "cooshoons" of velvet or leather,
+which were given by will to the church, and which were kept in the pulpit,
+and were nibbled by the squirrels, were for the Bible, not the minister, to
+rest upon.
+
+In many churches--in Durham, Concord and Sandwich--the pews had
+swing-shelves, "leaning shelves," upon which a church attendant could rest
+his paper and his arm when taking notes from the sermon, as was at one time
+the universal custom, and in which even school-boys of a century ago had
+to take part. Funny stories are told of the ostentatious notes taken by
+pompous parishioners who could neither write nor read, but who could
+scribble, and thus cut a learned figure.
+
+The doors of the pews were usually cut down somewhat lower than the
+pew-walls, and frequently had no top-rails. They sometimes bore the name of
+the pew-owner painted in large white letters. They were secured when
+closed by clumsy wooden buttons. In many country congregations the elderly
+men--stiff old farmers--had a fashion of standing up in the middle of the
+sermon to stretch their cramped limbs, and they would lean against and hang
+over the pew door and stare up and down the aisle. In Andover, Vermont,
+old Deacon Puffer never let a summer Sunday pass without thus resting and
+diverting himself. One day, having ill-secured the wooden button at the
+door of his pew, the leaning-place gave way under his weight, and out he
+sprawled on all-fours, with a loud clatter, into the middle of the aisle,
+to the amusement of the children, and the mortification of his wife.
+
+Thus it may be seen, as an old autobiography phrases it, "diversions was
+frequent in meeting, and the more duller the sermon, the more likely it was
+that some accident or mischief would be done to help to pass the time."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Seating the Meeting.
+
+
+
+Perhaps no duty was more important and more difficult of satisfactory
+performance in the church work in early New England than "seating the
+meeting-house." Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all
+forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was
+the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the
+seat in which each person should sit during public worship. A committee of
+dignified and influential men was appointed to assign irrevocably to each
+person his or her place, according to rank and importance. Whittier wrote
+of this custom:--
+
+  "In the goodly house of worship, where in order due and fit,
+  As by public vote directed, classed and ranked the people sit;
+  Mistress first and goodwife after, clerkly squire before the clown,
+  From the brave coat, lace embroidered: to the gray frock shading down."
+
+In many cases the members of the committee were changed each year or at
+each fresh seating, in order to obviate any of the effects of partiality
+through kinship, friendship, personal esteem, or debt. A second committee
+was also appointed to seat the members of committee number one, in order
+that, as Haverhill people phrased it, "there may be no Grumbling at them
+for picking and placing themselves."
+
+This seating committee sent to the church the list of all the attendants
+and the seats assigned to them, and when the list had been twice or thrice
+read to the congregation, and nailed on the meeting-house door, it became a
+law. Then some such order as this of the church at Watertown, Connecticut,
+was passed: "It is ordered that the next Sabbath Day every person shall
+take his or her seat appointed to them, and not go to any other seat where
+others are placed: And if any one of the inhabitants shall act contrary, he
+shall for the first offence be reproved by the deacons, and for a second
+pay a fine of two shillings, and a like fine for each offence ever
+after." Or this of the Stratham church: "When the comety have Seatid the
+meeting-house every person that is Seatid shall set in those Seats or pay
+Five Shillings Pir Day for every day they set out of There seats in a
+Disorderly Manner to advance themselves Higher in the meeting-house." These
+two church-laws were very lenient. In many towns the punishments and fines
+were much more severe. Two men of Newbury were in 1669 fined £27 4s.
+each for "disorderly going and setting in seats belonging to others." They
+were dissatisfied with the seats assigned to them by the seating committee,
+and openly and defiantly rebelled. Other and more peaceable citizens
+"entred their Decents" to the first decision of the committee and asked for
+reconsideration of their special cases and for promotion to a higher pew
+before the final orders were "Jsued."
+
+In all the Puritan meetings, as then and now in Quaker meetings, the men
+sat on one side of the meeting-house and the women on the other; and they
+entered by separate doors. It was a great and much-contested change when
+men and women were ordered to sit together "promiscuoslie." In front,
+on either side of the pulpit (or very rarely in the foremost row in the
+gallery), was a seat of highest dignity, known as the "foreseat," in which
+only the persons of greatest importance in the community sat.
+
+Sometimes a row of square pews was built on three sides of the ground
+floor, and each pew occupied by separate families, while the pulpit was
+on the fourth side. If any man wished such a private pew for himself and
+family, he obtained permission from the church and town, and built it at
+his own expense. Immediately in front of the pulpit was either a long seat
+or a square inclosed pew for the deacons, who sat facing the congregation.
+This was usually a foot or two above the level of the other pews, and was
+reached by two or three steep, narrow steps. On a still higher plane was a
+pew for the ruling elders, when ruling elders there were. The magistrates
+also had a pew for their special use. What we now deem the best seats,
+those in the middle of the church, were in olden times the free seats.
+
+Usually, on one side of the pulpit was a square pew for the minister's
+family. When there were twenty-six children in the family, as at least one
+New England parson could boast, and when ministers' families of twelve
+or fourteen children were far from unusual, it is no wonder that we find
+frequent votes to "inlarge the ministers wives pew the breadth of the
+alley," or to "take in the next pue to the ministers wives pue into her
+pue." The seats in the gallery were universally regarded in the early
+churches as the most exalted, in every sense, in the house, with the
+exception, of course, of the dignity-bearing foreseat and the few private
+pews.
+
+It is easy to comprehend what a source of disappointed anticipation,
+heart-burning jealousy, offended dignity, unseemly pride, and bitter
+quarrelling this method of assigning scats, and ranking thereby, must have
+been in those little communities. How the goodwivcs must have hated the
+seating committee! Though it was expressly ordered, when the committee
+rendered their decision, that "the inhabitants are to rest silent and
+sett down satysfyed," who can still the tongue of an envious woman or an
+insulted man? Though they were Puritans, they were first of all men and
+women, and complaints and revolts were frequent. Judge Sewall records that
+one indignant dame "treated Captain Osgood very roughly on account of
+seating the meeting-house." To her the difference between a seat in the
+first and one in the second row was immeasurably great. It was not alone
+the Scribes and Pharisees who desired the highest seats in the synagogue.
+
+It was found necessary at a very early date to "dignify the meeting,"
+which was to make certain seats, though in different localities, equal in
+dignity; thus could peace and contented pride be partially restored. For
+instance, the seating committee in the Sutton church used their "best
+discresing," and voted that "the third seat below be equal in dignity with
+the foreseat in the front gallery, and the fourth seat below be equal in
+dignity with the foreseat in the side gallery," etc., thus making many
+seats of equal honor. Of course wives had to have seats of equal importance
+with those of their husbands, and each widow retained the dignity
+apportioned to her in her husband's lifetime. We can well believe that much
+"discresing" was necessary in dignifying as well as in seating. Often,
+after building a new meeting-house with all the painstaking and thoughtful
+judgment that could be shown, the dissensions over the seating lasted for
+years. The conciliatory fashion of "dignifying the seats" clung long in the
+Congregational churches of New England. In East Hartford and Windsor it was
+not abandoned until 1824.
+
+Many men were unwilling to serve on these seating committees, and refused
+to "medle with the seating," protesting against it on account of the odium
+that was incurred, but they were seldom "let off." Even so influential and
+upright a man as Judge Sewall felt a dread of the responsibility and of
+the personal spleen he might arouse. He also feared in one case lest his
+seat-decisions might, if disliked, work against the ministerial peace of
+his son, who had been recently ordained as pastor of the church. Sometimes
+the difficulty was settled in this way: the entire church (or rather the
+male members) voted who should occupy the foreseat, or the highest pew, and
+the voted-in occupants of this seat of honor formed a committee, who in
+turn seated the others of the congregation.
+
+In the town of Rowley, "age, office, and the amount paid toward building
+the meeting-house were considered when assigning seats." Other towns had
+very amusing and minute rules for seating. Each year of the age counted one
+degree. Military service counted eight degrees. The magistrate's office
+counted ten degrees. Every forty shillings paid in on the church rate
+counted one degree. We can imagine the ambitious Puritan adding up his
+degrees, and paying in forty shillings more in order to sit one seat above
+his neighbor who was a year or two older.
+
+In Pittsfield, as early as the year 1765, the pews were sold by "vandoo"
+to the highest bidder, in order to stop the unceasing quarrels over
+the seating. In Windham, Connecticut, in 1762, the adoption of this
+pacificatory measure only increased the dissension when it was discovered
+that some miserable "bachelors who never paid for more than one head and
+a horse" had bid in several of the best pews in the meeting-house. In New
+London, two women, sisters-in-law, were seated side by side. Each claimed
+the upper or more dignified seat, and they quarrelled so fiercely over the
+occupation of it that they had to be brought before the town meeting.
+
+In no way could honor and respect be shown more satisfactorily in the
+community than by the seat assigned in meeting. When Judge Sewall married
+his second wife, he writes with much pride: "Mr. Oliver in the names of the
+Overseers invites my Wife to sit in the foreseat. I thought to have brought
+her into my pue. I thankt him and the Overseers." His wife died in a few
+months, and he reproached himself for his pride in this honor, and left the
+seat which he had in the men's foreseat. "God in his holy Sovereignty put
+my wife out of the Fore Seat. I apprehended I had Cause to be ashamed of my
+Sin and loath myself for it, and retired into my Pue," which was of course
+less dignified than the foreseat.
+
+Often, in thriving communities, the "pues" and benches did not afford
+seating room enough for the large number who wished to attend public
+worship, and complaints were frequent that many were "obliged to sit
+squeased on the stairs." Persons were allowed to bring chairs and stools
+into the meeting-house, and place them in the "alleys." These extra seats
+became often such encumbering nuisances that in many towns laws were passed
+abolishing and excluding them, or, as in Hadley, ordering them "back of the
+women's seats." In 1759 it was ordered in that town to "clear the Alleys of
+the meeting-house of chairs and other Incumbrances." Where the chairless
+people went is not told; perhaps they sat in the doorway, or, in the summer
+time, listened outside the windows. One forward citizen of Hardwicke had
+gradually moved his chair down the church alley, step by step, Sunday after
+Sunday, from one position of dignity to another still higher, until at last
+he boldly invaded the deacons' seat. When, in the year 1700, this honored
+position was forbidden him, in his chagrin and mortification he committed
+suicide by hanging.
+
+The young men sat together in rows, and the young women in corresponding
+seats on the other side of the house. In 1677 the selectmen of Newbury
+gave permission to a few young women to build a pew in the gallery. It is
+impossible to understand why this should have roused the indignation of the
+bachelors of the town, but they were excited and angered to such a pitch
+that they broke a window, invaded the meeting-house, and "broke the pue in
+pessis." For this sacrilegious act they were fined £10 each, and sentenced
+to be whipped or pilloried. In consideration, however, of the fact that
+many of them had been brave soldiers, the punishment was omitted when they
+confessed and asked forgiveness. This episode is very comical; it exhibits
+the Puritan youth in such an ungallant and absurd light. When, ten years
+later, liberty was given to ten young men, who had sat in the "foure backer
+seats in the gallery," to build a pew in "the hindermost seat in the
+gallery behind the pulpit," it is not recorded that the Salem young women
+made any objection. In the Woburn church, the four daughters of one of the
+most respected families in the place received permission to build a pew in
+which to sit. Here also such indignant and violent protests were made by
+the young men that the selectmen were obliged to revoke the permission.
+It would be interesting to know the bachelors' discourteous objections to
+young women being allowed to own a pew, but no record of their reasons
+is given. Bachelors were so restricted and governed in the colonies that
+perhaps they resented the thought of any independence being allowed to
+single women. Single men could not live alone, but were forced to reside
+with some family to whom the court assigned them, and to do in all respects
+just what the court ordered. Thus, in olden times, a man had to marry to
+obtain his freedom. The only clue to a knowledge of the cause of the fierce
+and resentful objection of New England young men to permitting the young
+women of the various congregations to build and own a "maids pue" is
+contained in the record of the church of the town of Scotland, Connecticut.
+"An Hurlburt, Pashants and Mary Lazelle, Younes Bingham, prudenc Hurlburt
+and Jerusha meachem" were empowered to build a pew "provided they build
+within a year and raise ye pue no higher than the seat is on the Mens
+side." "Never ye Less," saith the chronicle, "ye above said have built said
+pue much higher than ye order, and if they do not lower the same within one
+month from this time the society comitte shall take said pue away." Do you
+wonder that the bachelors resented this towering "maids pue?" that they
+would not be scornfully looked down upon every Sabbath by women-folk,
+especially by a girl named "meachem"? Pashants and Younes and prudenc had
+to quickly come down from their unlawfully high church-perch and take a
+more humble seat, as befitted them; thus did their "vaulting ambition
+o'erleap itself and fall on the other side." Perhaps the Salem maids also
+built too high and imposing a pew. In Haverhill, in 1708, young women were
+permitted to build pews, provided they did not "damnify the Stairway." This
+somewhat profane-sounding restriction they heeded, and the Haverhill maids
+occupied their undamnifying "pue" unmolested. Medford young women, however,
+in 1701, when allowed only one side gallery for seats, while the young men
+were assigned one side and all the front gallery, made such an uproar that
+the town had to call a meeting, and restore to them their "woman's rights"
+in half the front gallery.
+
+Infants were brought to church in their mothers' arms, and on summer days
+the young mothers often sat at the meeting-house door or in the porch,--if
+porch there were,--where, listening to the word of God, they could attend
+also to the wants of their babes. I have heard, too, of a little cage, or
+frame, which was to be seen in the early meeting-houses, for the purpose
+of holding children who were too young to sit alone,--poor Puritan babies!
+Little girls sat with their mothers or elder sisters on "crickets" within
+the pews; or if the family were over-numerous, the children and crickets
+exundated into "the alley without the pues." Often a row of little
+daughters of Zion sat on three-legged stools and low seats the entire
+length of the aisle,--weary, sleepy, young sentinels "without the gates."
+
+The boys, the Puritan boys, those wild animals who were regarded with such
+suspicion, such intense disfavor, by all elderly Puritan eyes, and who were
+publicly stigmatized by the Duxbury elders as "ye wretched boys on ye Lords
+Day," were herded by themselves. They usually sat on the pulpit and gallery
+stairs, and constables or tithingmen were appointed to watch over them and
+control them. In Salem, in 1676, it was ordered that "all ye boyes of ye
+towne are and shall be appointed to sitt upon ye three pair of stairs in ye
+meeting-house on ye Lords Day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look after ye
+boyes yt sitte upon ye pulpit stairs. Reuben Guppy is to look and order soe
+many of ye boyes as may be convenient, and if any are unruly, to present
+their names, as the law directs." Nowadays we should hardly seat boys in a
+group if we wished them to be orderly and decorous, and I fear the man "by
+the name of Guppy" found it no easy task to preserve order and due gravity
+among the Puritan boys in Salem meeting. In fact, the rampant boys behaved
+thus badly for the very reason that they were seated together instead of
+with their respective families; and not until the fashion was universal of
+each family sitting in a pew or group by itself did the boys in meeting
+behave like human beings rather than like mischievous and unruly monkeys.
+
+In Stratford, in 1668, a tithingman was "appointed to watch over the youths
+of disorderly carriage, and see that they behave themselves comelie, and
+use such raps and blows as in his discretion meet."
+
+I like to think of those rows of sober-faced Puritan boys seated on the
+narrow, steep pulpit stairs, clad in knee-breeches and homespun flapped
+coats, and with round, cropped heads, miniature likenesses in dress and
+countenance (if not in deportment) of their grave, stern, God-fearing
+fathers. Though they were of the sedate Puritan blood, they were boys, and
+they wriggled and twisted, and scraped their feet noisily on the sanded
+floor; and I know full well that the square-toed shoes of one in whom
+"original sin" waxed powerful, thrust many a sly dig in the ribs and back
+of the luckless wight who chanced to sit in front of and below him on the
+pulpit stairs. Many a dried kernel of Indian corn was surreptitiously
+snapped at the head of an unwary neighbor, and many a sly word was
+whispered and many a furtive but audible "snicker" elicited when the dread
+tithingman was "having an eye-out" and administering "discreet raps and
+blows" elsewhere.
+
+One of these wicked youths in Andover was brought before the magistrate,
+and it was charged that he "Sported and played and by Indecent Gestures and
+Wry Faces caused laughter and misbehavior in the Beholders." The girls were
+not one whit better behaved. One of "ye tything men chosen of ye town of
+Norwich" reported that "Tabatha Morgus of s'd Norwich Did on ye 24th day
+February it being Sabbath on ye Lordes Day, prophane ye Lordes Day in ye
+meeting house of ye west society in ye time of ye forenoone service on s'd
+Day by her rude and Indecent Behaviour in Laughing and Playing in ye time
+of ye s'd Service which Doinges of ye s'd Tabatha is against ye peace of
+our Sovereign Lord ye King, his Crown and Dignity." Wanton Tabatha had to
+pay three shilings sixpence for her ill-timed mid-winter frolic. Perhaps
+she laughed to try to keep warm. Those who laughed at the misdemeanors of
+others were fined as well. Deborah Bangs, a young girl, in 1755 paid a fine
+of five shillings for "Larfing in the Wareham Meeting House in time of
+Public Worship," and a boy at the same time, for the same offence, paid a
+fine of ten shillings. He may have laughed louder and longer. In a law-book
+in which Jonathan Trumbull recorded the minor cases which he tried as
+justice of the peace, was found this entry: "His Majesties Tithing man
+entered complaint against Jona. and Susan Smith, that on the Lords Day
+during Divine Service, they did _smile_." They were found guilty, and
+each was fined five shillings and costs,--poor smiling Susan and Jonathan.
+
+Those wretched Puritan boys, those "sons of Belial," whittled, too, and cut
+the woodwork and benches of the meeting-house in those early days, just as
+their descendants have ever since hacked and cut the benches and desks in
+country schoolhouses,--though how they ever eluded the vigilant eye and ear
+of the ubiquitous tithingman long enough to whittle will ever remain an
+unsolved mystery of the past. This early forerunning evidence of what
+has become a characteristic Yankee trait and habit was so annoyingly and
+extensively exhibited in Medford, in 1729, that an order was passed to
+prosecute and punish "all who cut the seats in the meeting-house."
+
+Few towns were content to have one tithingman and one staff, but ordered
+that there should be a guardian set over the boys in every corner of the
+meeting-house. In Hanover it was ordered "That there be some sticks set up
+in various places in the meeting-house, and fit persons by them and _to
+use them_." I doubt not that the sticks were well used, and Hanover boys
+were well rapped in meeting.
+
+The Norwalk people come down through history shining with a halo of gentle
+lenity, for their tithingman was ordered to bear a short, small stick only,
+and he was "Desired to use it with clemency." However, if any boy proved
+"incoridgable," he could be "presented" before the elders; and perhaps he
+would rather have been treated as were Hartford boys by cruel Hartford
+church folk, who ordered that if "any boye shall be taken playing or
+misbehaving himself in the time of publick worship whether in the
+meeting-house or about the walls he shall be examined and punished at the
+present publickly before the assembly depart." Parson Chauncey, of Durham,
+when a boy misbehaved in meeting, and was "punched up" by the tithingman,
+often stopped in his sermon, called the godless young offender by name,
+and asked him to come to the parsonage the next day. Some very tender and
+beautiful lessons were taught to these Durham boys at these Monday morning
+interviews, and have descended to us in tradition; and the good Mr.
+Chauncey stands out a shining light of Christian patience and forbearance
+at a time when every other New England minister, from John Cotton down,
+preached and practised the stern repression and sharp correction of all
+children, and chanted together in solemn chorus, "Foolishness is bound up
+in the heart of a child."
+
+One vicious tithingman invented, and was allowed to exercise on the boys,
+a punishment which was the refinement of cruelty. He walked up to the
+laughing, sporting, or whittling boy, took him by the collar or the arm,
+led him ostentatiously across the meeting-house, and seated him by his
+shamefaced mother on the women's side. It was as if one grandly proud in
+kneebreeches should be forced to walk abroad in petticoats. Far rather
+would the disgraced boy have been whacked soundly with the heavy knob of
+the tithingman's staff; for bodily pain is soon forgotten, while mortifying
+abasement lingers long.
+
+The tithingman could also take any older youth who misbehaved or "acted
+unsivill" in meeting from his manly seat with the grown men, and force him
+to sit again with the boys; "if any over sixteen are disorderly, they shall
+be ordered to said seats." Not only could these men of authority keep the
+boys in order during meeting, but they also had full control during the
+nooning, and repressed and restrained and vigorously corrected the luckless
+boys during the midday hours. When seats in the galleries grew to be
+regarded as inferior to seats and pews on the ground floor, the boys, who
+of course must have the worst place in the house, were relegated from the
+pulpit stairs to pews in the gallery, and these square, shut-off pews grew
+to be what Dr. Porter called "the Devil's play-houses," and turbulent
+outbursts were frequent enough.
+
+The little boys still sat downstairs under their parents' watchful eyes.
+"No child under 10 alowed to go up Gailary." In the Sutherland church, if
+the big boys (who ought to have known better) "behaved unseemly," one of
+the tithing-men who "took turns to set in the Galary" was ordered "to bring
+Such Bois out of the Galary & set them before the Deacon's Seat" with the
+small boys. In Plainfield, Connecticut, the "pestigeous" boys managed to
+invent a new form of annoyance,--they "damnified the glass;" and a church
+regulation had to be passed to prevent, or rather to try to prevent them
+from "opening the windows or in any way damnifying the glass." It was
+doubtless hot work scuffling and wrestling in the close, shut-in pews high
+up under the roof, and they naturally wished to cool down by opening or
+breaking the windows. Grown persons could not inconsiderately open the
+church windows either. "The Constables are desired to _take notic_
+of the persons that open the windows in the tyme of publick worship." No
+rheumatic-y draughts, no bronchitis-y damps, no pure air was allowed to
+enter the New England meeting-house. The church doubtless took a vote
+before it allowed a single window to be opened.
+
+In Westfield, Massachusetts, the boys became so abominably rampant that the
+church formally decided "that if there is not a Reformation Respecting
+the Disorders in the Pews built on the Great Beam in the time of Publick
+Worship the comite can pul it down."
+
+The fashion of seating the boys in pews by themselves was slow of
+abolishment in many of the churches. In Windsor, Connecticut, "boys' pews"
+were a feature of the church until 1845. As years rolled on, the tithingmen
+became restricted in their authority: they could no longer administer "raps
+and blows;" they were forced to content themselves with loud rappings on
+the floor, and pointing with a staff or with a condemning finger at the
+misdemeanant. At last the deacons usurped these functions, and if rapping
+and pointing did not answer the purpose of establishing order (if the boy
+"psisted"), led the stubborn offender out of meeting; and they had full
+authority soundly to thrash the "wretched boy" on the horse-block. Rev. Dr.
+Dakin tells the story that, hearing a terrible noise and disturbance while
+he was praying in a church in Quincy, he felt constrained to open his eyes
+to ascertain the cause thereof; and he beheld a red-haired boy firmly
+clutching the railing on the front edge of the gallery, while a venerable
+deacon as firmly clutched the boy. The young rebel held fast, and the
+correcting deacon held fast also, until at last the balustrade gave way,
+and boy, deacon, and railing fell together with a resounding crash.
+Then, rising from the wooden debris, the thoroughly subdued boy and the
+triumphant deacon left the meeting-house to finish their little affair;
+and unmistakable swishing sounds, accompanied by loud wails and whining
+protestations, were soon heard from the region of the horse-sheds. Parents
+never resented such chastisings; it was expected, and even desired,
+that boys should be whipped freely by every school-master and person of
+authority who chose so to do.
+
+In some old church-orders for seating, boys were classed with negroes,
+and seated with them; but in nearly all towns the negroes had seats by
+themselves. The black women were all seated on a long bench or in an
+inclosed pew labelled "B.W.," and the negro men in one labelled "B.M." One
+William Mills, a jesting soul, being asked by a pompous stranger where he
+could sit in meeting, told the visitor that he was welcome to sit in Bill
+Mills's pew, and that it was marked "B.M." The man, who chanced to be
+ignorant of the local custom of marking the negro seats, accepted the kind
+invitation, and seated himself in the black men's pew, to the delight of
+Bill Mills, the amusement of the boys, the scandal of the elders, and his
+own disgust.
+
+Sometimes a little pew or short gallery was built high up among the beams
+and joists over the staircase which led to the first gallery, and was
+called the "swallows' nest," or the "roof pue," or the "second gallery." It
+was reached by a steep, ladder-like staircase, and was often assigned to
+the negroes and Indians of the congregation.
+
+Often "ye seat between ye Deacons seat and ye pulpit is for persons hard of
+hearing to sett in." In nearly every meeting a bench or pew full of aged
+men might be seen near the pulpit, and this seat was called, with Puritan
+plainness of speech, the "Deaf Pew." Some very deaf church members (when
+the boys were herded elsewhere) sat on the pulpit stairs, and even in the
+pulpit, alongside the preacher, where they disconcertingly upturned their
+great tin ear-trumpets directly in his face. The persistent joining in the
+psalm-singing by these deaf old soldiers and farmers was one of the bitter
+trials which the leader of the choir had to endure.
+
+The singers' seats were usually in the galleries; sometimes upon the ground
+floor, in the "hind-row on either side." Occasionally the choir sat in two
+rows of seats that extended quite across the floor of the house, in front
+of the deacons' seat and the pulpit. The men singers then sat facing the
+congregation, while the women singers faced the pulpit. Between them ran a
+long rack for the psalm-books. When they sang they stood up, and bawled and
+fugued in each other's faces. Often a square pew was built for the singers,
+and in the centre of this enclosure was a table, on which were laid, when
+at rest, the psalm-books. When they sang, the choir thus formed a hollow
+square, as does any determined band, for strength.
+
+One other seat in the old Puritan meeting-house, a seat of gloom,
+still throws its darksome shadow down through the years,--the stool of
+repentance. "Barbarous and cruel punishments" were forbidden by the
+statutes of the new colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking,
+sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat,
+crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long
+Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled
+and godly congregation, and the cold rebuke of the pious minister's averted
+face; bearing on the poor sinful head a deep-branding paper inscribed in
+"Capitall Letters" with the name of some dark or mysterious crime, or
+wearing on the sleeve some strange and dread symbol, or on the breast a
+scarlet letter.
+
+Let us thank God that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures--so
+degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,--these foul,
+in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never
+frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long time. In 1681
+two women were sentenced to sit during service on a high stool in the
+middle alley of the Salem meeting-house, having on their heads a paper
+bearing the name of their crime; and a woman in Agamenticus at about the
+same date was ordered "to stand in a white sheet publicly two several
+Sabbath-Days with the mark of her offence on her forehead." These are the
+latest records of this punishment that I have chanced to see.
+
+Thus, from old church and town records, we plainly discover that each laic,
+deacon, elder, criminal, singer, and even the ungodly boy had his alloted
+place as absolutely assigned to him in the old meeting-house as was the
+pulpit to the parson. Much has been said in semi-ridicule of this old
+custom of "seating" and "dignifying," yet it did not in reality differ much
+from our modern way of selling the best pews to whoever will pay the most.
+Perhaps the old way was the better, since, in the early churches, age,
+education, dignity, and reputation were considered as well as wealth.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The Tithingman and the Sleepers.
+
+
+
+The most grotesque, the most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure
+in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly
+burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of
+incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of
+monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early
+New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy,
+pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed
+with dangling foxtails,--creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the
+quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the
+drowsy sleepers; for they slept in country churches in the seventeenth
+century, notwithstanding dread of fierce correction, just as they nod
+and doze and softly puff, unawakened and unrebuked, in village churches
+throughout New England in the nineteenth century.
+
+This absurd and distorted type of the English church beadle, this colonial
+sleep banisher, was equipped with a long staff, heavily knobbed at one end,
+with which he severely and pitilessly rapped the heads of the too sleepy
+men, and the too wide-awake boys. From the other end of this wand of office
+depended a long foxtail, or a hare's-foot, which he softly thrust in the
+faces of the sleeping Priscillas, Charitys, and Hopestills, and which
+gently brushed and tickled them into reverent but startled wakefulness.
+
+One zealous but too impetuous tithingman in his pious ardor of office
+inadvertently applied the wrong end, the end with the heavy knob, the
+masculine end, to a drowsy matron's head; and for this severely ungallant
+mistake he was cautioned by the ruling elders to thereafter use "more
+discresing and less heist."
+
+Another over-watchful Newbury "awakener" rapped on the head a nodding man
+who protested indignantly that he was wide-awake, and was only bowing in
+solemn assent and approval of the minister's arguments. Roger Scott, of
+Lynn, in 1643 struck the tithingman who thus roughly and suddenly wakened
+him; and poor sleepy and bewildered Roger, who is branded through all time
+as "a common sleeper at the publick exercise," was, for this most naturally
+resentful act, but also most shockingly grave offence, soundly whipped, as
+a warning both to keep awake and not to strike back in meeting.
+
+Obadiah Turner, of Lynn, gives in his Journal a sad, sad disclosure of
+total depravity which was exposed by one of these sudden church-awakenings,
+and the story is best told in the journalist's own vivid words:--
+
+"June 3, 1616.--Allen Bridges hath bin chose to wake ye sleepers in
+meeting. And being much proude of his place, must needs have a fox taile
+fixed to ye ende of a long staff wherewith he may brush ye faces of them yt
+will have napps in time of discourse, likewise a sharpe thorne whereby he
+may pricke such as be most sound. On ye last Lord his day, as hee strutted
+about ye meeting-house, he did spy Mr. Tomlins sleeping with much comfort,
+hys head kept steadie by being in ye corner, and his hand grasping ye rail.
+And soe spying, Allen did quickly thrust his staff behind Dame Ballard and
+give him a grievous prick upon ye hand. Whereupon Mr. Tomlins did spring
+vpp mch above ye floore, and with terrible force strike hys hand against
+ye wall; and also, to ye great wonder of all, prophanlie exclaim in a loud
+voice, curse ye wood-chuck, he dreaming so it seemed yt a wood-chuck had
+seized and bit his hand. But on coming to know where he was, and ye greate
+scandall he had committed, he seemed much abashed, but did not speak. And I
+think he will not soon again goe to sleepe in meeting."
+
+How clear the picture! Can you not see it?--the warm June sunlight
+streaming in through the narrow, dusty windows of the old meeting-house;
+the armed watcher at the door; the Puritan men and women in their
+sad-colored mantles seated sternly upright on the hard narrow benches; the
+black-gowned minister, the droning murmur of whose sleepy voice mingles
+with the out-door sounds of the rustle of leafy branches, the song of
+summer birds, the hum of buzzing insects, and the muffled stamping of
+horses' feet; the restless boys on the pulpit-stairs; the tired, sleeping
+Puritan with his head thrown back in the corner of the pew; the vain,
+strutting, tithingman with his fantastic and thornéd staff of office; and
+then--the sudden, electric wakening, and the consternation of the whole
+staid and pious congregation at such terrible profanity in the house of
+God. Ah!--it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the
+quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all
+well, just as I saw it last summer in June.
+
+Another catastrophe from too fierce zeal on the part of the tithingman
+is recorded. An old farmer, worn out with a hard Saturday's work at
+sheep-washing, fell asleep ere the hour-glass had once been turned. Though
+he was a man of dignity, for he sat in his own pew, he could not escape the
+rod of the pragmatical tithingman. Being rudely disturbed, but not wholly
+wakened, the bewildered sheep-farmer sprung to his feet, seized his
+astonished and mortified wife by the shoulders and shook her violently,
+shouting at the top of his voice, "Haw back! haw back! Stand still, will
+ye?" Poor goodman and goodwife! many years elapsed ere they recovered from
+that keen disgrace.
+
+The ministers encouraged and urged the tithingmen to faithfully perform
+their allotted work. One early minister "did not love sleepers in ye
+meeting-house, and would stop short in ye exercise and call pleasantlie to
+wake ye sleepers, and once of a warm Summer afternoon he did take hys hat
+off from ye pegg in ye beam, and put it on, saying he would go home and
+feed his fowles and come back again, and maybe their sleepe would be ended,
+and they readie to hear ye remainder of hys discourse." Another time he
+suggested that they might like better the Church of England service of
+sitting down and standing up, and we can be sure that this "was competent
+to keepe their eyes open for a twelvemonth."
+
+All this was in the church of Mr. Whiting, of Lynn, a somewhat jocose
+Puritan,--if jocularity in a Puritan is not too anomalous an attribute
+to have ever existed. We can be sure that there was neither sleeping nor
+jesting allusion to such an irreverence in Mr. Mather's, Mr. Welde's, or
+Mr. Cotton's meetings. In many rigidly severe towns, as in Portsmouth in
+1662 and in Boston in 1667, it was ordered by the selectmen as a proper
+means of punishment that a "cage be made or some other means invented for
+such as sleepe on the Lord's Daie." Perhaps they woke the offender up and
+rudely and summarily dragged him out and caged him at once and kept him
+thus prisoned throughout the nooning,--a veritable jail-bird.
+
+A rather unconventional and eccentric preacher in Newbury awoke one sleeper
+in a most novel manner. The first name of the sleeping man was Mark, and
+the preacher in his sermon made use of these Biblical words: "I say unto
+you, mark the perfect man and behold the upright." But in the midst of his
+low, monotonous sermon-voice he roared out the word "mark" in a loud shout
+that brought the dozing Mark to his feet, bewildered but wide awake.
+
+Mr. Moody, of York, Maine, employed a similar device to awaken and mortify
+the sleepers in meeting. He shouted "Fire, fire, fire!" and when the
+startled and blinking men jumped up, calling out "Where?" he roared back in
+turn, "In hell, for sleeping sinners." Rev. Mr. Phillips, of Andover, in
+1755, openly rebuked his congregation for "sleeping away a great part of
+the sermon;" and on the Sunday following an earthquake shock which was felt
+throughout New England, he said he hoped the "Glorious Lord of the Sabbath
+had given them such a shaking as would keep them awake through one
+sermon-time." Other and more autocratic parsons did not hesitate to call
+out their sleeping parishioners plainly by name, sternly telling them also
+to "Wake up!" A minister in Brunswick, Maine, thus pointedly wakened one of
+his sweet-sleeping church-attendants, a man of some dignity and standing
+in the community, and received the shocking and tautological answer, "Mind
+your own business, and go on with your sermon."
+
+The women would sometimes nap a little without being discovered. "Ye women
+may sometimes sleepe and none know by reason of their enormous bonnets. Mr.
+Whiting doth pleasantlie say from ye pulpit hee doth seeme to be preaching
+to stacks of straw with men among them."
+
+From this seventeenth-century comment upon the size of the women's bonnets,
+it may be seen that objections to women's overwhelming and obscuring
+headgear in public assemblies are not entirely complaining protests of
+modern growth. Other records refer to the annoyance from the exaggerated
+size of bonnets. In 1769 the church in Andover openly "put to vote whether
+the parish Disapprove of the Female sex sitting with their Hats on in the
+Meeting-house in time of Divine Service as being Indecent." The parish did
+Disapprove, with a capital D, for the vote passed in the affirmative. There
+is no record, however, to tell whether the Indecent fashion was abandoned,
+but I warrant no tithingman was powerful enough to make Andover women take
+off their proudly worn Sunday bonnets if they did not want to. Another town
+voted that it was the "Town's Mind" that the women should take off their
+bonnets and "hang them on the peggs," as did the men their headgear. But
+the Town's Mind was not a Woman's Mind; and the big-bonnet wearers, vain
+though they were Puritans, did as they pleased with their own bonnets.
+And indeed, in spite of votes and in spite of expostulations, the female
+descendants of the Puritans, through constantly recurring waves of fashion,
+have ever since been indecently wearing great obscuring hats and bonnets in
+public assemblies, even up to the present day.
+
+The tithingman had other duties than awakening the sleepers and looking
+after "the boyes that playes and rapping those boyes,"--in short, seeing
+that every one was attentive in meeting except himself,--and the duties
+and powers of the office varied in different communities. Several of these
+officers were appointed in each parish. In Newbury, in 1688, there were
+twenty tithingmen, and in Salem twenty-five. They were men of authority,
+not only on Sunday, but throughout the entire week. Each had several
+neighboring families (usually ten, as the word "tithing" would signify)
+under his charge to watch during the week, to enforce the learning of the
+catechism at home, especially by the children, and sometimes he heard them
+"Say their Chatachize." These families he also watched specially on the
+Sabbath, and reported whether all the members thereof attended public
+worship. Not content with mounting guard over the boys on Sundays, he also
+watched on weekdays to keep boys and "all persons from swimming in the
+water." Do you think his duties were light in July and August, when school
+was out, to watch the boys of ten families? One man watching one family
+cannot prevent such "violations of the peace" in country towns now-a-days.
+He sometimes inspected the "ordinaries" and made complaint of any disorders
+which he there discovered, and gave in the names of "idle tiplers and
+gamers," and he could warn the tavern-keeper to sell no more liquor to any
+toper whom he knew or fancied was drinking too heavily. Josselyn complained
+bitterly that during his visit to New England in 1663 at "houses of
+entertainment called ordinaries into which a stranger went, he was
+presently followed by one appointed to that office who would thrust himself
+into his company uninvited, and if he called for more drink than the
+officer thought in his judgment he could soberly bear away, he would
+presently countermand it, and appoint the proportion beyond which he could
+not get one drop." The tithingman had a "spetial eye-out" on all bachelors,
+who were also carefully spied upon by the constables, deacons, elders,
+and heads of families in general. He might, perhaps, help to collect the
+ministerial rate, though his principal duty was by no means the collecting
+of tithes. He "worned peple out of ye towne." This warning was not at all
+because the new-comers were objectionable or undesired, but was simply a
+legal form of precaution, so that the parish would never be liable for the
+keeping of the "worned" ones in case they thereafter became paupers. He
+administered the "oath of fidelity" to new inhabitants. The tithingman
+also watched to see that "no young people walked abroad on the eve of the
+Sabbath,"--that is, on a Saturday night. He also marked and reported all
+those "who lye at home," and others who "prophanely behaved, lingered
+without dores at meeting time on the Lordes Daie," all the "sons of Belial
+strutting about, setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the
+day." These last two classes of offenders were first admonished by the
+tithingman, then "Sett in stocks," and then cited before the Court. They
+were also confined in the cage on the meeting-house green, with the Lord's
+Day sleepers. The tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode at too
+fast a pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who "walked or
+rode unnecessarily on the Sabath." Great and small alike were under his
+control, as this notice from the "Columbian Centinel" of December, 1789,
+abundantly proves. It is entitled "The President and the Tything man:"--
+
+    "The President, on his return to New York from his late tour through
+    Connecticut, having missed his way on Saturday, was obliged to ride a
+    few miles on Sunday morning in order to gain the town at which he had
+    previously proposed to have attended divine service. Before he arrived
+    however he was met by a Tything man, who commanding him to stop,
+    demanded the occasion of his riding; and it was not until the President
+    had informed him of every circumstance and promised to go no further
+    than the town intended that the Tything man would permit him to proceed
+    on his journey."
+
+Various were the subterfuges to outwit the tithingman and elude his
+vigilance on the Sabbath. We all remember the amusing incident in "Oldtown
+Folks." A similar one really happened. Two gay young sparks driving through
+the town on the Sabbath were stopped by the tithingman; one offender said
+mournfully in excuse of his Sabbath travel, "My grandmother is lying dead
+in the next town." Being allowed to drive on, he stood up in his wagon when
+at a safe distance and impudently shouted back, "And she's been lying dead
+in the graveyard there for thirty years."
+
+Thus it may be seen that the ancient tithingman was pre-eminently a general
+_snook_, to use an old and expressive word,--an informer, both in and
+out of meeting,--a very necessary, but somewhat odious, and certainly at
+times very absurd officer. He was in a degree a constable, a selectman, a
+teacher, a tax-collector, an inspector, a sexton, a home-watcher, and above
+all, a Puritan Bumble, whose motto was _Hie et ubique_. He was, in
+fact, a general law-enforcer and order-keeper, whose various duties,
+wherever still necessary and still performed, are now apportioned to
+several individuals. The ecclesiastical functions and authority of the
+tithingman lingered long after the civil powers had been removed or had
+gradually passed away from his office. Persons are now living who in their
+early and unruly youth were rapped at and pointed at by a New England
+tithingman when they laughed or were noisy in meeting.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The Length of the Service.
+
+
+Watches were unknown in the early colonial days of New England, and for a
+long time after their introduction both watches and clocks were costly and
+rare. John Davenport of New Haven, who died in 1670, left a clock to his
+heirs; and E. Needham, who died in 1677, left a "Striking clock, a watch,
+and a Larum that dus not Strike," worth £5; these are perhaps the first
+records of the ownership of clocks and watches in New England. The time of
+the day was indicated to our forefathers in their homes by "noon marks" on
+the floor or window-seats, and by picturesque sundials; and in the
+civil and religious meetings the passage of time was marked by a strong
+brass-bound hour-glass, which stood on a desk below or beside the pulpit,
+or which was raised on a slender iron rod and standard, so that all the
+members of the congregation could easily watch "the sands that ran i' the
+clock's behalf." By the side of the desk sat, on the Sabbath, a sexton,
+clerk, or tithingman, whose duty it was to turn the hour-glass as often
+as the sands ran out. This was a very ostentatious way of reminding the
+clergyman how long he had preached; but if it were a hint to bring the
+discourse to an end, it was never heeded; for contemporary historical
+registers tell of most painfully long sermons, reaching up through long
+sub-divisions and heads to "twenty-seventhly" and "twenty-eighthly."
+
+At the planting of the first church in Woburn, Massachusetts, the Rev.
+Mr. Symmes showed his godliness and endurance (and proved that of his
+parishioners also) by preaching between four and five hours. Sermons which
+occupied two or three hours were customary enough. One old Scotch clergyman
+in Vermont, in the early years of this century, bitterly and fiercely
+resented the "popish innovation and Sabbath profanation" of a Sunday-school
+for the children, which some daring and progressive parishioners proposed
+to hold at the "nooning." This canny Parson Whiteinch very craftily and
+somewhat maliciously prolonged his morning sermons until they each occupied
+three hours; thus he shortened the time between the two services to about
+half an hour, and victoriously crowded out the Sunday-school innovators,
+who had barely time to eat their cold lunch and care for their waiting
+horses, ere it was time for the afternoon service to begin. But one man
+cannot stop the tide, though he may keep it for a short time from one
+guarded and sheltered spot; and the rebellious Vermont congregation, after
+two or three years of tedious three-hour sermons, arose in a body and
+crowded out the purposely prolix preacher, and established the wished-for
+Sunday-school. The vanquished parson thereafter sullenly spent the noonings
+in the horse-shed, to which he ostentatiously carried the big church-Bible
+in order that it might not be at the service of the profaning teachers.
+
+An irreverent caricature of the colonial days represents a phenomenally
+long-preaching clergyman as turning the hour-glass by the side of his
+pulpit and addressing his congregation thus, "Come! you are all good
+fellows, we'll take another glass together!" It is recorded of Rev. Urian
+Oakes that often the hour-glass was turned four times during one of his
+sermons. The warning legend, "Be Short," which Cotton Mather inscribed over
+his study door was not written over his pulpit; for he wrote in his diary
+that at his own ordination he prayed for an hour and a quarter, and
+preached for an hour and three quarters. Added to the other ordination
+exercises these long Mather addresses must have been tiresome enough.
+Nathaniel Ward deplored at that time, "Wee have a strong weakness in New
+England that when wee are speaking, wee know not how to conclude: wee make
+many ends before wee make an end."
+
+Dr. Lord of Norwich always made a prayer which was one hour long; and an
+early Dutch traveller who visited New England asserted that he had heard
+there on Fast Day a prayer which was two hours long. These long prayers
+were universal and most highly esteemed,--a "poor gift in prayer" being a
+most deplored and even despised clerical short-coming. Had not the Puritans
+left the Church of England to escape "stinted prayers"? Whitefield prayed
+openly for Parson Barrett of Hopkinton, who could pray neither freely, nor
+well, that "God would open this dumb dog's mouth;" and everywhere in the
+Puritan Church, precatory eloquence as evinced in long prayers was felt to
+be the greatest glory of the minister, and the highest tribute to God.
+
+In nearly all the churches the assembled people stood during prayer-time
+(since kneeling and bowing the head savored of Romish idolatry) and in the
+middle of his petition the minister usually made a long pause in order that
+any who were infirm or ill might let down their slamming pew-seats and sit
+down; those who were merely weary stood patiently to the long and painfully
+deferred end. This custom of standing during prayer-time prevailed in the
+Congregational churches in New England until quite a recent date, and is
+not yet obsolete in isolated communities and in solitary cases. I have seen
+within a few years, in a country church, a feeble, white-haired old deacon
+rise tremblingly at the preacher's solemn words "Let us unite in prayer,"
+and stand with bowed head throughout the long prayer; thus pathetically
+clinging to the reverent custom of the olden time, he rendered tender
+tribute to vanished youth, gave equal tribute to eternal hope and faith,
+and formed a beautiful emblem of patient readiness for the last solemn
+summons.
+
+Sometimes tedious expounding of the Scriptures and long "prophesying"
+lengthened out the already too long service. Judge Sewall recorded that
+once when he addressed or expounded at the Plymouth Church, "being afraid
+to look at the glass, ignorantly and unwittingly I stood two hours and a
+half," which was doing pretty well for a layman.
+
+The members of the early churches did not dislike these long preachings and
+prophesyings; they would have regarded a short sermon as irreligious,
+and lacking in reverence, and besides, would have felt that they had not
+received in it their full due, their full money's worth. They often fell
+asleep and were fiercely awakened by the tithingman, and often they could
+not have understood the verbose and grandiose language of the preacher.
+They were in an icy-cold atmosphere in winter, and in glaring, unshaded
+heat in summer, and upon most uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at
+all seasons; but in every record and journal which I have read, throughout
+which ministers and laymen recorded all the annoyances and opposition which
+the preachers encountered, I have never seen one entry of any complaint or
+ill-criticism of too long praying or preaching. Indeed, when Rev. Samuel
+Torrey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, prayed two hours without stopping, upon
+a public Fast Day in 1696, it is recorded that his audience only wished
+that the prayer had been much longer.
+
+When we consider the training and exercise in prayer that the New England
+parsons had in their pulpits on Sundays, in their own homes on Saturday
+nights, on Lecture Days and Fast Days and Training Days, and indeed upon
+all times and occasions, can we wonder at Parson Boardman's prowess in New
+Milford in 1735? He visited a "praying" Indian's home wherein lay a sick
+papoose over whom a "pow-wow" was being held by a medicine-man at the
+request of the squaw-mother, who was still a heathen. The Christian warrior
+determined to fight the Indian witch-doctor on his own grounds, and while
+the medicine-man was screaming and yelling and dancing in order to cast the
+devil out ol the child, the parson began to pray with equal vigor and power
+of lungs to cast out the devil of a medicine-man. As the prayer and
+pow-wow proceeded the neighboring Indians gathered around, and soon became
+seriously alarmed for the success of their prophet. The battle raged for
+three hours, when the pow-wow ended, and the disgusted and exhausted Indian
+ran out of the wigwam and jumped into the Housatonic River to cool his
+heated blood, leaving the Puritan minister triumphant in the belief, and
+indeed with positive proof, that he could pray down any man or devil.
+
+The colonists could not leave the meeting-house before the long sen ices
+were ended, even had they wished, for the tithingman allowed no deserters.
+In Salem, in 1676, it was "ordered by ye Selectmen yt the three Constables
+doe attend att ye three greate doores of ye meeting-house every Lordes Day
+att ye end of ye sermon, both forenoone and afternoone, and to keep ye
+doores fast and suffer none to goe out before ye whole exercises bee
+ended." Thus Salem people had to listen to no end of praying and
+prophesying from their ministers and elders for they "couldn't get out."
+
+As the years passed on, the church attendants became less referential and
+much more impatient and fearless, and soon after the Revolutionary War one
+man in Medford made a bargain with his minister--Rev. Dr. Osgood--that he
+would attend regularly the church services every Sunday morning, provided
+he could always leave at twelve o'clock. On each Sabbath thereafter, as
+the obstinate preacher would not end his sermon one minute sooner than
+his habitual time, which was long after twelve, the equally stubborn
+limited-time worshipper arose at noon, as he had stipulated, and stalked
+noisily out of meeting.
+
+A minister about to preach in a neighboring parish was told of a custom
+which prevailed there of persons who lived at a distance rising and leaving
+the house ere the sermon was ended. He determined to teach them a lesson,
+and announced that he would preach the first part of his sermon to the
+sinners, and the latter part to the saints, and that the sinners would of
+course all leave as soon as their portion had been delivered. Every soul
+remained until the end of the service.
+
+At last, when other means of entertainment and recreation than church-going
+became common, and other forms of public addresses than sermons were
+frequently given, New England church-goers became so restless and
+rebellious under the regime of hour-long prayers and indefinitely
+protracted sermons that the long services were gradually condensed and
+curtailed, to the relief of both preacher and hearers.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House.
+
+
+
+In colonial days in New England the long and tedious services must have
+been hard to endure in the unheated churches in bitter winter weather, so
+bitter that, as Judge Sewall pathetically recorded, "The communion bread
+was frozen pretty hard and rattled sadly into the plates." Sadly down
+through the centuries is ringing in our ears the gloomy rattle of that
+frozen sacramental bread on the Church plate, telling to us the solemn
+story of the austere and comfortless church-life of our ancestors. Would
+that the sound could bring to our chilled hearts the same steadfast and
+pure Christian faith that made their gloomy, freezing services warm with
+God's loving presence!
+
+Again Judge Sewall wrote: "Extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow. Blows
+much more as coming home at Noon, and so holds on. Bread was frozen at
+Lord's Table. Though 't was so cold John Tuckerman was baptized. At six
+o'clock my ink freezes, so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my
+Wives chamber. Yet was very Comfortable at Meeting." In the penultimate
+sentence of this quotation may be found the clue and explanation of the
+seemingly incredible assertion in the last sentence. The reason why he was
+comfortable in church was that he was accustomed to sit in cold rooms; even
+with the great open-mouthed and open-chimneyed fireplaces full of blazing
+logs, so little heat entered the rooms of colonial dwelling-houses that one
+could not be warm unless fairly within the chimney-place; and thus, even
+while sitting by the fire, his ink froze. Another entry of Judge Sewall's
+tells of an exceeding cold day when there was "Great Coughing" in meeting,
+and yet a new-born baby was brought into the icy church to be baptized.
+Children were always carried to the meeting-house for baptism the first
+Sunday after birth, even in the most bitter weather. There are no entries
+in Judge Sewall's diary which exhibit him in so lovable and gentle a light
+as the records of the baptism of his fourteen children,--his pride when
+the child did not cry out or shrink from the water in the freezing winter
+weather, thus early showing true Puritan fortitude; and also his noble
+resolves and hopes for their future. On this especially cold day when a
+baby was baptized, the minister prayed for a mitigation of the weather,
+and on the same day in another town "Rev. Mr. Wigglesworth preached on the
+text, Who can stand before His Cold? Then by his own and people's sickness
+three Sabbaths passed without public Worship." February 20 he preached from
+these words: "He sends forth his word and thaws them." And the very next
+day a thaw set in which was regarded as a direct answer to his prayer and
+sermon. Sceptics now-a-days would suggest that he chose well the time to
+pray for milder weather.
+
+Many persons now living can remember the universal and noisy turning up
+of great-coat collars, the swinging of arms, and knocking together of the
+heavy-booted feet of the listeners towards the end of a long winter sermon.
+Dr. Hopkins used to say, when the noisy tintamarre began, "My hearers, have
+a little patience, and I will soon close."
+
+Another clergyman was irritated beyond endurance by the stamping,
+clattering feet, a _supplosio pedis_ that he regarded as an irreverent
+protest and complaint against the severity of the weather, rather than as a
+hint to him to conclude his long sermon. He suddenly and noisily closed his
+sermon-book, leaned forward out of his high pulpit, and thundered out these
+Biblical words of rebuke at his freezing congregation, whose startled faces
+stared up at him through dense clouds of vapor. "Out of whose womb came the
+ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are
+hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Knowest thou the
+ordinance of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?
+Great things doth God which we cannot comprehend. He saith to the snow, Be
+thou on the earth. By the breath of God frost is given. He causeth it to
+come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. Hearken unto
+this. _Stand still_, and consider the wondrous works of God." We can
+believe that he roared out the words "stand still," and that there was no
+more noise in that meeting-house on cold Sundays during the remainder of
+that winter.
+
+The ministers might well argue that no one suffered more from the freezing
+atmosphere than they did. In many records I find that they were forced to
+preach and pray with their hands cased in woollen or fur mittens or heavy
+knit gloves; and they wore long camlet cloaks in the pulpit and covered
+their heads with skull caps--as did Judge Sewall--and possibly wore, as he
+did also, a _hood_. Many a wig-hating minister must, in the Arctic
+meeting-house, have longed secretly for the grateful warmth to his head and
+neck of one of those "horrid Bushes of Vanity," a full-bottomed flowing
+wig.
+
+On bitter winter days Dr. Stevens of Kittery used to send a servant to the
+meeting-house to find out how many of his flock had braved the piercing
+blasts. If only seven persons were present, the servant asked them to
+return with him to the parsonage to listen to the sermon; but if there were
+eight members in the meeting-house he so reported to the Doctor, who then
+donned his long worsted cloak, tied it around his waist with a great
+handkerchief, and attired thus, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears,
+and with heavy mittens on his hands, ploughed through the deep snow to
+the church, and in the same dress preached his long, knotty sermon in
+his pulpit, while fierce wintry blasts rattled the windows and shook the
+turret, and the eight godly, shivering souls wished profoundly that one of
+their number had "lain at home in a slothfull, lazey, prophane way," and
+thus permitted the seven others and the minister to have the sermon in
+comfort in the parsonage kitchen before the great blazing logs in the open
+fireplace.
+
+Ah, it makes one shiver even to think of those gloomy churches, growing
+colder, and more congealed through weeks of heavy frost and fierce
+northwesters until they bore the chill of death itself. One can but
+wonder whether that fell scourge of New England, that hereditary
+curse--consumption--did not have its first germs evolved and nourished in
+our Puritan ancestors by the Spartan custom of sitting through the long
+winter services in the icy, death-like meeting-houses.
+
+Of the insufficient clothing of the church attendants of olden times it
+is unnecessary to speak with much detail. The goodmen with their heavy
+top-boots or jack-boots, their milled or frieze stockings, their warm
+periwigs surmounted by fur caps or beaver hats or hoods; and with their
+many-caped great-coats or full round cloaks were dressed with a sufficient
+degree of comfort, though they did not possess the warm woollen and silken
+underclothing which now make a man's winter attire so comfortable. They
+carried muffs too, as the advertisements of the times show. The "Boston
+News Letter" of 1716 offers a reward for a man's muff lost on the Sabbath
+day in the street. In 1725 Dr. Prince lost his black bearskin muff, and in
+1740 a "sableskin man's muff" was advertised as having been lost.
+
+But the Puritan goodwives and maidens were dressed in a meagre and scanty
+fashion that when now considered seems fairly appalling. As soon as
+the colonies grew in wealth and fashion, thin silk or cotton hose were
+frequently worn in midwinter by the wives and daughters of well-to-do
+colonists; and correspondingly thin cloth or kid or silk slippers,
+high-channelled pumps, or low shoes with paper soles and "cross-cut" or
+wooden heels were the holiday and Sabbath-day covering for the feet. In wet
+weather clogs and pattens formed an extra and much needed protection
+when the fair colonists walked. Linen underclothing formed the first
+superstructure of the feminine costume and threw its penetrating chill to
+the very marrow of the bones. Often in mid-winter the scant-skirted French
+calico gowns were made with short elbow sleeves and round, low necks, and
+the throat and shoulders were lightly covered with thin lawn neckerchiefs
+or dimity tuckers. The flaunting hooped-petticoat of another decade was
+worn with a silk or brocade sacque. A thin cloth cape or mantle or spencer,
+lined with sarcenet silk, was frequently the only covering for the
+shoulders. In examining the treasured contents of old wardrobes, trunks,
+and high-chests, and in reading the descriptions of women's winter attire
+worn throughout the eighteenth and half through the nineteenth century, I
+am convinced that the only portions of Puritan female anatomy that were
+clothed with anything approaching respectable regard for health in the
+inclement New England climate were the head and the hands. The hands of
+"New English dames" were carefully protected with embroidered kid or
+leather gloves (for the early New Englanders were great glove wearers) or
+with warm knit woollen mittens, though mittens for women's wear were
+always fingerless. The well-gloved hands were moreover warmly ensconced in
+enormous stuffed muffs of bearskin which were almost as large as a
+flour barrel, or in smaller muffs of rabbit-skin or mink or beaver. The
+goodwives' heads bore, besides the close caps so universally worn, mufflers
+and veils and hoods,--hoods of all kinds and descriptions, from the hoods
+of serge and camlet and gauze and black silk that Mistress Estabrook, wife
+of the Windham parson, proudly owned and wore, from the prohibited "silk
+and tiffany hoods" of the earliest planters down through the centuries'
+inflorescence of "hoods of crimson colored persian," "wild bore and hum-hum
+long hoods," "pointed velvet capuchins," "scarlet gipsys," "pinnered
+and tasselled hoods," "shirred lustring hoods," "hoods of rich pptuna,"
+"muskmelon hoods," to the warm quilted "punkin hoods" worn within this
+century in country churches. These "punkin-hoods" were quilted with great
+rolls of woollen wadding and drawn tight between the rolls with strong
+cords. They formed a deafening and heating head-covering which always had
+to be loosened and thrust back when the wearer was within doors. It
+was only equalled in shapeless clumsiness and unique ugliness by its
+summer-sister of the same date, the green silk calash,--that funniest and
+quaintest of all New England feminine headgear,--a great sunshade that
+could not be called a bonnet, always made of bright green silk shirred on
+strong lengths of rattan or whalebone, and extendible after the fashion of
+a chaise top. It could be drawn out over the face by a little green ribbon
+or "bridle" that was fastened to the extreme front at the top; or it could
+be pushed in a close-gathered mass on the back of the head These calashes
+were frequently a foot and a half in diameter, and thus stood well up from
+the head and did not disarrange the hair nor crush the headdress or cap.
+They formed a perfect and easily-adjusted shade from the sun. Masks, too,
+the fair Puritans wore to further protect their heads and faces,--masks of
+green silk or black vehet, with silver mouthpieces to place within the lips
+and thus enable the wearer to keep the mask firmly in place. Sometimes two
+little strings with a silver bead at one end were fastened to the mask, and
+seined as mouthpieces. With a string and bead at either corner of the
+mouth the mask-wearer could talk quite freely while still retaining her
+face-covering in its protecting position. These masks were never worn
+within doors. In the list of goods ordered by George Washington from Europe
+for his fair bride Martha were several of these riding-masks, and the kind
+step-father even ordered a supply of small masks for "Miss Custis," his
+little step-daughter.
+
+In bitter winter weather women carried to meeting little
+foot-stoves,--metal boxes which stood on legs and were filled with hot
+coals at home, and a second time during the morning from the hearthstone of
+a neighboring farm-house or a noon-house. These foot-warmers helped to make
+endurable to the goodwives the icy chill of the meeting-house; and round
+their mother's foot-stove the shivering little children sat on their low
+crickets, warming their half-frozen fingers.
+
+Some of these foot-stoves were really pretentious church-furnishings. I
+have seen one "brassen foot-stove" which had the owner's cipher cut out of
+the sheet metal, and from the side was hung a wrought brass chain. By this
+chain, a century ago, the shining polished brass stove was carried into
+church in the hands of a liveried black man, who held it ostentatiously at
+arms' length, that neither ash nor scorch might touch his scarlet velvet
+breeches. And after he had tucked it under my lady's tiny feet as she sat
+in her pew, he retired to his freezing loft high up among the beams,--the
+"Nigger Pew,"--where, I am sorry to record, he more than once solaced and
+warmed himself with a bottle of "kill-devil" which he had smuggled into
+church, until he fell ignominiously asleep and his drunken snores so
+disturbed the minister and the congregation, that two tithingmen were
+forced to climb the ladder-like staircase and pull him down and out of
+the church and to the neighboring tavern to sleep off the effects of the
+liquor. For being "a man and a brother" and, above all, in spite of his
+petty idiosyncrasies, a very good and cherished servant, he could not be
+thrust out into the snow to freeze to death.
+
+But with the extreme Puritan contempt of comfort even foot-stoves were
+not always allowed. The First Church of Roxbury, after having one church
+edifice destroyed by fire in 1747, prohibited the use of footstoves in
+meeting, and the Roxbury matrons sat with frozen toes in their fine new
+meeting-house. The Old South Church of Boston was not so rigid, though it
+felt the same dread of fire; for we find this entry on the records of the
+church under the date of January 10, 1771: "Whereas, danger is apprehended
+from the [foot] stoves that arc frequently left in the meeting-house after
+the publick worship is over; Voted, that the Saxton make diligent search on
+the Lord's Day evening and in the evening after a lecture, to see if any
+stoves are left in the house, and that if he find any there he take them
+to his own house; and it is expected that the owners of such stoves make
+reasonable satisfaction to the Saxton for his trouble before they take them
+away."
+
+In Hardwicke, in 1792, it was ordered that "no stows be carried into our
+new meeting-house with fire in them." The Hardwicke women may have found
+comfort in a contrivance which is thus described in by an "old inhabitant:"
+
+      "There to warm their feet
+  Was seen an article now obsolete,
+  A sort of basket tub of braided straw
+  Or husks, in which is placed a heated stone,
+  Which does half-frozen limbs superbly thaw.
+  And warms the marrow of the oldest bone."
+
+In some of the early, poorly built log meeting-houses, fur bags made of
+coarse skins, such as wolf-skin, were nailed or tied to the edges of the
+benches, and into these bags the worshippers thrust their feet for warmth.
+In some communities it was the custom for each family to bring on cold days
+its "dogg" to meeting; where, lying at or on his master's feet, he proved
+a source of grateful warmth. These animal stoves became such an abounding
+nuisance, however, that dog-whippers had to be appointed to serve on
+Sundays to drive out the dogs. All through the records of the early
+churches we find such entries as this: "Whatsoever doggs come into the
+meeting-house in time of public worship, their owners shall each pay
+sixpence." Sixpence seems little, but the thrifty and poor Puritans would
+rather freeze their toes than pay sixpence for their calorific dogs.
+
+The church members made many rules and regulations to keep the cold out of
+the meeting-house during service-time, or perhaps we should say to keep the
+wind out. Thus in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1725 it was ordered that the
+"several doors of the meeting-house be taken care of and kept shut in very
+cold and windy seasons according to the lying of the wind from time to
+time; and that people in such windy weather come in at the leeward doors
+only, and take care that they are easily shut both to prevent the breaking
+of the doors and the making of a noise." In other churches it was ordered
+that "no doors be opened to the windward and only one door to the leeward"
+during winter weather.
+
+The first church of Salem built a "cattied chimney twelve feet long" in its
+meeting-house in 1662, but five years later it was removed, perhaps through
+the colonists' dread lest the building be destroyed by a conflagration
+caused by the combustible nature of the materials of which the chimney was
+composed. Felt, in his "Annals of Salem," asserts that the First Church of
+Boston was the first New England congregation to have a stove for heating
+the meeting-house at the time of public worship; this was in 1773. This
+statement is incorrect. Mr. Judd says the Hadley church had an iron stove
+in their meeting-house as early as 1734--the Hadley people were such
+sybarites and novelty-lovers in those early days! The Old South Church of
+Boston followed in the luxurious fashion in 1783, and the "Evening Post"
+of January 25, 1783, contained a poem of which these four lines show the
+criticising and deprecating spirit:--
+
+  "Extinct the sacred fire of love,
+    Our zeal grown cold and dead,
+  In the house of God we fix a stove
+    To warm us in their stead."
+
+Other New England congregations piously froze during service-time well into
+this century. The Longmeadow church, early in the field, had a stove in
+1810; the Salem people in 1815; and the Medford meeting in 1820. The church
+in Brimfield in 1819 refused to pay for a stove, but ordered as some
+sacrifice to the desire for comfort, two extra doors placed on the
+gallery-stairs to keep out draughts; but when in that town, a few years
+later, a subscription was made to buy a church stove, one old member
+refused to contribute, saying "good preaching kept him hot enough without
+stoves."
+
+As all the church edifices were built without any thought of the
+possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best
+they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually
+placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters,
+there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous
+stove-pipes that too often spread, from every leaky and ill-fastened
+joint, smoke and sooty vapors, and sometimes pyroligneous drippings on the
+congregation. Often tin pails to catch the drippings were hung under the
+stove-pipes, forming a further chaste and elegant church-decoration. Many
+serious objections were made to the stoves besides the aesthetic ones.
+It was alleged that they would be the means of starting many destructive
+conflagrations; that they caused severe headaches in the church attendants;
+and worst of all, that the _heat warped the ladies' tortoise-shell
+back-combs_.
+
+The church reformers contended, on the other hand, that no one could
+properly receive spiritual comfort while enduring such decided bodily
+discomfort. They hoped that with increased physical warmth, fervor in
+religion would be equally augmented,--that, as Cowper wrote,--
+
+  "The churches warmed, they would no longer hold
+  Such frozen figures, stiff as they are cold."
+
+Many were the quarrels and discussions that arose in New England
+communities over the purchase and use of stoves, and many were the meetings
+held and votes taken upon the important subject.
+
+"Peter Parley"--Mr. Samuel Goodrich--gave, in his "Recollections," a very
+amusing account of the sufferings endured by the wife of an anti-stove
+deacon. She came to church with a look of perfect resignation on the
+Sabbath of the stove's introduction, and swept past the unwelcome intruder
+with averted head, and into her pew. She sat there through the service,
+growing paler with the unaccustomed heat, until the minister's words about
+"heaping coals of fire" brought too keen a sense of the overwhelming and
+unhealthful stove-heat to her mind, and she fainted. She was carried out of
+church, and upon recovering said languidly that it "was the heat from the
+stove." A most complete and sudden resuscitation was effected, however,
+when she was informed of the fact that no fire had as yet been lighted in
+the new church-furnishing.
+
+Similar chronicles exist about other New England churches, and bear a
+striking resemblance to each other. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in an address
+delivered in New York on December 20, 1853, the anniversary of the Landing
+of the Pilgrims, referred to the opposition made to the introduction of
+stoves into the old meeting-house in Litchfield, Connecticut, during the
+ministry of his father, and gave an amusing account of the results of the
+introgression. This allusion called up many reminiscences of anti-stove
+wars, and a writer in the "New York Enquirer" told the same story of the
+fainting woman in Litchfield meeting, who began to fan herself and at
+length swooned, saying when she recovered "that the heat of the horrid
+stove had caused her to faint." A correspondent of the "Cleveland Herald"
+confirmed the fact that the fainting episode occurred in the Litchfield
+meeting-house. The editor of the "Hartford Daily Courant" thus added his
+testimony:--
+
+    "Violent opposition had been made to the introduction of a stove in the
+    old meeting-house, and an attempt made in vain to induce the soc
+    to purchase one. The writer was one of seven young men who finally
+    purchased a stove and requested permission to put it up in the
+    meeting-house on trial. After much difficulty the committee consented.
+    It was all arranged on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday we took our
+    seats in the Bass, rather earlier than usual, to see the fun. It was a
+    warm November Sunday, in which the sun shone cheerfully and warmly on
+    the old south steps and into the naked windows. The stove stood in the
+    middle aisle, rather in front of the Tenor Gallery. People came in and
+    stared. Good old Deacon Trowbridge, one of the most simple-hearted and
+    worthy men of that generation, had, as Mr. Beecher says, been induced
+    to give up his opposition. He shook his head, however, as he felt the
+    heat reflected from it, and gathered up the skirts of his great
+    as he passed up the broad aisle to the deacon's seat. Old Uncle Noah
+    Stone, a wealthy farmer of the West End, who sat near, scowled and
+    muttered at the effects of the heat, but waited until noon to utter his
+    maledictions over his nut-cakes and cheese at the intermission. There
+    had in fact been _no fire in the stove_, the day being too warm.
+    We were too much upon the broad grin to be very devotional, and smiled
+    rather loudly at the funny things we saw. But when the editor of the
+    village paper, Mr. Bunce, came in (who was a believer in stoves in
+    churches) and with a most satisfactory air warmed his hands by the
+    stove, keeping the skirts of his great-coat carefully between his
+    knees, we could stand it no longer but dropped invisible behind the
+    breastwork. But the climax of the whole was (as the Cleveland man says)
+    when Mrs. Peck went out in the middle of the service. It was, however,
+    the means of reconciling the whole society; for after that first day we
+    heard no more opposition to the warm stove in the meeting-house."
+
+With all this corroborative evidence I think it is fully proved that the
+event really happened in Litchfield, and that the honor was stolen for
+other towns by unveracious chroniclers; otherwise we must believe in an
+amazing unanimity of church-joking and sham-fainting all over New England.
+
+The very nature, the stern, pleasure-hating and trial-glorying Puritan
+nature, which made our forefathers leave their English homes to come, for
+the love of God and the freedom of conscience, to these wild, barren, and
+unwelcoming shores, made them also endure with fortitude and almost with
+satisfaction all personal discomforts, and caused them to cling with
+persistent firmness to such outward symbols of austere contempt of
+luxury, and such narrow-minded signs of love of simplicity as the lack of
+comfortable warmth during the time of public worship. The religion which
+they had endured such bitter hardships to establish, did not, in their
+minds, need any shielding and coddling to keep it alive, but thrived far
+better on Spartan severity and simplicity; hence, it took two centuries of
+gradual and most tardy softening and modifying of character to prepare the
+Puritan mind for so advanced a reform and luxury as proper warmth in the
+meeting-houses in winter.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Noon-House.
+
+
+
+There might have been seen a hundred years ago, by the side of many an old
+meeting-house in New England, a long, low, mean, stable-like building, with
+a rough stone chimney at one end. This was the "noon-house," or "Sabba-day
+house," or "horse-hows," as it was variously called. It was a place of
+refuge in the winter time, at the noon interval between the two services,
+for the half-frozen members of the pious congregation, who found there the
+grateful warmth which the house of God denied. They built in the rude stone
+fireplace a great fire of logs, and in front of the blazing wood ate their
+noon-day meal of cold pie, of doughnuts, of pork and peas, or of brown
+bread with cheese, which they had brought safely packed in their capacious
+saddlebags. The dining-place smelt to heaven of horses, for often at the
+further end of the noon-house were stabled the patient steeds that, doubly
+burdened, had borne the Puritans and their wives to meeting; but this
+stable-odor did not hinder appetite, nor did the warm equine breaths that
+helped to temper the atmosphere of the noon-house offend the senses of the
+sturdy Puritans. From the blazing fire in this "life-saving station" the
+women replenished their little foot-stoves with fresh, hot coals, and thus
+helped to make endurable the icy rigor of the long afternoon service.
+
+If the winter Sabbath Day were specially severe, a "hired-man," or one of
+the grown sons of the family, was sent at an early hour to the noon-house
+in advance of the other church-attendants, and he started in the rough
+fireplace a fire for their welcome after their long, cold, morning ride;
+and before its cheerful blaze they thoroughly warmed themselves before
+entering the icy meeting-house. The embers were carefully covered over
+and left to start a second blaze at the nooning, covered again during the
+afternoon service, and kindled up still a third time to warm the chilled
+worshippers ere they started for their cold ride home in the winter
+twilight. And when the horses were saddled, or were harnessed and hitched
+into the great box-sleighs or "pungs," and when the good Puritans were well
+wrapped up, the dying coals were raked out for safety and the noon-house
+was left as quiet and as cold as the deserted meeting-house until the
+following Sabbath or Lecture day.
+
+If the meeting-house chanced to stand in the middle of the town (as was
+the universal custom in the earliest colonial days) of course a noon-house
+would be rarely built, for it would plainly not be needed. Nor was a
+"Sabba-day house" always seen in more lonely situations, if the sanctuary
+were placed near the substantial farm-house of a hospitable farmer; for to
+that friendly shelter the whole congregation would at noon-time repair and
+absorb to the fullest degree the welcome cider and warmth.
+
+In Lexington for many years after the Revolutionary War, the winter
+church-goers who came from any distance spent the nooning at the Dudley
+Tavern, where a roaring fire was built in the inn-parlor, and there the
+women and children ate their midday lunch. The men gathered in the bar-room
+and drank flip, and ate the tavern gingerbread and cheese, and talked over
+the horrors and glories of the war. In Haverhill, Derby, and many other
+towns, the school-house, which was built on the village green beside the
+church, was used for a noon-house by the church members, though not by
+their horses. The house of learning was never chimneyless and fireless, as
+was the house of God.
+
+As churches and towns multiplied, a meeting-house was often built to
+accommodate two little settlements or villages (and thus was convenient for
+neither), and was frequently placed in an isolated or inconvenient place,
+the top of a high hill being perhaps the most inconvenient and the most
+favored site. Thus a noon-house became an absolute necessity to Puritan
+health and existence, and often two or three were built near one
+meeting-house; while in some towns, as in Bristol, a whole row of
+disfiguring little "Sabba-day houses" stood on the meeting-house green,
+and in them the farmers (as they quaintly expressed in their petitions for
+permission to erect the buildings) "kept their duds and horses."
+
+In Derby, after several petitions had been granted to build noon-houses, it
+was found necessary, in 1764, to place some restrictions as to the location
+of the buildings, which had hitherto evidently been placed with the
+characteristically Puritanical indifference to general convenience or
+appearance. While the town still permitted the little log-huts to be
+erected, and though they could be placed on either side of the highway, it
+was ordered that the builders must not so locate them as to "incommode any
+highways." As early as 1690 the thoughtful Stonington people built a house
+"14 foot square and seven foot posts" with a chimney at one side, for the
+express purpose of having a place where their minister, Rev. Mr. Noyes,
+could thaw out between services. The New Canaan Church built on the green
+beside their meeting-house a fine "Society House," twenty-one feet long
+and sixteen feet wide, with a big chimney and fireplace. The horses were
+plainly "not in society" in New Canaan, for they were excluded from the
+occupancy and privileges of the Society House.
+
+"James June & all that lives at Larences" were allowed to build a
+"Sabbath-House" on the green near the New Britain meeting-house "as a
+Commodate for their conveniency of comeing to meeting on the Sabbath;" at
+the same time James Slason of the same village was given permission to "set
+yp a house for ye advantage of his having a place to go to" on the Sabbath.
+Frequently the petitions "to build a Sabbath Day House" or a "Housel for
+Shelter for Horss" were made in company by several farmers for their joint
+use and comfort, as shown by entries in the town and church records of
+Norwalk, New Milford, Durham, and Hartford.
+
+Noon-houses were much more frequent in Connecticut than in Massachusetts,
+and in several small towns in the former State they were used weekly
+between Sunday services until within the memory of persons now living;
+and some of the buildings still exist, though changed into granaries or
+stables. There was one also in use for many years and until recent years in
+Topsfield, in Massachusetts. We chanced upon one still standing on a lonely
+Narragansett road. A little enclosed burial-place, with moss-grown and
+weather-smoothed head-stones and neglected graves, was by the side of a
+filled-in cellar, upon which a church evidently had once stood. At a short
+distance from the church-site was a long, low, gray, weather-beaten wooden
+building, with a coarse stone-and-mortar chimney at one end, and a great
+door at the other. Two small windows, destitute of glass, permitted us
+to peer into the interior of this dilapidated old structure, and we saw
+within, a floor of beaten earth, a rough stone fireplace, and a few rude
+horse-stalls. We felt sure that this tumble-down building had been neither
+a dwelling-house nor a stable, but a noon-house; and the occupants of a
+neighboring farm-house confirmed our decision. Too worthless to destroy,
+too out of the way to be of any use to any person, that old noon-house,
+through neglect and isolation, has remained standing until to-day.
+
+It was not until the use of chaises and wagons became universal, and the
+new means of conveyance crowded out the old-fashioned saddle and pillion,
+and the trotting horse superseded the once fashionable but quickly despised
+pacer, that the great stretches of horse-sheds were built which now
+surround and disfigure all our country churches. These sheds protect,
+of course, both horse and carriage from wind and rain. Few churches had
+horse-sheds until after the War of the Revolution, and some not until after
+the War of 1812. In 1796 the Longmeadow Church had "liberty to erect a
+Horse House in the Meeting House Lane." This horse house was a horse-shed.
+
+The "wretched boys" were not permitted even in these noon-houses to talk,
+much less to "sporte and playe." In some parishes it was ordered by the
+minister and the deacons that the Bible should be read and expounded
+to them, or a sermon be read to keep them quiet during the nooning.
+Occasionally some old patriarch would explain to them the notes that he
+had taken during the morning sermon. More unbearable still, the boys were
+sometimes ordered to explain the notes which they had taken themselves. I
+would I had heard some of those explanations! Thus they literally, as was
+written in 1774, throve on the "Good Fare of Brown Bread and the Gospell."
+
+In Andover, Judge Phillips left in his will a silver flagon to the church
+as an expression of interest and hope that the "laudable practice of
+reading between services may be continued so long as even a small number
+shall be disposed to attend the exercise." Mr. Abbott left another silver
+flagon to the Andover Church to encourage reading between services; though
+how this piece of plate encouraged personally, since neither the deacons
+nor the boys got it as a prize, cannot be precisely understood. The
+noon-house in Andover was a large building with a great chimney and open
+fireplace at either end. It has always seemed to me a piece of gratuitous
+posthumous cruelty in Judge Phillips and Mr. Abbott to try to cheat those
+Andover boys of their noon-time rest and relaxation, and to expect them,
+wriggling and twisting with repressed vitality, to listen to a long extra
+sermon, read perhaps by some unskilled reader, or explained by some
+incapable expounder. The Sabbath-school did not then exist, and was not in
+general favor until the noon-houses had begun to disappear. The Reverend
+Jedediah Morse, father of the inventor of the electric telegraph, was
+almost the first New England clergyman who approved of Sabbath-schools and
+established them in his parish. In Salem they were opened in 1808, and the
+scholars came at half-past six on Sunday mornings. Fancy the chill and
+gloom of the unheated, ill-lighted churches at that hour on winter
+mornings. The "Salem Gazette" openly characterized Sunday-schools, when
+first suggested, as profanations of the Sabbath, and for years they were
+not allowed in many Congregational churches. When the Sabbath-schools
+were universally established, and thus the attention and interest of the
+children was gained during the noon interval (the time the schools were
+usually held in country churches), and when each family sat in its own pew,
+and thus the boys were separated, and each under his parents' guardianship,
+the "wretched boys" of the Puritan Sabbath disappeared, and well-behaved,
+quiet, orderly boys were seen instead in the New England churches.
+
+This fashion of sermon-reading at the nooning happily did not obtain in
+all parts of New England. In many villages the meetings in the society
+noon-houses were to the townspeople what a Sunday newspaper is to Sunday
+readers now-a-days, an advertisement and exposition of all the news of the
+past week, and also a suggestion of events to come. At noon they discussed
+and wondered at the announcements and publishings which were tacked on
+the door of the meeting-house or the notices that had been read from the
+pulpit. The men talked in loud voices of the points of the sermon, of the
+doctrines of predestination pedobaptism and antipedobaptism, of original
+sin, and that most fascinating mystery, the unpardonable sin, and in lower
+voices of wolf and bear killing, of the town-meeting, the taxes, the crops
+and cattle; and they examined with keen interest one another's horses,
+and many a sly bargain in horse-flesh or exchange of cows and pigs was
+suggested, bargained over, and clinched in the "Sabba'-day house." Many a
+piece of village electioneering was also discussed and "worked" between the
+services. The shivering women crowded around the blazing and welcome fire,
+and seated themselves on rude benches and log seats while they ate and
+exchanged doughnuts, slices of rusk, or pieces of "pumpkin and Indian mixt"
+pie, and also gave to each other receipts therefor; and they discoursed
+in low voices of their spinning and weaving, of their candle-dipping
+or candle-running, of their success or failure in that yearly trial of
+patience and skill--their soap-making, of their patterns in quilt-piecing,
+and sometimes they slyly exchanged quilt-patterns. A sentence in an old
+letter reads thus: "Anne Bradford gave to me last Sabbath in the Noon House
+a peecing of the Blazing Star; tis much Finer than the Irish Chain or the
+Twin Sisters. I want yelloe peeces for the first joins, small peeces will
+do. I will send some of my lilac flowered print for some peeces of Cicelys
+yelloe India bed vallants, new peeces not washed peeces." They gave one
+another medical advice and prescriptions of "roots and yarbs" for their
+"rheumatiz," "neuralgy," and "tissick;" and some took snuff together, while
+an ancient dame smoked a quiet pipe. And perhaps (since they were women as
+well as Puritans) they glanced with envy, admiration, or disapproval, or
+at any rate with close scrutiny, at one another's gowns and bonnets and
+cloaks, which the high-walled pews within the meeting-house had carefully
+concealed from any inquisitive, neighborly view.
+
+The wood for these beneficent noon-house fires was given by the farmers
+of the congregation, a load by each well-to-do land-owner, if it were a
+"society-house," and occasionally an apple-growing farmer gave a barrel of
+"cyder" to supply internal instead of external warmth. Cider sold in 1782
+for six shillings "Old Tenor" a barrel, so it was worth about the same
+as the wood both in money value and calorific qualities. A hundred years
+previously--in 1679--cider was worth ten shillings a barrel. In 1650, when
+first made in America, it was a costly luxury, selling for £4 4s. a barrel.
+That this thawed-out Sunday barrel of cider would prove invariably a source
+of much refreshment, inspiration, solace, tongue-loosing, and blood-warming
+to the chilled and shivering deacons, elders, and farmers who gathered in
+the noon-house, any one who has imbibed that all-potent and intoxicating
+beverage, oft-frozen "hard" cider, can fervently testify.
+
+Sometimes a very opulent farmer having built a noon-house for his own and
+his family's exclusive use, would keep in it as part of his "duds" a few
+simple cooking utensils in which his wife or daughters would re-heat or
+partially cook his noon-day Sabbath meal, and mix for him a hot toddy or
+punch, or a mug of that "most insinuating drink"--flip. Flip was made of
+home-brewed beer, sugar, and a liberal dash of Jamaica rum, and was mixed
+with a "logger-head"--a great iron "stirring-stick" which was heated in the
+fire until red hot and then thrust into the liquid. This seething iron made
+the flip boil and bubble and imparted to it a burnt, bitter taste which was
+its most attractive attribute. I doubt not that many a "loggerhead" was
+kept in New England noon-houses and left heating and gathering insinuating
+goodness in the glowing coals, while the pious owner sat freezing in the
+meeting-house, also gathering goodness, but internally keeping warm at the
+thought of the bitter nectar he should speedily brew and gladly imbibe at
+the close of the long service.
+
+The comfort of a hot midday dinner on the Sabbath was not regarded with
+much favor, though perhaps with secret envy, by the neighbors of the
+luxury-loving farmer, who saw in it too close an approach to "profanation
+of the Sabbath." The heating and boiling of the flip with the red hot
+"loggerhead" hardly came under the head of "unnecessary Sabbath cooking"
+even in the minds of the most straight-laced descendants of the Puritans.
+
+When stoves were placed and used in the New England meeting-houses, the
+noon-day lunches were eaten within the pews inside the sanctuary, and the
+noon-houses, no longer being needed, followed the law of cause and effect,
+and like many other institutions of the olden times quickly disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+The Deacon's Office.
+
+
+
+The deacons in the early New England churches had, besides their regular
+duties on the Lord's Day, and their special duties on communion Sabbaths,
+the charge of prudential concerns, and of providing for the poor of the
+church. They also "dispensed the word" on Sabbaths to the congregation
+during the absence of the ordained minister. Judge Sewall thus describes
+in his diary under the date of November, 1685, the method at that time of
+appointing or ordaining a deacon:--
+
+    "In afternoon Mr. Willard ordained our Brother Theophilus Frary to the
+    office of a Deacon. Declared his acceptance January 11th first
+    now again. Propounded him to the congregation at Noon. Then in even
+    propounded him if any of the church of other had to object they might
+    speak. Then took the Church's Vote, then call'd him up to the Pulpit,
+    laid his Hand on's head, and said I ordain Thee, etc., etc., gave him
+    his charge, then Prayed & sung 2nd Part of 84th Psalm."
+
+The deacons always sat near the pulpit in a pew, which was generally
+raised a foot or two above the level of the meeting-house floor, and which
+contained, usually, several high-backed chairs and a table or a broad
+swinging-shelf for use at the communion service. These venerable men were
+a group of awe-inspiring figures, who, next to the parson, received the
+respect of the community. In Bristol, Connecticut, the deacons wore
+starched white linen caps in the meeting-house to indicate their office,--a
+singular local custom. One of their duties in many communities was
+naturally to furnish the sacramental wines, and the money for the payment
+thereof was allowed to them from the church-rates, or was raised by special
+taxation. In Farmington, Connecticut, in 1669, each male inhabitant was
+ordered to pay a peck of wheat or one shilling to the deacons of the church
+to defray the expenses of the sacrament. In Groton church, in 1759, "4
+Coppers for every Sacrament for 1 year" was demanded from each communicant.
+In Springfield the "deacon's rate" was paid in "wampam,"--sixpence in
+"wampam" or a peck of Indian corn from each family in the town. This
+special tax was somewhat modified in case a man had no wife, or if he were
+not a church-member, but in the latter case he still had to pay some dues,
+though of course he could not take part in the communion service. In 1734
+the Milton church ordered the deacons to procure "good Canary Wine for
+the Communion Table." Abuses sometimes arose,--abominably poor wines were
+furnished, though full rates were paid for the purchase of wine of
+good quality; and in Newbury the man who was appointed to furnish the
+sacramental wines, sold, under that religious cover, wine and liquors at
+retail.
+
+The deacons also had charge of the vessels used in the communion service.
+These vessels were frequently stored, when not in use, under the pulpit in
+a little closet which opened into "the Ministers wives pue," and which was
+fabled to be at the disposal of the tithingmen and deacons for the darksome
+incarceration of unruly and Sabbath-breaking boys. The communion vessels
+were not always of valuable metal; John Cotton's first church had wooden
+chalices; the wealthier churches owned pieces of silver which had been
+given to them, one piece at a time, by members or friends of the church;
+but communion services of pewter were often seen.
+
+The church in Hanover, Massachusetts, bought a pewter service in 1728, and
+the record of the purchase still exists. It runs thus:--
+
+  3 Pewter Tankards marked C. T.    10 shillings.
+  5   "    Beakers    "    C. E.    6 sh. 6d. each.
+  2   "    Platters   "    C. P.    5 sh. each.
+  1   "    Basin for Baptisms.
+
+This pewter service is still owned by the Hanover church, a highly prized
+relic. Until 1753 the church in Andover used a pewter communion service,
+but when a silver service was given to it, the Andover church sent the
+vessels of baser metal to a sister church in Methuen. In Haverhill the will
+of a church-member named White gave to the church absolutely the pewter
+dishes which were used at the sacrament, and which had been his personal
+property. The "ffirst church" of Hartford had "one Puter fflagon, ffower
+pewter dishes, and a bason" left to it by the bequest of one of its
+members. When the Danvers church was burned in 1805, the pewter communion
+vessels were saved while the silver ones were either burnt or stolen. As
+pewter was, in the early days of New England, far from being a despised
+metal, and as pewter dishes and plates were seen on the tables of the
+wealthiest families, were left by will as precious possessions, were
+engraved with initials and stamped with coats of arms, and polished with
+as much care as were silver vessels, a communion service of pewter was
+doubtless felt to be a thoroughly satisfactory acquisition and appointment
+to a Puritan church.
+
+The deacons of course took charge of the church contributions. Lechford,
+in his "Plaine Dealing," thus describes the manner of giving in the Boston
+church in 1641:--
+
+    "Baptism being ended, follows the contribution, one of the deacons
+    saying, 'Brethren of the Congregation, now there is time left for
+    contribution, whereof as God has prospered you so freely offer.' The
+    Magistrates and chief gentlemen first, and then the Elders and all the
+    Congregation of them, and most of them that are not of the church, all
+    single persons, widows and women in absence of their husbands, came up
+    one after another one way, and bring their offering to the deacon at
+    his seat, and put it into a box of wood for the purpose, if it be money
+    or papers. If it be any other Chattel they set or lay it down before
+    the deacons; and so pass on another way to their seats again; which
+    money and goods the Deacons dispose towards the maintenance of the
+    Minister, and the poor of the Church, and the Churches occasions
+    without making account ordinarily."
+
+Lechford also said he saw a "faire gilt cup" given at the public
+contribution; and other gifts of value to the church and minister were
+often made. Libellous verses too were thrown into the contribution boxes,
+and warning and gloomy messages from the Quakers; and John Rogers,
+in derision of a pompous New London minister, threw in the insulting
+contribution of an old periwig. One Puritan goodwife, sternly unforgiving,
+never saw a contribution taken for proselyting the Indians without
+depositing in the contribution-box a number of leaden bullets, the only
+tokens she wished to see ever dispersed among the red men.
+
+Even our pious forefathers were not always quite honest in their church
+contributions, and had to be publicly warned, as the records show, that
+they must deposit "wampum without break or deforming spots," or "passable
+peage without breaches." The New Haven church was particularly tormented by
+canny Puritans who thus managed to dispose of their broken and worthless
+currency with apparent Christian generosity. In 1650 the New Haven "deacons
+informed the Court that the wampum which is putt into the Church Treasury
+is generally so bad that the Elders to whom they pay it cannot pay it
+away."
+
+In 1651, as the bad wampum was still paid in by the pious New Haven
+Puritans, it was ordered that "no money save silver or bills" be accepted
+by the deacons. After this order the deacons and elders found tremendous
+difficulty in getting any contributions at all, and many are the records of
+the actions and decisions of the church in regard to the perplexing matter.
+It should be said, in justice to the New Haven colonists, though they were
+the most opulent of the New England planters, save the wealthy settlers
+of Narragansett, that money of all kinds was scarce, and that the Indian
+money, wampum-peag, being made of a comparatively frail sea-shell, was more
+easily disfigured and broken than was metal coin; and that there was little
+transferable wealth in the community anyway, even in "Country Pay." The
+broken-wampum-giver of the seventeenth century, who contributed with intent
+to defraud and deceive the infant struggling church was the direct and
+lineal ancestor of the sanctimonious button-giver of nineteenth-century
+country churches.
+
+In Revolutionary times, after the divine service, special contributions
+were taken for the benefit of the Continental Army. In New England large
+quantities of valuable articles were thus collected. Not only money, but
+finger-rings, earrings, watches, and other jewelry, all kinds of male
+attire,--stockings, hats, coats, breeches, shoes,--produce and groceries of
+all kinds, were brought to the meeting-house to give to the soldiers. Even
+the leaden weights were taken out of the window-sashes, made into bullets,
+and brought to meeting. On one occasion Madam Faith Trumbull rose up in
+Lebanon meeting-house in Connecticut, when a collection was being made for
+the army, took from her shoulders a magnificent scarlet cloak, which had
+been a present to her from Count Rochambeau, the commander-in-chief of the
+French allied army, and advancing to the altar, gave it as her offering to
+the gallant men, who were fighting not only the British army, but terrible
+want and suffering. The fine cloak was cut into narrow strips and used as
+red trimmings for the uniforms of the soldiers. The romantic impressiveness
+of Madam Trumbull's patriotic act kindled warm enthusiasm in the
+congregation, and an enormous collection was taken, packed carefully, and
+sent to the army.
+
+One early duty of the deacons which was religiously and severely performed
+was to watch that no one but an accepted communicant should partake of the
+holy sacrament. One stern old Puritan, having been officially expelled from
+church-membership for some temporal rather than spiritual offence, though
+ignored by the all-powerful deacon, still refused to consider himself
+excommunicated, and calmly and doggedly attended the communion service
+bearing his own wine and bread, and in the solitude of his own pew communed
+with God, if not with his fellow-men. For nearly twenty years did this
+austere man rigidly go through this lonely and sad ceremonial, until he
+conquered by sheer obstinacy and determination, and was again admitted to
+church-fellowship.
+
+A very extraordinary custom prevailed in several New England churches.
+Through it the deacons were assigned a strange and serious duty which
+appeared to make them all-important and possibly self-important, and
+which must have weighed heavily upon them, were they truly godly, and
+conscientious in the performance of it. In the rocky little town of Pelham
+in the heart of Massachusetts, toward the close of the eighteenth century
+and during the pastorate of the notorious thief, counterfeiter, and forger,
+Rev. Stephen Burroughs, that remarkable rogue organized and introduced to
+his parishioners the custom of giving during the month a metal check to
+each worthy and truly virtuous church-member, on presentation of which the
+check-bearer was entitled to partake of the communion, and without which he
+was temporarily excommunicated. The duty of the deacon in this matter was
+to walk up and down the aisles of the church at the close of each service
+and deliver to the proper persons (proper in the deacon's halting human
+judgment) the significant checks. The deacon had also to see that this
+religionistic ticket was presented on the communion Sabbath. Great must
+have been the disgrace of one who found himself checkless at the end of the
+month, and greater even than the heart-burnings over seating the meeting
+must have been the jealousies and church quarrels that arose over the
+communion-checks. And yet no records of the protests or complaints of
+indignant or grieving parishioners can be found, and the existence of
+the too worldly, too business-like custom is known to us only through
+tradition.
+
+Many of the little chips called "Presbyterian checks" are, however, still
+in existence. They are oblong discs of pewter, about an inch and a half
+long, bearing the initials "P. P.," which stand, it is said, for "Pelham
+Presbyterian." I could not but reflect, as I looked at the simple little
+stamped slips of metal, that in a community so successful in the difficult
+work of counterfeiting coin, it would have been very easy to form a mould
+and cast from it spurious checks with which to circumvent the deacons and
+preserve due dignity in the meeting.
+
+The Presbyterian checks have never been attributed in Massachusetts to
+other than the Pelham church, and are usually found in towns in the
+vicinity of Pelham; and there the story of their purpose and use is
+universally and implicitly believed. A clergyman of the Pelham church gave
+to many of his friends these Presbyterian checks, which he had found among
+the disused and valueless church-properties, and the little relics of the
+old-time deacons and services have been carefully preserved.
+
+In New Hampshire, however, a similar custom prevailed in the churches of
+Londonderry and the neighboring towns.. The Londonderry settlers were
+Scotch-Irish Presbyterians (and the Pelham planters were an off-shoot of
+the Londonderry settlement), and they followed the custom of the Scotch
+Presbyterians in convening the churches twice a year to partake of the
+Lord's Supper. This assembly was always held in Londonderry, and ministers
+and congregations gathered from all the towns around. Preparatory services
+were held on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Long tables were placed in
+the aisles of the church on the Sabbath; and after a protracted and solemn
+address upon the deep meaning of the celebration and the duties of the
+church-members, the oldest members of the congregation were seated at the
+table and partook of the sacrament. Thin cakes of unleavened bread were
+specially prepared for this sacred service. Again and again were the tables
+refilled with communicants, for often seven hundred church-members were
+present. Thus the services were prolonged from early morning until
+nightfall. When so many were to partake of the Lord's Supper, it seemed
+necessary to take means to prevent any unworthy or improper person from
+presenting himself. Hence the tables were fenced off, and each communicant
+was obliged to present a "token." These tokens were similar to the
+"Presbyterian checks;" they were little strips of lead or pewter stamped
+with the initials "L. D.," which may have stood for "Londonderry" or
+"Lord's Day." They were presented during the year by the deacons and elders
+to worthy and pious church-members. This bi-annual celebration of the
+Lord's Supper--this gathering of old friends and neighbors from the rocky
+wilds of New Hampshire to join, in holy communion--was followed on Monday
+by cheerful thanksgiving and social intercourse, in which, as in every
+feast, our old friend, New England rum, played no unimportant part. The
+three days previous to the communion Sabbath were, however, solemnly
+devoted to the worship of God; a Londonderry man was reproved and
+prosecuted for spreading grain upon a Thursday preceding a communion
+Sunday, just as he would have been for doing similar work upon the Sabbath.
+The use of these "tokens" in the Londonderry church continued until the
+year 1830.
+
+In the coin collection of the American Antiquarian Society are little
+pewter communion-checks, or tokens, stamped with a heart. These were used
+in the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, and were delivered to pious
+church-members at the Friday evening prayer-meeting preceding the communion
+Sabbath. Long tables were set in the aisles, as at Londonderry. In
+practice, belief, and origin, the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania churches
+were sisters.
+
+The deacons had many minor duties to perform in the different parishes.
+Some of these duties they shared with the tithingman. They visited the
+homes of the church-members to hear the children say the catechism, they
+visited and prayed with the sick, and they also reported petty offences,
+though they were not accorded quite so powerful legal authority as the
+tithingmen and constables.
+
+It was much desired by several of the first-settled ministers that there
+should be deaconesses in the New England Puritan church, and many good
+reasons were given for making such appointments. It was believed that
+for the special duty of visiting the sick and afflicted in the community
+deaconesses would be more useful than deacons. There had been an aged
+deaconess in the Puritan church in Holland, who with a "little birchen
+rod" had kept the children in awe and order in meeting, and who had also
+exercised "her guifts" in speaking; but when she died no New England
+successor was appointed to fill her place.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims.
+
+
+We read in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," of the fair Priscilla, when
+John Alden came to woo her for his friend, the warlike little captain, that
+
+    "Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,
+    Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together; Rough-hewn,
+    angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and
+    overhung by the running vine of the verses. Such was the book from
+    whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem."
+
+One of these "well-worn psalm-books of Ainsworth" lies now before me,
+perhaps the very one from which the lonely Priscilla sang as she sat
+a-spinning.
+
+There is something especially dear to the lover and dreamer of the olden
+time, to the book-lover and antiquary as well, in an old, worn psalm or
+hymn book. It speaks quite as eloquently as does an old Bible of loving
+daily use, and adds the charm of interest in the quaint verse to reverence
+for the sacred word. A world of tender fancies springs into life as I turn
+over the pages of any old psalm-book "reading between the lines," and as
+I decipher the faded script on the titlepage. But this "psalm-book of
+Ainsworth," this book loved and used by the Pilgrims, brought over in one
+of those early ships, perhaps in the "Mayflower" itself, this book so
+symbolic of those early struggling days in New England, has a romance, a
+charm, an interest which thrills every drop of Puritan blood in my veins.
+
+It is pleasing, too, this "Ainsworth's Version," aside from any thought of
+its historic associations; its square pages of diversified type are well
+printed, and have a quaint unfamiliar look which is intensely attractive,
+and to which the odd, irregular notes of music, the curiously ornamented
+head and tail pieces, and the occasional Hebrew or Greek letters add their
+undefinable charm.
+
+It is a square quarto of three hundred and forty-eight closely printed
+pages, bound in time-stained but well-preserved parchment, and even the
+parchment itself is interesting, and lovely to the touch. The titlepage is
+missing, but I know that this is the edition printed, as was Priscilla's,
+in Amsterdam in 1612 (not "in England in 1600" as a note written in the
+last blank page states). The full title was "The Book of Psalms. Englished
+both in Prose and Metre. With annotations opening the words and sentences
+by conference with other Scriptures. Eph. v: 18,19. Bee yee filled with
+the Spirit speaking to yourselves in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual-Songs
+singing and making melodie in your hearts to the Lord." The book contains
+besides the Psalms and Annotations, on its first pages, a "Preface
+declaring the reason and use of the Book;" and at the last pages a "Table
+directing to some principal things observed in the Annotations of the
+Psalms," a list of "Hebrew phrases observed which are somewhat hard and
+figurative," and also some "General Observations touching the Psalms."
+
+I can well imagine what a pious delight this book was to our Pilgrim
+Fathers; and what a still greater delight it was to our Pilgrim Mothers,
+in that day and country of few books. They possessed in it, not only a
+wonderful new metrical version of the Psalms for singing, but a prose
+version for comparison as well; and the deeply learned and profoundly
+worded annotations placed at the end of each Psalm were doubtless of
+special interest to such "scripturists with all their hearts" as they were.
+
+There were also, "for the use and edification of the saints," printed above
+each psalm the airs of appropriate tunes. The "rough-hewn, angular notes"
+are irregularly lozenge-shaped, like the notes or "pricks" in Queen
+Elizabeth's "Virginal-Book," and are placed on the staff without bars.
+Ainsworth, in his preface, says, "Tunes for the Psalms I find none set of
+God: so that ech people is to use the most grave decent and comfortable
+manner that they know how, according to the general rule. The singing notes
+I have most taken from our Englished psalms when they will fit the mesure
+of the verse: and for the other long verses I have also taken (for the most
+part) the gravest and easiest tunes of the French and Dutch psalmes." Easy
+the tunes certainly are, to the utmost degree of simplicity.
+
+Great diversity too of type did the Pilgrims find in their Psalm-book:
+Roman type, Italics, black-letter, all were used; the verse was printed in
+Italics, the prose in Roman type, and the annotation in black-letter and
+small Roman text with close-spaced lines. This variety though picturesque
+makes the text rather difficult to read; for while one can decipher
+black-letter readily enough when reading whole pages of it, when it is
+interspersed with other type it makes the print somewhat confusing to the
+unaccustomed eye.
+
+One curious characteristic of the typography is the frequent use of the
+hyphen, compound words or rather compound phrases being formed apparently
+without English rule or reason. Such combinations as these are given as
+instances: "highly-him-preferre," "renowned-name," "repose-me-quietlie,"
+"in-mind-uplay," "turn-to-ashes," "my-alonely-soul," "beat-them-final,"
+"pouring-out-them-hard," "inveyers-mak-streight," and "condemn-thou-them-
+as-guilty,"--which certainly would make fit verses to be sung to the
+accompaniment of Master Mace's "excellent-large-plump-lusty-fullspeaking-
+organ."
+
+Ainsworth's Version when read proves to be a scholarly book, exhibiting far
+better grammar and punctuation and more uniformity of spelling than "The
+New England Psalm-book," which at a later date displaced Ainsworth in the
+affections and religious services of the New England Puritans and Pilgrims.
+Both versions are somewhat confused in sense, and of uncouth and grotesque
+versification; though the metre of Ainsworth is better than the rhyme. It
+is all written in "common metre," nearly all in lines of eight and six
+syllables alternately.
+
+The name of the author of this version was Henry Ainsworth; he was the
+greatest of all the Holland Separatists, a typical Elizabethan Puritan,
+who left the church in which he was educated and attached himself to the
+Separatists, or Brownists, as they were called. He went into exile in
+Amsterdam in 1593, and worked for some time as a porter in a book-seller's
+shop, living (as Roger Williams wrote) "upon ninepence in the weeke with
+roots boyled." He established, with the Reverend Mr. Johnson, the new
+church in Holland; and when it was divided by dissension, he became the
+pastor of the "Ainsworthian Brownists" and so remained for twelve years.
+He was a most accomplished scholar, and was called the "rabbi of his age."
+Governor Bradford, in his "Dialogue," written in 1648, says of Ainsworth,
+"He had not his better for the Hebrew tongue in the University nor scarce
+in Europe." Hence, naturally, he was constantly engaged upon some work of
+translating or commentating, and still so highly prized is some of his work
+that it has been reprinted during this century. He also, being a skilful
+disputant, wrote innumerable controversial pamphlets and books, many
+of which still exist. It is said that he once had a long and spirited
+controversy with a brother divine as to whether the ephod of Aaron were
+blue or green. I fear we of to-day have lost much that the final, decisive
+judgment from so learned scholars and students as to the correct color has
+not descended to us, and now, if we wish to know, we shall have to fight it
+all over again.
+
+In spite of his power of argument (or perhaps on account of it) the most
+prominent part which Ainsworth seemed to take in Amsterdam for many years
+was that of peacemaker, as many of his contemporaries testify: for they
+quarrelled fiercely among themselves in the exiled church, though they
+had such sore need of unity and good fellowship; and they had many church
+arguments and judgments and lawsuits. They quarrelled over the exercise of
+power in the church; over the true meaning of the text Matthew xviii. 17;
+whether the members of the congregation should be allowed to look on their
+Bibles during the preaching or on their Psalm-books during the singing;
+whether they should sing at all in their meetings; over the power of the
+office of ruling elder (a fruitful source of dissension and disruption in
+the New England congregations likewise) and above all, they quarrelled long
+and bitterly over the unseemly and gay dress of the parson's wife, Madam
+Johnson. These were the terrible accusations that were brought against that
+bedizened Puritan: that she wore "her bodies tied to the petticote with
+points as men do their doublets and hose; contrary to I Thess. v: 22,
+conferred with Deut. xx: 11;" that she also wore "lawn coives," and
+"busks," and "whalebones in the petticote bodies," and a "veluet hoode,"
+and a "long white brest;" and that she "stood gazing bracing and vaunting
+in the shop dores;" and that "men called her a bounceing girl" (as if
+she could help that!). And one of her worst and most bitterly condemned
+offences was that she wore "a topish hat." This her husband vehemently
+denied; and long discussions and explanations followed on the hat's
+topishness,--"Mr. Ainsworth dilating much upon a greeke worde" (as of
+course so learned a man would). For the benefit of unlearned modern
+children of the Puritans let me give the old Puritan's precise explanation
+and classification of topishness. "Though veluet in its nature were not
+topish, yet if common mariners should weare such it would be a sign of
+pride and topishness in them. Also a gilded raper and a feather are not
+topish in their nature, neither in a captain to weare them, and yet if a
+minister should weare them they would be signs of great vanity topishness
+and lightness." I wonder that topish hat had not undone the whole Puritan
+church in Holland.
+
+In settling all these and many other disputes, in translating,
+commentating, and versifying, did Henry Ainsworth pass his days; until,
+worn out by hard labor, and succumbing to long continued weakness, he died
+in 1623. This romantic story of his death is told by Neal. "It was sudden
+and not without suspicion of violence; for it is reported that, having
+found a diamond of very great value in the streets of Amsterdam, he
+advertised it in print; and when the owner, who was a Jew, came to demand
+it, he offered him any acknowledgment he would desire, but Ainsworth though
+poor would accept of nothing but conference with some of his rabbis upon
+the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the Messiah, which the
+other promised, but not having interest enough to obtain it he was
+poisoned." This rather ambiguous sentence means that Ainsworth was
+poisoned, not the Jew. Brooks's account of the story is that the conference
+took place, the Jews were vanquished, and in revenge poisoned the champion
+of Christianity afterwards. Dexter most unromantically throws cold water on
+this poisoning story, and adduces much circumstantial testimony to prove
+its improbability; but it could hardly have been invented in cold blood by
+the Puritan historians, and must have had some foundation in truth. And
+since he is dead, and the thought cannot harm him, I may acknowledge that I
+firmly believe and I like to believe that he died in so romantic a way.
+
+The Puritans were psalm-singers ever; and in Holland the Brownist division
+of the church came under strong influences from Geneva and Wittenberg, the
+birth-places of psalm-singing, that made them doubly fond of "worship in
+song." Hence the Pilgrim Fathers, Brewster, Bradford, Carver, and Standish,
+for love of music as well as in affectionate testimony to their old pastor
+and friend, brought to the New World copies of his version of the Psalms
+and sang from it with delight and profit to themselves, if not with ease
+and elegance.
+
+Dexter says very mildly of Ainsworth's literary work that "there are
+diversities of gifts, and it is no offence to his memory to conclude that
+he shone more as an exegete than as a poet." Poesy is a gift of the gods
+and cometh not from deep Hebrew study nor from vast learning, and we must
+accept Ainsworth's pious enthusiasm in the place of poetic fervor. Of the
+quality of his work, however, it is best to judge for one's self. Here is
+his rendition of the Nineteenth Psalm, so well known to us in verse by
+Addison's glorious "The spacious firmament on high." The prose version is
+printed in one column and the verse by its side.
+
+    1. To the Mayster of the Musik: A Psalm of David
+
+    2. The heavens, doo tel the glory of God: and the out-spred firmament
+    shevveth; the work of his hand.
+
+    3. Day unto day uttereth speech: and night unto night manifesteth
+    knowledge:
+
+    4. No speech, and no words: not heard is their voice
+
+    5. Through all the earth, gone-forth is their line: and unto the
+    utmost-end of the world their speakings: he hath put a tent in them for
+    the sun.
+
+    6. And he; as a bridegroom, going-forth out of his privy-chamber:
+    joyes as a mighty-man to run a race
+
+    7. From the utmost end of the heavens is his egress; and his
+    compassing-regress is unto the utmost-ends of them: and none _is_
+    hidd, from his heat.
+
+    2. The heav'ne, doo tel the glory of God and his firmament dooth
+    preach.
+
+    3. work of his hands. Day unto day dooth largely-utter speach and night
+    unto night dooth knowledge shew
+
+    4. No speach, and words are none.
+
+    5. thier voice it-is not heard. Thier line through all the earth is
+    gone: and to the worlds end, thier speakings: in them he did dispose,
+
+    6. tent for the Sun. Who-bride-groom-like out of his chamber goes:
+    joyes strong-man-like, to run a race
+
+    7. From heav'ns end, his egress: and his regress to the end of them
+    hidd from his heat, none is:
+
+In order to show the proportion of annotation in the book, and to indicate
+the mental traits of the author, let me state that this psalm, in both
+prose and metrical versions, occupies about one page; while the closely
+printed annotations fill over three pages; which is hardly "explaining with
+brevitie," as Ainsworth says in his preface. With this psalm the notes
+commence thus:--
+
+"2. (the out-spred-firmament) the whole cope of heaven, with the aier which
+though it be soft and liquid and spred over the Earth, yet it is fast and
+firm and therefore called of us according to the common Greek version a
+firmament: the holy Ghost expresseth it by another term Mid-heaven.
+This out-spred-firmament of expansion God made amidds the waters for a
+separation and named it Heaven, which of David is said to be stretched out
+as courtayn and elsewhere is said to be as firm as moulten glass. So under
+this name firmament be commised the orbs of the heav'ns and the aier and
+the whole spacious country above the earth."
+
+These annotations must have formed to the Pilgrims not only a dictionary
+but a perfect encyclopædia of useful knowledge. Things spiritual and things
+temporal were explained therein. Scientific, historic, and religious
+information were dispensed impartially. Much and varied instruction was
+given in Natural History, though viewed of course from a strictly religious
+point of view. The little Pilgrims learned from their Psalm-Book that the
+"Leviathan is the great whalefish or seadragon, so called of the fast
+joyning together of his scales as he is described Job 40: 20, 41 and
+is used to resemble great tyrants." They also learned that "Lions of
+sundry-kinds have sundry-names. Tear-in-pieces like a lion. That he ravin
+not, make-a-prey; called a plueker Renter or Tearer, and elsewhere Laby
+that is, Harty and couragious; Kphir, this lurking, Couchant. The reason
+of thier names is shewed, as The renting-lion as greedy to tear, and the
+lurking-Lion as biding in covert places. Other names are also given to this
+kind as Shachal, of ramping, of fierce nature; and Lajith of subduing his
+prey. Psalm LVI Lions called here Lebain, harty, stowt couragious, Lions.
+Lions are mentioned in the Scriptures for the stowtness of thier hart,
+boldnes, and grimnes of thier countenance."
+
+Here are other annotations taken at hap-hazard. The lines,
+
+  "Al they that doo upon me look
+    a scoff at me doe make
+  they with the lip do make-a-mow
+    the head they scornful-shake,"
+
+Ainsworth thus explains: "Make-a-mow, making-an-opening with the lip
+which may be taken both for mowing and thrusting out of the lip and for
+licentious opening thereof to speak reproach." The expression "Keep thou me
+as the black of the apple of the eye" is thus annotated: "The black, that
+is, the sight in the midds of the eye wherein appeareth the resemblance of
+a little man, and thereupon seemeth to be called in Hebrew Ishon which is a
+man. And as that part is blackish so this word is also used for other black
+things as the blackness of night. The apple so we call that which the
+Hebrew here calleth bath and babath that is the babie or little image
+appearing in the eye." Anger receives this definition: "ire, outward in
+the face, grauue, grimnes or fiercenes of countenance. The original Aph
+signifieth both the nose by which one breatheth, and Anger which appeareth
+in the snuffing or breathing of the nose."
+
+Before the Holland exiles had this version of Ainsworth's to sing from,
+they used the book known as "Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms." They gave it
+up gladly to show honor to the work of their loved pastor, and perhaps also
+with a sense of pleasure in not having to sing any verses which had been
+used and authorized by the Church of England. In doing this they had to
+abandon, however, such spirited lines as Sternhold's--
+
+  "The earth did shake, for feare did quake
+    the hills their bases shook.
+  Removed they were, in place most fayre
+    at God's right fearfull looks.
+
+  "He rode on hye, and did soe flye
+    Upon the cherubins
+  He came in sight and made his flight
+    Upon the winges of windes."
+
+They sung instead,--
+
+  "And th' earth did shake and quake and styrred bee
+  grounds of the mount: & shook for wroth was hee
+  Smoke mounted, in his wrath, fyre did eat
+  out of his mouth: from it burned-with heat."
+
+Alas, poor Priscilla! how could she sing with ease or reverence such
+confused verses? The tune, too, set in the psalm-book seems absolutely
+unfitted to the metre. I fear when she sang from the pages "the old Puritan
+anthem" that she was forced to turn it into a chant, else the irregular
+lines could never have been brought within the compass of the melody; and
+yet, the metre is certainly better than the sense.
+
+It may be thought that these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for
+their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome
+that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the
+most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the
+reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot be hidden, even by
+the wording of the learned Puritan minister:--
+
+    1. Jehovah feedeth me: I shall not lack
+
+    2. In grassy fields, he downe dooth make me lye: he gently-leads mee,
+    quiet-Waters by.
+
+    3. He dooth return my soul: for his name-sake in paths of justice
+    leads-me-quietly.
+
+    4. Yea, though I walk in dale of deadly-shade ile fear none yll, for
+    with me thou wilt be thy rod, thy staff eke, they shall comfort mee.
+
+But few of these psalm-books of Ainsworth are now in existence; but few
+indeed came to New England. Elder Brewster owned one, as is shown by
+the inventory of the books in his library. Not every member of the
+congregation, not every family possessed one; many were too poor, many
+"lacked skill to read," and in some communities only one psalm-book was
+owned in the entire church. Hence arose the odious custom of "deaconing" or
+"lining" the psalm, by which each line was read separately by the deacon or
+elder and then sung by the congregation. There is no doubt, however,
+that this Ainsworth's Version was used in many of the early New England
+meetings. Reverend Thomas Symmes, in his "Joco-Serious Dialogue," printed
+in 1723, wrote: "Furthermore the Church of Plymouth made use of Ainsworths
+Version of the Psalms until the year 1692. For altho' our New England
+version of the Psalms was compiled by sundry hands and completed by
+President Dunster about the year 1640; yet that church did not use it, it
+seems, 'till two and fifty years after but stuck to Ainsworth; and until
+about 1682 their excellent custom was to sing without reading the lines."
+
+John Cotton's account of the Salem church written in 1760, says, "On June
+19, 1692, the pastor propounded to the church that seeing many of the
+psalms in Mr. Ainsworth's translation which had hitherto been sung in the
+congregation had such difficult tunes that none in the church could set,
+they would consider of some expedient that they might sing all the psalms.
+After some time of consideration on August 7 following, the church voted
+that when the tunes were difficult in the translation then used, they
+would make use of the New England psalm-book, long before received in
+the churches of the Massachusetts colony, not one brother opposing the
+conclusion. But finding it inconvenient to use two psalm-books, they at
+length, in June 1696 agreed wholly to lay aside Ainsworth and with general
+consent introduced the other which is used to this day, 1760. And here it
+will be proper to observe that it was their practice until the beginning of
+October, 1681 to sing the psalms without reading the lines; but then, at
+the motion of a brother who otherwise could not join in the ordinance [I
+suppose because he could not read] they altered the custom, and reading
+was introduced, the elder performing that service after the pastor had
+first expounded the psalm, which were usually sung in course."
+
+On the blank leaf of the copy of Ainsworth now lying before me are written
+these words, "This was used in Salem half-a-century from the first
+settlement." In a record of the Salem church is this entry of a church
+meeting: "4 of 5th month, 1667. The pastor having formerly propounded
+and given reason for the use of the Bay Psalm Book in regard to the
+_difficulty of the tunes_ and that we could not sing them so well
+as formerly and _that there was a singularity in our using Ainsworths
+tunes_: but especially because we had not the liberty of singing all the
+scripture Psalms according to Col. iii. 16. He did not again propound the
+same, and after several brethren had spoken, there was at last a unanimous
+consent with respect to the last reason mentioned, that the Bay Psalm Book
+should be used together with Ainsworth to supply the defects of it."
+
+It is significant enough of the "low state of the musik in the meetings"
+when we find that the simple tunes written in Ainsworth's Version were too
+difficult for the colonists to sing. To such a condition had church-music
+been reduced by "lining the psalm" and by the lack of musical instruments
+to guide and control the singers. It was not much better in old England;
+for we find in the preface of Rous' Psalms (which were published in
+1643 and authorized to be used in the English Church) references to the
+"difficulty of Ainsworth's tunes."
+
+Hood says, "There is almost a certainty that no other version than
+Ainsworth was ever used in the colonies until the New England Version was
+published. But if any one was used in one or two of the churches it was
+Sternhold and Hopkins." I cannot feel convinced of this, but believe that
+both Ravenscroft's and Sternhold and Hopkins' Versions were used at first
+in many of the Bay settlements. Salem church had a peculiar connection in
+its origin with the church of Plymouth, which would account, doubtless,
+for its protracted use of the version so loved by the Pilgrims; but the
+Puritans of the Bay, coming directly from England, must have brought with
+them the version which they had used in England, that of Sternhold and
+Hopkins; and they would hardly have wished, nor would it have been possible
+for them to acquire speedily in the new land the Ainsworth's Version used
+by the Pilgrims from Holland.
+
+The second edition of Ainsworth's Version was printed in 1617, a third
+in 1618; the fourth, in London in 1639, was a folio; and the sixth, in
+Amsterdam in 1644, was an octavo. A little 24mo copy is in the Essex
+Institute in Salem, and an octavo is in the Prince Library, now in the
+custody of the Public Library of the City of Boston. The latter copy has
+a note in it written by the Rev. Thomas Prince: "Plymouth, May 1, 1732. I
+have seen an edition of this version of 1618; and this version was sung
+in Plymouth Colony and I suppose in the rest of New England 'till the New
+England Version was printed."
+
+There is a copy of the first edition of Ainsworth in the Bodleian Library
+and one in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The American Antiquarian
+Society and the Lenox Library are the only public libraries in America that
+possess copies, so far as I know. The one in the library of the American
+Antiquarian Society was presented to it in 1815 by the Rev. William Bentley
+of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom also belonged the copy of the Bay Psalm
+Book now in the library at Worcester. He was a divine and a bibliophile and
+an antiquary, but there also ran in his veins blood of warmer flow. During
+the war of 1812, when the report came, in meeting-time, that the frigate
+"Constitution" was being chased into Marblehead harbor, the loyal parson
+Bentley locked up his church, and tucked up his gown, and sallied forth
+with his whole flock of parishioners to march to Marblehead with the
+soldiers, ready to "fight unto death" if necessary. Being short and fat,
+and the mercury standing at eighty-five degrees, the doctor's physical
+strength gave out, and he had to be hoisted up astride a cannon to ride to
+the scene of conflict,--martial in spirit though weak in the legs.
+
+But this association with the old book is comparatively of our own day; and
+the most pleasing fancy which the "psalm-book of Ainsworth" brings to my
+mind, the most sacred and reverenced thought, is of a far more remote, a
+more peaceful and quiet scene; though men of warlike blood and fighting
+stock were there present and took part therein. It is with that Sabbath Day
+before the Landing at Plymouth which was spent by the Pilgrims, as Mather
+says, "in the devout and pious exercises of a sacred rest." And though
+Matthew Arnold thought that the Mayflower voyagers would have been
+intolerable company for Shakespeare and Virgil, yet in that quiet day of
+devout prayer and praise they show a calm religious peace and trust that
+is, perhaps, the highest spiritual type of "sweetness and light." And from
+this quaint old book their lips found words and music to express in song
+their pure and holy faith.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The Bay Psalm-Book.
+
+
+
+It seems most proper that the first book printed in New England should be
+now its rarest one, and such is the case. It was also meet that the first
+book published by the Puritan theocracy should be a psalm-book. This New
+England psalm-book, being printed by the colony at Massachusetts Bay, is
+familiarly known as "The Bay Psalm-Book," and was published two hundred
+and fifty years ago with this wording on the titlepage: "The Whole Book of
+Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre. Whereunto is prefixed a
+discourse declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the
+Heavenly Ordinance of Singing Psalmes in the Churches of God.
+
+"Coll. III. Let the word of God dwell plenteously in you in all wisdome,
+teaching, and exhorting one another in Psalmes, Himnes, and spirituall
+Songs, singing to the Lord with grace in your hearts.
+
+"James V. If any be afflicted, let him pray; and if any be merry let him
+sing psalmes. Imprinted 1640."
+
+The words "For the Use, Edification, and Comfort of the Saints in Publick
+and Private especially in New England," though given in Thomas's "History
+of Printing," Lowndes's "Bibliographers Manual," Hood's "History of Music
+in New England," and many reliable books of reference, as part of the
+correct title, were in fact not printed upon the titlepage of this first
+edition, but appeared on subsequent ones. Mr. Thomas, at the time he wrote
+his history, knew of but one copy of the first edition; "an entire copy
+except the title-page is now in the possession of rev. mr. Bentley of
+Salem." The titlepage being missing, he probably fell into the error of
+copying the title of a later edition, and other cataloguers and manualists
+have blindly followed him.
+
+There were in 1638 thirty ministers in New England, all men of intelligence
+and education; and to three of them, Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John
+Eliot was entrusted the literary part of the pious work. They managed to
+produce one of the greatest literary curiosities in existence. The book
+was printed in the house of President Dunster of Harvard College upon a
+"printery," or printing-press, which had cost £50, and was the gift of
+friends in Holland to the new community in 1638, the name-year of Harvard
+College. Governor Winthrop in his journal tells us that the first sheet
+printed on this press was the Freeman's Oath, certainly a characteristic
+production; the second an almanac for New England, and the third, "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." Some, who deem an almanac a book, call this psalm-book the
+second book printed in British America.
+
+A printer named Steeven Daye was brought over from England to do the
+printing on this new press. Now Steeven must have been given entire charge
+of the matter, and could not have been a very literate fellow (as we
+know positively he was a most reprehensible one), or the three reverend
+versifiers must have been most uncommonly careless proof-readers, for
+certainly a worse piece of printer's work than "The Bay Psalm Book" could
+hardly have been struck off. Diversity and grotesqueness of spelling were
+of course to be expected, and paper might have been coarse without reproof,
+in that new and poor country; but the type was good and clear, the paper
+strong and firm, and with ordinary care a very presentable book might have
+been issued. The punctuation was horrible. A few commas and periods and
+a larger number of colons were "pepered and salted" _à la_ Timothy
+Dexter, apparently quite by chance, among the words. Periods were placed
+in the middle of sentences; words of one syllable were divided by hyphens;
+capitals and italics were used after the fashion of the time, apparently
+quite at random; and inverted letters were common enough. The pages were
+unnumbered, and on every left-hand page the word "Psalm" in the title was
+spelled correctly, while on the right-hand page it is uniformly spelled
+"Psalme." But after all, these typographical blemishes might be forgiven if
+the substance, the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification
+was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the
+sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with
+the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical
+construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct.
+Such amazing verses as these may be found:--
+
+  "And sayd He would not them waste: had not
+  Moses stood (whom He chose)
+  'fore him i' th' breach; to turne his wrath
+  lest that he should waste those."
+
+Cotton Mather, in his "Magnalia," gives thus the full story of the
+production of "The Bay Psalm-book":--
+
+    "About the year 1639, the New-English reformers, considering that their
+    churches enjoyed the other ordinances of Heaven in their scriptural
+    purity were willing that the 'The singing of Psalms' should be restored
+    among them unto a share of that _purity_. Though they blessed God
+    for the religious endeavours of them who translated the Psalms into the
+    _meetre _usually annexed at the end of the Bible, yet they beheld
+    in the translation so many _detractions _from, _additions
+    _to, and _variations _of, not only the text, but the very
+    _sense _of the psalmist, that it was an offense unto them.
+    Resolving then upon a new translation, the chief divines in the country
+    took each of them a portion to be translated; among whom were Mr. Welds
+    and Mr. Eliot of Eoxbury, and Mr. Mather of Dorchester. These like the
+    rest were so very different a _genius_ for their poetry that Mr.
+    Shephard, of Cambridge, on the occasion addressed them to this purpose:
+
+      You Roxb'ry poets keep clear of the crime
+      Of missing to give us very good rhime.
+      And you of Dorchester, your verses lengthen
+      And with the text's own words, you will them strengthen.
+
+    The Psalms thus turned into _meetre_ were printed at Cambridge, in
+    the year 1640. But afterwards it was thought that a little more of art
+    was to be employed upon them; and for that cause they were committed
+    unto Mr. Dunster, who revised and refined this translation; and (with
+    some assistance from Mr. Richard Lyon who being sent over by Sir Henry
+    Mildmay as an attendant unto his, son, then a student at Harvard
+    College, now resided in Mr. Dunster's house:) he brought it
+    the condition wherein our churches have since used it. Now though
+    I heartily join with those gentlemen who wish that the _poetry_
+    thereof were mended, yet I must confess, that the Psalms have never
+    yet seen a _translation_ that I know of nearer to the Hebrew
+    original; and I am willing to receive the excuse which our translators
+    themselves do offer us when they say: 'If the verses are not always so
+    elegant as some desire or expect, let them consider that God's
+    altar needs not our pollishings; we have respected rather a plain
+    translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any
+    paraphrase. We have attended conscience rather than elegance, fidelity
+    rather than ingenuity, that so we may sing in Zion the Lord's songs of
+    praise, according unto his own will, until he bid us enter into our
+    Master's joy to sing eternal hallelujahs.'"
+
+I have never liked Cotton Mather so well as after reading this calm
+and kindly account of the production of "The Bay-Psalm-Book." He was a
+scholarly man, and doubtless felt keenly and groaned inwardly at the
+inelegance, the appalling and unscholarly errors in the New England
+version; and yet all he mildly said was that "it was thought that a little
+more of art was to be employed upon them," and that he "wishes the poetry
+hereof was mended." Such justice, such self-repression, such fairness
+make me almost forgive him for riding around the scaffold on which his
+fellow-clergyman was being executed for witchcraft, and urging the crowd
+not to listen to the poor martyr's dying words. I can even almost overlook
+the mysterious fables, the outrageous yarns which he imposed upon us under
+the guise of history.
+
+The three reverend versifiers who turned out such questionable poetry are
+known to have been writers of clear, scholarly, and vigorous prose. They
+were all graduated at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the nursery of Puritans.
+Mr. Welde soon returned to England and published there two intelligent
+tracts vindicating the purity of the New England worship. Richard Mather
+was the general prose-scribe for the community; he drafted the "Cambridge
+Platform" and other important papers, and was clear and scholarly enough
+in all his work _except_ the "Bay Psalm-Book." From his pen came the
+tedious, prolix preface to the work; and the first draft of it in his own
+handwriting is preserved in the Prince Library. The other co-worker was
+John Eliot, that glory of New England Puritanism, the apostle to the
+Indians. His name heads my list of the saints of the Puritan calendar; but
+I confess that when I consider his work in "The Bay Psalm-Book," I have
+sad misgivings lest the hymns which he wrote and published in the Indian
+language may not have proved to the poor Massachusetts Indians all that our
+loving and venerating fancy has painted them. It is said also that Francis
+Quarles, the Puritan author of "Divine Emblems," sent across the Atlantic
+some of his metrical versions of the psalms as a pious contribution to the
+new version of the new church in the new land.
+
+The "little more of art" which was bestowed by the improving President
+Dunster left the psalms still improvable, as may be seen by opening at
+random at any page of the revised editions. Mr. Lyon conferred also upon
+the New England church the inestimable boon of a number of hymns or
+"Scripture-Songs placed in order as in the Bible." They were printed in
+that order from the third until at least the sixteenth edition, but in
+subsequent editions the hymns were all placed at the end of the book after
+the psalms. I doubt not that the Puritan youth, debarred of merry catches
+and roundelays, found keen delight in these rather astonishing renditions
+of the songs of Solomon, portions of Isaiah, etc. Those Scripture-Songs
+should be read quite through to be fully appreciated, as no modern
+Christian could be full enough of grace to sing them. Here is a portion of
+the song of Deborah and Barak:--
+
+  24. Jael the Kenite Hebers wife
+  'bove women blest shall be:
+  Above the women in the tent
+  a blessed one is she.
+  25. He water ask'd: she gave him milk
+  him butter forth she fetch'd
+  26. In lordly dish: then to the nail
+  she forth her left hand stretched.
+
+  Her right the workman's hammer held
+  and Sisera struck dead:
+  She pierced and struck his temple through
+  and then smote off his head.
+  27. He at her feet bow'd, fell, lay down
+  he at her feet bow'd, where
+  He fell: ev'n where he bowed down
+  he fell destroyed there.
+
+  28. Out of a window Sisera
+  his mother looked and said
+  The lattess through in coming why
+  so long his chariot staid?
+  His chariot wheels why tarry they?
+  29.   her wise dames, answered
+  Yea she turned answer to herself
+  30.   and what have they not sped?
+
+  31. The prey by poll; a maid or twain
+  what parted have not they?
+  Have they not parted, Sisera,
+  a party-colour'd prey
+  A party-colour'd neildwork prey
+  of neildwork on each side
+  That's party-colour'd meet for necks
+  of them that spoils divide?
+
+Our Pilgrim Fathers accepted these absurd, tautological verses gladly, and
+sang them gratefully; but we know the spirit of poesy could never have
+existed in them, else they would have fought hard against abandoning such
+majestic psalms as Sternhold's--
+
+  "The Lord descended from above
+    and bow'd the heavens hye
+  And underneath his feete he cast
+    the darkness of the skye.
+
+  "On cherubs and on cherubines
+    full royally he road
+  And on the winges of all the windes
+    came flying all abroad."
+
+They gave up these lines of simple grandeur, to which they were accustomed,
+for such wretched verses as these of the New England version:--
+
+  9.  Likewise the heavens he downe-bow'd and he descended, & there was
+      under his feet a gloomy cloud
+  10. And he on cherub rode and flew; yea, he flew on the wings of winde.
+  11. His secret place hee darkness made his covert that him round confide.
+
+I cannot understand why they did not sing the psalms of David just as
+they were printed in the English Bible; it would certainly be quite as
+practicable as to sing this latter selection.
+
+President Dunster's improving hand and brain evolved this rendition:--
+
+  "Likewise the heavens he down-bow'd
+    and he descended: also there
+  Was at his feet a gloomy cloud
+    and he on cherubs rode apace.
+  Yea on the wings of wind he flew
+    he darkness made his secret place
+  His covert round about him drew."
+
+Though the grotesque wording and droll errors of these old psalm-books can,
+after the lapse of centuries, be pointed out and must be smiled at, there
+is after all something so pathetic in the thought of those good, scholarly
+old New England saints, hampered by poverty, in dread of attack of Indians,
+burdened with hard work, harassed by "eighty-two pestilent heresies," still
+laboring faithfully and diligently in their strange new home at their
+unsuited work,--something so pathetic, so grand, so truly Christian, that
+when I point out any of the absurdities or failures in their work, I dread
+lest the shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather, of Eliot, brand me as of
+old, "in capitall letters," as "AN OPEN AND OBSTINATE CONTEMNER OF GOD'S
+HOLY ORDINANCES," or worse still, with that mysterious, that dread name, "A
+WANTON GOSPELLER."
+
+The second edition of the "New England Psalm-Book" was published in 1647;
+the one copy known to exist has sold for four hundred and thirty-five
+dollars. The third edition was the one revised by President Dunster and
+Mr. Lyon, and was printed in 1650. In 1691 the unfortunate book was again
+"pollished" by a committee of ministers, who thus altered the last two
+stanzas of the Song of Deborah and Barak:--
+
+  28. Out of a window Sisera
+        His mother look'd and said
+      The lattess through in coming why
+        So long's chariot staid?
+      His chariot-wheels why tarry they?
+        Her ladies wise reply'd
+  29. Yea to herself the answer made,
+  30.     Have they not speed? she cry'd.
+
+  31. The prey to each a maid or twain
+        Divided have not they?
+      To Sisera have they not shar'd
+        A divers-colour'd prey?
+      Of divers-colour'd needle-work
+        Wrought curious on each side
+      Of various colours meet for necks
+        Of those who spoils divide?
+
+Rev. Elias Nason wittily says of "The Bay Psalm-Book," "Welde, Eliot, and
+Mather mounted the restive steed Pegasus, Hebrew psalter in hand, and
+trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical
+psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and slashing,
+mending and patching, twisting and turning, finally produced what must ever
+remain the most unique specimen of poetical tinkering in our literature."
+
+Other editions quickly followed these "pollishings" until, in 1709, sixteen
+had been printed. Mr. Hood stated that at least seventy editions in all
+were brought out. Some of these were printed in England and Scotland, in
+exceedingly fine and illegible print, and were intended to be bound up with
+the Bible; and occasionally duodecimo Bibles were sent from Scotland to
+New England with "The Bay Psalm-Book" bound at the back part of the book.
+Strange as it may seem, the poor, halting New England version was used in
+some of the English dissenting congregations and Scotch kirks, instead of
+the smoother verses composed in England for the English churches.
+
+The Reverend Thomas Prince, after two years of careful work thereon,
+published in 1758 a revised edition of the much-published book, and it was
+adopted by his church, the Old South, of Boston, the week previous to his
+death. It was used by his congregation until 1786. He clung closely to the
+form of the old editions, changing only an occasional word. In his preface
+Dr. Prince says that "The Bay Psalm-Book" "had the honor of being the
+first book printed in North America, and as far as I can find, in this
+New World." We have fuller means of information now-a-days than had the
+reverend reviser, and we know that as early as 1535 a book called "The
+Book of St. John Climacus or The Spiritual Ladder" had been printed in the
+Spanish tongue, in Mexico; and no less than one hundred and sixteen other
+Spanish works in the sixteenth century, as the "Bibliografia Mexicana"
+testifies.
+
+If the printing of all these various editions was poor, and the diction
+worse, the binding certainly was good and could be copied in modern times
+to much advantage. No flimsy cloth or pasteboard covers, no weak paper
+backs, no ill-pasted leaves, no sham-work of any kind was given; securely
+sewed, firmly glued, with covers of good strong leather, parchment, kid, or
+calfskin, these psalm-books endured constant _daily_ (not weekly) use
+for years, for decades, for a century, and are still whole and firm.
+They were carried about in pockets, in saddle-bags, and were opened, and
+handled, and conned, as often as were the Puritan Bibles, and they bore the
+usage well. They were distinctively characteristic of the unornamental,
+sternly pious, eminently honest, and sturdily useful race that produced
+them.
+
+Judge Sewall makes frequent mention in his famous diary of "the New Psalm
+Book." He bought one "bound neatly in Kids Leather" for "3 shillings &
+sixpence" and gave it to a widow whom he was wooing. Rather a serious
+lover's gift, but characteristic of the giver, and not so gloomy as
+"Dr. Mathers Vials of Wrath," "Dr. Sibbs Bowels," "Dr. Preston's Church
+Carriage," and "Dr. Williard's Fountains opened," all of which he likewise
+presented to her.
+
+The Judge frequently gave a copy as a bridal gift, after singing from it
+"Myrrh aloes," to the gloomy tune of Windsor, at the wedding.
+
+  8. Myrrh Aloes and Cussias _smell_
+       all of thy garments _had_
+     Out of the yvory pallaces
+       whereby they made thee glad:
+
+  9. Amongst thine honourable maids
+       kings daughters present were
+     The Queen is set at thy right hand
+       in fine gold of Ophir.
+
+But his most frequent mention of the "new psalm-book" is in his "Humbell
+acknowledgement" made to God of the "great comfort and merciful kindness
+received through singing of His Psalmes;" and the pages of the diary bear
+ample testimony that whatever the book may appear to us now, it was to the
+early colonists the very Word of God.
+
+As years passed on, however, and singing-schools multiplied, it became much
+desired, and even imperative that there should be a better style and manner
+of singing, and open dissatisfaction arose with "The Bay Psalm-Book;" the
+younger members of the congregations wished to adopt the new and smoother
+versions of Tate and Brady, and of Watts. Petitions were frequently made in
+the churches to abolish the century-used book. Here is an opening sentence
+of one church-letter which is still in existence; it was presented to the
+ministers and elders of the Roxbury church September 11th, 1737, and was
+signed by many of the church members:--
+
+"The New England Version of Psalms however useful it may formerly have
+been, has now become through the natural variableness of Language, not only
+very uncouth but in many Places unintelligible; whereby the mind instead
+of being Raised and spirited in Singing The Praises of Almighty God and
+thereby being prepared to Attend to other Parts of Divine Service is Damped
+and made Spiritless in the Performance of the Duty at least such is the
+Tendency of the use of that Version," etc., etc.
+
+Great controversy arose over the abolition of the accustomed book, and
+church-quarrels were rife; but the end of the century saw the dearly loved
+old version consigned to desuetude, uever again to be opened, alas! but by
+critical or inquisitive readers.
+
+There is owned by the American Antiquarian Society, and kept carefully
+locked in the iron safe in the building of that Society in Worcester, a
+copy of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm Book." It is a quarto (not
+octavo, as Thomas described it in his "History of Printing") and is in very
+good condition, save that the titlepage is missing. It is in the original
+light-colored, time-stained parchment binding, and contains the autograph
+of Stephen Sewall. It also bears on the inside of the front cover the
+book-plate of Isaiah Thomas, and at the back, in the veteran printer's
+clear and beautiful handwriting, this statement: "After advertising for
+another copy of this book and making enquiry in many places in New England
+&c. I was not able to obtain or even hear of another. This copy is
+therefore invaluable and must be preserved with the greatest care. Isaiah
+Thomas, Sep. 20. 1820." His "History of Printing," was published in 1810,
+and the Society had acquired through the gift of "the rev. mr. Bentley" the
+copy which Thomas mentioned in his book.
+
+It is strange that Thomas should have been ignorant of the existence of
+other copies of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm-Book," for there were
+at that time six copies belonging to the Prince Library in the possession
+of the Old South Church of Boston. One would fancy that the Prince Library
+would have been one of his first objective points of search, save that a
+dense cloud of indifference had overshadowed that collection for so long
+a time. Five of those copies remained in the custody of the deacons and
+pastor of the Old South Church until 1860, and they were at one time all
+deposited in the Public Library of the City of Boston. Two still remain in
+that suitable place of deposit; they are almost complete in paging, but are
+in modern bindings. The other three copies were surrendered by Lieut-Gov.
+Samuel Armstrong (who, as one of the deacons of the Old South Church,
+had joint custody of the Prince Library), severally, to Mr. Edward
+Crowninshield of Boston, Dr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff of Boston, and Mr.
+George Livermore of Cambridge. Governor Armstrong surrendered these three
+books in consideration of certain modern books being given to the Prince
+Library, and of the modern bindings bestowed on the two other copies; which
+seems to us hardly a brilliant or judicious exchange.
+
+In Dr. Shurtleff "The Bay Psalm-Book" found a congenial and loving owner;
+and under his careful superintendence an exact reprint was published in
+1862 in the Riverside Press at Cambridge. He wrote for it a preface. It was
+published by subscription; one copy on India paper, fifteen on thick paper,
+and fifty on common paper. Copies on the last named paper have sold readily
+for thirty dollars each. All the typographical errors of the original were
+carefully reproduced in this reprint.
+
+At Dr. Shurtleffs death, his "Bay Psalm-Book" was catalogued with the rest
+of his library, which was to be sold on Dec. 2, 1875; but an injunction was
+obtained by the deacons of the Old South Church, to prevent the sale of the
+old psalm-book. They were rather late in the day however, to try to obtain
+again the too easily parted with book, and the ownership of it was adjudged
+to the estate. The book was sold Oct. 12, 1876, at the Library salesroom,
+Beacon Street, Boston, for one thousand and fifty dollars. It is now in the
+library of Mrs. John Carter Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island. Special
+interest attaches to this copy, because it was "Richard Mather, His Book"
+as several autographs in it testify; and the author's own copy is always of
+extra value. Cotton Mather, a grandson of Richard, was the close friend of
+the Reverend Thomas Prince, who founded the Prince Library, and who left it
+by will to the Old South Church in 1758. Mr. Prince's book-plate is on the
+reverse of the titlepage of this copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book," and is in
+itself a rarity. It reads thus:--
+
+     "This Book belongs to
+      The New England Library
+  Begun to be collected by Thomas Prince
+  upon his ent'ring Harvard-College July 6
+  1703, and was given by said Prince, to
+      remain therein forever."
+
+There was a sixth copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book" in the Prince Library in
+1830 when Dr. Wisner wrote his four sermons on the Old South Church of
+Boston,--a copy annotated by Dr. Prince and used by him while he was
+engaged on his revision. It has disappeared, together with many other
+important books and manuscripts belonging to the same library. The
+vicissitudes through which this most valuable collection has passed--lying
+neglected for years on shelves, in boxes, and in barrels in the
+steeple-room of the Old South Church, depleted to use for lighting fires,
+injured by British soldiery, but injured still more by the neglect and
+indifference of its custodians--are too painful to contemplate or relate.
+They contribute to the scholarly standing and honor of neither pastors nor
+congregations during those years. It is enough to state, however, that it
+is to the noble and ill-requited forethought of Dr. Prince that we owe all
+but three of the copies of the Bay Psalm-Book which are now known to be in
+existence.
+
+There is also a perfect copy of the first edition of the old book in the
+Lenox Library in New York, and the manner in which it was acquired (and
+also some further accounts of two of our old friends of the Prince Library,
+the acquisitions of Messrs. Crowninshield and Liverraore) is told so
+entertainingly by Henry Stevens, of Vermont, in his charming book,
+"Recollections of Mr. James Lenox" that it is best to quote his account in
+full:--
+
+    "For nearly ten years Mr. Lenox had entertained a longing de
+    to possess a perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book.' He gave me to
+    understand that if an opportunity occurred of securing a copy for him I
+    might go as far as one hundred guineas. Accordingly from 1847 till his
+    death, six years later, my good friend William Pickering and I put our
+    heads and book-hunting forces together to run down this rarity. The
+    only copy we knew of on this side the Atlantic was a spotless one in
+    the Bodleian Library, which had lain there unrecognized for ages, and
+    even in the printed catalogue of 1843 its title was recorded without
+    distinction among the common herd of Psalms in verse. I had handled it
+    several times with great reverence, and noted its many peculiar points,
+    but, as agreed with Mr. Pickering, without making any sign or imparting
+    any information to our good and obliging friend Dr. Bandinel, Bodley's
+    Librarian. We thought that when we had secured a copy for oursel
+    it would be time enough to acquaint the learned Doctor that he was
+    entertaining unawares this angel of the New World.
+
+    "Under these circumstances, therefore, only an experienced collector
+    can judge of my surprise and inward satisfaction, when on the 12
+    January, 1855, at Sotheby's, at one of the sales of Pickering's stock,
+    after untying parcel after parcel to see what I might chance to see,
+    and keeping ahead of the auctioneer, Mr. Wilkinson, on resolving to
+    prospect in one parcel more before he overtook me, my eye rested
+    an instant only on the long-lost Benjamin, clean and unspotted. I
+    instantly closed the parcel (which was described in the Catalogue as
+    Lot '531 Psalmes, other editions, 1630 to 1675 black letter, a parcel')
+    and tightened the string just as Alfred came to lay it on the table. A
+    cool-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing to the table behind Mr.
+    Lilly I quietly bid, in a perfectly natural tone, 'Sixpence,' and so
+    the bids went on increasing by sixpence until half a crown was reached,
+    and Mr. Lilly had loosened the string. Taking up this very volume he
+    turned to me and remarked that 'This looks a rare edition, Mr. Stevens,
+    don't you think so? I do not remember having seen it before,' and
+    raised the bid to five shillings. I replied that I had little doubt of
+    its rarity though comparatively a late edition of the Psalms,
+    at the same time gave Mr. Wilkinson a six-penny nod. Thenceforth a
+    'spirited competition' arose between Mr. Lilly and myself, until
+    finally the lot was knocked down to 'Stevens' for nineteen shillings. I
+    then called out with perhaps more energy than discretion, 'Delivered!'
+    On pocketing this volume, leaving the other seven to take the usual
+    course, Mr. Lilly and others inquired with some curiosity, 'What rarity
+    have you got now?' 'Oh, nothing,' said I, 'but the first English book
+    printed in America.' There was a pause in the sale, while all had a
+    good look at the little stranger. Some said jocularly, 'There has
+    evidently been a mistake; put up the lot again.' Mr. Stevens, with the
+    book again safely in his pocket, said, 'Nay, if Mr. Pickering, whose
+    cost mark of [3s] did not recognize the prize he had won, certainly the
+    cataloguer might be excused for throwing it away into the hands of the
+    right person to rescue, appreciate, and preserve it. I am now fully
+    rewarded for my long and silent hunt of seven years.'
+
+    "On reaching Morley's I eagerly collated the volume, and at first found
+    it right witli all the _usual_ signatures correct. The leaves were
+    not paged or folioed. But on further collation I missed sundry of the
+    Psalms, enough to fill four leaves. The puzzle was finally solved when
+    it was discovered that the inexperienced printer had marked the sheet
+    with the signature w after v, which is very unusual.
+
+    "This was a very disheartening disappointment, but I held my tongue,
+    and knowing that my old friend and correspondent, George Liverm
+    of Cambridge, N. E., possessed an imperfect copy, which he and Mr.
+    Crowninshield, after the noble example of the 'Lincoln Nosegay,' had
+    won from the Committee of the 'Old South' together with another and
+    perfect copy, I proposed an advantageous exchange and obtained
+    four missing leaves. Mr. Crowninshield strongly advised Mr. Livermore
+    against parting with his four leaves, because, as he said, 'They would
+    enable Stevens to complete his copy and to place it in the library of
+    Mr. Lenox, who would then crow over us because he also had a perfect
+    copy of "The Bay-Psalm Book."'
+
+    "Having thus completed my copy and had it bound by Francis Bedford in
+    his best style, I sent it to Mr. Lenox for £80. Five years later I
+    bought the Crowninshield Library in Boston for $10,000, mainly to
+    obtain his perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book,' and brought the whole
+    library to London. This second copy, after being held several months,
+    was at the suggestion of Mr. Thomas Watts, offered to the British
+    Museum for £150. The Keeper of the Printed Books, however, never had
+    the courage to send it before the Trustees for approval and payment; so
+    after waiting five or six years longer the volume was withdrawn, bound
+    by Bedford, taken to America in 1868, and sold to Mr. George Brinley
+    for 150 guineas. At the Brinley sale, in March, 1878, it was bought by
+    Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for $1200, or more than three times the cost
+    of my first copy to Mr. Lenox."
+
+We hear the expression of a book being "worth its weight in gold." "The Bay
+Psalm-Book," in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society, weighs
+nine ounces, hence Mr. Vanderbilt paid at least seven times its weight in
+gold for his precious book. Lowndes's "Bibliographers' Manual" says, "This
+volume, which is extremely rare and would at an auction in America produce
+from four to six thousand dollars, is familiarly termed 'The Bay Psalm
+Book.'" This must have been intended to be printed four to six hundred
+dollars, and is about as correct as the remainder of the description in
+that manual.
+
+The copy which is spoken of by Mr. Stevens as being in the Bodleian Library
+at Oxford was once the property of Bishop Tanner, the famous antiquary.
+Thus it is seen that there are seven copies at least of the first edition
+of "The Bay Psalm-Book" now in existence in America, instead of "five or
+at the most six," as a recent writer in "The Magazine of American History"
+states.
+
+And of all the manifold later editions of the New England Psalm-Book
+comparatively few copies now remain. Occasionally one is discovered in an
+old church library or seen in the collection of an antiquary. It is usually
+found to bear on its titlepage the name of its early owner, and often,
+also, in a different handwriting, the simple record and date of his death.
+Tender little memorial postils are frequently written on the margins of
+the pages: "Sung this the day Betty was baptized"--"This Psalm was sung at
+Mothers Funeral" "Gods Grace help me to heed this word." Sometimes we see
+on the blank pages, in a fine, cramped handwriting, the record of the
+births and deaths of an entire family. More frequently still we find the
+familiar and hackneyed verses of ancient titlepage lore, such as are
+usually seen on the blank leaves of old Bibles. This script was written in
+a "Bay Psalm-Book" of the sixteenth edition, and with the characteristic
+indifference of our New England forefathers for tiresome repetition, or
+possibly with their disdain of novelty, was seen on each and every blank
+page of the book:--
+
+  "Israel Balch, His Book,
+  God give him Grace theirin to look
+  And when the Bell for him doth toal
+  May God have mearcy on his Sole."
+
+What the diction lacked in variety is quite made up, however, in the
+spelling, which was painstakingly different on each page.
+
+Another Psalm-Book bore, inscribed in an elegant, minute handwriting, these
+lines, which were probably intended for verse, since the first word of each
+line commenced with a capital letter:--
+
+  "Abednego Prime His Book
+  When he withein these pages looks
+  May he find Grace to sing therein
+  Seventeen hundred and forty-seven."
+
+This is certainly pretty bad poetry,--bad enough to be worthy a place in
+"The Bay Psalm Book,"--but is also a most noble, laudable, and necessary
+aspiration; for power of Grace was plainly needed to enable Abednego or any
+one else to sing from those pages; and our pious New England forefathers
+must have been under special covenant of grace when they persevered against
+such obstacles and under such overwhelming disadvantages in having singing
+in their meetings.
+
+Another copy of the old New England Psalm-Book was thus inscribed:--
+
+      "Elam Noyes His Book
+  You children of the name of Noyes
+  Make Jesus Christ your only choyse."
+
+The early members of the Noyes family all seemed to be exceedingly and
+properly proud of this rhyming couplet; it formed a sort of patent of
+nobility. They wrote the pious injunction to their descendants in their
+Psalm-Books and their Bibles, in their wills, their letters; and they,
+with the greatest unanimity of feeling, had it cut upon their several
+tombstones. It was their own family motto,--their totem, so to speak.
+
+In a New England Psalm-Book in the possession of the American Antiquarian
+Society there is written in the distinct handwriting of Isaiah Thomas these
+explanatory words:--
+
+"This was the Pocket Psalm-book of John Symmons who died at Salem at
+100 years. He was born at North Salem went a-fishing in his youth was a
+prisoner with the Indians in Nova Scotia afterwards followed his labours in
+a Shipyard and till great old age laboured upon his lands and died
+without pain Aet 100. 31 October, 1791. He was a worthy conscientious and
+well-informed man and agreeable until the last hour of his life."
+
+I can think of no pleasanter tribute to be given to the character of any
+one than the simple words, "He was agreeable until the last hour of his
+life." What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and
+enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present
+influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant
+study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet
+agreeability which so characterized John Symmons.
+
+There lies now before me a copy of one of the early editions of "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." As I open the little dingy octavo volume, with its worn
+and torn edges, I am conscious of that distinctive, penetrating,
+_old-booky_ smell,--that ancient, that fairly _obsolete_ odor that
+never is exhaled save from some old, infrequently opened, leather-bound
+volume, which has once in years far past been much used and handled. A book
+which has never been familiarly used and loved cannot have quite the same
+antique perfume. The mouldering, rusty, flaky leather comes off in a
+yellow-brown powder on my fingers as I take up the book; and the cover
+nearly breaks off as I open it, though with tender, book-loving usage. The
+leather, though strong and honest, has rotted or disintegrated until it has
+almost fallen into dust. Across the yellow, ill-printed pages there runs,
+zig-zagging sideways and backwards crab-fashion on his crooked brown legs,
+one of those pigmy book-spiders,--those ugly little bibliophiles that seem
+flatter even than the close-pressed pages that form their home.
+
+Fair Puritan hands once held this dingy little book, honest Puritan eyes
+studied its ill-expressed words, and sweet Puritan lips sang haltingly but
+lovingly from its pages. This was "Cicely Morse Her Book" in the year 1710,
+and bears on many a page her name and the simple little couplet:--
+
+  "In youth I praise
+  And walk thy ways."
+
+And pretty it were to see Cicely in her praiseful and godly-walking youth,
+as she stood primly clad in her sad-colored gown and long apron, with a
+quoif or ciffer covering her smooth hair, and a red whittle on her slender
+shoulders, a-singing in the old New England meeting-house through the
+long, tedious psalms, which were made longer and more tedious still by the
+drawling singing and the deacons' "lining." Truly that were a pretty sight
+for our eyes, and for other eyes than ours, without doubt. Staid Puritan
+youth may have glanced soberly across the old meeting-house at the fair
+girl as she sung the Song of Solomon, with its ardent wording, without any
+very deep thought of its symbolic meaning:--
+
+  "Let him with kisses of his mouth
+    be pleased me to kiss,
+  Because much better than the wine
+    thy loving-kindness is.
+  To troops of horse in Pharoahs coach,
+    my love, I thee compare,
+  Thy neck with chains, with jewels new,
+    thy cheeks full comely are.
+  Borders of gold with silver studs
+    for thee make up we will,
+  Whilst that the king at's table sits
+    my spikenard yields her smell.
+
+  Like as of myrrh a bundle is
+    my well-belov'd to be,
+  Through all the night betwixt my breasts
+    his lodging-place shall be;
+  My love as in Engedis vines
+    like camphire-bunch to me,
+  So fair, my love, thou fair thou art
+    thine eyes as doves eyes be."
+
+Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school--that
+safety-valve of young New England life--had not then been established or
+even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical
+love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old
+meeting-house at Cicely as she sung.
+
+But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book. She may
+have been stately and prosperous and seated in the dignified "foreseat;"
+she may have been feeble and infirm in her place in the "Deaf Pue;" and she
+may have been careworn and sad, tired of fighting against poverty, worn
+with dread of fierce Indians, weary of the howls of the wolves in the dense
+forests so near, and home-sick and longing for the yonderland, her "faire
+Englishe home;" but were she sad or careworn or heartsick, in her treasured
+psalm-book she found comfort,--comfort in the halting verses as well as
+in the noble thoughts of the Psalmist. And the glamour of eternal,
+sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the
+inscription in the old psalm-book,--
+
+  "In youth I praise
+  And walk thy ways,"--
+
+the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole
+New World was young.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms.
+
+
+
+The metrical translation of the Psalms known as Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was doubtless used in the public worship of God in many of the
+early New England settlements, especially those of the Connecticut River
+Valley, though the old register of the town of Ipswich is the only local
+record that gives positive proof of its use in the Puritan church. In
+1693 an edition of Sternhold and Hopkins was printed in Cambridge,
+Massachusetts. It was not a day nor a land where a whole edition of such a
+book would be printed for reference or comparison only; and to thus publish
+the work of the English psalmists in the very teeth of the popularity of
+"The Bay Psalm Book" is to me a proof that Sternhold and Hopkins' Version
+was employed far more extensively in the colonial churches and homes than
+we now have records of, and than many of our church historians now fancy.
+Certainly the familiar English psalm-books must have been brought across
+the ocean and used temporarily until the newly landed colonists could
+acquire the version of Ainsworth or of the New England divines.
+
+An everlasting interest attaches to this metrical arrangement of the
+Psalms, to Americans as well as to Englishmen, because it was the earliest
+to be adopted in public worship in England. According to Strype, in his
+Memorial, the singing of psalms was allowed in England as early as 1548,
+but it was not until 1562 that the versified psalms of Sternhold and
+Hopkins were appended to the Book of Common Prayer. Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was also the first to give all the psalms of David in English verse
+to the English public.
+
+Very little is known of the authors of this version. Sternhold was educated
+at Oxford; was Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., was a
+"bold and busy Calvinist," and died in 1549. The little of interest told
+of John Hopkins is that he was a minister and schoolmaster, and that he
+assisted the work of Sternhold.
+
+The full reason for Sternhold's pious work is thus given by an old English
+author, Wood: "Being a most zealous reformer and a very strict liver he
+became so scandalyzed at the loose amorous songs used in the court that he
+forsooth turned into English metre fifty-one of Davids Psalms, and caused
+musical notes to be set to them, thinking thereby that the courtiers
+would sing them instead of their sonnets; but they did not, only some few
+excepted." The preface printed in the book stated Sternhold's wish and
+intention that the verses should be sung by Englishmen, not only in church,
+but "moreover in private houses for their godly solace and comfort; laying
+apart all ungodly Songs & Ballads which tend only to the nourishment of
+vice & corrupting of youth."
+
+The first edition contained nineteen psalms only, which were all versified
+by Sternhold. It was published in 1548 or 1549, under this title, "Certayn
+Psalmes chosen out of the Psalter of Daid and drawen into English Metre by
+Thomas Sternhold Groom of ye Kynges Maiesties Roobes." I believe no copy of
+this edition is now known to exist.
+
+The praise which Sternhold received for his pious rhymes had the same
+effect upon him as did similar encomiums upon his predecessor, the French
+psalm-writer Marot,--it encouraged him to write more psalm-verses.
+
+The second edition was printed in 1549, and contained thirty-seven psalms
+by Sternhold and seven by Hopkins. It bore this title, "Al such Psalmes of
+David as Thomas Sternehold late grome of his maiesties robes did in his
+lyfe tyme drawe into English metre." It was a well-printed book and copies
+are still preserved in the British Museum and the Public Library of
+Cambridge, England. This second and enlarged edition was dedicated, in a
+four-page preface, to King Edward VI., and a pretty story is told of the
+young king's interest in the verses. The delicate and gentle boy of twelve
+heard Sternhold when "singing them to his organ" as Strype says, and
+wandered in to hear the music and listen to the words. So great was his
+awakened interest in the sacred songs that Sternhold resolved to write in
+verse for him still further of the psalms. The dedication reads: "Seeing
+that your tender and godly zeale dooth more delight in the holye songs of
+veritie than in any fayncd rymes of vanytie, I am encouraged to travayle
+further in the said booke of Psalmes." This young king restored to the
+English people the free reading of the Bible, which his wicked father,
+Henry VIII., had forbidden them, and he was of a sincerely religious
+nature. He also was a music-lover, and encouraged the art as much as his
+short life and troubled reign permitted.
+
+Hopkins also wrote a preface for his share of the work, in which he spoke
+with much modesty of himself and much praise of Sternhold. He said his own
+verses were not "in any parte to bee compared with his [Sternhold's] most
+exquisite dooynges." He thinks, however, that his owne are "fruitfull
+though they bee not fyne."
+
+The third edition, in 1556, contained fifty-one psalms; the fourth, in
+1560, had sixty-seven psalms; the fifth, in 1561, increased the number to
+eighty-seven; and in 1562 or 1563 the whole book of psalms appeared. Other
+authors had some share in this work: Norton, Whyttyngham (a Puritan divine
+who married Calvin's sister), Kethe, who wrote the 100th Psalm, "All people
+that on earth do dwell," which is still seen in some of our hymn-books. Of
+all these men, sly old Thomas Fuller truthfully and quaintly said, "They
+were men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more
+of Jordan than of Helicon."
+
+For over one hundred years from the first publication there was a steady
+outpour of editions of these Psalms. Before the year 1600 there were
+seventy-four editions,--a most astonishing number for the times; and from
+1600 to 1700 two hundred and thirty-five editions. In 1868 six hundred and
+one editions were known, including twenty-one in this nineteenth century
+and doubtless there were still others uncatalogued and forgotten. Among
+other editions this version had in the time of Charles II. two in
+shorthand, one printed by "Thos. Cockerill at the Three Legs and Bible in
+the Poultry." Two copies of these editions are in the British Museum. They
+are tiny little 64mos, of which half a dozen could be laid side by side on
+the palm of the hand. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version had also in 1694 the
+honor of having arranged for it a Concordance.
+
+Upon no production of the religious Muse in the English tongue has greater
+diversity of criticism been displayed or more extraordinary or varied
+judgment been rendered than upon Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. A world of
+testimony could be adduced to fortify any view which one chose to take
+of them. At the time of their early publication they induced a swarm of
+stinging lampoons and sneering comments, that often evince most plainly
+that a difference in religious belief or scorn for an opposing sect brought
+them forth. The poetry of that and the succeeding century abounds in
+allusions to them. Phillips wrote:--
+
+      "Singing with woful noise
+  Like a crack'd saints bell jarring in the steeple,
+  Tom Sternhold's wretched prick-song for the people."
+
+Another poet, a courtier, wrote:--
+
+  "Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms
+  When they translated David's psalms."
+
+But I see no signs of qualmishness; they show to me rather a healthy
+sturdiness as one of their strongest characteristics.
+
+Pope at a later day wrote:--
+
+  "Not but there are who merit other palms
+    Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms.
+  The boys and girls whom charity maintains
+    Implore your help in these pathetic strains.
+  How could devotion touch the country pews
+    Unless the gods bestowed a proper muse."
+
+Wesley sneered at this version, saying, "When it is seasonable to sing
+praises to God we do it, not in the scandalous doggrel of Hopkins and
+Sternhold, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such
+as would provoke a _critic_ to turn _Christian_ rather than a
+_Christian_ to turn _critic_."
+
+The edition of 1562 was printed with the notes of melodies that were then
+called Church Tunes. They formed the basis of all future collections of
+psalm-music for over a century. They soon were published in harmony in four
+parts, "which may be sung to all musical instrumentes set forth for the
+encrease of vertue and abolyshing of other vayne and tryfling ballads." In
+1592 a very important collection of psalm-tunes was published to use with
+Sternhold and Hopkins' words. It is called "The Whole Booke of Psalmes:
+with their wonted tunes as they are sung in Churches composed into four
+parts." This book is noteworthy because in it the tunes are for the first
+time named after places, as is still the custom. The music contained square
+or oblong notes and also lozenge-shaped notes. The square note was a
+"semy-brave," the lozenge-shaped note was a "prycke" or a "mynymme," and
+"when there is a prycke by the square note, that prycke is half as much as
+the note that goeth before."
+
+Music at that time was said to be pricked, not printed,--the word being
+derived from the prick or dot which formed the head of the note. Any song
+which was printed in various parts was called a prick-song, to distinguish
+it from one sung extemporaneously or by ear. The word prick-song occurs not
+only in all the musical books, but in the literature of the time, and in
+Shakespeare. "Tom Sternhold's" songs were entitled to be called prick-songs
+because they had notes of music printed with them. Many of the tunes
+in this collection were taken from the Genevan Psalter and Luther's
+Psalm-Book, or from Marot and Beza's French Book of Psalms. Hence they were
+irreverently called "Genevan Jiggs," and "Beza's Ballets."
+
+There is much difference shown in the wording of these various editions of
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. The earlier ones were printed as Sternhold
+wrote them; but with the Genevan editions began great and astonishing
+alterations. Warton, who was no lover of Sternhold and Hopkins' verses,
+calling them "the disgrace of sacred poetry," said of these attempted
+improvements, with vehemence, that "many stanzas already too naked and weak
+like a plain old Gothic edifice stripped of its signatures of antiquity,
+have lost that little and almost only strength and support which they
+derived from ancient phrases." Other old critics thought that Sternhold,
+could he return to life, would hardly know his own verses.
+
+This is Sternhold's rendering of the Psalm in the edition of 1549:--
+
+  1.  The heavens & the fyrmamente
+        do wondersly declare
+      The glory of God omnipotent
+        his workes and what they are.
+
+  2.  Ech daye declareth by his course
+        an other daye to come
+      And By the night we know lykwise
+        a nightly course to run.
+
+  3.  There is no laguage tong or speche
+        where theyr sound is not heard,
+      In al the earth and coastes thereof
+        theyr knowledge is conferd.
+
+  4.  In them the lord made royally
+        a settle for the sunne
+      Where lyke a Gyant joyfully
+        he myght his iourney runne.
+
+  5.  And all the skye from ende to ende
+        he compast round about
+      No man can hyde hym from his heate
+        but he wll fynd hym out
+
+In order to show the liberties taken with the text we can compare with it
+the Genevan edition printed in 1556. The second verse of that presumptuous
+rendering reads,--
+
+  "The wonderous works of God appears
+    by every days success
+  The nyghts which likewise their race runne
+    the selfe same thinges expresse."
+
+The fourth,--
+
+  "In them the lorde made for the sunne
+    a place of great renoune
+  Who like a bridegrome rady-trimed
+    doth from his chamber come."
+
+The expression "rady-trimed," meaning close-shaven, is often instanced as
+one of the inelegancies of Sternhold, but he surely ought not to be held
+responsible for the "improvements" of the Genevan edition published after
+his death.
+
+The Genevan editors also invented and inserted an extra verse:--
+
+  "And as a valiant champion
+    who for to get a prize
+  With joye doth hast to take in hande
+    some noble enterprise."
+
+The fifth verse is thus altered:--
+
+  "And al the skye from ende to ende
+    he compasseth about,
+  Nothing can hyde it from his heate
+    but he wil finde it out."
+
+I cannot express the indignation with which I read these belittling and
+weakening alterations and interpolations; they are so unjust and
+so degrading to the reputation of Sternhold. It seems worse than
+forgery--worse than piracy; for instead of stealing from the defenceless
+dead poet, it foists upon him a spurious and degrading progeny; there is no
+word to express this tinkering libellous literary crime.
+
+Cromwell had a prime favorite among these psalms; it was the one hundred
+and ninth and is known as the "cursing psalm." Here are a few lines from
+it:--
+
+  "As he did cursing love, it shall
+    betide unto him so,
+  And as he did not blessing love
+    it shall be farre him fro,
+  As he with cursing clad himselfe
+    so it like water shall
+  Into his bowels and like oyl
+    Into his bones befall.
+  As garments let it be to him
+    to cover him for aye
+  And as a girdle wherewith he
+    may girded be alway."
+
+Another authority gives the "cursing psalm" as the nineteenth of King
+James's version; but there is nothing in "The heavens declare the glory of
+God," &c. to justify the nickname of "cursing."
+
+It is said when the tyrannical ruler Andros visited New Haven and attended
+church there that (Sternhold and Hopkins' Version being used) the fearless
+minister very inhospitably gave out the fifty-second psalm to be sung. The
+angry governor, who took it as a direct insult, had to listen to the lining
+and singing of these words, and I have no doubt they were roared out with a
+lusty will:--
+
+  1.  Why dost thou tyrant boast thyself
+        thy wicked deeds to praise
+      Dost thou not know there is a God
+        whose mercies last alwaies?
+
+  2.  Why doth thy mind yet still deuise
+        such wisked wiles to warp?
+      Thy tongue untrue, in forging lies
+        is like a razer sharp.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  4.  Thou dost delight in fraude & guilt
+        in mischief bloude and wrong:
+      Thy lips have learned the flattering stile
+        O false deceitful tongue.
+
+  5.  Therefore shall God for eye confounde
+        and pluck thee from thy place.
+      Thy seed and root from out the grounde
+        and so shall thee deface;
+
+  6.  The just when they behold thy fall
+        with feare will praise the Lord:
+      And in reproach of thee withall
+        cry out with one accord.
+
+When the unhappy King Charles fled from Oxford to a camp of troops he also
+was insulted by having the same psalm given out in his presence by the
+boorish chaplain of the troops. After the cruel words were ended the
+heartsick king rose and asked the soldiers to sing the fifty-sixth psalm.
+Whenever I read the beautiful and pathetic words, as peculiarly appropriate
+as if they had been written for that occasion only, I can see it all before
+me,--the great camp, the angry minister, the wretched but truly royal king;
+and I can hear the simple and noble song as it pours from the lips of
+hundreds of rude soldiers:
+
+  1.  Have mercy Lord on mee I pray
+        for man would mee devour.
+      He fighteth with me day by day
+        and troubleth me each hour.
+
+  2.  Mine enemies daily enterprise
+        to swallow mee outright
+      To fight against me many rise
+        O thou most high of might
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  5.  What things I either did or spake
+        they wrest them at thier wil:
+      And all the councel that they take
+        is how to work me il.
+
+  6.  They all consent themselves to hide
+        close watch for me to lay:
+      They spie my pathes, and snares have layd
+        to take my life away.
+
+  7.  Shall they thus scape on mischief set,
+        thou God on them wilt frowne:
+      For in his wrath he will not let
+        to throw whole kingdomes downe.
+
+It would perhaps be neither just nor conducive to proper judgment to gather
+only a florilege of noble verses from Sternhold and Hopkins' Version and
+point out none of the "weedy-trophies," the quaint and even uncouth lines
+which disfigure the work. We must, however, in considering and judging
+them, remember that many words and even phrases which at present
+seem rather ludicrous or undignified had, in the sixteenth century,
+significations which have now become obsolete, and which were then neither
+vulgar nor unpoetical. I also have been forced to take my selections from
+a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins printed in 1599, and bound up with a
+"Breeches Bible;" for I have access to no earlier edition. Sternhold
+and Hopkins themselves may not be in truth responsible for many of
+the crudities. Hopkins, in his rendition of the 12th verse of the
+seventy-fourth Psalm, thus addresses the Deity:--
+
+  "Why doost withdraw thy hand abacke
+    and hide it in thy lappe?
+  O pluck it out and bee not slacke
+    to give thy foes a rap."
+
+"Rap" may have meant a heavier, a mightier blow then than it does
+now-a-days.
+
+Here is another curious verse from the seventieth psalm,--
+
+  "Confounde them that apply
+    and seeke to make my shame
+  And at my harme doe laugh & crye
+    So So there goeth the game."
+
+The sixth verse of the fifty-eighth psalm is rendered thus:--
+
+  "O God breake thou thier teeth at once
+    within thier mouthes throughout;
+  The tuskes that in thier great jawbones
+    like Lions whelpes hang out."
+
+Another verse reads thus:--
+
+  "The earth did quake, the raine pourde down
+    Heard men great claps of thunder
+  And Mount Sinai shooke in such state
+    As it would cleeve in sunder."
+
+One verse of the thirty-fifth psalm reads thus:--
+
+  "The belly-gods and flattering traine
+    that all good things deride
+  At me doe grin with greate disdaine
+    and pluck thier mouths aside.
+  Lord when wilt thou amend this geare
+    why dost thou stay & pause?
+  O rid my soul, my onely deare,
+    out of these Lions clawes."
+
+The word tush occurs frequently and quaintly: "Tush I an sure to fail;"
+"Tush God forgetteth this."
+
+  "And with a blast doth puff against
+  such as would him correct
+  Tush Tush saith he I have no dread."
+
+Here are some of the curious expressions used:--
+
+  "Though gripes of grief and pangs full sore
+    shall lodge with us all night."
+
+  "For why their hearts were nothing lent
+    to Him nor to His trade."
+
+  "Our soul in God hath joy and game."
+
+  "They are so fed that even for fat
+    thier eyes oft-times out start."
+
+  "They grin they mow they nod thier heads."
+
+  "While they have war within thier hearts."
+    as butter are thier words."
+
+  "Divide them Lord & from them pul
+    thier devilish double-tongue."
+
+  "My silly soul uptake."
+
+  "And rained down Manna for them to eat
+    a food of mickle-wonder."
+
+  "For joy I have both gaped & breathed."
+
+But it is useless to multiply these selections, which, viewed individually,
+are certainly absurd and inelegant. They often indicate, however, the exact
+thought of the Psalmist, and are as well expressed as the desire to be
+literal as well as poetic will permit them to be. Sternhold's verses
+compare quite favorably, when looked at either as a whole or with regard to
+individual lines, with those of other poets of his day, for Chaucer was the
+only great poet who preceded him.
+
+I must acknowledge quite frankly in the face of critics of both this and
+the past century that I always read Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms with a
+delight, a satisfaction that I can hardly give reasons for. Many of the
+renderings, though unmelodious and uneven, have a rough vigor and a
+sweeping swing that is to me wonderfully impressive, far more so than many
+of the elegant and polished methods of modern versifiers. And they are so
+thoroughly antique, so devoid of any resemblance to modern poems, that I
+love them for their penetrating savor of the olden times; and they seem no
+more to be compared and contrasted with modern verses than should an old
+castle tower be compared with a fine new city house. We prefer the latter
+for a habitation, it is infinitely better in every way, but we can admire
+also the rough grandeur of the old ruin.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Other Old Psalm-Books.
+
+
+
+There are occasionally found in New England on the shelves of old
+libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old
+farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a
+pile of dusty books in a barrel,--there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered
+psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly
+used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed
+in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some
+colonist, in affectionate remembrance of the church of his youth, and sung
+from only with tender reminiscent longing in his own home. But when groups
+of settlers who were neighbors and friends in their old homes came to
+America and formed little segregated communities by themselves, there is no
+doubt that they sung for a time from the psalm-books that they brought with
+them.
+
+A rare copy is sometimes seen of Marot and Beza's French Psalm-book,
+brought to America doubtless by French Huguenot settlers, and used by them
+until (and perhaps after) the owners had learned the new tongue. Some of
+the Huguenots became members of the Puritan churches in America, others
+were Episcopalians. In Boston the Fancuils, Baudoins, Boutineaus,
+Sigourneys, and Johannots were all Huguenots, and attended the little brick
+church built on School Street in 1704, which was afterwards occupied by
+the Twelfth Congregational Society of Boston, and in 1788 became a Roman
+Catholic church.
+
+The pocket psalm-book of Gabriel Bernon, the builder of the old French Fort
+at Oxford, is one of Marot and Beza's Version, and is still preserved and
+owned by one of his descendants; other New England families of French
+lineage cherish as precious relics the French psalm-books of their Huguenot
+ancestors. There has been in France no such incessant production of new
+metrical versions of the psalms as in England. From the time of the
+publication of the first versified psalms in 1540, through nearly three
+centuries the psalm-book of all French Protestants has been that of Marot
+and Beza. This French version of the psalms is of special interest to all
+thoughtful students of the history of Protestantism, because it was the
+first metrical translation of the psalms ever sung and used by the people;
+and it was without doubt one of the most powerful influences that assisted
+in the religious awakening of the Reformation.
+
+Clement Marot was the "Valet of the Bed-chamber to King Francis I.," and
+was one of the greatest French poets of his time; in fact, he gave his
+name to a new school of poetry,--"Marotique." He had tried his hand at
+an immense variety of profane verse, he had written ballades, chansons,
+pastourelles, vers équivoques, eclogues, laments, complaints, epitaphs,
+chants-royals, blasons, contreblasons, dizains, huitains, envois; he had
+been, Warton says, "the inventor of the rondeau and the restorer of the
+madrigal;" and yet, in spite of his well-known ingenuity and versatility,
+it occasioned much surprise and even amusement when it was known that the
+gay poet had written psalm-songs and proposed to substitute them for the
+love-songs of the French court. I doubt if Marot thought very deeply of the
+religious influence of his new songs, in spite of Mr. Morley's belief in
+the versifier's serious intent. He was doubtless interested and perhaps
+somewhat infected by "Lutheranisme," though perhaps he was more of a
+free-thinker than a Protestant. He himself said of his faith:--
+
+              "I am not a Lutherist
+  Nor Zuinglian and less Anabaptist,
+  I am of God through his son Jesus Christ.
+  I am one who has many works devised
+  From which none could extract a single line
+  Opposing itself to the law divine."
+
+And again:--
+
+  "Luther did not come down from heaven for me
+  Luther was not nailed to the cross to be
+  My Saviour; for my sins to suffer shame,
+  And I was not baptized in Luther's name.
+  The name I was baptized in sounds so sweet
+  That at the sound of it, what we entreat
+  The Eternal Father gives."
+
+In the year 1540, at the instigation of King Francis, Marot presented a
+manuscript copy of his thirty new psalm-songs to Charles V., king of Spain,
+receiving therefor two hundred gold doubloons. Francis encouraged him by
+further gifts, and so praised his work that the author soon published the
+thirty in a book which he dedicated to the king; and to which he also
+prefixed a metrical address to the ladies of France, bidding these fair
+dames to place their
+
+    "doigts sur les espinettes
+  Pour dire sainctes chansonnettes."
+
+These "sainctes chansonnettes" became at once the rage; courtiers and
+princes, lords and ladies, ever ready for some new excitement, seized at
+once upon the novel psalm-songs, and having no special or serious music for
+them, cheerfully sang the sacred words to the ballad-tunes of the times,
+and to their gailliards and measures, without apparently any very deep
+thought of their religious meaning. Disraeli says that each of the royal
+family and each nobleman chose for his favorite song a psalm expressive of
+his own feeling or sentiments. The Dauphin, as became a brave huntsman,
+chose
+
+  "Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre,"
+
+  "As the hart panteth after the water-brook,"
+
+and he gayly and noisily sang it when he went to the chase. The Queen chose
+
+  "Ne vueilles pas, ô sire,
+  Me reprendre en ton ire."
+
+  "Rebuke me not in thine indignation."
+
+Antony, king of Navarre, sung
+
+  "Revenge moy prens la querelle,"
+
+  "Stand up, O Lord! to revenge my quarrel,"
+
+to the air of a dance of Poitou. Diane de Poictiers chose
+
+  "Du fond de ma pensée."
+
+  "From the depth of my heart."
+
+But when from interest in her psalm-song she wished to further read and
+study the Bible, she was warned from the danger with horror by the Cardinal
+of Lorraine. This religious awakening and inquiry was of course deprecated
+and dreaded by the Romish Church; to the Sorbonne all this rage for
+psalm-singing was alarming enough. What right had the people to sing God's
+word, "I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall be continually
+in my mouth"? The new psalm-songs were soon added to the list of "Heretical
+Books" forbidden by the Church, and Marot fled to Geneva in 1543. He had
+ere this been under ban of the Church, even under condemnation of death;
+had been proclaimed a heretic at all the cross-ways throughout the kingdom,
+and had been imprisoned. But he had been too good a poet and courtier to be
+lost, and the king had then interested himself and obtained the release of
+the versatile song writer. The fickle king abandoned for a second time the
+psalm versifier, who never again returned to France.
+
+The austere and far-seeing Calvin at once adopted Marot's version of the
+Psalms, now enlarged to the number of fifty, and added them to the Genevan
+Confession of Faith,--recommending however that they be sung with the grave
+and suitable strains written, for them by Guillaume Frane.
+
+The collection was completed with the assistance of Theodore Beza, the
+great theologian, and the demand for the books was so great that the
+printers could not supply them quickly enough. Ten thousand copies were
+sold at once,--a vast number for the times.
+
+But Marot was not happy in Geneva with Calvin and the Calvinists, as we can
+well understand. Beza, in his "History of the French Reformed Churches"
+said, "He (Marot) had always been bred up in a very bad school, and could
+not live in subjection to the reformation of the Gospel, and therefore
+went and spent the rest of his days in Piedmont, which was then in the
+possession of the king, where he lived in some security under the favor of
+the governor." He lived less than a year, however, dying in 1544.
+
+These psalms of Marot's passed through a great number and variety of
+editions. In addition to the Genevan publications, an immense number were
+printed in England. Nearly all the early editions were elegant books;
+carefully printed on rich paper, beautifully bound in rich moroccos and
+leathers, often emblazoned with gold on the covers, and with corners and
+clasps of precious metals,--they show the wealth and fashion of the owners.
+When, however, it came to be held an infallible sign of "Lutheranisme" to
+be a singer of psalms, simpler and cheaper bindings appear; hence the dress
+of the French Psalm-Book found in New England is often dull enough, but
+invariably firm and substantial.
+
+These psalms of Marot's are written in a great variety of song-measures,
+which seem scarcely as solemn and religious as the more dignified and even
+metres used by the early English writers. Some are graceful and smooth,
+however, and are canorous though never sonorous. They are pleasing to read
+with their quaint old spelling and lettering.
+
+In the old Sigourney psalm-book the nineteenth psalm was thus rendered:--
+
+  "Les cieux en chaque lieu
+  La puissance de Dieu
+    Racourent aux humains
+  Ce grand entour espars
+  Publie en toutes parts
+    L'ouvrage de ses mains.
+
+  "Iour apres iour coulant
+  Du Saigneur va parlant
+    Par longue experience.
+  La nuict suivant la nuict,
+  Nous presche et nous instruicst
+    De sa grád sapience"
+
+Another much-employed metre was this, of the hundred and thirty-third
+psalm:--
+
+  "Asais aux bors do ce superbe fleuve
+  Que de Babel les campagnes abreuve,
+  Nos tristes coeurs ne pensoient qu' à Sion.
+  Chacun, helas, dans cette affliction
+  Les yeux en pleurs la morte peinte au visage
+  Pendit sa harpe aux saules du rivage."
+
+A third and favorite metre was this:--
+
+  "Mais sa montagne est un sainct lieu:
+  Qui viendra done au mont de Dieu?
+    Qui est-ce qui là tiendra place?
+  Le homine de mains et coeur lavé,
+  En vanité non éslevé
+    Et qui n'a juré en fallace."
+
+Marot wrote in his preface to the psalms:--
+
+  "Thrice happy they who shall behold
+  And listen in that age of gold
+  As by the plough the laborer strays
+  And carman 'mid the public ways
+  And tradesman in his shop shall swell
+  The voice in psalm and canticle,
+  Sing to solace toil; again
+  From woods shall come a sweeter strain,
+  Shepherd and shepherdess shall vie
+  In many a tender Psalmody,
+  And the Creator's name prolong
+  As rock and stream return their song."
+
+Though these words seem prophetic, the gay and volatile Marot could never
+have foreseen what has proved one of the most curious facts in religious
+history,--that from the airy and unsubstantial seed sown by the French
+courtier in such a careless, thoughtless manner, would spring the
+great-spreading and deep-rooted tree of sacred song.
+
+Little volumes of the metrical rendering of the Psalms, known as "Tate and
+Brady's Version," are frequently found in New England. It was the first
+English collection of psalms containing any smoothly flowing verses. Many
+of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal
+renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were
+"tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were
+certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate.
+It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able
+to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too
+modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write
+an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel.
+Brady--equally modest--translated the Aeneid in rivalry of Dryden. "This
+translation," says Johnson, "when dragged into the world did not live long
+enough to cry."
+
+Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a
+stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's
+hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them
+we owe, however, these noble lines, which were written thus:--
+
+  "Be thou, O God, exalted High,
+  And as thy glory fills the Skie
+  So let it be on Earth displaid
+  Till thou art here as There obeyed."
+
+The hymn commencing,--
+
+  "My soul for help on God relies,
+    From him alone my safety flows,"
+
+is also of their composition.
+
+The first edition of these psalms was printed in 1696, and bore this
+title, "The Book of Psalms, a new version in metre fitted to the tunes used
+in Churches. By N. Tate and N. Brady." It was dedicated to King William,
+and though its use was permitted in English churches, it never supplanted
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version. In New England Tate and Brady's Psalms
+became more universally popular,--not, however, without fierce opposing
+struggles from the older church-members at giving up the venerated "Bay
+Psalm-Book."
+
+Another version of Psalms which is occasionally found in New England is
+known as "Patrick's Version." The title is "The Psalms of David in Metre
+Fitted to the Tunes used in Parish Churches by John Patrick, D.D. Precentor
+to the Charter House London." A curious feature of this octavo edition of
+1701, which I have, is, "An Explication of Some Words of less Common
+Use For the Benefit of the Common People." Here are a few of the
+"explications:"--
+
+  "Celebrate--Make renown'd.
+  Climes--Countries differing in length of days.
+  Detracting--Lessening one's credit.
+  Fluid--Yielding.
+  Infest--Annoy.
+  Theam--Matter of Discourse.
+  Uncessant--Never ceasing.
+  Stupemlious--Astonishing."
+
+Baxter said of Patrick, "His holy affection and harmony hath so far
+reconciled the Nonconformists that diverse of them use his Psalms in
+their congregation." I doubt if the version were used in New England
+Nonconformist congregations. Some of his verses read thus:--
+
+  "Lord hear the pray'rs and mournfull cries
+    Of mine afflicted estate,
+  And with thy Comforts chear my soul,
+    Before it is too late.
+
+  "My days consume away like Smoak
+    Mine anguish is so great,
+  My bones are not unlike a hearth
+    Parched & dry with heat.
+
+  "Such is my grief I little else
+    Can do but sigh and groan.
+  So wasted is my flesh I'm left
+    Nothing but skin and bone.
+
+  "Like th' Owl and Pelican that dwell
+    In desarts out of sight,
+  I sadly do bemoan myself,
+    In solitude delight.
+
+  "The wakeful bird that on Housetops
+    Sits without company
+  And spends the night in mournful cries
+    Leads such a life as I.
+
+  "The Ashes I rowl in when I eat
+    Are tasted with my bread,
+  And with my Drink are mixed the tears
+    I plentifully shed."
+
+A version of the Psalms which seems to have demanded and deserved more
+attention than it received was written by Cotton Mather. He was doomed to
+disappointment in seeing his version adopted by the New England churches
+just as his ambitions and hopes were disappointed in many other ways. This
+book was published in 1718. It was called "Psalterium Americanum. A Book
+of Psalms in a translation exactly conformed unto the Original; but all
+in blank verse. Fitted unto the tunes commonly used in the Church." By a
+curious arrangement of brackets and the use of two kinds of print these
+psalms could be divided into two separate metres and could be sung to
+tunes of either long or short metre. After each psalm were introduced
+explanations written in Mather's characteristic manner,--a manner both
+scholarly and bombastic. I have read the "Psalterium Americanum" with care,
+and am impressed with its elegance, finish, and dignity. It is so popular,
+however, even now-a-days, to jibe at poor Cotton Mather, that his Psalter
+does not escape the thrusts of laughing critics. Mr. Glass, the English
+critic, holds up these lines as "one of the rich things:"--
+
+  "As the Hart makes a panting cry
+    For cooling streams of water,
+  So my soul makes a panting cry
+    For thee--O Mighty God."
+
+I have read these lines over and over again, and fail to see anything very
+ludicrous in them, though they might be slightly altered to advantage.
+Still they may be very absurd and laughable from an English point of view.
+
+So superior was Cotton Mather's version to the miserable verses given in
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" that one wonders it was not eagerly accepted by the
+New England churches. Doubtless they preferred rhyme--even the atrocious
+rhyme of "The Bay Psalm Book." And the fact that the "Psalterium
+Americanum" contained no musical notes or directions also militated against
+its use.
+
+Other American clergymen prepared metrical versions of the psalms that were
+much loved and loudly sung by the respective congregations of the writers.
+The work of those worthy, painstaking saints we will neither quote nor
+criticise,--saying only of each reverend versifier, "Truly, I would
+the gods had made thee poetical." Rev. John Barnard, who preached for
+fifty-four years in Marblehead, published at the age of seventy years a
+psalm-book for his people. Though it appeared in 1752, a time when "The Bay
+Psalm Book" was being shoved out of the New England churches, Barnard's
+Version of the Psalms was never used outside of Marblehead. Rev. Abijah
+Davis published another book of psalms in which he copied whole pages from
+Watts without a word of thanks or of due credit, which was apparently
+neither Christian, clerical nor manly behavior.
+
+Watts's monosyllabic Hymns, which were not universally used in America
+until after the Revolution, are too well known and are still too frequently
+seen to need more than mention. Within the last century a flood of new
+books of psalms of varying merit and existence has poured out upon the New
+England churches, and filled the church libraries and church, pews, the
+second-hand book shops, the missionary boxes, and the paper-mills.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+The Church Music.
+
+
+
+Of all the dismal accompaniments of public worship in the early days of New
+England, the music was the most hopelessly forlorn,--not alone from the
+confused versifications of the Psalms which were used, but from the
+mournful monotony of the few known tunes and the horrible manner in which
+those tunes were sung. It was not much better in old England. In 1676
+Master Mace wrote of the singing in English churches, "'T is sad to
+hear what whining, toling, yelling or shreaking there is in our country
+congregations."
+
+A few feeble efforts were made in America at the beginning of the
+eighteenth century to attempt to guide the singing. The edition of 1698 of
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" had "Some few Directions" regarding the singing added
+on the last pages of the book, and simple enough they were in matter if not
+in form. They commence, "_First_, observe how many note-compass the
+tune is next the place of your first note, and how many notes above and
+below that so as you may begin the tune of your first note, as the rest may
+be sung in the compass of your and the peoples voices without Squeaking
+above or Grumbling below."
+
+This "Squeaking above and Grumbling below" had become far too frequent in
+the churches; Judge Sewall writes often with much self-reproach of his
+failure in "setting the tune," and also records with pride when he "set the
+psalm well." Here is his pathetic record of one of his mistakes: "He spake
+to me to set the tune. I intended Windsor and fell into High Dutch, and
+then essaying to set another tune went into a Key much to high. So I pray'd
+to Mr. White to set it which he did well. Litchfield Tune. The Lord Humble
+me and Instruct me that I should be the occasion of any interruption in the
+worship of God."
+
+The singing at the time must have been bad beyond belief; how much of its
+atrocity was attributable to the use of "The Bay Psalm-Book," cannot now
+be known. The great length of many of the psalms in that book was a fatal
+barrier to any successful effort to have good singing. Some of them were
+one hundred and thirty lines long, and occupied, when lined and sung, a
+full half-hour, during which the patient congregation stood. It is told of
+Dr. West, who preached in Dartmouth in 1726, that he forgot one Sabbath Day
+to bring his sermon to meeting. He gave out a psalm, walked a quarter of a
+mile to his house, got his sermon, and was back in his pulpit long before
+the psalm was finished. The irregularity of the rhythm in "The Bay Psalm
+Book" must also have been a serious difficulty to overcome. Here is the
+rendering given of the 133d Psalm:--
+
+  1. How good and sweet to see
+       i'ts for bretheren to dwell
+       together in unitee:
+
+  2. Its like choice oyle that fell
+       the head upon
+       that down did flow
+       the beard unto
+       beard of Aron:
+       The skirts of his garment
+       that unto them went down:
+
+  3. Like Hermons dews descent
+       Sions mountains upon
+       for there to bee
+       the Lords blessing
+       life aye lasting
+       commandeth hee.
+
+How this contorted song could have been sung even to the simplest tune by
+unskilled singers who possessed no guiding notes of music is difficult
+to comprehend. Small wonder that Judge Sewall was forced to enter in his
+diary, "In the morning I set York tune and in the second going over, the
+gallery carried it irresistibly to St. Davids which discouraged me very
+much." We can fancy him stamping his foot, beating time, and roaring York
+at the top of his old lungs, and being overcome by the strong-voiced
+gallery, and at last sadly succumbing to St. David's. Again he writes: "I
+set York tune and the Congregation went out of it into St. Davids in the
+very 2nd going over. They did the same 3 weeks before. This is the 2nd
+Sign. It seems to me an intimation for me to resign the Praecentor's Place
+to a better Voice. I have through the Divine Long suffering and Favour done
+it for 24 years and now God in his Providence seems to call me off, my
+voice being enfeebled." Still a third time he "set Windsor tune;" they "ran
+over into Oxford do what I would." These unseemly "running overs" became
+so common that ere long each singer "set the tune" at his own will and the
+loudest-voiced carried the day. A writer of the time, Rev. Thomas Walter,
+says of this reign of _concordia discors_: "The tunes are now
+miserably tortured and twisted and quavered, in some Churches, into a
+horrid Medly of confused and disorderly Voices. Our tunes are left to the
+Mercy of every unskilful Throat to chop and alter, to twist and change,
+according to their infinitely divers and no less Odd Humours and Fancies.
+I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two Men in the
+Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good
+Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with
+perpetual Interfearings with one another."
+
+Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and
+unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they
+possessed,--a foretaste of heaven;
+
+      "for all we know
+  Of what the blessed do above
+  Is that they sing and that they love."
+
+And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous
+melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal.
+
+Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the
+early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering
+and holding the colonists together in love. And they reverenced their poor
+halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever
+a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a
+psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he
+doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must
+believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,--
+
+    "There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged,
+    I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune."
+
+Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved
+to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words.
+"The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears
+at the words, _bought with thy blood_." He also, with a vehemence of
+language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that
+he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of
+his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield,
+Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs.
+
+About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously
+prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing
+Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These
+thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound
+often with "The Bay Psalm-Book." They were reprinted from Playford's "Book
+of Psalms" and the notes of the staff were replaced with letters and dots,
+and the bars marking the measures were omitted. To the Puritans, this great
+number of new tunes appeared fairly monstrous, and formed the signal for
+bitter objections and fierce quarrels.
+
+In 1647 a tract had appeared on church-singing which had attracted much
+attention. It was written by Rev John Cotton to attempt to influence the
+adoption and universal use of "The Bay Psalm-Book." This tract thoroughly
+considered the duty of singing, the matter sung, the singers, and the
+manner of singing, and, like all the literature of the time, was full of
+Biblical allusion and quotation. It had been said that "man should sing
+onely and not the women. Because it is not permitted to a woman to speake
+in the Church, how then shall they sing? Much lesse is it permitted to them
+to prophecy in the church and singing of Psalms is a kind of Prophecying."
+Cotton fully answered and contradicted these false reasoners, who would
+have had to face a revolution had they attempted to keep the Puritan women
+from singing in meeting. The tract abounds in quaint expressions, such as,
+"they have scoffed at Puritan Ministers as calling the people to sing one
+of _Hopkins-Jiggs_ and so _hop_ into the pulpit." Though he wrote
+this tract to encourage good singing in meeting, his endorsement of "lining
+the Psalm" gave support to the very element that soon ruined the singing.
+His reasons, however, were temporarily good, "because many wanted books and
+skill to read." At that time, and for a century later, many congregations
+had but one or two psalm-books, one of which was often bound with the
+church Bible and from which the deacon lined the psalm.
+
+So villanous had church-singing at last become that the clergymen arose in
+a body and demanded better performances; while a desperate and disgusted
+party was also formed which was opposed to all singing. Still another band
+of old fogies was strong in force who wished to cling to the same way of
+singing that they were accustomed to; and they gave many objections to the
+new-fangled idea of singing by note, the chief item on the list being the
+everlasting objection of all such old fossils, that "the old way was good
+enough for our fathers," &c. They also asserted that "_the names of
+the notes were blasphemous_;" that it was "popish;" that it was a
+contrivance to get money; that it would bring musical instruments into the
+churches; and that "no one could learn the tunes any way." A writer in the
+"New England Chronicle" wrote in 1723, "Truly I have a great jealousy
+that if we begin to _sing_ by _rule_, the next thing will be
+to _pray_ by rule and _preach_ by rule and _then comes popery_."
+
+It is impossible to overestimate the excitement, the animosity, and the
+contention which arose in the New England colonies from these discussions
+over "singing by rule" or "singing by rote." Many prominent clergymen wrote
+essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of
+Regular Singing," also a "Joco-serious Dialogue on Singing," by Reverend
+Mr. Symmes; "Cases of Conscience," compiled by several ministers; "The
+Accomplished Singer," by Cotton Mather, were the most important. "Singing
+Lectures" also were given in many parts of New England by various prominent
+ministers. So high was party feud that a "Pacificatory Letter" was
+necessary, which was probably written by Cotton Mather, and which soothed
+the troubled waters. The people who thought the "old way was the best" were
+entirely satisfied when they were convinced that the oldest way of all was,
+of course, by note and not by rote.
+
+This naive extract from the records of the First Church of Windsor,
+Connecticut, will show the way in which the question of "singing by rule"
+was often settled in the churches, and it also gives a very amusing glimpse
+of the colonial manner of conducting a meeting:--
+
+"July 2. 1736. At a Society meeting at which Capt. Pelatiah Allyn
+Moderator. The business of the meeting proceeded in the following manner
+Viz. the Moderator proposed as to the consideration of the meeting in the
+1st Place what should be done respecting that part of publick Woiship
+called Singing viz. whether in their Publick meetings as on Sabbath day,
+Lectures &c they would sing the way that Deacon Marshall usually sung in
+his lifetime commonly called the 'Old Way' or whether they would sing the
+way taught by Mr. Beal commonly called 'Singing by Rule,' and when the
+Society had discoursed the matter the Moderator pioposed to vote for said
+two ways as followeth viz. that those that were for singing in publick in
+the way practiced by Deacon Marshall should hold up their hands and be
+counted, and then that those that were desirous to sing in Mr. Beals way
+called 'by Rule' would after show their minds by the same sign which method
+was proceeded upon accordingly. But when the vote was passed there being
+many voters it was difficult to take the exact number of votes in order to
+determine on which side the major vote was; whereupon the Moderator ordered
+all the voters to go out of the seats and stand in the alleys and then
+those that were for Deacon Marshalls way should go into the mens seats and
+those that were for Mr. Beals way should go into the womens seat and
+after much objections made against that way, which prevailed not with the
+Moderator, it was complied with, and then the Moderator desired that those
+that were of the mind that the way to be practiced for singing for the
+future on the Sabbath &c should be the way sung by Deacon Marshall as
+aforesaid would signify the same by holding up their hands and be counted,
+and then the Moderator and myself went and counted the voters and the
+Moderator asked me how many there was. I answered 42 and he said there was
+63 or 64 and then we both counted again and agreed the number being 43.
+Then the Moderator was about to count the number of votes for Mr. Beals
+way of Singing called 'by Rule' but it was offered whether it would not be
+better to order the voters to pass out of the Meeting House door and there
+be counted who did accordingly and their number was 44 or 45. Then the
+Moderator proceeded and desired that those who were for singing in Public
+the way that Mr. Beal taught would draw out of their seats and pass out of
+the door and be counted. They replied they were ready to show their minds
+in any proper way where they were if they might be directed thereto but
+would not go out of the door to do the same and desired that they might be
+led to a vote where they were and they were ready to show their minds which
+the Moderator refused to do and thereupon declared that it was voted that
+Deacon Marshalls way of singing called the 'Old Way' should be sung in
+Publick for the future and ordered me to record the same as the vote of the
+Said Society which I refused to do under the circumstances thereof and have
+recorded the facts and proceedings."
+
+Good old lining, droning Deacon Marshall! though you were dead and gone,
+you and your years of psalm-singings were not forgotten. You lived, an
+idealized memory of pure and pious harmony, in the hearts of your old
+church friends. Warmly did they fight for your "way of singing;" with
+most undeniable and open partiality, with most dubious ingenuousness and
+rectitude, did your old neighbor, Captain Pelatiah Allyn, conduct that hot
+July music-meeting, counting up boldly sixty-three votes in favor of your
+way, when there were only forty-three voters on your side of the alley, and
+crowding a final decision in your favor. It is sad to read that when icy
+winter chilled the blood, warm partisanship of old friends also cooled, and
+innovative Windsor youth carried the day and the music vote, and your good
+old way was abandoned for half the Sunday services, to allow the upstart
+new fashion to take control.
+
+One happy result arose throughout New England from the victory of the
+ardent advocates of the "singing by rule,"--the establishment of the New
+England "singing-school,"--that outlet for the pent-up, amusement-lacking
+lives of young people in colonial times. What that innocent and
+happy gathering was in the monotonous existence of our ancestors and
+ancestresses, we of the present pleasure-filled days can hardly comprehend.
+
+Extracts from the records of various colonial churches will show how soon
+the respective communities yielded to the march of improvement and "seated
+the taught singers" together, thus forming choirs. In 1762 the church
+at Rowley, Massachusetts, voted "that those who have learned the art of
+Singing may have liberty to sit in the front gallery." In 1780 the same
+parish "requested Jonathan Chaplin and Lieutenant Spefford to assist the
+deacons in Raising the tune in the meeting house." In Sutton, in 1791, the
+Company of Singers were allowed to sit together, and $13 was voted to pay
+for "larning to sing by Rule." The Roxbury "First Church" voted in 1770
+"three seats in the back gallery for those inclined to sit together for
+the purpose of singing" The church in Hanover, in 1742, took a vote to
+see whether the "church will sing in the new way" and appoint a tuner. In
+Woodbury, Connecticut, in 1750 the singers "may sitt up Galery all day if
+they please but to keep to there own seat & not to Infringe on the Women
+Pues." In 1763, in the Ipswich First Parish, the singers were allowed to
+sit "two back on each side of the front alley." Similar entries may be
+found in nearly every record of New England churches in the middle or
+latter part of that century.
+
+The musical battle was not finished, however, when the singing was at last
+taught by rule, and the singers were allowed to sit together and form a
+choir. There still existed the odious custom of "lining" or "deaconing"
+the psalm. To this fashion may be attributed the depraved condition of
+church-singing of which Walters so forcibly wrote, and while it continued
+the case seemed hopeless, in spite of singing-schools and singing-teachers.
+It would be trying to the continued uniformity of pitch of an ordinary
+church choir, even now-a-days, to have to stop for several seconds between
+each line to listen to a reading and sometimes to an explanation of the
+following line.
+
+The Westminster Assembly had suggested in 1664 the alternate reading and
+singing of each line of the psalm to those churches that were not well
+supplied with psalm-books. The suggestion had not been adopted without
+discussion, It was in 1680 much talked over in the church in Plymouth, and
+was adopted only after getting the opinion of each male church member.
+When once taken into general use the custom continued everywhere, through
+carelessness and obstinacy, long after the churches possessed plenty of
+psalm-books. An early complaint against it was made by Dr. Watts in the
+preface of his hymns, which were published by Benjamin Franklin in 1741. As
+Watts' Psalms and Hymns were not, however, in general use in New England
+until after the Revolution, this preface with its complaint was for a long
+time little seen and little heeded.
+
+It is said that the abolition came gradually; that the impetuous and
+well-trained singers at first cut off the last word only of the deacon's
+"lining;" they then encroached a word or two further, and finally sung
+boldly on without stopping at all to be "deaconed." This brought down
+a tempest of indignation from the older church-members, who protested,
+however, in vain. A vote in the church usually found the singers
+victorious, and whether the church voted for or against the "lining," the
+choir would always by stratagem vanquish the deacon. One old soldier took
+his revenge, however. Being sung down by the rampant choir, he still showed
+battle, and rose at the conclusion of the psalm and opened his psalm-book,
+saying calmly, "_Now_ let the _people of the Lord sing_."
+
+The Rowley church tried diplomacy in their struggle against "deaconing,"
+by instituting a gradual abolishing of the custom. In 1785 the choir was
+allowed "to sing once on the Lord's Day without reading by the Deacon." In
+five years the Rowley singers were wholly victorious, and "lining out" the
+psalm was entirely discontinued.
+
+In 1770, dissatisfaction at the singing in the church was rife in
+Wilbraham, and a vote was taken to see whether the town would be willing
+to have singing four times at each service; and it was voted to "take into
+consideration the Broken State of this Town with regard to singing on the
+Sabbath Day." Special and bitter objection was made against the leader
+beating time so ostentatiously. A list of singers was made and a
+singing-master appointed. The deacon was allowed to lead and line and beat
+time in the forenoon, while the new school was to have control in the
+afternoon; and "whoever leads the singing shall be at liberty to use the
+motion of his hand while singing for the space of three months only." It is
+needless to state who came off victorious in the end. The deacon left as a
+parting shot a request to "make Inquiry into the conduct of those who call
+themselves the Singers in this town."
+
+In Worcester, in 1779, a resolution adopted at the town meeting was "that
+the mode of singing in the congregation here be without reading the psalms
+line by line." "The Sabbath succeeding the adoption of this resolution,
+after the hymn had been read by the minister, the aged and venerable Deacon
+Chamberlain, unwilling to abandon the custom of his fathers and his own
+honorable prerogative, rose and read the first line according to his usual
+practice. The singers, previously prepared to carry the desired alteration
+into effect, proceeded in their singing without pausing at the conclusion
+of the line. The white-haired officer of the church with the full power
+of his voice read on through the second line, until the loud notes of the
+collected body of singers overpowered his attempt to resist the progress
+of improvement. The deacon, deeply mortified at the triumph of the musical
+reformation, then seized his hat and retired from the meeting-house in
+tears." His conduct was censured by the church, and he was for a time
+deprived of partaking in the communion, for "absenting himself from the
+public services of the Sabbath;" but in a few weeks the unhouselled deacon
+was forgiven, and never attempted to "line" again.
+
+Though the opponents of "lining" were victorious in the larger villages and
+towns, in smaller parishes, where there were few hymn-books, the lining
+of the psalms continued for many years. Mr. Hood wrote, in 1846, the
+astonishing statement that "the habit of lining prevails to this day over
+three-fourths of the United States." This I can hardly believe, though I
+know that at present the practice obtains in out of the way towns with poor
+and ignorant congregations. The separation of the lines often gives a very
+strange meaning to the words of a psalm; and one wonders what the Puritan
+children thought when they heard this lino of contradictions that Hood
+points out:--
+
+  "The Lord will come and He will not,"
+
+and after singing that line through heard the second line,--
+
+  "Keep silence, but speak out."
+
+Many new psalm-books appeared about the time of the Revolutionary War, and
+many church petitions have been preserved asking permission to use the
+new and more melodious psalm and hymn books. Books of instruction also
+abounded,--books in which the notes were not printed on the staff, and
+books in which there were staffs but no notes, only letters or other
+characters (these were called "dunce notes"); books, too, in which the
+notes were printed so thickly that they could scarcely be distinguished one
+from the other.
+
+  "A dotted tribe with ebon heads
+  That climb the slender fence along,
+  As black as ink, as thick as weeds,
+  Ye little Africans of song."
+
+One book--perhaps the worst, since it was the most pretentious--was "The
+Compleat Melody or Harmony of Sion," by William Tansur,--"Ingenious
+Tans'ur Skilled in Musicks Art." It was a most superficial, pedantic, and
+bewildering composition. The musical instruction was given in the form of a
+series of ill-spelled dialogues between a teacher and pupil, interspersed
+with occasional miserable rhymes. It was ill-expressed at best, and
+such musical terms as "Rations of Concords," "Trilloes," "Trifdiapasons,"
+"Leaps," "Binding cadences," "Disallowances," "Canons," "Prime Flower
+of Florid," "Consecutions of Perfects," and "Figurates," make the book
+exceedingly difficult of comprehension to the average reader, though
+possibly not to a student of obsolete musical phraseology.
+
+A side skirmish on the music field was at this time fought between the
+treble and the tenor parts. Ravenscroft's Psalms and Walter's book had
+given the melody, or plain-song, to the tenor. This had, of course, thrown
+additional difficulties in the way of good singing; but when once the
+trebles obtained the leading part, after the customary bitter opposition,
+the improved singing approved the victory.
+
+Many objections, too, were made to the introduction of "triple-time" tunes.
+It gave great offence to the older Puritans, who wished to drawl out all
+the notes of uniform length; and some persons thought that marking and
+accenting the measure was a step toward the "Scarlet Woman." The time was
+called derisively, "a long leg and a short one."
+
+These old bigots must have been paralyzed at the new style of psalm-singing
+which was invented and introduced by a Massachusetts tanner and
+singing-master named Billings, and which was suggested, doubtless, by the
+English anthems. It spread through the choirs of colonial villages and
+towns like wild-fire, and was called "fuguing." Mr. Billings' "Fuguing
+Psalm Singer" was published in 1770. It is a dingy, ill-printed book with
+a comically illustrated frontispiece, long pages of instruction, and this
+motto:--
+
+  "O, praise the Lord with one consent
+    And in this grand design
+  Let Britain and the Colonies
+    Unanimously join."
+
+The succeeding hymn-books, and the patriotic hymns of Billings in
+post-Revolutionary years have no hint of "Britain" in them. The names
+"Federal Harmony," "Columbian Harmony," "Continental Harmony," "Columbian
+Repository," and "United States Sacred Harmony" show the new nation.
+Billings also published the "Psalm Singer's Amusement," and other
+singing-books. The shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather must have groaned
+aloud at the suggestions, instructions, and actions of this unregenerate,
+daring, and "amusing" leader of church-singing.
+
+It seems astonishing that New England communities in those times of anxious
+and depressing warfare should have so delightedly seized and adopted this
+unusual and comparatively joyous style of singing, but perhaps the new
+spirit of liberty demanded more animated and spirited expression; and
+Billings' psalm-tunes were played with drum and fife on the battlefield to
+inspire the American soldiers. Billings wrote of his fuguing invention, "It
+has more than twenty times the power of the old slow tunes. Now the solemn
+bass demands their attention, next the manly tenor, now the lofty counter,
+now the volatile treble. Now here! Now there! Now here again! Oh ecstatic,
+push on, ye sons of harmony!" Dr. Mather Byles wrote thus of fuguing:--
+
+  "Down starts the Bass with Grave Majestic Air,
+  And up the Treble mounts with shrill Career,
+  With softer Sounds in mild melodious Maze
+  Warbling between, the Tenor gently plays
+  And, if th' inspiring Altos joins the Force
+  See! like the Lark it Wings its towering Course
+  Thro' Harmony's sublimest Sphere it flies
+  And to Angelic Accents seems to rise."
+
+A more modern poet in affectionate remembrance thus sings the fugue:--
+
+  "A fugue let loose cheers up the place,
+    With bass and tenor, alto, air,
+  The parts strike in with measured grace,
+    And something sweet is everywhere.
+
+  "As if some warbling brood should build
+    Of bits of tunes a singing nest;
+  Each bringing that with which it thrilled
+    And weaving it with all the rest."
+
+All public worshippers in the meetings one hundred years ago did not,
+however, regard fuguing as "something sweet everywhere," nor did they agree
+with Billings and Byles as to its angelic and ecstatic properties. Some
+thought it "heartless, tasteless, trivial, and irreverent jargon." Others
+thought the tunes were written more for the absurd inflation of the singers
+than for the glory of God; and many fully sympathized with the man who
+hung two cats over Billings's door to indicate his opinion of Billings's
+caterwauling. An old inhabitant of Roxbury remembered that when fuguing
+tunes were introduced into his church "they produced a literally fuguing
+effect on the older people, who went out of the church as soon as the first
+verse was sung." One scandalized and belligerent old clergyman, upon the
+Sabbath following the introduction of fuguing into his church, preached
+upon the prophecy of Amos, "The songs of the temple shall be turned
+into howling," while another took for his text the sixth verse of the
+seventeenth chapter of Acts, "Those that have turned the world upside down,
+are come hither also." One indignant and disgusted church attendant thus
+profanely recorded in church his views:--
+
+"Written out of temper on a Pannel in one of the Pues in Salem Church:--
+
+  "Could poor King David but for once
+    To Salem Church repair;
+  And hear his Psalms thus warbled out,
+    Good Lord, how he would swear
+
+  "But could St Paul but just pop in,
+    From higher scenes abstracted,
+  And hear his Gospel now explained,
+    By Heavens, he'd run distracted."
+
+These lines were reprinted in the "American Apollo" in 1792.
+
+The repetition of a word or syllable in fuguing often lead to some
+ridiculous variations in the meanings of the lines. Thus the words--
+
+  "With reverence let the saints appear
+  And bow before the Lord,"
+
+were forced to be sung, "And bow-wow-wow, And bow-ow-ow," and so on until
+bass, treble, alto, counter, and tenor had bow-wowed for about twenty
+seconds; yet I doubt if the simple hearts that sung ever saw the absurdity.
+
+It is impossible while speaking of fuguing to pass over an extraordinary
+element of the choir called "singing counter." The counter-tenor parts in
+European church-music were originally written for boys' voices. From
+thence followed the falsetto singing of the part by men; such was also
+the "counter" of New England. It was my fortune to hear once in a country
+church an aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and
+respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start
+of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and
+apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir,
+but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however
+chosen, would fail in attempting to describe the grotesque and uncanny
+sound.
+
+It is very evident, when once choirs of singers were established and
+attempts made for congregations to sing the same tune, and to keep
+together, and upon the same key, that in some way a decided pitch must be
+given to them to start upon. To this end pitch-pipes were brought into the
+singers' gallery, and the pitch was given sneakingly and shamefacedly to
+the singers. From these pitch-pipes the steps were gradual, but they led,
+as the Puritan divines foresaw, to the general introduction of musical
+instruments into the meetings.
+
+This seemed to be attacking the very foundations of their church; for the
+Puritans in England had, in 1557, expressly declared "concerning singing of
+psalms we allow of the people joining with one voice in a plain tune, but
+not in tossing the psalms from one side to the other with mingling of
+organs." The Round-heads had, in 1664, gone through England destroying the
+noble organs in the churches and cathedrals. They tore the pipes from the
+organ in Westminster Abbey, shouting, "Hark! how the organs go!" and, "Mark
+what musick that is, that is lawful for a Puritan to dance," and they sold
+the metal for pots of ale. Only four or five organs were left uninjured in
+all England. 'Twas not likely, then, that New England Puritans would take
+kindly to any musical instruments. Cotton Mather declared that there was
+not a word in the New Testament that authorized the use of such aids to
+devotion. The ministers preached often and long on the text from the
+prophecy of Amos, "I will not hear the melody of thy viols;" while,
+Puritan-fashion, they ignored the other half of the verse, "Take thou away
+from me the noise of thy songs." Disparaging comparisons were made with
+Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut,
+and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical
+knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players."
+
+Some of the first pitch-pipes were comical little apple-wood instruments
+that looked like mouse-traps, and great pains was taken to conceal them as
+they were passed surreptitiously from hand to hand in the choir. I have
+seen one which was carefully concealed in a box that had a leather binding
+like a book, and which was ostentatiously labelled in large gilt letters
+"Holy Bible;" a piece of barefaced and unnecessary deception on the part of
+some pious New England deacon or chorister.
+
+Little wooden fifes were also used, and then metal tuning-forks. A canny
+Scotchman, who abhorred the thought of all musical instruments anywhere,
+managed to have one fling at the pitch-pipe. The pitch had been given but
+was much too high, and before the first verse was ended the choir had to
+cease singing. The Scotchman stood up and pointed his long finger to the
+leader, saying in broad accents of scorn, "Ah, Johnny Smuth, now ye can
+have a chance to blaw yer braw whustle agaen." At a similar catastrophe
+owing to the mistake of the leader in Medford, old General Brooks rose in
+his pew and roared in an irritated voice of command, "Halt! Take another
+pitch, Bailey, take another pitch."
+
+In 1713 there was sent to America an English organ, "a pair of organs" it
+was called, which had chanced, by being at the manufacturers instead of in
+a church, to have escaped the general destruction by the Round-heads. It
+was given by Thomas Brattle to the Brattle Street Church in Boston. The
+congregation voted to refuse the gift, and it was then sent to King's
+Chapel, where it remained unpacked for several months for fear of hostile
+demonstrations, but was finally set up and used. In 1740 a Bostonian named
+Bromfield made an organ, and it was placed in a meeting-house and used
+weekly. In 1794 the church in Newbury obtained an organ, and many
+unpleasant and disparaging references were made by clergymen of other
+parishes to "our neighbor's box of whistles," "the tooting tub."
+
+Violoncellos, or bass-viols, as they were universally called, were almost
+the first musical instruments that were allowed in the New England
+churches. They were called, without intentional irreverence, "Lord's
+fiddles." Violins were widely opposed, they savored too much of low, tavern
+dance-music. After much consultation a satisfactory compromise was agreed
+upon by which violins were allowed in many meetings, if the performers
+"would play the fiddle wrong end up." Thus did our sanctimonious
+grandfathers cajole and persuade themselves that an inverted fiddle was
+not a fiddle at all, but a small bass-viol. An old lady, eighty years old,
+wrote thus in the middle of this century, of the church of her youth:
+"After awhile there was a bass-viol Introduced and brought into meeting and
+did not suit the Old people; one Old Gentleman got up, took his hat off
+the peg and marched off. Said they had begun fiddling and there would be
+dancing soon." Another church-member, in derisive opposition to a clarinet
+which had been "voted into the choir," brought into meeting a fish-horn,
+which he blew loud and long to the complete rout of the clarinet-player and
+the singers. When reproved for this astounding behavior he answered stoutly
+that "if one man could blow a horn in the Lord's House on the Sabbath day
+he guessed he could too," and he had to be bound over to keep the peace
+before the following Sunday. A venerable and hitherto decorous old deacon
+of Roxbury not only left the church when the hated bass-viol began its
+accompanying notes, but he stood for a long time outside the church door
+stridently "caterwauling" at the top of his lungs. When expostulated with
+for this unseemly and unchristianlike annoyance he explained that he was
+"only mocking the banjo." To such depths of rebellion were stirred the
+Puritan instincts of these religious souls.
+
+Many a minister said openly that he would like to walk out of his pulpit
+when the obnoxious and hated flutes, violins, bass-viols, and bassoons were
+played upon in the singing gallery. One clergyman contemptuously announced
+"We will now sing and fiddle the forty-fifth Psalm." Another complained of
+the indecorous dress of the fiddle-player. This had reference to the almost
+universal custom, in country churches in the summer time, of the bass-viol
+player removing his coat and playing "in his shirt sleeves." Others hated
+the noisy tuning of the bass-viol while the psalm was being read. Mr.
+Brown, of Westerly, sadly deplored that "now we have only catgut and resin
+religion."
+
+In 1804 the church in Quincy, being "advanced," granted the singers the
+sum of twenty-five dollars to buy a bass-viol to use in meeting, and a few
+other churches followed their lead. From the year 1794 till 1829 the
+church in Wareham, Massachusetts, was deeply agitated over the question of
+"Bass-Viol, or No Bass-Viol." They voted that a bass-viol was "expedient,"
+then they voted to expel the hated abomination; then was obtained "Leave
+for the Bass Viol to be brought into ye meeting house to be Played On every
+other Sabbath & to Play if chosen every Sabbath in the Intermission between
+meetings & not to Pitch the Tunes on the Sabbaths that it don't Play" Then,
+they tried to bribe the choir for fifty dollars not to use the "bars-vile,"
+but being unsuccessful, many members in open rebellion stayed away from
+church and were disciplined therefor. Then they voted that the bass-viol
+could not be used unless Capt. Gibbs were previously notified (so he and
+his family need not come to hear the hated sounds); but at last, after
+thirty years, the choir and the "fiddle-player" were triumphant in Wareham
+as they were in other towns.
+
+We were well into the present century before any cheerful and also simple
+music was heard in our churches; fuguing was more varied and surprising
+than cheerful. Of course, it was difficult as well as inappropriate to
+suggest pleasing tunes for such words as these:--
+
+  "Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+    The land of horror and despair,
+  Justice hath built a dismal hell,
+    And laid her stores of vengeance there:
+
+  "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+    Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+  And darts to inflict immortal pains,
+    Dyed in the blood of damned souls."
+
+But many of the words of the old hymns were smooth, lively, and
+encouraging; and the young singers and perhaps the singing-masters craved
+new and less sober tunes. Old dance tunes were at first adapted; "Sweet
+Anne Page," "Babbling Echo," "Little Pickle" were set to sacred words. The
+music of "Few Happy Matches" was sung to the hymn "Lo, on a narrow neck
+of land;" and that of "When I was brisk and young" was disguised with
+the sacred words of "Let sinners take their course." The jolly old tune,
+"Begone dull care," which began,--
+
+  "My wife shall dance, and I will sing,
+  And merrily pass the day."
+
+was strangely appropriated to the solemn words,--
+
+  "If this be death, I soon shall be
+  From every pain and sorrow free,"
+
+and did not seem ill-fitted either.
+
+"Sacred arrangements," "spiritual songs," "sacred airs," soon followed, and
+of course demanded singers of capacity and education to sing them. From
+this was but a step to a paid quartette, and the struggle over this last
+means of improvement and pleasure in church music is of too recent a date
+to be more than referred to.
+
+I attended a church service not many years ago in Worcester, where an old
+clergyman, the venerable "Father" Allen, of Shrewsbury, then too aged
+and feeble to preach, was seated in the front pew of the church. When a
+quartette of singers began to render a rather operatic arrangement of a
+sacred song he rose, erect and stately, to his full gaunt height, turned
+slowly around and glanced reproachfully over the frivolous, backsliding
+congregation, wrapped around his spare, lean figure his full cloak
+of quilted black silk, took his shovel hat and his cane, and stalked
+indignantly and sadly the whole length of the broad central aisle, out
+of the church, thus making a last but futile protest against modern
+innovations in church music. Many, in whom the Puritan instincts and blood
+are still strong, sympathize internally with him in this feeling; and all
+novelty-lovers must acknowledge that the sublime simplicity and deep piety
+in which the old Puritan psalm-tunes abound, has seldom been attained in
+the modern church-songs. Even persons of neither musical knowledge, taste,
+nor love, feel the power of such a tune as Old Hundred; and more modern and
+more difficult melodies, though they charm with their harmony and novelty,
+can never equal it in impressiveness nor in true religious influence.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+The Interruptions of the Services.
+
+
+
+Though the Puritans were such a decorous, orderly people, their religious
+meetings were not always quiet and uninterrupted. We know the torment they
+endured from the "wretched boys," and they were harassed by other
+annoying interruptions. For the preservation of peace and order they made
+characteristic laws, with characteristic punishments. "If any interrupt
+or oppose a preacher in season of worship, they shall be reproved by the
+Magistrate, and on repetition, shall pay £5, or stand two hours on a block
+four feet high, with this inscription in Capitalls, 'A WANTON GOSPELLER.'"
+As with other of their severe laws the rigid punishment provoked the crime,
+for Wanton Gospellers abounded. The Baptists did not hesitate to state
+their characteristic belief in the Puritan meetings, and the Quakers or
+"Foxians," as they were often called, interrupted and plagued them sorely.
+Judge Sewall wrote, in 1677, "A female quaker, Margaret Brewster, in
+sermon-time came in, in a canvass frock, her hair dishevelled loose like a
+Periwig, her face as black as ink, led by two other quakers, and two other
+quakers followed. It occasioned the greatest and most amazing uproar that I
+ever saw." More grievous irruptions still of scantily clad and even naked
+Quaker women were made into other Puritan meetings; and Quaker men shouted
+gloomily in through the church windows, "Woe! Woe! Woe to the people!"
+and, "The Lord will destroy thee!" and they broke glass bottles before
+the minister's very face, crying out, "Thus the Lord will break thee in
+pieces!" and they came into the meeting-house, in spite of the fierce
+tithingman, and sat down in other people's seats with their hats on their
+heads, in ash-covered coats, rocking to and fro and groaning dismally, as
+if in a mournful obsession. Quaker women managed to obtain admission to the
+churches, and they jumped up in the quiet Puritan assemblies screaming out,
+"Parson! thou art an old fool," and, "Parson! thy sermon is too long," and,
+"Parson! sit down! thee has already said more than thee knows how to say
+well," and other unpleasant, though perhaps truthful personalities. It is
+hard to believe that the poor, excited, screaming visionaries of those
+early days belonged to the same religious sect as do the serene,
+low-voiced, sweet-faced, and retiring Quakeresses of to-day. And there is
+no doubt that the astounding and meaningless freaks of these half-crazed
+fanatics were provoked by the cruel persecutions which they endured from
+our much loved and revered, but alas, intolerant and far from perfect
+Puritan Fathers. These poor Quakers were arrested, fined, robbed, stripped
+naked, imprisoned, laid neck and heels, chained to logs of wood, branded,
+maimed, whipped, pilloried, caged, set in the stocks, exiled, sold
+into slavery and hanged by our stern and cruel ancestors. Perhaps some
+gentle-hearted but timid Puritan souls may have inwardly felt that the
+Indian wars, and the destructive fires, and the earthquakes, and the dead
+cattle, blasted wheat, and wormy peas, were not judgments of God for small
+ministerial pay and periwig-wearing, but punishments for the heartrending
+woes of the persecuted Quakers.
+
+Others than the poor Quakers spoke out in colonial meetings. In Salem
+village and in other witch-hunting towns the crafty "victims" of the
+witches were frequently visited with their mock pains and sham fits in the
+meeting-houses, and they called out and interrupted the ministers most
+vexingly. Ann Putnam, the best and boldest actress among those cunning
+young Puritan witch-accusers, the protagonist of that New England tragedy
+known as the Salem Witchcraft, shouted out most embarrassingly, "There is
+a yellow-bird sitting on the minister's hat, as it hangs on the pin in the
+pulpit." Mr. Lawson, the minister, wrote with much simplicity that "these
+things occurring in the time of public worship did something interrupt me
+in my first prayer, being so unusual." But he braced himself up in spite
+of Ann and the demoniacal yellow-bird, and finished the service. These
+disorderly interruptions occurred on every Lord's Day, growing weekly
+more constant and more universal, and must have been unbearable. Some few
+disgusted members withdrew from the church, giving as reason that "the
+distracting and disturbing tumults and noises made by persons under
+diabolical power and delusions, preventing sometimes our hearing and
+understanding and profiting of the word preached; we having after many
+trials and experiences found no redress in this case, accounted ourselves
+under a necessity to go where we might hear the word in quiet." These
+withdrawing church-members were all of families that contained at least
+one person that had been accused of practising witchcraft. They were thus
+severely intolerant of the sacrilegious and lawless interruptions of the
+shy young "victims," who received in general only sympathy, pity, and even
+stimulating encouragement from their deluded and excited neighbors.
+
+One very pleasing interruption,--no, I cannot call it by so severe a
+name,--one very pleasing diversion of the attention of the congregation
+from the parson was caused by an innocent custom that prevailed in many a
+country community. Just fancy the flurry on a June Sabbath in Killingly, in
+1785, when Joseph Gay, clad in velvet coat, lace-frilled shirt, and white
+broadcloth knee-breeches, with his fair bride of a few days, gorgeous in a
+peach-colored silk gown and a bonnet trimmed "with sixteen yards of white
+ribbon," rose, in the middle of the sermon, from their front seat in the
+gallery and stood for several minutes, slowly turning around in order to
+show from every point of view their bridal finery to the eagerly gazing
+congregation of friends and neighbors. Such was the really delightful and
+thoughtful custom, in those fashion-plateless days, among persons of
+wealth in that and other churches; it was, in fact, part of the wedding
+celebration. Even in midwinter, in the icy church, the blushing bride would
+throw aside her broadcloth cape or camblet roquelo and stand up clad in a
+sprigged India muslin gown with only a thin lace tucker over her neck, warm
+with pride in her pretty gown, her white bonnet with ostrich feathers and
+embroidered veil, and in her new husband.
+
+The services in the meeting-house on the Sabbath and on Lecture days
+were sometimes painfully varied, though scarcely interrupted, by a very
+distressing and harrowing custom of public abasement and self-abnegation,
+which prevailed for many years in the nervously religious colonies. It was
+not an enforced punishment, but a voluntary one. Men and women who had
+committed crimes or misdemeanors, and who had sincerely repented of their
+sins, or who were filled with remorse for some violation of conscience, or
+even with regret for some neglect of religious ethics, rose in the Sabbath
+meeting before the assembled congregation and confessed their sins, and
+humbly asked forgiveness of God, and charity from their fellows. At
+other times they stood with downcast heads while the minister read their
+confession of guilt and plea for forgiveness. A most graphic account of one
+of those painful scenes is thus given by Governor Winthrop in his "History
+of New England:"--
+
+    "Captain Underhill being brought by the blessing of God in this
+    church's censure of excommunication, to remorse for his foul sins,
+    obtained, by means of the elders, and others of the church of Boston, a
+    safe conduct under the hand of the governor and one of the council to
+    repair to the church. He came at the time of the court of assistants,
+    and upon the lecture day, after sermon, the pastor called him forth and
+    declared the occasion, and then gave him leave to speak: and in
+    it was a spectacle winch caused many weeping eyes, though it afforded
+    matter of much rejoicing to behold the power of the Lord Jesus in his
+    ordinances, when they are dispensed in his own way, holding forth the
+    authority of his regal sceptre in the simplicity of the gospel
+    came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his
+    bravery and neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close
+    to his eyes; and standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs
+    and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his
+    hypocrisy, his persecution of God's people here, and especially his
+    pride (as the root of all which caused God to give him over to his
+    other sinful courses) and contempt of the magistrates.... He spake
+    well save that his blubbering &c interrupted him, and all along he
+    discovered a broken and melting heart and gave good exhortations to
+    take heed of such vanities and beginnings of evil as had occasioned his
+    fall; and in the end he earnestly and humbly besought the church to
+    have compassion of him and to deliver him out of the hands of Satan."
+
+What a picture! what a story! "Of all tales 'tis the saddest--and more sad
+because it makes us smile."
+
+Captain John Underhill was a brave though somewhat bumptious soldier, who
+had fought under the Prince of Orange in the War of the Netherlands, and
+had been employed as temporal drill-master in the church-militant in New
+England. He did good service for the colonists in the war with the Pequot
+Indians, and indeed wherever there was any fighting to be done. "He thrust
+about and justled into fame" He also managed to have apparently a very good
+time in the new land, both in sinning and repenting. When he stood up on
+the church-seat before the horrified, yet wide-open eyes of pious Boston
+folk, in his studiously and theatrically disarranged garments, and
+blubbered out his whining yet vain-glorious repentance, he doubtless acted
+his part well, for he had twice before been through the same performance,
+supplementing his second rehearsal by kneeling down before an injured
+husband in the congregation, and asking earthly forgiveness. I wish I
+could believe that this final repentance of the resilient captain were
+sincere--but I cannot. Nor did Boston people believe it either, though that
+noble and generous-minded man, Winthrop, thought he saw at the time of
+confession evidences of a truly contrite heart. The Puritans sternly and
+eagerly cast out the gay captain to the Dutch when he became an Antinomian,
+and he came to live and fight and gallant in a town on the western end of
+Long Island, where he perhaps found a church-home with members less severe
+and less sharp-eyed than those of his Boston place of martyrdom, and a
+people less inclined to resent and punish his frailties and his ways of
+amusing himself.
+
+In justice to Underhill (or perhaps to show his double-dealing) I will say
+that he left behind him a letter to Hanserd Knollys, complaining of the
+ill-treatment he had received; and in it he gives a very different account
+of this little affair with the Boston Church from that given us by Governor
+Winthrop. The offender says nothing about his hypocrisy, his public and
+self-abasing confession, nor of his sanctimonious blubbering and wishes for
+death. He explains that his offence was mild and purely mental, that in an
+infaust moment he glanced (doubtless stared soldier-fashion) at "Mistris
+Miriam Wildbore" as she sat in her "pue" at meeting. The elders, noting his
+admiring and amorous glances, thereupon accused him of sin in his heart,
+and severely asked him why he did not look instead at Mistress Newell or
+Mistress Upham. He replied very spiritedly and pertinently that these dames
+were "not desiryable women as to temporal graces," which was certainly
+sufficient and proper reason for any man to give, were he Puritan or
+Cavalier. Then acerb old John Cotton and some other Boston ascetics
+(perhaps Goodman Newell and Goodman Upham, resenting for their wives the
+_spretæ injuria formæ_) at once hunted up some plainly applicable
+verses from the Bible that clearly proved him guilty of the alleged
+sin--and summarily excommunicated him. He also wrote that the pious church
+complained that the attractive, the temporally graced Mistress Wildbore
+came vainly and over-bravely clad to meeting, with "wanton open-worked
+gloves slitt at the thumbs and fingers for the purpose of taking snuff,"
+and he resented this complaint against the fair one, saying no harm could
+surely come from indulging in the "good creature called tobacco." He would
+naturally feel that snuff-taking was a proper and suitable church-custom,
+since his own conversion,--dubious though it was,--his religious belief had
+come to him, "the spirit fell home upon his heart" while he was indulging
+in a quiet smoke.
+
+The story of his offences as told b his contemporaries does not assign to
+him so innocuous a diversion as staring across the meeting-house, but the
+account is quite as amusing as his own plaintive and deeply injured version
+of his arraignment.
+
+Other letters of his have been preserved to us,--letters blustering as
+was Ancient Pistol, and equally sanctimonious, letters fearfully and
+phonetically spelt. Here is the opening of a letter written while he
+was under sentence of excommunication from the Boston Church, and of
+banishment. It is to Governor Winthrop, his friend and fellow-emigrant:--
+
+"Honnored in the Lord,--
+
+"Your silenc one more admirse me. I Youse chrischan playnnes. I know you
+love it.... Silene can not reduce the hart of youer lovd brother: I would
+the rightchous would smite me espechah youerslfe & the honnered Depoti to
+whom I also dereckt this letter.... I would to God you would tender me
+soule so as to youse playnnes with me. I wrot to you both but now answer: &
+here I am dayli abused by malishous tongue. John Baker I here hath wrot to
+the honnored depoti how as I was drouck & like to be cild & both falc, upon
+okachon I delt with Wannerton for intrushon & finddmg them resolutli bent
+to rout all gud a mong us & advanc there superstischous ways & by boystrous
+words indeferd to fritten men to accomplish his end. & he abusing me to
+my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent & dastardli
+sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with
+intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered
+him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too
+month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let
+justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to soggest youer will to this
+barrer you will find him tracktabel."
+
+My sense of drollery is always most keenly tickled when I read Underhill's
+epistles, with their amazing and highly-varied letter concoctions, and
+remember that he also--wrote a book. What that seventeenth-century printer
+and proof-reader endured ere they presented his "edited" volume to the
+public must have been beyond expression by words. It was a pretty good book
+though, and in it, like many another man of his ilk, he tendered to his
+much-injured wife loud and diffuse praise, ending with these sententious
+words, "Let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife--though she be a
+woman."
+
+And yet, upon careful examination we find a method, a system, in
+Underhill's orthography, or rather in his cacography. He thinks a final
+tion should be spelt chon--and why not? "proposichon," "satisfackchon,"
+"oblegachon," "persekuchon," "dereckchon," "himelyachon"--thus he spells
+such words. And his plurals are plain when once you grasp his laws:
+"poseschouse" and "considderachonse," "facktse," and "respecktse." And
+his ly is alwajs li, "exacktli," "thorroli," "fidelliti," "charriti,"
+"falsciti." And why is not "indiered," as good as 'endeared,' "pregedic,"
+as 'prejudice,' "obstrucktter" as 'obstructer,' "pascheges," and
+"prouydentt," and "antyentt," just as clear as our own way of spelling
+these words? A "painful" speller you surely were, my gay Don Juan
+Underbill, as your pedantic "writtingse" all show, and the most dramatic
+and comic figure among all the early Puritans as well, though you scarcely
+deserve to be called a Puritan; we might rather say of you, as of Malvolio,
+"The devil a Puritan that he was, or anything constantly but a
+time-pleaser ... his ground of faith that all who looked on him loved him."
+
+In keen contrast to this sentimental excitement is the presence of noble
+Judge Sewall, white-haired and benignant, standing up calmly in Boston
+meeting, with dignified face and demeanor, but an aching and contrite
+heart, to ask through the voice of his minister humble forgiveness of God
+and man for his sad share as a judge in the unjust and awful condemnation
+and cruel sentencing to death of the poor murdered victims of that terrible
+delusion the Salem Witchcraft. Years of calm and unshrinking reflection, of
+pleading and constant communion with God had brought to him an overwhelming
+sense of his mistaken and over-influenced judgment, and a horror and
+remorse for the fatal results of his error. Then, like the steadfast and
+upright old Puritan that he was, he publicly acknowledged his terrible
+mistake. It is one of the finest instances of true nobility of soul and of
+absolute self-renunciation that the world affords. And the deep strain, the
+sharp wrench of the step is made more apparent still by the fact of the
+disapproval of his fellow-judges of his public confession and recantation.
+The yearly entries in his diary, simply expressed yet deeply speaking,
+entries of the prayerful fasts which he spent alone in his chamber when
+the anniversary of the fatal judgment-day returned, show that no half-vain
+bigotry, no emotional excitement filled and moved him to the open words of
+remorse. The lesson of his repentance is farther reaching than he
+dreamed, when the story of his confession can so move and affect this
+nineteenth-century generation, and fill more than one soul with a nobler
+idea of the Puritan nature, and with a higher and fuller conception of the
+absolute truth of the Puritan Christianity.
+
+Some very prosaic and earthly interruptions to the church services are
+recorded as being made, and possibly by the church-members themselves. In
+one church, in 1661, a fine of five shillings was imposed on any one "who
+shot off a gun or led a horse into the meeting-house." These seem to me
+quite as unseemly, irreverent, and disagreeable disturbances as shouting
+out, Quaker-fashion, "Parson, your sermon is too long;" but possibly the
+house of God was turned into a stable on week-days, not on the Sabbath.
+
+In many parishes church-attendants were fined who brought their "doggs"
+into the meeting-house. Dogs swarmed in the colony, for they had been
+imported from England, "sufficient mastive dogs, hounds and beagles," and
+also Irish wolf-hounds; and they caused an interruption in one afternoon
+service by chasing into the meeting-house one of those pungently offensive,
+though harmless, animals that abounded even in the earliest colonial
+days, and whose mephitic odor, in this case, had power to scatter the
+congregation as effectively as would have a score of armed Indian braves.
+Officially appointed "Dogg-whippers" and the never idle tithingman expelled
+the intruding and unwelcome canine attendants from the meeting-house with
+fierce blows and fiercer yelps. The swarming dogs, though they were trained
+to hunt the Indians and wolves and tear them in pieces, were much fonder of
+hunting and tearing the peaceful sheep, and thus became such unmitigated
+nuisances, out of meeting as well as in, that they had to be muzzled and
+hobbled, and killed, and land was granted (as in Newbury in 1703) on
+condition that no dog was ever kept thereon. As late as the year 1820, it
+was ordered in the town of Brewster that any dog that came into meeting
+should be killed unless the owner promised to thenceforth keep the intruder
+out.
+
+Alarms of fire in the neighborhood frequently disturbed the quiet of
+the early colonial services; for the combustible catted chimneys were
+a constant source of conflagration, especially on Sundays, when the
+fireplaces with their roaring fires were left unwatched; and all the men
+rushed out of the meeting at sound of the alarm to aid in quenching the
+flames, which could however be ill-fought with the scanty supply of
+water that could be brought in a few leathern fire-buckets and
+milk-pails,--though at a very early date as an aid in extinguishing
+fires each New England family was ordered by law to own a fire-ladder.
+Occasionally the town's ladder and poles and hooks and cedar-buckets were
+kept in the meeting-house, and thus were handy for Sunday fires.
+
+Sometimes armed men, bearing rumors of wars and of hostile attacks, rode
+clattering up to the church-door, and strode with jingling spurs and
+rattling swords into the excited assembly with appeal for more soldiers to
+bear arms, or for more help for those already in the army, and the whole
+congregation felt it no interruption but a high religious privilege and
+duty, to which they responded in word and deed. On some happy Sabbaths the
+armed riders bore good news of great victories, and great was the rejoicing
+thereat in prayer and praise in the old meeting-house.
+
+But usually through the Sabbath services, though the quiet was not that
+of our modern carpeted, cushioned, orderly churches, but few interrupting
+sounds were heard. The cry of a waking infant, the scraping of restless
+feet on the sanded floor, the lumbering noise of the motions of a cramped
+farmer as he stood up to lean over the pew-door or gallery-rail, the
+clatter of an overturned cricket, the twittering of swallows in the
+rafters, and in the summer-time the bumping and buzzing of an invading
+bumble-bee as he soared through the air and against the walls, were
+the only sounds within the meeting-house that broke the monotonous
+"thirteenthly" and "fourteenthly" of the minister's sermon.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+The Observances of the Day.
+
+
+
+The so-called "False Blue Laws" of Connecticut, which were foisted upon the
+public by the Reverend Samuel Peter, have caused much indignation among all
+thoughtful descendants and all lovers of New England Puritans. Three of
+his most bitterly resented false laws which refer to the observance of the
+Sabbath read thus:--
+
+"No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or
+shave on the Sabbath Day.
+
+"No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.
+
+"No one shall ride on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere
+except reverently to and from meeting."
+
+Though these laws were worded by Dr. Peters, and though we are disgusted to
+hear them so often quoted as historical facts, still we must acknowledge
+that though in detail not correct, they are in spirit true records of the
+old Puritan laws which were enacted to enforce the strict and decorous
+observance of the Sabbath, and which were valid not only in Connecticut and
+Massachusetts, but in other New England States. Even a careless glance at
+the historical record of any old town or church will give plenty of details
+to prove this.
+
+Thus in New London we find in the latter part of the seventeenth century a
+wicked fisherman presented before the Court and fined for catching eels on
+Sunday; another "fined twenty shillings for sailing a boat on the Lord's
+Day;" while in 1670 two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused
+of and tried for "sitting together on the Lord's Day under an apple tree in
+Goodman Chapman's Orchard,"--so harmless and so natural an act. In Plymouth
+a man was "sharply whipped" for shooting fowl on Sunday; another was fined
+for carrying a grist of corn home on the Lord's Day, and the miller who
+allowed him to take it was also fined. Elizabeth Eddy of the same town was
+fined, in 1652, "ten shillings for wringing and hanging out clothes." A
+Plymouth man, for attending to his tar-pits on the Sabbath, was set in the
+stocks. James Watt, in 1658, was publicly reproved "for writing a note
+about common business on the Lord's Day, _at least in the evening
+somewhat too soon._" A Plymouth man who drove a yoke of oxen was
+"presented" before the Court, as was also another offender, who drove some
+cows a short distance "without need" on the Sabbath.
+
+In Newbury, in 1646, Aquila Chase and his wife were presented and fined for
+gathering peas from their garden on the Sabbath, but upon investigation the
+fines were remitted, and the offenders were only admonished. In Wareham,
+in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the
+Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham
+citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five
+shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put
+in his shoe" to protect his foot--for doing this piece of heavy work on the
+Lord's Day, was fined, and paid forty shillings.
+
+Captain Kemble of Boston was in 1656 set for two hours in the public stocks
+for his "lewd and unseemly behavior," which, consisted in his kissing his
+wife "publicquely" on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, when
+he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years. The lewd
+offender was a man of wealth and influence, the father of Madam Sarah
+Knights, the "fearfull female travailler" whose diary of a journey from
+Boston to New York and return, written in 1704, rivals in quality if not in
+quantity Judge Sewall's much-quoted diary. A traveller named Burnaby tells
+of a similar offence of an English sea-captain who was soundly whipped for
+kissing his wife on the street of a New England town on Sunday, and of his
+retaliation in kind, by a clever trick upon his chastisers; but Burnaby's
+narrative always seemed to me of dubious credibility.
+
+Abundant proof can be given that the act of the legislature in 1649 was not
+a dead letter which ordered that "whosoever shall prophane the Lords daye
+by doeing any seruill worke or such like abusses shall forfeite for euery
+such default ten shillings or be whipt."
+
+The Vermont "Blue Book" contained equally sharp "Sunday laws." Whoever was
+guilty of any rude, profane, or unlawful conduct on the Lord's Day, in
+words or action, by clamorous discourses, shouting, hallooing, screaming,
+running, riding, dancing, jumping, was to be fined forty shillings and
+whipped upon the naked back not to exceed ten stripes. The New Haven code
+of laws, more severe still, ordered that "Profanation of the Lord's Day
+shall be punished by fine, imprisonment, or corporeal punishment; and
+if proudly, and with a high hand against the authority of God--_with
+death_."
+
+Lists of arrests and fines for walking and travelling unnecessarily on the
+Sabbath might be given in great numbers, and it was specially ordered
+that none should "ride violently to and from meeting." Many a pious New
+Englander, in olden days, was fined for his ungodly pride, and his desire
+to "show off" his "new colt" as he "rode violently" up to the meeting-house
+green on Sabbath morn. One offender explained in excuse of his unnecessary
+driving on the Sabbath that he had been to visit a sick relative, but
+his excuse was not accepted. A Maine man who was rebuked and fined for
+"unseemly walking" on the Lord's Day protested that he ran to save a man
+from drowning. The Court made him pay his fine, but ordered that the money
+should be returned to him when he could prove by witnesses that he had
+been on that errand of mercy and duty. As late as the year 1831, in
+Lebanon, Connecticut, a lady journeying to her father's home was arrested
+within sight of her father's house for unnecessary travelling on the
+Sabbath; and a long and fiercely contested lawsuit was the result, and
+damages were finally given for false imprisonment. In 1720 Samuel Sabin
+complained of himself before a justice in Norwich that he visited on
+Sabbath night some relatives at a neighbor's house. His morbidly tender
+conscience smote him and made him "fear he had transgressed the law,"
+though he felt sure no harm had been done thereby. In 1659 Sam Clarke, for
+"Hankering about on men's gates on Sabbath evening to draw company out
+to him," was reproved and warned not to "harden his neck" and be "wholly
+destrojed." Poor stiff-necked, lonely, "hankering" Sam! to be so harshly
+reproved for his harmlessly sociable intents. Perhaps he "hankered" after
+the Puritan maids, and if so, deserved his reproof and the threat of
+annihilation.
+
+Sabbath-breaking by visiting abounded in staid Worcester town to a most
+base extent, but was severely punished, as local records show. In Belfast,
+Maine, in 1776, a meeting was held to get the "Towns Mind" with regard to
+a plan to restrain visiting on the Sabbath. The time had passed when such
+offences could be punished either by fine or imprisonment, so it was voted
+"that if any person makes unnecessary Vizits on the Sabeth, They shall be
+Look't on with Contempt." This was the universal expression throughout the
+Puritan colonies; and looked on with contempt are Sabbath-breakers and
+Sabbath-slighters in New England to the present day. Even if they committed
+no active offence, the colonists could not passively neglect the Church
+and its duties. As late as 1774 the First Church of Roxbury fined
+non-attendance at public worship. In 1651 Thomas Scott "was fyned ten
+shillings unless he have learned Mr. Norton's 'Chatacise' by the next
+court" In 1760 the legislature of Massachusetts passed the law that "any
+person able of Body who shall absent themselves from publick worship of God
+on the Lord's Day shall pay ten shillings fine." By the Connecticut code
+ten shillings was the fine, and the law was not suspended until the year
+1770. By the New Haven code five shillings was the fine for non-attendance
+at church, and the offender was often punished as well. Captain Dennison,
+one of New Haven's most popular and respected citizens, was fined fifteen
+shillings for absence from church. William Blagden, who lived in New Haven
+in 1647, was "brought up" for absence from meeting. He pleaded that he had
+fallen into the water late on Saturday, could light no fire on Sunday to
+dry his clothes, and so had lain in bed to keep warm while his only suit of
+garments was drying. In spite of this seemingly fair excuse, Blagden was
+found guilty of "sloathefuluess" and sentenced to be "publiquely whipped."
+Of course the Quakers contributed liberally to the support of the Court,
+and were fined in great numbers for refusing to attend the church which
+they hated, and which also warmly abhorred them; and they were zealously
+set in the stocks, and whipped and caged and pilloried as well,--whipped
+if they came and expressed any dissatisfaction, and whipped if they stayed
+away.
+
+Severe and explicit were the orders with regard to the use of the "Creature
+called Tobacko" on the Sabbath. In the very earliest days of the colony
+means had been taken to present the planting of the pernicious weed
+except in very small quantities "for meere necessitie, for phisick, for
+preseruaceon of health, and that the same be taken privatly by auncient
+men." In Connecticut a man could by permission of the law smoke once if
+he went on a journey of ten miles (as some slight solace for the arduous
+trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house.
+Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the
+law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a
+long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor
+buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men
+love it now, they somehow invoked or spirited it into their pipes, though
+they never could smoke it in public unfined and unpunished. The shrewd and
+thrifty New Haven people permitted the raising of it for purposes of trade,
+though not for use, thus supplying the "devil's weed" to others, chiefly
+the godless Dutch, but piously spurning it themselves--in public. Its use
+was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on the Sabbath within two
+miles of the meeting-house, which (since at that date all the homes were
+clustered around the church-green) was equivalent to not smoking it at all
+on the Lord's Day, if the lav were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed,
+poor slaves of habit, who were in Duxbury fined ten shillings for each
+offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it
+told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston
+the fine for "drinking tobacco in the meeting-house" was five shillings for
+each drink, which I take to mean chewing tobacco rather than smoking it;
+many men were fined for thus drinking, and solacing the weary hours, though
+doubtless they were as sly and kept themselves as unobserved as possible.
+Four Yarmouth men--old sea-dogs, perhaps, who loved their pipe--were, in
+1687, fined four shillings each for smoking tobacco around the end of the
+meeting-house. Silly, ostrich-brained Yarmouth men! to fancy to escape
+detection by hiding around the corner of the church; and to think that the
+tithingman had no nose when he was so Argus-eyed. Some few of the ministers
+used the "tobacco weed." Mr. Baily wrote with distress of mind and
+abasement of soul in his diary of his "exceeding in tobacco." The hatred of
+the public use of tobacco lingered long in New England, even in large towns
+such as Providence, though chiefly on account of universal dread lest
+sparks from the burning weed should start conflagrations in the towns.
+Until within a few years, in small towns in western Massachusetts,
+Easthampton and neighboring villages, tobacco-smoking on the street was not
+permitted either on weekdays or Sundays.
+
+Not content with strict observance of the Sabbathday alone, the Puritans
+included Saturday evening in their holy day, and in the first colonial
+years these instructions were given to Governor Endicott by the New England
+Plantation Company: "And to the end that the Sabeth may be celebrated in
+a religious man ner wee appoint that all may surcease their labor every
+Satterday throughout the yeare at three of the clock in the afternoone, and
+that they spend the rest of the day in chatechizing and preparacoon for
+the Sabeth as the ministers shall direct." Cotton Mather wrote thus of his
+grandfather, old John Cotton: "The Sabbath he begun the evening before, for
+which keeping from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming
+to New England, and I suppose 't was from his reason and practice that the
+Christians of New England have generally done so too." He then tells of the
+protracted religious services held in the Cotton household every Saturday
+night,--services so long that the Sabbath-day exercises must have seemed in
+comparison like a light interlude.
+
+John Norton described these Cotton Sabbaths more briefly thus: "He [John
+Cotton] began the Sabbath at evening; therefore then performed family-duty
+after supper, being longer than ordinary in Exposition. After which he
+catechized his children and servants and then returned unto his study. The
+morning following, family-worship being ended, he retired into his study
+until the bell called him away. Upon his return from meeting he returned
+again into his study (the place of his labor and prayer) unto his private
+devotion; where, having a small repast carried him up for his dinner, he
+continued until the tolling of the bell. The public service being over, he
+withdrew for a space to his pre-mentioned oratory for his sacred addresses
+to God, as in the forenoon, then came down, _repeated the sermon in the
+family_, prayed, after supper sang a Psalm, and towards bedtime betaking
+himself again to his study he closed the day with prayer. Thus he spent the
+Sabbath continually." Just fancy the Cotton children and servants listening
+to his long afternoon sermon a second time!
+
+All the New England clergymen were rigid in the prolonged observance of
+Sunday. From sunset on Saturday until Sunday night they would not shave,
+have rooms swept, nor beds made, have food prepared, nor cooking utensils
+and table-ware washed. As soon as their Sabbath began they gathered their
+families and servants around them, as did Cotton, and read the Bible and
+exhorted and prayed and recited the catechism until nine o'clock, usually
+by the light of one small "dip candle" only; on long winter Saturdays it
+must have been gloomy and tedious indeed. Small wonder that one minister
+wrote back to England that he found it difficult in the new colony to get a
+servant who "_enjoyed catechizing and family duties_." Many clergymen
+deplored sadly the custom which grew in later years of driving, and even
+transacting business, on Saturday night. Mr. Bushnell used to call it
+"stealing the time of the Sabbath," and refused to countenance it in any
+way.
+
+It was very generally believed in the early days of New England that
+special judgments befell those who worked on the eve of the Sabbath.
+Winthrop gives the case of a man who, having hired help to repair a
+milldam, worked an hour on Saturday after sunset to finish what he had
+intended for the day's labor. The next day his little child, being left
+alone for some hours, was drowned in an uncovered well in the cellar of his
+house. "The father freely, in open congregation, did acknowledge it the
+righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day."
+
+Visitors and travellers from other countries were forced to obey the rigid
+laws with regard to Saturday-night observance. Archibald Henderson, the
+master of a vessel which entered the port of Boston, complained to the
+Council for Foreign Plantations in London that while he was in sober Boston
+town, being ignorant of the laws of the land, and having walked half an
+hour after sunset on Saturday night, as punishment for this unintentional
+and trivial offence, a constable entered his lodgings, seized him by the
+hair of his head, and dragged him to prison. Henderson claimed £800 damages
+for the detention of his vessel during his prosecution. I have always
+suspected that the gay captain may have misbehaved himself in Boston
+on that Saturday night in some other way than simply by walking in
+the streets, and that the Puritan law-enforcers took advantage of the
+Sabbath-day laws in order to prosecute and punish him. We know of
+Bradford's complaint of the times; that while sailors brought "a greate
+deale" of money from foreign parts to New England to spend, they also
+brought evil ways of spending it--"more sine I feare than money."
+
+The Puritans found in Scripture support for this observance of Saturday
+night, in these words, "The evening and the morning were the first day,"
+and they had many followers in their belief. In New England country towns
+to this day, descendants of the Puritans regard Saturday night, though in
+a modified way, as almost Sunday, and that evening is never chosen for any
+kind of gay gathering or visiting. As late as 1855 the shops in Hartford
+were never open for customers upon Saturday night.
+
+Much satire was directed against this Saturday night observance both by
+English and by American authors. In the "American Museum" for February,
+1787, appeared a poem entitled, "The Connecticut Sabbath." After saying at
+some length that God had thought one day in seven sufficient for rest, but
+New England Christians had improved his law by setting apart a day and a
+half, the poet thus runs on derisively:--
+
+  "And let it be enacted further still
+  That all our people strict observe our will;
+  Five days and a half shall men, and women, too,
+  Attend their bus'ness and their mirth pursue,
+  But after that no man without a fine
+  Shall walk the streets or at a tavern dine.
+  One day and half 'tis requisite to rest
+  From toilsome labor and a tempting feast.
+  Henceforth let none on peril of their lives
+  Attempt a journey or embrace their wives;
+  No barber, foreign or domestic bred,
+  Shall e'er presume to dress a lady's head;
+  No shop shall spare (half the preceding day)
+  A yard of riband or an ounce of tea."
+
+And many similar rhymes might be given.
+
+Sunday night, being shut out of the Sabbath hours, became in the eighteenth
+century a time of general cheerfulness and often merry-making. This sudden
+transition from the religious calm and quiet of the afternoon to the noisy
+gayety of the evening was very trying to many of the clergymen, especially
+to Jonathan Edwards, who preached often and sadly against "Sabbath evening
+dissipations and mirth-making." In some communities singing-schools were
+held on Sunday nights, which afforded a comparatively decorous and orderly
+manner of spending the close of the day.
+
+Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm
+Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath,--sign and token to them,
+not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal
+rest to come. The universal quiet and peace of the community showed the
+primitive instinct of a pure, simple devotion, the sincere religion which
+knew no compromise in spiritual things, no half-way obedience to God's
+Word, but rested absolutely on the Lord's Day--as was commanded. No work,
+no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was
+seen except the necessary care of the patient cattle and other dumb beasts,
+the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the nooning,
+a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead. This
+absolute obedience to the letter as well as to the spirit of God's Word
+was one of the most typical traits of the character of the Puritans, and
+appeared to them to be one of the most vital points of their religion.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The Authority of the Church and the Ministers.
+
+
+
+Severely were the early colonists punished if they ventured to criticise
+or disparage either the ministers or their teachings, or indeed any of the
+religious exercises of the church. In Sandwich a man was publicly whipped
+for speaking deridingly of God's words and ordinances as taught by the
+Sandwich minister. Mistress Oliver was forced to stand in public with a
+cleft stick on her tongue for "reproaching the elders." A New Haven man was
+severely whipped and fined for declaring that he received no profit from
+the minister's sermons. We also know the terrible shock given the Windham
+church in 1729 by the "vile and slanderous expressions" of one unregenerate
+Windhamite who said, "I had rather hear my dog bark than Mr. Bellamy
+preach." He was warned that he would be "shakenoff and givenup," and
+terrified at the prospect of so dire a fate he read a confession of his
+sorrow and repentance, and promised to "keep a guard over his tongue," and
+also to listen to Mr. Bellamy's preaching, which may have been a still more
+difficult task. Mr. Edward Tomlins, of Boston, upon retracting his opinion
+which he had expressed openly against the singing in the churches, was
+discharged without a fine. William Howes and his son were in 1744 fined
+fifty shillings "apeece for deriding such as sing in the congregation,
+tearming them fooles." The church music was as sacred to the Puritans as
+were the prayers, but it must have been a sore trial to many to keep still
+about the vile manner and method of singing. In 1631 Phillip Ratcliffe,
+for "speaking against the churches," had his ears cut off, was whipped and
+banished. We know also the consternation caused in New Haven in 1646 by
+Madam Brewster's saying that the custom of carrying contributions to
+the Deacons' table was popish--was "like going to the High Alter,"
+and "savored of the Mass." She answered her accusers in such a bold,
+highhanded, and defiant manner that her heinous offence was considered
+worthy of trial in a higher court, whose decision is now lost.
+
+The colonists could not let their affection and zeal for an individual
+minister cause them to show any disrespect or indifference to the Puritan
+Church in general. When the question of the settlement of the Reverend Mr.
+Lenthal in the church of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was under discussion, the
+tyranny of the Puritan Church over any who dared oppose or question it was
+shown in a marked manner, and may be cited as a typical case. Mr. Lenthal
+was suspected of being poisoned with the Anne Hutchinson heresies, and he
+also "opposed the way of gathering churches." Hence his ordination over the
+church in the new settlement was bitterly opposed by the Boston divines,
+though apparently desired by the Weymouth congregation. One Britton, who
+was friendly towards Lenthal and who spoke "reproachfully" and slurringly
+of a book which defended the course of the Boston churches, was whipped
+with eleven stripes, as he had no money to pay the imposed fine. John
+Smythe, who "got hands to a blank" (which was either canvassing for
+signatures to a proxy vote in favor of Lenthal or obtaining signatures
+to an instrument declaring against the design of the churches), for thus
+"combining to hinder the orderly gathering" of the Weymouth church at this
+time, was fined £2. Edward Sylvester for the same offence was fined and
+disfranchised. Ambrose Martin, another friend of Lenthal's, for calling
+the church covenant of the Boston divines "a stinking carrion and a human
+invention," was fined £10, while Thomas Makepeace, another Weymouth
+malcontent, was informed by those in power that "they were weary of him,"
+or, in modern slang, that "he made them tired." Parson Lenthal himself,
+being sent for by the convention, weakened at once in a way his church
+followers must have bitterly despised; he was "quickly convinced of his
+error and evil." His conviction was followed with his confession, and in
+open court he gave under his hand a laudable retraction, which retraction
+he was ordered also to "utter in the assembly at Weymouth, and so no
+further censure was passed on him." Thus the chief offender got the
+lightest punishment, and thus did the omnipotent Church rule the whole
+community.
+
+The names of loquacious, babbling Quakers and Baptists who spoke
+disrespectfully of some or all of the ordinances of the Puritan church
+might be given, and would swell the list indefinitely; they were fined and
+punished without mercy or even toleration.
+
+All profanity or blaspheming against God was severely punished. One very
+wicked man in Hartford for his "fillthy and prophane expressions," namely,
+that "hee hoped to meet some of the members of the Church in Hell before
+long, and he did not question but hee should," was "committed to prison,
+there to be kept in safe custody till the sermon, and then to stand the
+time thereof in the pillory, and after sermon to be severely whipped." What
+a severe punishment for so purely verbal an offence! New England ideas of
+profanity were very rigid, and New England men had reason to guard well
+their temper and tongue, else that latter member might be bored with a
+hot iron; for such was the penalty for profanity. We know what horror Mr.
+Tomlins's wicked profanity, "Curse ye woodchuck!" caused in Lynn meeting,
+and Mr. Dexter was "putt in ye billboes ffor prophane saying dam ye cowe."
+The Newbury doctor was sharply fined also for wickedly cursing. When
+drinking at the tavern he raised his glass and said,--
+
+  "I'll pledge my friends, and for my foes
+  A plague for their heels, and a poxe for their toes."
+
+He acknowledged his wickedness and foolishness in using the "olde proverb,"
+and penitently promised to curse no more.
+
+Sad to tell, Puritan women sometimes lost their temper and their
+good-breeding and their godliness. Two wicked Wells women were punished in
+1669 "for using profane speeches in their common talk; as in making answer
+to several questions their answer is, The Devil a bit." In 1640, in
+Springfield, Goody Gregory, being grievously angered, profanely abused an
+annoying neighbor, saying, "Before God I coulde breake thy heade!" But she
+acknowledged her "great sine and faulte" like a woman, and paid her fine
+and sat in the stocks like a man, since she swore like the members of that
+profane sex.
+
+Sometimes the sins of the fathers were visited on the children in a most
+extraordinary manner. One man, "for abusing N. Parker at the tavern," was
+deprived of the privilege of bringing his children to be baptized, and was
+thus spiritually punished for a very worldly offence. For some offences,
+such as "speaking deridingly of the minister's powers," as was done in
+Plymouth, "casting uncharitable reflexions on the minister," as did an
+Andover man; and also for absenting one's self from church services; for
+"sloathefulness," for "walking prophanely," for spoiling hides when tanning
+and refusing explanation thereof; for selling short weight in grain,
+for being "given too much to Jearings," for "Slanndering," for being a
+"Makebayte," for "ronging naibors," for "being too Proude," for "suspitions
+of stealing pinnes," for "pnishouse Squerilouse Odyouse wordes," and for
+"lyeing," church-members were not only fined and punished but were deprived
+of partaking of the sacrament. In the matter of lying great distinction was
+made as to the character and effect of the offence. George Crispe's wife,
+who "told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly," was simply
+admonished and remonstrated with. Will Randall, who told a "plain lie," was
+fined ten shillings. While Ralph Smith, who "lied about seeing a whale,"
+was fined twenty shillings and excommunicated.
+
+In some communities, of which Lechford tells us New Haven was one, these
+unhouselled Puritans were allowed, if they so desired, to stand outside the
+meeting-house door at the time of public worship and catch what few words
+of the service they could. This humble waiting for crumbs of God's word was
+doubtless regarded as a sign of repentance for past deeds, for it was often
+followed by full forgiveness. As excommunicated persons were regarded with
+high disfavor and even abhorrence by the entire pious and godly walking
+community, this apparently spiritual punishment was more severe in its
+temporal effects than at first sight appears. From the Cambridge Platform,
+which was drawn up and adopted by the New England Synod in 1648, we learn
+that "while the offender remains excommunicated the church is to refrain
+from all communion with him in civil things," and the members were
+specially "to forbear to eat and drink with him;" so his daily and even his
+family life was made wretched. And as it was not necessary to wait for the
+action of the church to pronounce excommunication, but the "pastor of a
+church might by himself and authoritatively suspend from the Lord's table
+a brother _suspected_ of scandal" until there was time for full
+examination, we can see what an absolute power the church and even the
+minister had over church-members in a New England community.
+
+Nor could the poor excommunicate go to neighboring towns and settlements to
+start afresh. No one wished him or would tolerate him. Lancaster, in 1653,
+voted not to receive into its plantation "any excommunicat or notoriously
+erring agt the Docktrin & Discipline of churches of this Commonwealth."
+Other towns passed similar votes. Fortunately, Rhode Island--the island of
+"Aquidnay" and the Providence Plantations--opened wide its arms as a place
+of refuge for outcast Puritans. Universal freedom and religious toleration
+were in Rhode Island the foundations of the State. Josiah Quincy said that
+liberty of conscience would have produced anarchy if it had been permitted
+in the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century, but the
+flourishing Narragansett, Providence, and Newport plantations seem to prove
+the absurdity of that statement. Liberty of conscience was there allowed,
+as Dr. MacSparran, the first clergyman of the Narragansett Church,
+complained in his "America Dissected," "to the extent of no religion at
+all." The Gortonians, the Foxians, and Hutchinsonians, the Anabaptists, the
+Six Principle Baptists, the Church of England, apparently all the followers
+of the eighty-two "pestilent heresies" so sadly enumerated and so bitterly
+hated and "cast out to Satan" by the Massachusetts Puritan divines,--all
+the excommunicants and exiles found in Rhode Island a home and
+friends--other friends than the Devil to whom they had been consigned.
+
+Though the early Puritan ministers had such powerful influence in every
+other respect, they were not permitted to perform the marriage-service
+nor to raise their voices in prayer or exhortation at a funeral. Sewall
+jealously notes when the English burial-service began to be read at
+burials, saying, "the office for Burial is a Lying very bad office makes no
+difference between the precious and the vile." The office of marriage was
+denied the parson, and was generally relegated to the magistrate. In this,
+Governor Bradford states, they followed "ye laudable custome of ye Low
+Countries." Not rulers and magistrates only were empowered to perform the
+marriage ceremony; squires, tavern-keepers, captains, various authorized
+persons might wed Puritan lovers; any man of dignity or prominence in the
+community could apparently receive authority to perform that office except
+the otherwise all-powerful parson.
+
+As years rolled on, though the New Englanders still felt great reverence
+and pride for their church and its ordinances, the minister was no longer
+the just man made perfect, the oracle of divine will. The church-members
+escaped somewhat from ecclesiastical power, and some of them found fault
+with and openly disparaged their ministers in a way that would in early
+days have caused them to be pilloried, whipped, caged, or fined; and often
+the derogatory comments were elicited by the most trivial offences. One
+parson was bitterly condemned because he managed to amass eight hundred
+dollars by selling the produce of his farm. Another shocking and severely
+criticised offence was a game of bowls which one minister played and
+enjoyed. Still another minister, in Hanover, Massachusetts, was reproved
+for his lack of dignity, which was shown in his wearing stockings "footed
+up with another color;" that is, knit stockings in which the feet were
+colored differently from the legs. He also was found guilty of having
+jumped over the fence instead of decorously and clerically walking through
+the gate when going to call on one of his parishioners. Rev. Joseph Metcalf
+of the Old Colony was complained of in 1720 for wearing too worldly a wig.
+He mildly reproved and shamed the meddlesome women of his church by asking
+them to come to him and each cut off a lock of hair from the obnoxious
+wig until all the complainers were satisfied that it had been rendered
+sufficiently unworldly. Some Newbury church-members, in 1742, asserted that
+their minister unclerically wore a colored kerchief instead of a band. This
+he indignantly denied, saying that he "had never buried a babe even in most
+tempestuous weather," when he rode several miles, but he always wore a
+band, and he complained in turn that members of his congregation turned
+away from him on the street, and "glowered" at him and "sneered at him."
+Still more unseemly demonstrations of dislike were sometimes shown, as in
+South Hadley, in 1741, when a committee of disaffected parishioners
+pulled the Rev. Mr Rawsom out of the pulpit and marched him out of the
+meeting-house because they did not fancy his preaching. But all such
+actions were as offensive to the general community then as open expressions
+of dissatisfaction and contempt are now.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The Ordination of the Minister.
+
+
+
+The minister's ordination was, of course, an important social as well as
+spiritual event in such a religious community as was a New England colonial
+town. It was always celebrated by a great gathering of people from far and
+near, including all the ministers from every town for many miles around;
+and though a deeply serious service, was also an excuse for much
+merriment. In Connecticut, and by tradition also in Massachusetts, an
+"ordination-ball" was frequently given. It is popularly supposed that at
+this ball the ministers did not dance, nor even appear, nor to it in any
+way give their countenance; that it was only a ball given at the time of
+the ordination because so many people would then be in the town to take
+part in the festivity. That this was not always the case is proved by
+a letter of invitation still in existence written by Reverend Timothy
+Edwards, who was ordained in Windsor in 1694; it was written to Mr. and
+Mrs. Stoughton, asking them to attend the ordination-ball which was to be
+given in his, the minister's house. But whether the parsons approved and
+attended, or whether they strongly discountenanced it, the ordination-ball
+was always a great success. It is recorded that at one in Danvers a young
+man danced so vigorously and long on the sanded floor that he entirely wore
+out a new pair of shoes. The fashion of giving ordination-balls did not die
+out with colonial times. In Federal days it still continued, a specially
+gay ball being given in the town of Wolcott at an ordination in 1811.
+
+There was always given an ordination supper,--a plentiful feast, at which
+visiting ministers and the new pastor were always present and partook with
+true clerical appetite. This ordination feast consisted of all kinds of New
+England fare, all the mysterious compounds and concoctions of Indian corn
+and "pompions," all sorts of roast meats, "turces" cooked in various ways,
+gingerbread and "cacks," and--an inevitable feature at the time of every
+gathering of people, from a corn-husking or apple-bee to a funeral--a
+liberal amount of cider, punch, and grog was also supplied, which latter
+compound beverages were often mixed on the meeting-house green or even in
+punch-bowls on the very door-steps of the church. Beer, too, was specially
+brewed to honor the feast. Rev. Mr. Thatcher, of Boston, wrote in his diary
+on the twentieth of May, 1681, "This daye the Ordination Beare was brewed."
+Portable bars were sometimes established at the church-door, and strong
+drinks were distributed free of charge to the entire assemblage. As late
+as 1825, at the installation of Dr. Leonard Bacon over the First
+Congregational Church in New Haven, free drinks were furnished at an
+adjacent bar to all who chose to order them, and were "settled for" by the
+generous and hospitable society. In considering the extravagant amount of
+moneys often recorded as having been paid out for liquor at ordinations,
+one must not fail to remember that the seemingly large sums were often
+spent in Revolutionary times during the great depreciation of Continental
+money. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars were disbursed for the
+entertainment of the council at the ordination of Mr. Kilbourn, of
+Chesterfield; but the items were really few and the total amount of liquor
+was not great,--thirty-eight mugs of flip at twelve dollars per mug; eleven
+gills of rum bitters at six dollars per gill, and two mugs of sling at
+twenty-four dollars per mug. The church in one town sent the Continental
+money in payment for the drinks of the church-council in a wheelbarrow to
+the tavern-keeper, and he was not very well paid either.
+
+It gives one a strange sense of the customs and habits of the olden times
+to read an "ordination-bill" from a tavern-keeper which is thus endorsed,
+"This all Paid for exsept the Minister's Rum." To give some idea of the
+expense of "keeping the ministers" at an ordination in Hartford in 1784,
+let me give the items of the bill:--
+
+                          £  s. d.
+  To keeping Ministers    0  2  4
+  2 Mugs tody             0  5 10
+  5 Segars                0  3  0
+  1 Pint wine             0  0  9
+  3 lodgings              0  9  0
+  3 bitters               0  0  9
+  3 breakfasts            0  3  6
+  15 boles Punch          1 10  0
+  24 dinners              1 16  0
+  11 bottles wine         0  3  6
+  5 mugs flip             0  5 10
+  3 boles punch           0  6  0
+  3 boles tody            0  3  6
+
+One might say with Falstaff, "O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread
+to this intolerable deal of sack!" I sadly fear me that at that Hartford
+ordination our parson ancestors got grievsously "gilded," to use a choice
+"red-lattice phrase."
+
+Many accounts of gay ordination parties have been preserved in diaries for
+us. Reverend Mr. Smith, who was settled in Portland in the early part of
+the eighteenth century, wrote thus in his journal of an ordination which
+he attended: "Mr. Foxcroft ordained at New Gloucester. We had a pleasant
+journey home. Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry. A _jolly ordination_.
+We lost all sight of decorum." The Mr. L. referred to was Mr. Stephen
+Longfellow, greatgrandfather of the poet.
+
+Bills for ordination-expenses abound in items of barrels of rum and cider
+and metheglin, of bowls of flip and punch and toddy, of boxes of lemons and
+loaves of sugar, in punches, and sometimes broken punchbowls, and in one
+case a large amount of Malaga and Canary wine, spices and "ross water,"
+from which was brewed doubtless an appetizing ordination-cup which may have
+rivalled Josselyn's New England nectar of "cyder, Maligo raisins, spices,
+and sirup of clove-gillyflowers."
+
+In Massachusetts, in January, 1759, the subject of the frequent disorders
+and irregularities in connection with ordination-services, especially in
+country towns, came before the council of the province, who referred
+its consideration to a convention of ministers. The ministers at that
+convention were recommended to each give instruction, exhortation, and
+advice against excesses to the members of his congregation whenever an
+ordination was about to take place in the vicinity of his church. In this
+way it was hoped that the reformation would be aided, and temperance,
+order, and decorum established. The newspapers were free in their
+condemnation of the feasting and roistering at ordination-services. When
+Dr. Cummings was ordained over the Old South Church of Boston in February,
+1761, a feast took place at the Rev. Dr. Sewall's house which occasioned
+much comment. A four-column letter of criticism appeared in the Boston
+Gazette of March 9, 1761, over the signature of "Countryman," which
+provoked several answers and much newspaper controversy. As Dr. Sewall had
+been moderator of the meeting of ministers held only two years previously
+with the hope, and for the purpose of abolishing ordination revelries, it
+is not strange that the circumstance of the feast being given in his house
+should cause public comment and criticism.
+
+"Countryman" complained that "the price of provisions was raised a quarter
+cart in Boston for several days before the instalment by reason of the
+great preparations therefor, and the readiness of the ecclesiastical
+caterers to give almost any price that was demanded. Many Boston people
+complained the town had, by this means, in a few days lost a large sum of
+money; which was, as it were, levied on and extorted from them. If the
+poor were the _better for what remained of so plentiful and splendid a
+feast_ I am very glad but yet think it is a pity the charity were not
+better timed." He reprovingly enumerates, "There were six tables that held
+one with another eighteen persons each, upon each table a good rich plumb
+pudding, a dish of boil'd pork and fowls, and a corn'd leg of pork with
+sauce proper for it, a leg of bacon, a piece of alamode beef, a leg of
+mutton with caper sauce, a roast line of veal, a roast turkey, a venison
+pastee, besides chess cakes and tarts, cheese and butter. Half a dozen
+cooks were employed upon this occasion, upwards of twenty tenders to wait
+upon the tables; they had the best of old cyder, one barrel of Lisbon wine,
+punch in plenty before and after dinner, made of old Barbados spirit. The
+cost of this moderate dinner was upwards of fifty pounds lawful money."
+This special ordination-feast, even as detailed by the complaining
+"Countryman," does not seem to me very reprehensible. The standing of the
+church, the wealth of the congregation, the character of the guests (among
+whom were the Governor and the judges of the Superior Court) all make
+this repast appear neither ostentatious nor extravagant. Fifty pounds was
+certainly not an enormous sum to spend for a dinner with wine for over one
+hundred persons, and such a good dinner too. Nor is it probable that a city
+as large as was Boston at that date could through that dinner have been
+swept of provisions to such an extent that prices would be raised a quarter
+part. I suspect some personal malice caused "Countryman's" attacks, for he
+certainly could have found in other towns more flagrant cases to complain
+of and condemn.
+
+Though no record exists to prove that "the poor were the better for
+what remained" after this Boston feast, in other towns letters
+and church-entries show that any fragments remaining after the
+ordination-dinner were well disposed of. Sometimes they furnished forth the
+new minister's table. In one case they were given to "a widowed family"
+("widowed" here being used in the old tender sense of bereaved). In
+Killingly "the overplush of provisions" was sold to help pay the arrearages
+of the salary of the outgoing minister, thus showing a laudable desire to
+"settle up and start square."
+
+If the church were dedicated at the time of the ordination, that would
+naturally be cause for additional gayety. A very interesting and graphic
+account of the feast at the dedication of the Old Tunnel Meeting-House of
+Lynn in the year 1682 has been preserved. It thus describes the scene:--
+
+"Ye Deddication Dinner was had in ye greate barne of Mr. Hoode which by
+reason of its goodly size was deemed ye most fit place. It was neatly
+adorned with green bows and other hangings and made very faire to look
+upon, ye wreaths being mostly wrought by ye young folk, they meeting
+together, both maides and young men, and having a merry time in doing ye
+work. Ye rough stalls and unbowed posts being gaily begirt and all ye
+corners and cubbies being clean swept and well aired, it truly did appear
+a meet banquetting hall. Ye scaffolds too from which ye provinder had been
+removed were swept cleane as broome could make them. Some seats were put up
+on ye scaffoldes whereon might sitt such of ye antient women as would see &
+ye maides and children. Ye greate floor was all held for ye company which
+was to partake of ye feast of fat things, none others being admitted there
+save them that were to wait upon ye same. Ye kine that were wont to be
+there were forced to keep holiday in the field."
+
+Then follows a minute account of how the fowls persisted in flying in
+and roosting over the table, scattering feathers and hay on the parsons
+beneath.
+
+"Mr. Shepard's face did turn very red and he catched up an apple and hurled
+it at ye birds. But he thereby made a bad matter worse for ye fruit being
+well aimed it hit ye legs of a fowl and brought him floundering and
+flopping down on ye table, scattering gravy, sauce and divers things upon
+our garments and in our faces. But this did not well please some, yet with
+most it was a happening that made great merryment. Dainty meats were on ye
+table in great plenty, bear-stake, deer-meat, rabbit, and fowle, both wild
+and from ye barnyard. Luscious puddings we likewise had in abundance,
+mostly apple and berry, but some of corn meal with small bits of sewet
+baked therein; also pyes and tarts. We had some pleasant fruits, as apples,
+nuts and wild grapes, and to crown all, we had plenty of good cider and ye
+inspiring Barbadoes drink. Mr. Shepard and most of ye ministers were
+grave and prudent at table, discoursing much upon ye great points of ye
+deddication sermon and in silence laboring upon ye food before them. But I
+will not risque to say on which they dwelt with most relish, ye discourse
+or ye dinner. Most of ye young members of ye Council would fain make a
+jolly time of it. Mr. Gerrish, ye Wenham minister, tho prudent in his
+meat and drinks, was yet in right merry mood. And he did once grievously
+scandalize Mr. Shepard, who on suddenly looking up from his dish did spy
+him, as he thot, winking in an unbecoming way to one of ye pretty damsels
+on ye scaffold. And thereupon bidding ye godly Mr. Rogers to labor with him
+aside for his misbehavior, it turned out that ye winking was occasioned by
+some of ye hay seeds that were blowing about, lodging in his eye; whereat
+Mr. Shepard felt greatly releaved.
+
+"Ye new Meeting house was much discoursed upon at ye table. And most thot
+it as comely a house of worship as can be found in the whole Collony save
+only three or four. Mr. Gerrish was in such merry mood that he kept ye end
+of ye table whereby he sat in right jovial humour. Some did loudly laugh
+and clap their hands. But in ye middest of ye merryment a strange disaster
+did happen unto him. Not having his thots about him he endeavored ye
+dangerous performance of gaping and laughing at the same time which he must
+now feel is not so easy or safe a thing. In doing this he set his jaws open
+in such wise that it was beyond all his power to bring them together again.
+His agonie was very great, and his joyful laugh soon turned to grievous
+gioaning. Ye women in ye scaffolds became much distressed for him. We did
+our utmost to stay ye anguish of Mr. Gerrish, but could make out little
+till Mr. Rogers who knoweth somewhat of anatomy did bid ye sufferer to sit
+down on ye floor, which being done Mr. Rogers took ye head atween his legs,
+turning ye face as much upward as possible and then gave a powerful blow
+and then sudden press which brot ye jaws into working order. But Mr.
+Geirish did not gape or laugh much more on that occasion, neither did he
+talk much for that matter.
+
+"No other weighty mishap occurred save that one of ye Salem delegates, in
+boastfully essaying to crack a walnut atween his teeth did crack, instead
+of ye nut, a most usefull double tooth and was thereby forced to appear at
+ye evening with a bandaged face."
+
+This ended this most amusing chapter of disasters to the ministers, though
+the banquet was diversified by interrupting crows from invading roosters,
+fierce and undignified counter-attacks with nuts and apples by the
+clergymen, a few mortifyingly "mawdlin songs and much roistering laughter,"
+and the account ends, "so noble and savoury a banquet was never before
+spread in this noble town, God be praised." What a picture of the good old
+times! Different times make different manners; the early Puritan ministers
+did not, as a rule, drink to excess, any more than do our modern clergymen;
+but it is not strange that though they were of Puritan blood and belief,
+they should have fallen into the universal custom of the day, and should
+have "gone to their graves full of years, honor, simplicity, and rum." The
+only wonder is, when the ministers had the best places at every table, at
+every feast, at every merry-making in New England, that stories of their
+roistering excesses should not have come down to us as there have of the
+intemperate clergy of Virginia.
+
+The ordination services within the meeting-houses were not always decorous
+and quiet scenes. In spite of the reverence which our forefathers had for
+their church and their ministers, it did not prevent them from bitterly
+opposing the settlement of an unwished-for clergyman over them, and many
+towns were racked and divided, then as now, over the important question.
+As years passed on the church members grew bold enough to dare to offer
+personal and bodily opposition. At the ordination of the Rev. Peter
+Thatcher in the New North Church in Boston, in 1720, there were two
+parties. The members who did not wish him to be settled over the church
+went into the meeting-house and made a great disorder and clamor. They
+forbade the proceedings, and went into the gallery, and threw from thence
+water and missiles on the friends of the clergymen who were gathered around
+him at the altar. Perhaps they obtained courage for these sacrilegious acts
+from the barrels of rum and the bowls of strong punch. And this was in
+Puritanical Boston, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of the landing
+of the Mayflower. Thus had one century changed the absolute reverence and
+affectionate regard of the Pilgrims for their church, their ministers,
+and their meeting-houses, to irreverent and obstinate desire for personal
+satisfaction. No wonder that the ministers at that date preached and
+believed that Satan was making fresh and increasing efforts to destroy the
+Puritan church. The hour was ready for Whitefield, for Edwards, for any
+new awakening; and was above all fast approaching for the sadly needed
+temperance reform.
+
+In the seventeenth century a minister was ordained and re-ordained at
+each church over which he had charge; but after some years the name of
+installation was given to each appointment after the first ordination, and
+the ceremony was correspondingly changed.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+The Ministers.
+
+
+
+The picture which Colonel Higginson has drawn of the Puritan minister is so
+well known and so graphic that any attempt to add to it would be futile.
+All the succeeding New England parsons, as years rolled by, were not,
+however, like the black-gowned, black-gloved, stately, and solemn man whom
+he has so clearly shown us. Men of rigid decorum, and grave ceremony there
+were, such as Dr. Emmons and Jonathan Edwards; but there were parsons also
+of another type,--eccentric, unconventional, and undignified in demeanor
+and dress. Parson Robinson, of Duxbury, persisted in wearing in the pulpit,
+as part of his clerical attire, a round jacket instead of the suitable
+gown or Geneva cloak, and he was known thereby as "Master Jack." With
+astonishing inconsistency this Master Jack objected to the village
+blacksmith's wearing his leathern apron into the church, and he assailed
+the offender again and again with words and hints from his pulpit. He was
+at last worsted by the grimaces of the victorious smith (where was the
+Duxbury tithingman?), and indignantly left the pulpit, ejaculating, "I'll
+not preach while that man sits before me." A remonstrating parishioner
+said afterward to Master Jack, "I'd not have left if the Devil sat there."
+"Neither would I", was the quick answer.
+
+Another singular article of attire was worn in the pulpit by Father Mills,
+of Torrington, though neither in irreverence nor indifference. When his
+dearly loved wife died he pondered how he, who always wore black, could
+express to the world that he was wearing mourning; and his simple heart hit
+upon this grotesque device: he left off his full-flowing wig, and tied
+up his head in a black silk handkerchief, which he wore thereafter as a
+trapping of woe.
+
+Parson Judson, of Taunton, was so lazy that he used to preach while sitting
+down in the pulpit; and was so contemptibly fond of comfort that he would
+on summer Sundays give out to the sweltering members of his congregation
+the longest psalm in the psalm-book, and then desert them--piously
+perspiring and fuguing--and lie under a tree enjoying the cool outdoor
+breezes until the long psalm was ended, escaping thus not only the heat but
+the singing; and when we consider the quantity and quality of both, and
+that he condemned his good people to an extra amount of each, it seems
+a piece of clerical inhumanity that would be hard to equal. Surely this
+selfish Taunton sybarite was the prosaic ideal of Hamlet's words:--
+
+  "Some ungracious pastors do
+  Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven,
+  Whilst like a puff'd and reckless libertine
+  Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
+  And recks not his own rede."
+
+But lazy and slothful ministers were fortunately rare in New England. No
+primrose path of dalliance was theirs; industrious and hard-working were
+nearly all the early parsons, preaching and praying twice on the Sabbath,
+and preaching again on Lecture days; visiting the sick and often giving
+medical and "chyrurgycal" advice; called upon for legal counsel and
+adjudication; occupied in spare moments in teaching and preparing young
+men for college; working on their farms; hearing the children say their
+catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,--truly
+they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded
+on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan
+vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John
+Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher,"
+while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a
+contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious
+epithets and descriptions were applied to the parsons; they were called
+"holy-heavenly," "sweet-affecting," "soul-ravishing," "heaven-piercing,"
+"angel-rivalling," "subtil," "irrefragable," "angelical," "septemfluous,"
+"holy-savoured," "princely," "soul-appetizing," "full of antic tastes"
+(meaning having the tastes of an antiquary), "God-bearing." Of two of the
+New England saints it was written:--
+
+  "Thier Temper far from Injucundity,
+  Thier tongues and pens from Infecundity."
+
+Many other fulsome, turgid, and even whimsical expressious of praise might
+be named, for the Puritans were rich in classic sesquipedalian adjectives,
+and their active linguistic consciences made them equally fertile in
+producing new ones.
+
+Ready and unexpected were the solemn Puritans in repartee. A party of gay
+young sparks, meeting austere old John Cotton, determined to guy him. One
+of the young reprobates sent up to him and whispered in his ear, "Cotton,
+thou art an old fool." "I am, I am," was the unexpected answer; "the Lord
+make both thee and me wiser than we are." Two young men of like intent met
+Mr. Haynes, of Vermont, and said with mock sad faces, "Have you heard the
+news? the Devil is dead." Quick came the answer, "Oh, poor, fatherless
+children! what will become of you?"
+
+Gloomy and depressed of spirits they were often. The good Warham, who could
+take faithful and brave charge of his flock in the uncivilized wilds
+of Connecticut among ferocious savages, was tortured by doubts and
+"blasphemous suggestions," and overwhelmed by unbelief, enduring specially
+agonizing scruples about administering and partaking of the Lord's Supper,
+and was thus perplexed and buffeted until the hour of his sad death. The
+ministers went through various stages of uncertainty and gloom, from the
+physical terror of Dr. Cogswell in a thunderstorm, through vacillating and
+harassing convictions about the Half Way Covenant, through doubt of God,
+of salvation, of heaven, of eternite, particularly distressing suspicions
+about the reality of hell and the personality of the Devil, to the stage
+of deep melancholy which was shown in its highest type in "Handkerchief
+Moody," who preached and prayed and always appeared in public with a
+handkerchief over his face, and gave to Hawthorne the inspiration for his
+story of "The Black Veil." Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of
+Charlestown, was so hypochondriacal that he was afraid to preach in the
+pulpit, feeling sure that he would die if he entered therein; so he always
+delivered his sermons to his patient congregation from the deacons' pew.
+Mr. Bradstreet was unconventional in many other respects, and was far from
+being a typical Puritan minister. He seldom wore a coat, but generally
+appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth,--a
+most disreputable addition to the clerical toilet at that date, or, in
+truth, at any date. He was a learned and pious man, however, and was thus
+introduced to a fellow clergyman, "Here is a man who can whistle Greek."
+
+Scarcely one of the early Puritan ministers was free from the sad shadow of
+doubt and fear. No "rose-pink or dirty-drab views of humanity" were theirs;
+all was inky-black. And it is impossible to express the gloom and the
+depression of spirit which fall on one now, after these centuries of
+prosperous and cheerful years, when one considers thoughtfully the deep and
+despairing agony of mind endured by these good, brave, steadfast, godly
+Puritan ministers. Read, for instance, the sentences from the diary of the
+Rev. John Baily, or of Nathaniel Mather, as given by Cotton Mather in his
+"Magnalia." Mather says that poor, sad, heart-sick Baily was filled with
+"desponding jealousies," "disconsolate uneasinesses," gloomy fears, and
+thinks the words from his diary "may be profitable to some discouraged
+minds." Profitable! Ah, no; far from it! The overwhelming blackness
+of despair, the woful doubts and fears about destruction and utter
+annihilation which he felt so deeply and so continually, fall in a heavy,
+impenetrable cloud upon us as we read, until we feel that we too are in the
+"Suburbs of hell" and are "eternally damned."
+
+But in succeeding years they were not always gloomy and not always staid,
+as we know from the stories of the cheerful parties at ordination-times;
+and I doubt not the reverend Assembly of Elders at Cambridge enjoyed to the
+full degree the twelve gallons of sack and six gallons of white wine sent
+to them by the Court as a testimony of deep respect. And the group of
+clergymen who were painted over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of
+Newbury, must have been far from gloom, as the punch-bowl and drinking-cups
+and tobacco and pipes would testify, and their cheerful motto likewise: "In
+essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." And
+the Rev. Mr. ---- no, I will not tell his name--kept an account with
+one Jerome Ripley, a storekeeper, and on one page of this account-book,
+containing thirty-nine entries, twenty-one were for New England rum.
+It somewhat lessens in our notions the personal responsibility, or the
+personal potatory capability of the parson, to discover that there was
+an ordination in town during that rum-paged week, and that the visiting
+ministers probably drank the greater portion of Jerome Ripley's liquor.
+But I wish the store-keeper had--to save this parson's reputation among
+succeeding generations--called and entered the rum as hay, or tea, or
+nails, or anything innocent and virtuous and clerical. When we read of all
+these doings and drinkings of the old New England ministers,--"if ancient
+tales say true, nor wrong these ancient men"--we feel that we cannot so
+fiercely resent nor wonder at the degrading coupling in Byron's sneering
+lines:--
+
+  "There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms,
+  As rum and true religion."
+
+All the cider made by the New England elders did not tend to gloom,
+and they were celebrated for their fine cider. The best cider in
+Massachusetts--that which brought the highest price--was known as the
+Arminian cider, because the minister who furnished it to the market was
+suspected of having Arminian tendencies. A very telling compliment to the
+cider of one of the first New England ministers is thus recorded: "Mr.
+Whiting had a score of appill-trees from which he made delicious cyder.
+And it hath been said yt an Indyan once coming to hys house and Mistress
+Whiting giving him a drink of ye cyder, he did sett down ye pot and smaking
+his lips say yt Adam and Eve were rightlie damned for eating ye appills in
+ye garden of Eden, they should have made them into cyder." This perverse
+application of good John Eliot's teaching would have vexed the apostle
+sorely. Of so much account were the barrels of cider, and so highly were
+they prized by the ministers, that one honest soul did not hesitate to
+thank the Lord in the pulpit for the "many barrels of cider vouchsafed to
+us this year."
+
+Stronger liquors than cider were also manufactured by the ministers,--and
+by God-fearing, pious ministers also. They did not hesitate to own and
+operate distilleries. Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church of
+Hartford and author of the hymn "Swell the anthem, raise the song," was
+engaged in the distilling business and did not make a success of it either.
+Having become bankrupt, he did not dare show his head anywhere in public
+for some time, except on Sunday, for fear of arrest. This disreputable and
+most unclerical affair did not operate against him in the minds of the
+contemporaneous public, for ten years later he received the degree of
+Doctor of Divinity from Princeton College; and he did not hesitate to joke
+about his liquor manufacturing, saying to two of his brother-clergymen,
+"Oh, we are all three in the same boat together,--Brother Prime raises the
+grain, I distil it, and Brother Flint drinks it."
+
+Impostors there were--false parsons--in the early struggling days of New
+England (since "the devil was never weary and never ceasing in disturbing
+the peace of the new English church"), and they plagued the colonists
+sorely. The very first shepherd of the wandering flock--Mr. Lyford, who
+preached to the planters in 1624--was, as Bradford says, "most unsavory
+salt," a most agonizing and unbearable thorn in the flesh and spirit of the
+poor homesick Pilgrims; and he was finally banished to Virginia, where it
+was supposed that he would find congenial and un-Puritanlike companions.
+Another bold-faced cheat preached to the colonists a most impressive sermon
+on the text, "Let him that stole steal no more," while his own pockets were
+stuffed out with stolen money. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth
+speaketh."
+
+Dicky Swayn, "after a thousand rogueries," set up as a parson in Boston.
+But, unfortunately for him, he prayed too loud and too long on one
+occasion, and his prayer attracted the attention of a woman whose servant
+he had formerly been. She promptly exposed his false pretensions and past
+villanies, and he left Boston and an army of cheated creditors. In 1699
+two other attractive and plausible scamps--Kingsbury and May--garbed and
+curried themselves as ministers, and went through a course of unchecked
+villany, building only on their agreeable presence. Cotton Mather wrote
+pertinently of one of these charmers, "Fascination is a thing whereof
+mankind has more Experience than Comprehension;" and he also wrote very
+despitefully of the adventurer's scholarly attainments saying there were
+"eighteen horrid false spells and not one point in one very short note I
+received from him." As the population increased, so also did the list of
+dishonest impostors, who made a cloak of religion most effectively to
+aid them in deceiving the religious community; and sometimes, alas! the
+ordained clergymen became sad backsliders.
+
+Nor were the pious and godly Puritan divines above the follies and
+frailties of other men in other places and in other times. It can be said
+of them, as of the Jew, had they not "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions,
+senses, affections, passions?"--were they not as other men? It is recorded
+of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, that "once coming among a gay partie of
+yong people he kist all ye maides and said yt he felt all ye better for
+it." And who can doubt it? Even that extreme type, that highest pinnacle
+of American Puritanical bigotry,--solemn and learned Cotton Mather,--had,
+when he was a mourning widower, a most amusing amorous episode with a
+rather doubtful, a decidedly shady, young Boston woman, whom he styled an
+"Ingenious Child," but who was far from being an ingenuous child. "She," as
+he proudly stated, "became charmed with my person to such a degree that she
+could not but break in upon me with her most importunate requests." And a
+very handsome and thoroughly attractive person does his portrait show
+even to modern eyes. Poor Cotton resisted the wiles of the devil in this
+alluring form, though he had to fast and pray three consecutive nights ere
+the strong Puritan spirit conquered the weak flesh, and he could consent
+and resolve to give up the thought of marrying the siren. His self-denial
+and firmness deserved a better reward than the very trying matrimonial
+"venture" that he afterwards made.
+
+Many another Puritan parson has left record of his wooings that are warm
+to read. And well did the parsons' wives deserve their ardent wooings and
+their tender love-letters. Hard as was the minister's life, over-filled as
+was his time, highly taxed as were his resources, all these hardships were
+felt in double proportion by the minister's wife. The old Hebrew standard
+of praise quoted by Cotton Mather, "A woman worthy to be the wife of a
+priest," was keenly epigrammatic; and ample proof of the wise insight
+of the standard of comparison may be found in the lives of "the pious,
+prudent, and prayerful" wives of New England ministers. What wonder that
+their praises were sung in many loving though halting threnodies, in
+long-winded but tender eulogies, in labored anagrams, in quaintly spelled
+epitaphs?--for the ministers' wives were the saints of the Puritan
+calendar.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+The Ministers' Pay.
+
+
+
+The salaries of New England clergymen were not large in early days, but the
+£60 or £70 which they each were yearly voted was quite enough to suitably
+support them in that new country of plain ways and plain living, if they
+only received it, which was, alas! not always the case. The First Court of
+Massachusetts, in 1630, set the amount of the minister's annual stipend
+to be £20 or £30 according to the wealth of the community, and made it a
+public charge. In 1659 the highest salary paid in Suffolk County was £100
+to Mr. Thatcher, and the lowest was £40 to the clergyman at Hull. The
+minister of the Andover church was voted a salary of £60, and "when he
+shall have occacion to marry, £10 more." He was very glad, however, to take
+£42 in hard cash instead of £60 in corn and labor, which were at that time
+the most popular forms of ministerial remuneration; even though the "hard
+cash" were in the form of wampum, beaver-skins, or leaden bullets.
+
+Many congregations, though the members were so pious and godly, were pretty
+sharp in bargaining with their preachers; for instance, the church in New
+London made its new parson sign a contract that "in case he remove before
+the year is out, he returneth the £80 paid him." Often clergymen would
+"supply" (or "Sipploye," or "syploy" or "sipply," or "sciploy," as various
+records have it) from month to mouth without "settling." As they got the
+"keepe of a hors," and their own board for Saturday and Sunday, and on
+Monday morning a cash payment for preaching (though often the amount was
+only twelve shillings), they were richer than with a small yearly salary
+that was irregularly and inconveniently paid. Often too they entered by
+preference into a yearly contract with a church, without any wish for
+regular settlement or ordination.
+
+A large portion of the stipends in early parishes being paid in corn and
+labor, the amounts were established by fixed rate upon the inhabitants;
+and the amount of land owned and cultivated by each church-member was
+considered in reckoning his assessment. These amounts were called voluntary
+contributions. If, however, any citizen refused to "contribute," he
+was taxed; and if he refused to pay his church-tax he could be fined,
+imprisoned, or pilloried. For one hundred years the ministers' salaries
+in Boston were paid by these so-called "voluntary contributions." In one
+church it was voted that "the Deacons have liberty for a quarter of a yeare
+to git in every mans sume either in a Church way or in a Christian way."
+I would the process employed in the "Church way" were recorded, since it
+differed so from the Christian way.
+
+It is one of the Puritan paradoxes that abounded in New England, that the
+community of New Haven, a "State whose Desire was Religion," and religion
+alone, was particularly backward in paying the minister who had spiritual
+charge there. After much trouble in deciding about the form and quality
+of the currency which should be used in pay, since so much bad wampum was
+thrust upon the deacons at the public contributions, it was in 1651 enacted
+that "whereas it is taken notice of that Divers give not into the Treasury
+at all on the Lords Day, it is decreed that all such if they give not
+freely, of themselves be rated according to the Jurisdiction order for the
+Ministers Maintaynance." The delinquents were ordered to bring their "rate"
+to the Deacon's house at once. A presuming young man ventured to suggest
+that the recreant members who would not pay in the face of the whole
+congregation would hardly rush to the Deacon's door to give in their
+"rate." He was severely ordered to keep silence in the company of wiser and
+elder people; but time proved his simply wise supposition to be correct;
+and many and various were the devices and forces which the deacons were
+obliged to use to obtain the minister's rate in New Haven.
+
+Some few bold Puritan souls dared to protest against being forced to pay
+the church rate whether they wished to or not. Lieutenant Fuller, of
+Barnstable, was fined fifty shillings for "prophanely" saying "that the law
+enacted about the ministers maintenance was a wicked and devilish one, and
+that the devil sat at the helm when the law was made." Such courageous
+though profane expressions of revolt but little availed; for not only
+were members and attendants of the Puritan churches taxed, but Quakers,
+Baptists, and Church-of-England men were also "rated," and if they refused
+to pay to help support the church that they abhorred, they were fined and
+imprisoned. One man, of Watertown, named Briscoe, dared to write a book
+against the violent enforcement of "voluntary" subscriptions. He was fined
+£10 for his wickedness; and the printer of the book was also punished. A
+virago in New London, more openly courageous, threw scalding water on the
+head of the tithingman who came to collect the minister's rate. Old John
+Cotton preached long and earnestly upon the necessity and propriety of
+raising the money for the minister's salary, and for other expenses of the
+church, wholly by voluntary and eagerly given contributions,--the "Lord
+having directed him to make it clear by Scripture." He believed that tithes
+and church-taxes were productive of "pride, contention and sloth," and
+indicated a declining spiritual condition of the church. But it was a
+strange voluntary gift he wished, that was forced by dread of the pillory
+and cage!
+
+Since, as Higginson said, "New England was a plantation of Religion, not a
+plantation of Trade," the church and its support were of course the first
+thought in laying out a new town-settlement, and some of the best town-lots
+were always set aside for the "yuse of the minister." Sometimes these lots
+were a gift outright to the first settled preacher, in other townships they
+were set aside as glebes, or "ministry land" as it was called. It was a
+universal custom to build at once a house for the minister, and some very
+queer contracts and stipulations for the size, shape, and quality of the
+parson's home-edifice may be read in church-records. To the construction
+of this house all the town contributed, as also to the building of the
+meeting-house; some gave work; some, the use of a horse or ox-team; some,
+boards; some, stones or brick; some, logs; others, nails; and a few, a very
+few, money. At the house-raising a good dinner was provided, and of course,
+plenty of liquor. Some malcontents rebelled against being forced to work on
+the minister's house. Entries of fines are common enough for "refusing
+to dig on the Minister's Selor," for neglecting to send "the Minister's
+Nayles," for refusing to "contribute clay-boards," etc. As with the
+town-lot, the house sometimes was a gift outright to the clergyman, and
+ofttimes the ownership was retained by the church, and the free use only
+was given to each minister.
+
+It was a universal custom to allow free pasturage for the minister's
+horse, for which the village burial-ground was assigned as a favorite
+feeding-ground. Sometimes this privilege of free pasturage was abused. In
+Plymouth, in 1789, Rev. Chandler Robbins was requested "not to have more
+horses than shall be necessary, for his many horses that had been pastured
+on 'Burial Hill'" had sadly damaged and defaced the gravestones,--perhaps
+the very headstones placed over the bones of our Pilgrim Fathers.
+
+The "strangers' money," which was the money contributed by visitors who
+chanced to attend the services, and which was sometimes specified as "all
+the silver and black dogs given by strangers," was usually given to the
+minister. A "black dog" was a "dog dollar."
+
+Often a settlement or a sum of money was given outright to the clergyman
+when he was first ordained or settled in the parish. At a town meeting in
+Sharon, January 8, 1755, which was held with regard to procuring a new
+minister, it was voted "that a committe confer with Mr. Smith, and know
+which will be more acceptable to him, to have a larger settlement and a
+smaller salary, or a larger salary and a smaller settlement, and make
+report to this meeting." On Jan. 15th it was voted "that we give to said
+Mr. Smith 420 ounces of silver or equivalent in old Tenor bills, for a
+settlement, to be paid in three years after settlement. That we give to
+said Mr. Smith 220 Spanish dollars or an equivalent in old Tenor bills for
+his yearly salary." Mr. Smith was very generous to his new parish, for his
+acceptance of its call contains this clause: "As it will come heavy upon
+some perhaps to pay salary and settlement together I have thought of
+releasing part of the payment of the salary for a time to be paid to me
+again. The first year I shall allow you out of the salary you have voted me
+40 dollars, the 2nd 30 dollars, the 3rd 15, the 4th year 20 to be repaid
+to me again, the 5th year 20 more, the 6th year 20 more and the 25 dollars
+that remain, I am willing that the town should keep 'em for its own use."
+He was apparently "willing to live very low," as Parson Eliot humbly and
+pathetically wrote in a petition to his church.
+
+The Puritan ministers in New England in the eighteenth century were all
+good Whigs; they hated the English kings, fully believing that those stupid
+rulers, who really cared little for the Church of England, were burning
+with pious zeal to make Episcopacy the established church of the colonies,
+and knowing that were that deed accomplished they themselves would probably
+lose their homes and means of livelihood. They were the most eager of
+Republicans and patriots, and many of them were good and brave soldiers in
+the Revolution.
+
+When the minister acquired the independence he so longed and fought for,
+it was not all his fancy painted it. He found himself poor
+indeed,--practically penniless. He complained sadly that he was paid his
+salary in the worthless continental paper money, and he refused to take it.
+Often he cannily took merchandise of all kinds instead of the low-valued
+paper money, and he became a good and sharp trader, exchanging his various
+goods for whatever he needed--and could get. Merchandise was, indeed, far
+preferable to money. The petition of Rev. Mr. Barnes to his Willsborough
+people has been preserved, and he thus speaks of his salary: "In 1775 the
+war comenced & Paper money was emitted which soon began to depreciate and
+the depreciation was so rappid that in may 1777 your Pastor gave the whole
+of his years Salary for one sucking Calf, the next year he gave the whole
+for a small store pig. Your Pastor has not asked for any consideration
+being willing to try to Scrabble along with the people while they are in
+low circumstances." His neighbor, Rev. Mr. Sprague, of Dublin, formally
+petitioned his church not to increase his salary, "as I am plagued to death
+to get what is owing to me now," or to buy anything with it when he got it.
+The minister in Scarborough had to be paid £5,400 in paper money to make
+good his salary of £60 in gold which had been voted him.
+
+"Living low" and "scrabbling along" seems to have been the normal and
+universal condition of the New England minister for some time after the War
+of Independence. He was obliged to go without his pay, or to take it in
+whatever shape it might chance to be tendered. Indeed, from the earliest
+colonial days it was true that of whatever they had, the church-members
+gave; meal, maize, beans, cider, lumber, merchantable pork, apples,
+"English grains," pumpkins,--all were paid to the parson. Part of the
+stipend of a minister on Cape Cod was two hundred fish yearly from each
+parishioner, with which to fertilize his sandy corn-land. In Plymouth,
+in 1662, the following method of increasing the minister's income was
+suggested: "The Court Proposeth it as a thing that they judge would be very
+commendable and beneficiall to the townes where God's providence shall cast
+any whales, if they should agree to set aparte some p'te of every such fish
+or oyle for the Incouragement of an able and godly minister among them." In
+Sandwich, also, the parson had a part of every whale that came ashore.
+
+Various gifts, too, came to the preachers. In Newbury the first salmon
+caught each year in the weir was left by will to the parson. Judge Sewall
+records that he visited the minister and "carried him a Bushel of
+Turnips, cost me five shillings, and a Cabbage cost half a Crown." Such a
+high-priced cabbage!
+
+That New England country institution--the "donation party" to the
+minister--was evolved at a later date. At these donation parties the
+unfortunate shepherd of the flock often received much that neither he
+nor the wily donors could use, while more valuable and useful gifts were
+lacking.
+
+A very material plenishing of the minister's house was often furnished in
+the latter part of the eighteenth century by the annual "Spinning Bee." On
+a given day the women of the parish, each bearing her own spinning-wheel
+and flax, assembled at the minister's house and spun for his wife great
+"runs" of linen thread, which were afterward woven into linen for the use
+of the parson and his family. In Newbury, April 20,1768, "Young ladies met
+at the house of the Rev. Mr. Parsons, who preached to them a sermon from
+Proverbs 31-19. They spun and presented to Mrs. Parsons two hundred and
+seventy skeins of good yarn." They drank "liberty tea." This makeshift of
+a beverage was made of the four-leaved loosestrife. The herb was pulled
+up like flax, its stalks were stripped of the leaves and were boiled. The
+leaves were put in a kettle and basted with the liquor distilled from the
+stalks. After this the leaves were dried in an oven to use in the same
+manner as tea-leaves. Liberty tea sold readily for sixpence a pound. In
+1787 these same Newbury women spun two hundred and thirty-six skeins
+of thread and yarn for the wife of the Rev. Mr. Murray. Some were busy
+spinning, some reeling and carding, and some combing the flax, while the
+minister preached to them on the text from Exodus xxxv. 25: "And all
+the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands." These
+spinning-bees were everywhere in vogue, and formed a source of much profit
+to the parson, and of pleasure to the spinners, in spite of the sermons.
+
+Pieced patchwork bed-quilts for the minister's family were also given by
+the women of the congregation. Sometimes each woman furnished a neatly
+pieced square, and all met at the parsonage and joined and quilted the
+coverlet. At other times the minister's wife made the patchwork herself,
+but the women assembled and transformed it into quilts for her. The parson
+was helped also in his individual work. When the rye or wheat or grain on
+the minister's land was full grown and ready for reaping and mowing, the
+men in his parish gave him gladly a day's work in harvesting, and in turn
+he furnished them plenty of good rum to drink, else there were "great
+uneasyness." The New England men were not forced to drink liberty tea.
+
+One universal contribution to the support of the minister all over New
+England was cord-wood; and the "minister's wood" is an institution up to
+the present day in the few thickly wooded districts that remain. A load of
+wood was usually given by each male church-member, and he was expected to
+deliver the gift at the door of the parsonage. Sixty loads a year were a
+fair allowance, but the number sometimes ran up to one hundred, as was
+furnished to Parson Chauncey, of Durham. Rev. Mr. Parsons, of East Hadley,
+was the greatest wood-consumer among the old ministers of whom I have
+chanced to read. Good, cheerful, roaring fires must the Parsons family have
+kept; for in 1774 he had eighty loads of wood supplied to him; in 1751 he
+was furnished with one hundred loads; in 1763 the amount had increased to
+one hundred and twenty loads, when the parish was glad to make a compromise
+with their extravagant shepherd and pay him instead £13 6s 8d annually
+in addition to his regular salary, and let him buy or cut his own wood.
+Firewood at that time in that town was worth only the expense of cutting
+and hauling to the house. A "load" of wood contained about three quarters
+of a cord, and until after the Revolutionary War was worth in the vicinity
+of Hadley only three shillings a load. The minister's loads were expected
+to be always of good "hard-wood." One thrifty parson, while watching a
+farmer unload his yearly contribution, remarked, "Isn't that pretty soft
+wood?" "And don't we sometimes have pretty soft preaching?" was the answer.
+It was well that the witty retort was not made a century earlier; for the
+speaker would have been punished by a fine, since they fined so sharply
+anything that savored of "speaking against the minister." In some towns a
+day was appointed which was called a "wood-spell," when it was ordered that
+all the wood be delivered at the parson's door; and thus the farmers formed
+a cheerful gathering, at which the minister furnished plentiful flip, or
+grog, to the wood-givers. Rev. Stephen Williams, of Longmeadow, never
+failed to make a note of the "wood-sleddings" in his diary. He wrote on
+Jan. 25, 1757, "Neighbors sledded wood for me and shewed a Good Humour.
+I rejoice at it. The Lord bless them that are out of humour and brot no
+wood." In other towns the wood did not always come in when it was wanted or
+needed, and winter found the parsonage woodshed empty. Rev. Mr. French, of
+Andover, gave out this notice in his pulpit one Sunday in November: "I will
+write two discourses and deliver them in this meeting-house on Thanksgiving
+Day, _provided I can manage to write them without a fire_." We can be
+sure that Monday morning saw several loads of good hard wood deposited at
+the parson's door.
+
+Other ministers did not hesitate to demand their cord-wood most openly,
+while still others became adepts in hinting and begging, not only for wood,
+but for other supplies. It is told of a Newbury parson that he rode from
+house to house one winter afternoon, saying in each that he "wished he had
+a slice of their good cheese, for his wife expected company." On his way
+home his sleigh, unfortunately, upset, and the gathering darkness could not
+conceal from the eyes of the astonished townspeople, who ran to "right the
+minister," the nine great cheeses that rolled out into the snow.
+
+Another source of income to New England preachers was the sale of the
+gloves and rings which were given to them (and indeed to all persons of
+any importance) at weddings, funerals, and christenings. In reading Judge
+Sewall's diary one is amazed at the extraordinary number of gloves he thus
+received, and can but wonder what became of them all, since, had he had
+as many hands as Briareus, he could hardly have worn them. The manuscript
+account-book of the Rev. Mr. Elliot, who was ordained pastor of the New
+North Church of Boston in 1742, shows that he, having a frugal mind, sold
+both gloves and rings. He kept a full list of the gloves he received, the
+kid gloves, the lambswool gloves, and the long gloves,--which were for his
+wife. It seems incredible, but in thirty-two years he received two thousand
+and nine hundred and forty pairs of gloves. Of these, though dead men's
+gloves did not have a very good market, he sold through various salesmen
+and dealers about six hundred and forty dollars worth. One wonders that he
+did not "combine" with the undertaker or sexton who furnished the gloves to
+mourners, and thus do a very thrifty business.
+
+The parson, especially in a low-salaried, rural district, had to practise a
+thousand petty and great economies to eke out his income. He and his family
+wore homespun and patched clothing, which his wife had spun and wove and
+cut and made. She knitted woollen mittens and stockings by the score. She
+unfortunately could not make shoes, and to keep the large family shod was a
+serious drain on the clerical purse, one minister declaring vehemently
+that he should have died a rich man if he and his family could have gone
+barefoot. The pastors of seaboard and riverside parishes set nets, like the
+Apostles of old, and caught fish with which they fed their families until
+the over-phosphorized brains and stomachs rebelled. They set snares and
+traps and caught birds and squirrels and hare, to replenish their tables,
+and from the skins of the rabbits and woodchucks and squirrels, the
+parsons' wives made fur caps for the husbands and for the children.
+
+The whole family gathered in large quantities from roadsides and pastures
+the oily bayberries, and from them the thrifty and capable wife made scores
+of candles for winter use, patiently filling and refilling her few moulds,
+or "dipping" the candles again and again until large enough to use. These
+pale-green bayberry tallow candles, when lighted in the early winter
+evening, sent forth a faint spicy fragrance--a true New England
+incense--that fairly perfumed and Orientalized the atmosphere of the
+parsonage kitchen. They were very saving, however, even of these home-made
+candles, blowing them out during the long family prayers.
+
+Some parsons could not afford always to use candles. In the home of one
+well-known minister the wife always knitted, the children ciphered and
+studied, and the husband wrote his sermon by the flickering fire-light (for
+they always had wood in plenty), with his scraps of sermon paper placed on
+the side of the great leathern bellows as it lay in his lap; a pretty home
+scene that was more picturesque to behold than comfortable to take part in.
+
+Country ministers could scarcely afford paper to write on, as it was taxed
+and was high priced. They bought their sermon paper by the pound; but they
+made the first drafts of their addresses, in a fine, closely written hand,
+on wrapping-paper, on the backs of letters, on the margins of their few
+newspapers, and copied them when finished in their sermon-books with a
+keen regard for economy of space and paper. The manuscript sermons of New
+England divines are models of careful penmanship, and may be examined with
+interest by a student of chirography. The letters are cramped and crabbed,
+like the lives of many of the writers, but the penmanship is methodical,
+clear, and distinct, without wavering lines or uncertain touch.
+
+As every parsonage had some glebe land, the parson could raise at least a
+few vegetables to supply his table. One minister, prevented by illness from
+planting his garden, complained with bitterness that, save for a few rare
+gifts of vegetables from his parishioners, his family had no green thing
+all summer save "messes of dandelion greens" which he had dug by the
+roadside, and the summer's succession of wild berries and mushrooms. The
+children had gathered the berries and had sold them when they could, but of
+course no one would buy the mushrooms, hence they had been forced to eat
+them at the parsonage; and he spoke despitefully and disdainfully of the
+mean, unnourishing, and doubtfully healthful food.
+
+In winter the parson's family fared worse; one minister declared that he
+had had nothing but mush and milk with occasional "cracker johnny-cakes"
+all winter, and that he had not once tasted meat in that space of time,
+save at a funeral or ordination-supper, where I doubt not he gorged with
+the composure and capacity of a Sioux brave at a war feast.
+
+Often the low state of the parsonage larder was quite unknown to the
+unthinking members of the congregation, who were not very luxuriously fed
+themselves; and in the profession of preaching as in all other walks of
+life much depended on the way the parson's money was spent,--economy and
+good judgment in housekeeping worked wonders with the small salary. Dr.
+Dwight, in eulogizing Abijah Weld, pastor at Attleborough, declared that
+on a salary of two hundred and twenty dollars a year Mr. Weld brought up
+eleven children, kept a hospitable house, and gave liberally in charity to
+the poor. I fear if we were to ask some carnal-minded person, who knew not
+the probity of Dr. Dwight, how Mr. Weld could possibly manage to accomplish
+such wonderful results with so little money, that we should meet with
+scepticism as to the correctness of the facts alleged. Such cases were,
+however, too common to be doubted. My answer to the puzzling financial
+question would be this: examine and study the story of the home life, the
+work of _Mrs_. Weld, that unsalaried helper in clerical labor; therein
+the secret lies.
+
+In many cases, in spite of the never failing and never ceasing economy,
+care, and assistance of the hard-working, thrifty wife, in spite of
+tributes, tithes and windfalls--in country parishes especially--the
+minister, unless he fortunately had some private wealth, felt it incumbent
+upon him to follow some money-making vocation on week-days. Many were
+farmers on week-days. Many took into their families young men who wished
+to be taught, or fitted for college. Rev. Mr. Halleck in the course of his
+useful and laborious life educated over three hundred young Puritans in his
+own household. It is not recorded how Mrs. Halleck enjoyed the never ending
+cooking for this regiment of hungry young men. Some parsons learned to draw
+up wills and other legal documents, and thus became on a small scale the
+lawyers of the town. Others studied the mystery of medicine, and bought a
+small stock of the nauseous drugs of the times, which they retailed
+with accompanying advice to their parishioners. Some were coopers, some
+carpenters, rope-makers, millers, or cobblers. One cobbler clergyman in
+Andover, Vermont, worked at his shoe-mending all the week with his Bible
+open on his bench before him, and he marked the page containing any text
+which bore on the subject of his coming sermon, with a marker of waxed
+shoe-thread. Often the Bible, in his pulpit on Sunday, had thirty or forty
+of these shoe-thread guides hanging down from it.
+
+One minister, having been reproved for his worldliness in amassing a large
+enough fortune to buy a good farm, answered his complaining congregation
+thus: "I have obtained the money to buy this farm by neglecting to follow
+the maxim to 'mind my own business.' My business was to study the word of
+God and attend to my parish duties and preach good sermons. All this I
+acknowledge I have not done, for I have been meddling with your business.
+_That_ was to support me and my family; that _you_ have not done.
+But remember this: while I have performed your duties, you have not done
+mine, so I think you cannot complain."
+
+Some of the early ministers, in addition to preaching in the meeting-house,
+did not disdain to take care of the edifice. Parson Everitt of Sandwich was
+paid three dollars a year for sweeping out the meeting-house in which he
+preached; and after he resigned this position of profit, the duties were
+performed by the town physician "as often as there shalbe ocation to keepe
+it deesent." The thrifty Mr. Everitt had a pleasing variety of occupations;
+he was also a successful farmer, a good fence-builder, and he ran a
+fulling-mill.
+
+So, altogether, as they were wholly exempt from taxation, the New England
+parsons did not fare ill, though Mr. Cotton said that "ministers and milk
+were the only cheap things in New England," and he deemed various ills,
+such as attacks by fierce Indians, loss of cattle, earthquakes, and failure
+of crops, to be divine judgments for the small ministerial pay; while
+Cotton Mather, in one of his pompous and depressing jokes, called the
+minister's stipend "Synecdotical Pay." A search in a treatise on rhetoric
+or in a dictionary will discover the point of this witticism--if it be
+worth searching for.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit.
+
+
+
+One thing which always interests and can but amuse every reader of the
+old Puritan sermons is the astonishingly familiar way in which these New
+England divines publicly shared their domestic joys and sorrows with
+the members of their congregations; and we are equally surprised at the
+ingenuity which they displayed in finding texts that were suitable for
+the various occasions and events. The Reverend Mr. Turell was specially
+ingenious. Of him Dr. Holmes wrote,--
+
+  "You've heard, no doubt, of Parson Turell;
+  Over at Medford he used to dwell,--
+  Married one of the Mathers' folks."
+
+His wife, Jane Coleman, was a handsome brunette. The bridegroom preached
+his first sermon after his wedding on this text, "I am black but comely, O
+ye daughters of Jerusalem." When he married a second time he chose as his
+text, "He is altogether lovely, this is my beloved, and this my friend, O
+daughters of Jerusalem!" It is possible that each of Parson Turell's brides
+may have chosen the text from which he preached her honeymoon sermon. It
+was the universal custom for many years thoughout New England to allow a
+bride the privilege of selecting for the parson who had solemnized her
+marriage, or at whose church she first appeared after the wedding, the text
+from which he should preach on the bridal Sabbath. Thus when John Physick
+and Mary Prescott were married in Portland, on July 4, 1770, the bride gave
+to Rev. Mr. Deane this text: "Mary hath chosen that good part;" and from it
+Parson Deane preached the "wedding sermon." When Abby Smith, daughter of
+Parson Smith, married 'Squire John Adams, whom her father disliked and
+would not invite home to dinner, she chose this text for her wedding
+sermon: "John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he
+hath a devil." The high-spirited bride had the honor of living to be the
+wife of one President of the United States, and mother of another.
+
+Another ingenious clergyman gave out one morning as his text, "Unto us a
+son is born;" and thus notified the surprised congregation of an event
+which they had been awaiting for some weeks. Another preached on the text,
+"My servant lieth at home sick," which was literally true. Another, a
+bachelor, dared to announce this abbreviated text: "A wonder was seen in
+heaven--a woman." Dr. Mather Byles, of Boston, being disappointed through
+the non-appearance of a minister named Prince, who had been expected to
+deliver the sermon, preached himself upon the text, "Put not your trust
+in princes." But Dr. Byles was one who would always "court a grin when he
+should win a soul."
+
+One minister felt it necessary to reprove a money-making parishioner who
+had stored and was holding in reserve (with the hope of higher prices) a
+large quantity of corn which was sadly needed for consumption in the town.
+The parson preached from this appropriate text, Proverbs xi. 26. "He that
+withholdeth his corn, the people shall curse him; but blessings shall be
+upon the head of him that selleth it." As the minister grew warmer in his
+explanation and application of the text, the money-seeking corn-storer
+defiantly and unregenerately sat up stiff and unmoved, until at last the
+preacher, provoked out of prudence and patience, roared out, "Colonel
+Ingraham, Colonel Ingraham! you know I mean you; why don't you hang down
+your head?" In a similar case another stern parson employed the text,
+"Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone;" though the personalities
+of the sermon made unnecessary the open reference in the text to the
+offender's name.
+
+The ministers were such autocrats in the Puritan community that they never
+hesitated to show their authority in any manner in the pulpit. Judge Sewall
+records with much bitterness a libel which his pastor, Mr. Pemberton,
+launched at him in the meeting through the medium of the psalm which
+he gave out to be sung. They had differed over the adjustment of some
+church-matter and on the following Sunday the clergyman assigned to be sung
+the libellous and significant psalm. Such lines as these must have been
+hard indeed for Judge Sewall to endure:--
+
+  "Speak, oh ye Judges of the Earth
+    if just your Sentence be
+  Or must not Innocence appeal
+    to Heav'n from your decree
+
+  "Your Wicked Hearts and Judgments are
+    alike by Malice sway'd
+  Your griping Hands by mighty Bribes
+    to violence betrayed.
+
+  "No Serpent of parch'd Afric's breed
+    doth Ranker poison bear
+  The drowsy Adder will as soon
+    unlock his Sullen Ear
+
+  "Unmov'd by good Advice, and dead
+    As Adders they remain
+  From whom the skilful Charmer's voice
+    can no attention gain."
+
+Small wonder that Judge Sewall writhed under the infliction of these lines
+as they were doubly thrust upon him by the deacon's "lining" and the
+singing of the congregation; and the words, "The drowsy Adder will as soon
+unlock his Sullen Ear" seemed to particularly irritate him; doubtless he
+felt sure that no one could doubt his integrity, but feared that some might
+think him stupid and obstinate.
+
+Another arbitrary clergyman, having had an altercation with some unruly
+singers in the choir, gave out with much vehemence on the following Sunday
+the hymn beginning,--
+
+  "And are you wretches yet alive
+  And do you yet rebel?"
+
+with a very significant glower towards the singers' gallery. In a similar
+situation another minister gave out to the rebellious choir the hymn
+commencing,--
+
+  "Let those refuse to sing
+  Who never knew our God."
+
+A visiting clergyman, preaching in a small and shabby church built in a
+parish of barren and stony farm-land, very spitefully and sneeringly read
+out to be sung the hymn of Watts' beginning,--
+
+  "Lord, what a wretched land is this,
+  That yields us no supplies!"
+
+But his malicious intent was frustrated and the tables were adroitly turned
+by the quick-witted choir-master, who bawled out in a loud voice as if
+in answer, "Northfield,"--the name of the minister's own home and
+parish,--while he was really giving out to the choir, as was his wont, the
+name of the tune to which the hymn was to be sung.
+
+Nor did the parsons hesitate to be personal even in their prayers. Rev. Mr.
+Moody, who was ordained pastor at York in the year 1700, reproved in an
+extraordinary manner a young man who had called attention to some fine new
+clothing which he wore by coming in during prayer time and thus attracting
+the notice of the congregation. Mr. Moody, in an elevated tone of voice,
+at once exclaimed, "And O Lord! we pray Thee, cure Ned Ingraham of that
+ungodly strut," etc. Another time he prayed for a young lady in the
+congregation and ended his invocation thus, "She asked me not to pray for
+her in public, but I told her I would, and so I have, Amen."
+
+Rev. Mr. Miles, while praying for rain, is said to have used this
+extraordinary phraseology: "O Lord, Thou knowest we do not want Thee to
+send us a rain which shall pour down in fury and swell our streams and
+carry away our hay-cocks, fences, and bridges; but, Lord, we want it to
+come drizzle-drozzle, drizzle-drozzle, for about a week, Amen."
+
+They did not think it necessary always to give their congregations novel
+thoughts and ideas nor fresh sermons. One minister, after being newly
+ordained in his parish, preached the same sermon three Sundays in
+succession; and a deacon was sent to him mildly to suggest a change. "Why,
+no," he answered, "I can see no evidence yet that this one has produced any
+effect."
+
+Rev. Mr. Daggett, of Yale College, had an entire system of sermons which
+took him four years to preach throughout. And for three successive years he
+delivered once a year a sermon on the text, "Is Thy servant a dog that he
+should do this thing?" And the fourth year he varied it with, "And the dog
+did it."
+
+Dr. Coggswell, of Canterbury, Connecticut, had a sermon which he thrust
+upon his people every spring for many years as being suitable to the time
+when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. In it he soberly
+reproved the young church attendants for gazing so much at each other in
+the meeting. This annual anti-amatory advice never failed to raise a smile
+on the face of each father and son in the congregation as he listened to
+the familiar and oft-repeated words.
+
+The Puritan ministers gave advice in their sermons upon most personal and
+worldly matters. Roger Williams instructed the women of his parish to wear
+veils when they appeared in public; but John Cotton preached to them
+one Sunday morning and proved to them that veils were a sign of undue
+subjection to their husbands; and in the afternoon the fair Puritans
+appeared with bare faces and showed that women had even at that early day
+"rights."
+
+How the varieties of headgear did torment the parsons! They denounced
+from many a pulpit the wearing of wigs. Mr. Noyes preached long and often
+against the fashion. Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the
+Indians, found time even in the midst of his arduous and incessant duties
+to deliver many a blast against "prolix locks,"--"with boiling zeal," as
+Cotton Mather said,--and he labelled them a "luxurious feminine protexity;"
+but lamented late in life that "the lust for wigs is become insuperable."
+He thought the horrors in King Philip's War were a direct punishment from
+God for wig-wearing. Increase Mather preached warmly against wigs, saying
+that "such Apparel is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture," and that "Monstrous Perriwigs such as some of our church
+members indulge in make them resemble ye locusts that came out of ye
+Bottomless Pit." To learn how these "Horrid Bushes of Vanity" were
+despised by a real live Puritan wig-hater one needs only to read the
+many disparaging, regretful, and bitter references to wig-wearing and
+wig-wearers in Judge Sewall's diary, which reached a culmination when a
+widow whom he was courting suggested most warmly that he ought to wear,
+what his very soul abominated, a periwig.
+
+Eliot had also a strong aversion to tobacco, and denounced its use in
+severe terms; but his opposition in this case was as ineffectual as it was
+against wigs. Allen said, "In contempt of all his admonitions the head
+would be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and the pipe would send up
+volumes of smoke."
+
+Rev. Mr. Rogers preached against long natural hair,--the "disguisement of
+long ruffianly hair,"--as did also President Chauncey of Harvard College;
+while Mr. Wigglesworth's sermon on the subject has often been reprinted,
+and is full of logical arguments. This offence was named on the list of
+existing evils which was made by the General Court: that "the men wore long
+hair like women's hair," while the women were complained of for "cutting
+and curling and laying out of hair, especially among the younger sort."
+Still, the Puritan magistrates, omnipotent as they were, did not dare to
+force the be-curled citizens to cut their long love-locks, though they
+instructed and bribed them to do so. A Salem man was, in 1687, fined ten
+shillings for a misdemeanor, but "in case he shall cutt off his long har of
+his head into a sevill (civil?) frame in the mean time shall have abated
+five shillings of his fine." John Eliot hated long natural hair as well
+as false hair. Cotton Mather said of him, in a very unpleasant figure of
+speech, "The hair of them that professed religion grew too long for him to
+swallow." Other fashions and habits brought forth denunciations from the
+pulpit,--hooped petticoats, gold-laced coats (unless worn by gentlemen),
+pointed shoes, chaise-owning, health-drinking, tavern-visiting, gossiping,
+meddling, tale-bearing, and lying.
+
+Political and business and even medical and sanitary subjects were popular
+in the early New England pulpit. Mr. Peters preached many a long sermon
+to urge the formation of a stock company for fishing, and canvassed all
+through the commonwealth for the same purpose. Cotton Mather said plainly
+that ministers ought to instruct themselves and their congregations in
+politics; and in Connecticut it was ordered by law that each minister
+should give sound and orthodox advice to his congregation at the time of
+civil elections.
+
+Every natural phenomenon, every unusual event called forth a sermon, and
+the minister could find even in the common events of every-day life plain
+manifestations of Divine wrath and judgment. He preached with solemn
+delight upon comets, and earthquakes, and northern lights, and great storms
+and droughts, on deaths and diseases, and wonders and scandals (for there
+were scandals even in puritanical New England), on wars both at home and
+abroad, on shipwrecks, on safe voyages, on distinguished visitors, on noted
+criminals and crimes,--in fact, upon every subject that was of spiritual or
+temporal interest to his congregation or himself. And his people looked
+for his religious comment upon passing events just as now-a-days we read
+articles upon like subjects in the newspaper. Thus was the Puritan minister
+not only a preacher, but a teacher, adviser, and friend, and a pretty
+plain-spoken one too.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+The Early Congregations.
+
+
+
+On Sunday morning in New England in the olden time, the country
+church-members whose homes were near the meeting-house walked reverently
+and slowly across the green meadows or the snowy fields to meeting.
+Townspeople, at the sound of the bell or drum or horn, walked decorously
+and soberly along the irregular streets to the house of God. Farmers who
+lived at a greater distance were up betimes to leave their homes and ride
+across the fields and through the narrow bridle-paths, which were then the
+universal and almost the only country roads. These staid Puritan planters
+were mounted on sturdy farmhorses, and a pillion was strapped on behind
+each saddle, and on it was seated wife, daughter, or perhaps a young
+child--I should like to have seen the church-going dames perched up proudly
+in all their Sunday finery, masked in black velvet, a sober Puritan
+travesty of a gay carnival fashion. Riding-habits were hardly known until
+a century ago, and even after their introduction were never worn
+a-pillion-riding, so the Puritan women rode in their best attire.
+Sometimes, in unusually muddy or dusty weather, a very daintily dressed
+"nugiperous" dame would don a linen "weather skirt" to protect her fine
+silken petticoats.
+
+The wealthier Puritans were mounted on fine pacing horses, "once so highly
+prized, now so odious deemed;" for trotting horses were not in much demand
+or repute in America until after the Revolutionary War. There were, until
+that date, professional horse-trainers, whose duties were to teach horses
+to pace; though by far the best saddle-horses were the natural-gaited
+"Narragansett Pacers," the first distinctively American race of horses.
+These remarkably easy-paced animals were in such demand in the West Indies
+for the use of the wives and daughters of the wealthy sugar-planters, and
+in Philadelphia and New York for rich Dutch and Quaker colonists, that
+comparatively few of them were allowed to remain in New England, and they
+were, indeed too high-priced for poor New England colonists. The natural
+and singular pace of these Narragansett horses, which did not incline the
+rider from side to side, nor jolt him up and down, and their remarkable
+sureness of foot and their great endurance, rendered them of much value
+in those days of travel in the saddle. They were also phenomenally
+broad-backed,--shaped by nature for saddle and pillion.
+
+When trotting-horses became fashionable, the trainers placed logs of wood
+at regular intervals across the road, and by exercising the animals
+over this obstructed path forced them to raise their feet at the proper
+intervals, and thus learn to trot.
+
+Long distances did many of the pre-revolutionary farmers of New England
+have to ride to reach their churches, and long indeed must have been the
+time occupied in these Sunday trips, for a horse was too well-burdened with
+saddle and pillion and two riders to travel fast. The worshippers must
+often have started at daybreak. When we see now an ancient pillion--a relic
+of olden times--brought out in jest or curiosity, and strapped behind a
+saddle on a horse's back, and when we see the poor steed mounted by two
+riders, it seems impossible for the over-burdened animal to endure a long
+journey, and certainly impossible for him to make a rapid one.
+
+Horse-flesh, and human endurance also, was economized in early days by what
+was called the "ride and tie" system. A man and his wife would mount saddle
+and pillion, ride a couple of miles, dismount, tie the steed, and walk
+on. A second couple, who had walked the first two miles, soon mounted the
+rested horse, rode on past the riders for two or three miles, dismounted,
+and tied the animal again. In that way four persons could ride very
+comfortably and sociably half-way to meeting, though they must have had
+to make an early start to allow for the slow gait and long halts. At the
+church the disburdened horses were tied during the long services to palings
+and to trees near the meeting-house (except the favored animals that found
+shelter in the noon-houses) and the scene must have resembled the outskirts
+of a gypsy camp or an English horse-fair. Such obedience did the Puritans
+pay to the letter of the law that when the Newbury people were forbidden,
+in tying their horses outside the church paling, to leave them near enough
+to the footpath to be in the way of church pedestrians, it did not prevent
+the stupid or obstinate Newburyites from painstakingly bringing their
+steeds within the gates and tying them to the gate-posts where they were
+much more seriously and annoyingly in the way.
+
+It is usual to describe and to think of the Puritan congregations as like
+assemblies of Quakers, solemn, staid, and uniform and dull of dress; but
+I can discover in historical records nothing to indicate simplicity,
+soberness, or even uniformity of apparel, except the uniformity of fashion,
+which was powerful then as now. The forbidding rules and regulations
+relating to the varied and elaborate forms of women's dress--and of men's
+attire as well--would never have been issued unless such prohibited apparel
+had been common and universally longed-for, and unless much diversity and
+elegance of dress had abounded.
+
+Indeed the daughters of the Pilgrims were true "daughters of Zion, walking
+with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, and mincing as they go." Save
+for the "nose jewels," the complaining and exhaustive list of the prophet
+Isaiah might serve as well for New England as for Judah and Jerusalem:
+"their cauls and their round tires like moons; the chains and the bracelets
+and the mufflers; the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the head
+bands, and the tablets, and the ear-rings; the rings and nose jewels; the
+changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the
+crisping pins; the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods and the
+veils." Nor has the day yet come to pass in the nineteenth century when the
+bravery of the daughters has been taken away.
+
+Pleasant it is to think of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and
+goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have
+been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote,"
+a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with
+"Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and
+a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or
+ciffer" (New England French for coiffure) with "long wings" at the side,
+and a silk or tiffany hood on her drooping head,--Priscilla in this attire
+were pretty indeed.
+
+Nor did sober John Alden and doughty Miles Standish lack for variety in
+their dress; besides their soldier's garb, their sentinel's armor, they
+had a vast variety of other attire to choose from; they could select their
+head-wear from "redd knitt capps" or "monmouth capps" or "black hats lyned
+at the browes with leather." They could have a "sute" of "dublett and hose
+of leather lyned with oyled-skin-leather," fastened with hooks and eyes
+instead of buttons; or one of "hampshire kerseys lyned." They could have
+"mandillions" (whatever they may have been) "lyned with cotton," and
+"wast-coats of greene cotton bound about with red tape," and breeches of
+oiled leather and leathern drawers (I do not know whether these leathern
+drawers were under-garments or leathern draw-strings at the knees of the
+breeches). They could wear "gloves of sheeps or calfs leather" or of kid,
+and fine gold belts, and "points" at the knees. In fact, the invoices of
+goods to the earliest settlers show that they had a choice of various
+materials for garments, including "gilford and gedleyman, holland and
+lockerum and buckerum, fustian, canvass, linsey-woolsey, red ppetuna,
+cursey, cambrick, calico-stuff, loom-work, Dutch serges, and English
+jeans"--enough for diversity, surely. Sad-colored mantles the goodmen wore,
+but their doublets were scarlet, and with their green waistcoats and red
+caps, surely the Puritan men were sufficiently gayly dressed to suit any
+fancy save that of a cavalier. Later in the history of the colony, when
+hooped petticoats and laced hoods and mantles, and long, embroidered gloves
+fastened with horsehair "glove tightens," and when velvet coats and satin
+breeches and embroidered waistcoats, gold lace, sparkling buckles, and
+cocked hats with full bottomed wigs were worn, the gray, sombre old
+meeting-house blossomed like a tropical forest, and vied with the worldly
+Church of England in gay-garbed church attendants.
+
+Stern and severe of face were many of the members of these early New
+England congregations, else they had not been true Puritans in heart, and
+above all, they had not been Pilgrims. Long and thin of feature were they,
+rarely smiling, yet not devoid of humor. Some handsome countenances
+were seen,--austere, bigoted Cotton Mather being, strangely enough, the
+handsomest and most worldly looking of them all. What those brave, stern
+men and women were, as well as what they looked, is known to us all, and
+cannot be dwelt upon here, any more than can here be shown and explained
+the details of their religious faith and creed. Patient, frugal,
+God-fearing, and industrious, cruel and intolerant sometimes, but never
+cowardly, sternly obeying the word of God in the spirit and the letter, but
+erring sometimes in the interpretation thereof,--surely they had no traits
+to shame us, to keep us from thrilling with pride at the drop of their
+blood which runs in our backsliding veins. Nothing can more plainly show
+their distinguishing characteristics, nothing is so fully typical of the
+motive, the spirit of their lives, as their reverent observance of the
+Lord's day.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sabbath in Puritan New England
+by Alice Morse Earle
+
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+Title: Sabbath in Puritan New England
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+Author: Alice Morse Earle
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND ***
+
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+PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar and
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+
+
+<h1>The Sabbath in Puritan New England</h1>
+
+<p align="center" class="smallcaps">by</p>
+
+<h2>Alice Morse Earle</h2>
+
+<h3>Seventh Edition</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<h4>To the Memory of my Mother.</h4>
+
+
+
+<h1>Contents.</h1>
+
+
+<ol style="list-style-type: upper-roman">
+<li><a href="#01">The New England Meeting-House</a></li>
+<li><a href="#02">The Church Militant</a></li>
+<li><a href="#03">By Drum and Horn and Shell</a></li>
+<li><a href="#04">The Old-Fashioned Pews</a></li>
+<li><a href="#05">Seating the Meeting</a></li>
+<li><a href="#06">The Tithingman and the Sleepers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#07">The Length of the Service</a></li>
+<li><a href="#08">The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House</a></li>
+<li><a href="#09">The Noon-House</a></li>
+<li><a href="#10">The Deacon's Office</a></li>
+<li><a href="#11">The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims</a></li>
+<li><a href="#12">The Bay Psalm-Book</a></li>
+<li><a href="#13">Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms</a></li>
+<li><a href="#14">Other Old Psalm-Books</a></li>
+<li><a href="#15">The Church Music</a></li>
+<li><a href="#16">The Interruptions of the Services</a></li>
+<li><a href="#17">The Observance of the Day</a></li>
+<li><a href="#18">The Authority of the Church and the Ministers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#19">The Ordination of the Minister</a></li>
+<li><a href="#20">The Ministers</a></li>
+<li><a href="#21">The Ministers' Pay</a></li>
+<li><a href="#22">The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit</a></li>
+<li><a href="#23">The Early Congregations</a></li>
+</ol>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>The Sabbath in Puritan New England.</h1>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>I</h1>
+
+<h2>The New England Meeting-House.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord's
+Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong
+and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every
+Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they
+worshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,
+the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein for
+the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton
+Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply
+such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the
+Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as
+bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the
+Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.</p>
+
+<p>The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these
+houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that
+theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England
+to create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slow
+or indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 that
+a meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if the
+people failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,
+and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of members
+necessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in the
+Platform of Church Discipline: "A church ought not to be of greater number
+than can ordinarilie meet convenientlie in one place, nor ordinarilie
+fewer than may convenientlie carry on church-work." Each church was quite
+independent in its work and government, and had absolute power to admit,
+expel, control, and censure its members.</p>
+
+<p>These first meeting-houses were simple buildings enough,--square log-houses
+with clay-filled chinks, surmounted by steep roofs thatched with long
+straw or grass, and often with only the beaten earth for a floor. It was
+considered a great advance and a matter of proper pride when the settlers
+had the meeting-house "lathed on the inside, and so daubed and whitened
+over workmanlike." The dimensions of many of these first essays at church
+architecture are known to us, and lowly little structures they were. One,
+indeed, is preserved for us under cover at Salem. The first meeting-house
+in Dedham was thirty-six feet long, twenty feet wide, and twelve feet high
+"in the stud;" the one in Medford was smaller still; and the Haverhill
+edifice was only twenty-six feet long and twenty wide, yet "none other than
+the house of God."</p>
+
+<p>As the colonists grew in wealth and numbers, they desired and built better
+sanctuaries, "good roomthy meeting-houses" they were called by Judge
+Sewall, the most valued and most interesting journal-keeper of the times.
+The rude early buildings were then converted into granaries or storehouses,
+or, as was the Pentucket meeting-house, into a "house of shelter or a house
+to sett horses in." As these meeting-houses had not been consecrated, and
+as they were town-halls, forts, or court-houses as well as meeting-houses,
+the humbler uses to which they were finally put were not regarded as
+profanations of holy places.</p>
+
+<p>The second form or type of American church architecture was a square wooden
+building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which
+was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or
+turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which
+was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this
+second style of architecture. These square meeting-houses, so much alike,
+soon abounded in New England; for a new church, in its contract for
+building, would often specify that the structure should be "like in every
+detaile to the Lynn meeting-house," or like the Hadley, Milford, Boston,
+Danvers, or New Haven meeting-house. This form of edifice was the prototype
+of the fine great First Church of Boston, a large square brick building,
+with three rows of windows and two galleries, which stood from the year
+1713 to 1808, and of which many pictures exist.</p>
+
+<p>The third form of the Puritan meeting-house, of which the Old South Church
+of Boston is a typical model, has too many representatives throughout New
+England to need any description, as have also the succeeding forms of New
+England church architecture.</p>
+
+<p>The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow
+lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the
+colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile
+of the meeting-house. Soon, however, the houses became too closely crowded
+for the most convenient uses of a farming community; pasturage for the
+cattle had to be obtained at too great a distance from the farmhouse;
+firewood had to be brought from too distant woods; nearness to water
+also had to be considered. Thus the law became a dead letter, and each
+new-coming settler built on outlying and remote land, since the Indians
+were no longer so deeply to be dreaded. Then the meeting-houses, having
+usually to accommodate a whole township of scattered farms, were placed on
+remote and often highly elevated locations; sometimes at the very top of a
+long, steep hill,--so long and so steep in some cases, especially in one
+Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down on horseback
+from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading
+their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The
+second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly
+pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England
+Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his
+dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he
+leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and
+surrounding): "This is very like the way to heaven; 'tis uphill. The Lord
+by His grace fetch us up."</p>
+
+<p>The location on a hilltop was chosen and favored for various reasons. The
+meeting-house was at first a watch-house, from which to keep vigilant
+lookout for any possible approach of hostile or sneaking Indians; it was
+also a landmark, whose high bell-turret, or steeple, though pointing to
+heaven, was likewise a guide on earth, for, thus stationed on a high
+elevation, it could be seen for miles around by travellers journeying
+through the woods, or in the narrow, tree-obscured bridle-paths which were
+then almost the only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for
+sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan
+ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb
+uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of
+having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of
+envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously
+remote and painfully inaccessible locations chosen for the site of many
+fine, roomy churches must astonish any observing traveller on the byroads
+of New England. Too often, alas! these churches are deserted, falling down,
+unopened from year to year, destitute alike of minister and congregation.
+Sometimes, too, on high hilltops, or on lonesome roads leading through a
+tall second growth of woods, deserted and neglected old graveyards--the
+most lonely and forlorn of all sad places--by their broken and fallen
+headstones, which surround a half-filled-in and uncovered cellar, show
+that once a meeting-house for New England Christians had stood there. Tall
+grass, and a tangle of blackberry brambles cover the forgotten graves,
+and perhaps a spire of orange tiger-lilies, a shrub of southernwood or of
+winter-killed and dying box, may struggle feebly for life under the shadow
+of the "plumed ranks of tall wild cherry," and prove that once these lonely
+graves were cared for and loved for the sake of those who lie buried in
+this now waste spot. No traces remain of the old meeting-house save the
+cellar and the narrow stone steps, sadly leading nowhere, which once were
+pressed by the feet of the children of the Pilgrims, but now are trodden
+only by the curious and infrequent passer-by, or the epitaph-seeking
+antiquary.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult often to understand the details in the descriptions of
+these early meeting-houses, the colonial spelling is so widely varied,
+and so cleverly ingenious. Uniformity of spelling is a strictly modern
+accomplishment, a hampering innovation. "A square roofe without Dormans,
+with two Lucoms on each side," means, I think, without dormer windows, and
+with luthern windows. Another church paid a bill for the meeting-house roof
+and the "Suppolidge." They had "turritts" and "turetts" and "turits" and
+"turyts" and "feriats" and "tyrryts" and "toryttes" and "turiotts" and
+"chyrits," which were one and the same thing; and one church had orders
+for "juyces and rayles and nayles and bymes and tymber and gaybels and a
+pulpyt, and three payr of stayrs," in its meeting-house,--a liberal supply
+of the now fashionable <i>y</i>'s. We read of "pinakles" and "pyks" and
+"shuthers" and "scaffills" and "bimes" and "lynters" and "bathyns" and
+"chymbers" and "bellfers;" and often in one entry the same word will be
+spelt in three or four different ways. Here is a portion of a contract in
+the records of the Roxbury church: "Sayd John is to fence in the Buring
+Plas with a Fesy ston wall, sefighiattly don for Strenk and workmanship
+as also to mark a Doball gatt 6 or 8 fote wid and to hing it."
+<i>Sefighiattly</i> is "sufficiently;" but who can translate "Fesy"? can it
+mean "facy" or faced smoothly?</p>
+
+<p>The church-raising was always a great event in the town. Each citizen was
+forced by law to take part in or contribute to "raring the Meeting hows."
+In early days nails were scarce,--so scarce that unprincipled persons set
+fire to any buildings which chanced to be temporarily empty, for the sake
+of obtaining the nails from the ruins; so each male inhabitant supplied
+to the new church a certain "amount of nayles." Not only were logs, and
+lumber, and the use of horses' and men's labor given, but a contribution
+was also levied for the inevitable barrel of rum and its unintoxicating
+accompaniments. "Rhum and Cacks" are frequent entries in the account books
+of early churches. No wonder that accidents were frequent, and that men
+fell from the scaffolding and were killed, as at the raising of the
+Dunstable meeting-house. When the Medford people built their second
+meeting-house, they provided for the workmen and bystanders, five barrels
+of rum, one barrel of good brown sugar, a box of fine lemons, and two
+loaves of sugar. As a natural consequence, two thirds of the frame fell,
+and many were injured. In Northampton, in 1738, ten gallons of rum were
+bought for &pound;8 "to raise the meeting-house"--and the village doctor got "&pound;3
+for setting his bone Jonathan Strong, and &pound;3 10s. for setting Ebenezer
+Burt's thy" which had somehow through the rum or the raising, both gotten
+broken. Sometimes, as in Pittsfield in 1671, the sum of four shillings was
+raised on every acre of land in the town, and three shillings a day were
+paid to every man who came early to work, while one shilling a day was
+apportioned to each worker for his rum and sugar. At last no liquor was
+allowed to the workmen until after the day's work was over, and thus fatal
+accidents were prevented.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest meeting-houses had oiled paper in the windows to admit the
+light. A Pilgrim colonist wrote to an English friend about to emigrate,
+"Bring oiled paper for your windows." Higginson, however, writing in 1629,
+asks for "glasse for windowes." When glass was used it was not set in the
+windows as now. We find frequent entries of "glasse and nayles for it," and
+in Newbury, in 1665, the church ordered that the "Glasse in the windows
+be ... look't to if any should happen to be loosed with winde to be nailed
+close again." The glass was in lozenge-shaped panes, set in lead in the
+form of two long narrow sashes opening in the middle from top to bottom,
+and it was many years before oblong or square panes came into common use.</p>
+
+<p>These early churches were destitute of shade, for the trees in the
+immediate vicinity were always cut down on account of dread of the fierce
+fires which swept often through the forests and overwhelmed and destroyed
+the towns. The heat and blazing light in summer were as hard to bear in
+these unscreened meeting-houses as was the cold in winter.</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Old house of Puritanic wood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Through whose unpainted windows streamed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;On seats as primitive and rude<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As Jacob's pillow when he dreamed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The white and undiluted day."</blockquote>
+
+<p>We have all heard the theory advanced that it is impossible there should be
+any true religious feeling, any sense of sanctity, in a garish and bright
+light,--"the white and undiluted day,"--but I think no one can doubt that
+to the Puritans these seething, glaring, pine-smelling hothouses were truly
+God's dwelling-place, though there was no "dim, religious light" within.</p>
+
+<p>Curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and the sunlight streamed in with
+unobstructed and unbroken rays. Heavy shutters for protection were often
+used, but to close them at time of service would have been to plunge
+the church into utter darkness. Permission was sometimes given, as in
+Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of
+the sun there,"--a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As
+years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches
+became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and
+fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which
+was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked
+live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed
+abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great
+hemlock-tree back of the pulpit window." Another minister, Dr. Storrs,
+having struggled to read his sermon in an ill-lighted, gloomy church, said
+he would never speak in that building again while it was so overshadowed
+with trees. A few years later he was invited to preach to the same
+congregation; but when he approached the church, and saw the great
+umbrageous tree still standing, he rode away, and left the people
+sermonless in their darkness. The chill of these sunless, unheated
+buildings in winter can well be imagined.</p>
+
+<p>Strange and grotesque decorations did the outside of the earliest
+meeting-houses bear,--grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and
+by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped
+from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his
+destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear,
+which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough.
+The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September,
+twenty bears were killed within two miles of Boston. This bear story
+requires unlimited faith in Puritan probity, and confidence in Puritan
+records to credit it, but believe it, ye who can, as I do! In Salem and in
+Ipswich, in 1640, any man who brought a living wolf to the meeting-house
+was paid fifteen shillings by the town; if the wolf were dead, ten
+shillings. In 1664, if the wolf-killer wished to obtain the reward, he was
+ordered to bring the wolf's head and "nayle it to the meeting-house and
+give notis thereof." In Hampton, the inhabitants were ordered to "nayle the
+same to a little red oake tree at northeast end of the meeting-house." One
+man in Newbury, in 1665, killed seven wolves, and was paid the reward
+for so doing. This was a great number, for the wary wolf was not easily
+destroyed either by musket or wolf-hook. In 1723 wolves were so abundant
+in Ipswich that parents would not suffer their children to go to and from
+church and school without the attendance of some grown person. As late as
+1746 wolves made sad havoc in Woodbury, Connecticut; and a reward of five
+dollars for each wolf's head was offered by law in that township in 1853.</p>
+
+<p>In 1718 the last public reward was paid in Salem for a wolf's head, but
+so late as the year 1779 the howls of wolves were heard every night in
+Newbury, though trophies of shrivelled wolves' heads no longer graced the
+walls of the meeting-house.</p>
+
+<p>All kinds of notices and orders and regulations and "bills" were posted on
+the meeting-house, often on the door, where they would greet the eye of
+all who entered: prohibitions from selling guns and powder to the Indians,
+notices of town meetings, intentions of marriage, copies of the laws
+against Sabbath-breaking, messages from the Quakers, warnings of "vandoos"
+and sales, lists of the town officers, and sometimes scandalous and
+insulting libels, and libels in verse, which is worse, for our forefathers
+dearly loved to rhyme on all occasions. On the meeting-house green stood
+those Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, whipping-post,
+pillory, and cage; and on lecture days the stocks and pillory were
+often occupied by wicked or careless colonists, or those everlasting
+pillory-replenishers, the Quakers. It is one of the unintentionally comic
+features of absurd colonial laws and punishments in which the early legal
+records so delightfully abound, that the first man who was sentenced to and
+occupied the stocks in Boston was the carpenter who made them. He was thus
+fitly punished for his extortionate charge to the town for the lumber
+he used in their manufacture. This was rather better than "making the
+punishment fit the crime," since the Boston magistrates managed to force
+the criminal to furnish his own punishment. In Shrewsbury, also, the
+unhappy man who first tested the wearisome capacity and endured the public
+mortication of the town's stocks was the man who made them. He "builded
+better than he knew." Pillories were used as a means of punishment until
+a comparatively recent date,--in Salem until the year 1801, and in Boston
+till 1803.</p>
+
+<p>Great horse-blocks, rows of stepping-stones, or hewn logs further graced
+the meeting-house green; and occasionally one fine horse-block, such as the
+Concord women proudly erected, and paid for by a contribution of a pound of
+butter from each house-wife.</p>
+
+<p>The meeting-house not only was employed for the worship of God and for town
+meetings, but it was a storehouse as well. Until after the Revolutionary
+War it was universally used as a powder magazine; and indeed, as no fire in
+stove or fireplace was ever allowed within, it was a safe enough place for
+the explosive material. In Hanover, the powder room was in the steeple,
+while in Quincy the "powder-closite" was in the beams of the roof. Whenever
+there chanced to be a thunderstorm during the time of public worship, the
+people of Beverly ran out under the trees, and in other towns they left
+the meeting-house if the storm seemed severe or near; still they built no
+powder houses. Grain, too, was stored in the loft of the meeting-house for
+safety; hatches were built, and often the corn paid to the minister was
+placed there. "Leantos," or "linters," were sometimes built by the side of
+the building for use for storage. In Springfield, Mr. Pyncheon was allowed
+to place his corn in the roof chamber of the meeting-house; but as the
+people were afraid that the great weight might burst the floor, he was
+forbidden to store more than four hundred bushels at a time, unless he
+"underpropped the floor."</p>
+
+<p>In one church in the Connecticut valley, in a township where it was
+forbidden that tobacco be smoked upon the public streets, the church
+loft was used to dry and store the freshly cut tobacco-leaves which the
+inhabitants sold to the "ungodly Dutch." Thus did greed for gain lead even
+blue Connecticut Christians to profane the house of God.</p>
+
+<p>The early meeting-houses in country parishes were seldom painted, such
+outward show being thought vain and extravagant. In the middle of the
+eighteenth century paint became cheaper and more plentiful, and a gay
+rivalry in church-decoration sprang up. One meeting-house had to be as fine
+as its neighbor. Votes were taken, "rates were levied," gifts were asked
+in every town to buy "colour" for the meeting-house. For instance, the new
+meeting-house in Pomfret, Connecticut, was painted bright yellow; it proved
+a veritable golden apple of discord throughout the county. Windham town
+quickly voted that its meeting-house be "coloured something like the
+Pomfret meeting-house." Killingly soon ordered that the "cullering of the
+body of our meeting-house should be like the Pomfret meeting-house, and the
+Roff shal be cullered Read." Brooklyn church then, in 1762, ordered that
+the outside of its meeting-house be "culered" in the approved fashion.
+The body of the house was painted a bright orange; the doors and "bottom
+boards" a warm chocolate color; the "window-jets," corner-boards, and
+weather-boards white. What a bright nosegay of color! As a crowning glory
+Brooklyn people put up an "Eleclarick Rod" on the gorgeous edifice, and
+proudly boasted that--Brooklyn meeting-house was the "newest biggest and
+yallowest" in the county. One old writer, however, spoke scornfully of the
+spirit of envious emulation, extravagance, and bad taste that spread and
+prevailed from the example of the foolish and useless "colouring" of the
+Pomfret meeting-house.</p>
+
+<p>Within the meeting-house all was simple enough: raftered walls, sanded
+floors, rows of benches, a few pews, and the pulpit, or the "scaffold,"
+as John Cotton called it. The bare rafters were often profusely hung with
+dusty spiders' webs, and were the home also of countless swallows, that
+flew in and out of the open bell-turret. Sometimes, too, mischievous
+squirrels, attracted by the corn in the meeting-house loft, made their
+homes in the sanctuary; and they were so prolific and so omnivorous that
+the Bible and the pulpit cushions were not safe from their nibbling
+attacks. On every Sunday afternoon the Word of God and its sustaining
+cushion had to be removed to the safe shelter of a neighboring farmhouse or
+tavern, to prevent total annihilation by these Puritanical, Bible-loving
+squirrels.</p>
+
+<p>The pulpits were often pretentious, even in the plain and undecorated
+meeting-houses, and were usually high desks, to which a narrow flight of
+stairs led. In the churches of the third stage of architecture, these
+stairs were often inclosed in a towering hexagonal mahogany structure,
+which was ornamented with pillars and panels. Into this the minister
+walked, closed the door behind him, and invisibly ascended the stairs;
+while the children counted the seconds from the time he closed the door
+until his head appeared through the trap-door at the top of the pulpit. The
+form known as a tub-pulpit was very popular in the larger churches. The
+pulpit of one old, unpainted church retained until the middle of this
+century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring
+eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the
+great, all-seeing eye of God.</p>
+
+<p>As the ceiling and rafters were so open and reverberating, it was generally
+thought imperative to hang above the pulpit a great sounding-board, which
+threatened the minister like a giant extinguisher, and was really as devoid
+of utility as it was curious in ornamentation, "reflecting most part an
+empty ineffectual sound." This great sound-killer was decorated with carved
+and painted rosettes, as in the Shrewsbury meeting-house; with carved ivy
+leaves, as in Farmington; with a carved bunch of grapes or pomegranates, as
+in the Leicester church; with letters indicating a date, as, "M. R. H." for
+March, in the Hadley church; with appropriate mottoes and texts, such as
+the words, "Holiness is the Lords," in the Windham church; with cords and
+tassels, with hanging fringes, with panels and balls; and thus formed a
+great ornament to the church, and a source of honest pride to the church
+members. The clumsy sounding-board was usually hung by a slight iron rod,
+which looked smaller still as it stretched up to the high, raftered roof,
+and always appeared to be entirely insufficient to sustain the great weight
+of the heavy machine. In Danvers, one of these useless though ornamental
+structures hung within eighteen inches of the preacher's nose, on a slender
+bar thirty feet in length; and every Sunday the children gazed with
+fascinated anticipation at the slight rod and the great hexagonal
+extinguisher, thinking and hoping that on this day the sounding-board would
+surely drop, and "put out" the minister. In fact, it was regarded by many
+a child, though this idea was hardly formulated in the little brain, as
+a visible means of possible punishment for any false doctrine that might
+issue from the mouth of the preacher.</p>
+
+<p>Another pastime and source of interest to the children in many old churches
+was the study of the knots and veins in the unpainted wood of which the
+pews and galleries were made. Age had developed and darkened and rendered
+visible all the natural irregularities in the wood, just as it had brought
+out and strengthened the dry-woody, close, unaired, penetrating scent which
+permeated the meeting-house and gave it the distinctive "church smell." The
+children, and perhaps a few of the grown people, found in these clusters
+of knots queer similitudes of faces, strange figures and constellations,
+which, though conned Sunday after Sunday until known by heart, still seemed
+ever to show in their irregular groupings a puzzling possibility of the
+discovery of new configurations and monstrosities.</p>
+
+<p>The dangling, dusty spiders' webs afforded, too, an interesting sight and
+diversion for the sermon-hearing, but not sermon-listening, young Puritans,
+who watched the cobwebs swaying, trembling, forming strange maps of
+imaginary rivers with their many tributaries, or outlines of intersecting
+roads and lanes. And if little Yet-Once, Hate-Evil, or Shearjashub chanced,
+by good fortune, to be seated near a window where a crafty spider and a
+foolish buzzing fly could be watched through the dreary exposition and
+attempted reconciliation of predestination and free will, that indeed were
+a happy way of passing the weary hours.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>II</h1>
+
+<h2>The Church Militant.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>For many years after the settlement of New England the Puritans, even in
+outwardly tranquil times, went armed to meeting; and to sanctify the Sunday
+gun-loading they were expressly forbidden to fire off their charges at
+any object on that day save an Indian or a wolf, their two "greatest
+inconveniencies." Trumbull, in his "Mac Fingal," Avrites thus in jest of
+this custom of Sunday arm-bearing:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"So once, for fear of Indian beating,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting,--<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Each man equipped on Sunday morn<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;With psalm-book, shot, and powder-horn,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And looked in form, as all must grant,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Like the ancient true church militant."</blockquote>
+
+<p>In 1640 it was ordered in Massachusetts that in every township the
+attendants at church should carry a "competent number of peeces, fixed
+and compleat with powder and shot and swords every Lords-day to the
+meeting-house;" one armed man from each household was then thought
+advisable and necessary for public safety. In 1642 six men with muskets and
+powder and shot were thought sufficient for protection for each church. In
+Connecticut similar mandates were issued, and as the orders were neglected
+"by divers persones," a law was passed in 1643 that each offender should
+forfeit twelve pence for each offence. In 1644 a fourth part of the
+"trayned hand" was obliged to come armed each Sabbath, and the sentinels
+were ordered to keep their matches constantly lighted for use in their
+match-locks. They were also commanded to wear armor, which consisted of
+"coats basted with cotton-wool, and thus made defensive against Indian
+arrows." In 1650 so much dread and fear were felt of Sunday attacks from
+the red men that the Sabbath-Day guard was doubled in number. In 1692, the
+Connecticut Legislature ordered one fifth of the soldiers in each town to
+come armed to each meeting, and that nowhere should be present as a guard
+at time of public worship fewer than eight soldiers and a sergeant. In
+Hadley the guard was allowed annually from the public treasury a pound of
+lead and a pound of powder to each soldier.</p>
+
+<p>No details that could add to safety on the Sabbath were forgotten or
+overlooked by the New Haven church; bullets were made common currency at
+the value of a farthing, in order that they might be plentiful and in every
+one's possession; the colonists were enjoined to determine in advance what
+to do with the women and children in case of attack, "that they do not hang
+about them and hinder them;" the men were ordered to bring at least six
+charges of powder and shot to meeting; the farmers were forbidden to "leave
+more arms at home than men to use them;" the half-pikes were to be headed
+and the whole ones mended, and the swords "and all piercing weapons
+furbished up and dressed;" wood was to be placed in the watch-house; it was
+ordered that the "door of the meeting-house next the soldiers' seat be kept
+clear from women and children sitting there, that if there be occasion
+for the soldiers to go suddenly forth, they may have free passage." The
+soldiers sat on either side of the main door, a sentinel was stationed
+in the meeting-house turret, and armed watchers paced the streets; three
+cannon were mounted by the side of this "church militant," which must
+strongly have resembled a garrison.</p>
+
+<p>Military duty and military discipline and regard for the Sabbath, and for
+the House of God as well, did not always make the well-equipped occupants
+of these soldiers' seats in New Haven behave with the dignity and decorum
+befitting such guardians of the peace and protectors in war. Serious
+disorders and disturbances among the guard were reported at the General
+Court on June 16, 1662. One belligerent son of Mars, as he sat in the
+meeting-house, threw lumps of lime--perhaps from the plastered chinks in
+the log wall--at a fellow-warrior, who in turn, very naturally, kicked his
+tormentor with much agility and force. There must have ensued quite a free
+fight all around in the meeting-house, for "Mrs. Goodyear's boy had his
+head broke that day in meeting, on account of which a woman said she
+doubted not the wrath of God was upon us." And well might she think so, for
+divers other unseemly incidents which occurred in the meeting-house at the
+same time were narrated in Court, examined into, and punished.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of these events in the New Haven church (which were certainly
+exceptional), the seemingly incongruous union of church and army was
+suitable enough in a community that always began and ended the military
+exercises on "training day" with solemn prayer and psalm-singing; and that
+used the army and encouraged a true soldier-like spirit not chiefly as aids
+in war, but to help to conquer and destroy the adversaries of truth, and to
+"achieve greater matters by this little handful of men than the world is
+aware of."</p>
+
+<p>The Salem sentinels wore doubtless some of the good English armor owned by
+the town,--corselets to cover the body; gorgets to guard the throat;
+tasses to protect the thighs; all varnished black, and costing each suit
+"twenty-four shillings a peece." The sentry also wore a bandileer, a large
+"neat's leather" belt thrown over the right shoulder, and hanging down
+under the left arm. This bandileer sustained twelve boxes of cartridges,
+and a well-filled bullet-bag. Each man bore either a "bastard musket with
+a snaphance," a "long fowling-piece with musket bore," a "full musket," a
+"barrell with a match-cock," or perhaps (for they were purchased by the
+town) a leather gun (though these leather guns may have been cannon).
+Other weapons there were to choose from, mysterious in name, "sakers,
+minions, ffaulcons, rabinets, murthers (or murderers, as they were
+sometimes appropriately called) chambers, harque-busses, carbins,"--all
+these and many other death-dealing machines did our forefathers bring and
+import from their war-loving fatherland to assist them in establishing
+God's Word, and exterminating the Indians, but not always, alas! to aid
+them in converting those poor heathen.</p>
+
+<p>The armed Salem watcher, besides his firearms and ammunition, had attached
+to his wrist by a cord a gun-rest, or gun-fork, which he placed upon
+the ground when he wished to fire his musket, and upon which that
+constitutional kicker rested when touched off. He also carried a sword and
+sometimes a pike, and thus heavily burdened with multitudinous arms and
+cumbersome armor, could never have run after or from an Indian with much
+agility or celerity; though he could stand at the church-door with his
+leather gun,--an awe-inspiring figure,--and he could shoot with his
+"harquebuss," or "carbin," as we well know.</p>
+
+<p>These armed "sentinells" are always regarded as a most picturesque
+accompaniment of Puritan religious worship, and the Salem and Plymouth
+armed men were imposing, though clumsy. But the New Haven soldiers, with
+their bulky garments wadded and stuffed out with thick layers of cotton
+wool, must have been more safety-assuring and comforting than they were
+romantic or heroic; but perhaps they too wore painted tin armor, "corselets
+and gorgets and tasses."</p>
+
+<p>In Concord, New Hampshire, the men, who all came armed to meeting, stacked
+their muskets around a post in the middle of the church, while the honored
+pastor, who was a good shot and owned the best gun in the settlement,
+preached with his treasured weapon in the pulpit by his side, ready from
+his post of vantage to blaze away at any red man whom he saw sneaking
+without, or to lead, if necessary, his congregation to battle. The church
+in York, Maine, until the year 1746, felt it necessary to retain the custom
+of carrying arms to the meeting-house, so plentiful and so aggressive were
+Maine Indians.</p>
+
+<p>Not only in the time of Indian wars were armed men seen in the
+meeting-house, but on June 17, 1775, the Provincial Congress recommended
+that the men "within twenty miles of the sea-coast carry their arms and
+ammunition with them to meeting on the Sabbath and other days when they
+meet for public worship." And on many a Sabbath and Lecture Day, during the
+years of war that followed, were proved the wisdom and foresight of that
+suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant
+dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and
+left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe
+exit of the latter. This custom prevailed from habit until a late date in
+many churches in New England, all the men, after the benediction and the
+exit of the parson, walking out in advance of the women. So also the custom
+of the men always sitting at the "head" or door of the pew arose from the
+early necessity of their always being ready to seize their arms and rush
+unobstructed to fight. In some New England village churches to this day,
+the man who would move down from his end of the pew and let a woman sit
+at the door, even if it were a more desirable seat from which to see the
+clergyman, would be thought a poor sort of a creature.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>III</h1>
+
+<h2>By Drum and Horn and Shell.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>At about nine o'clock on the Sabbath morning the Puritan colonists
+assembled for the first public service of the holy day; they were gathered
+together by various warning sounds. The Haverhill settlers listened for the
+ringing toot of Abraham Tyler's horn. The Montague and South Hadley people
+were notified that the hour of assembling had arrived by the loud blowing
+of a conch-shell. John Lane, a resident of the latter town, was engaged
+in 1750 to "blow the Cunk" on the Sabbath as "a sign for meeting." In
+Stockbridge a strong-lunged "praying" Indian blew the enormous shell, which
+was safely preserved until modern times, and which, when relieved from
+Sunday use, was for many years sounded as a week-day signal in the
+hay-field. Even a conch-shell was enough of an expense to the poor colonial
+churches. The Montague people in 1759 paid &pound;1 10s. for their "conk," and
+also on the purchase year gave Joseph Root 20 shillings for blowing the new
+shell. In 1785 the Whately church voted that "we will not improve anybody
+to blow the conch," and so the church-attendants straggled to Whately
+meeting each at his own time and pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>In East Hadley the inhabitant who "blew the kunk" (as phonetic East
+Hadleyites spelt it) and swept out the meeting-house was paid annually the
+munificent sum of three dollars for his services. Conch-blowing was not
+so difficult and consequently not so highly-paid an accomplishment as
+drum-beating. A verse of a simple old-fashioned hymn tells thus of the
+gathering of the Puritan saints:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"New England's Sabbath day<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Is heaven-like still and pure,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When Israel walks the way<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Up to the temple's door.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The time we tell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When there to come<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;By beat of drum<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Or sounding shell."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The drum, as highly suitable for such a military people, was often used as
+a signal for gathering for public worship, and was plainly the favorite
+means of notification. In 1678 Robert Stuard, of Norwalk, "ingages yt his
+son James shall beate the Drumb, on the Sabbath and other ocations," and in
+Norwalk the "drumb," the "drumne," the "drumme," and at last the drum was
+beaten until 1704, when the Church got a bell. And the "Drumber" was paid,
+and well paid too for his "Cervices," fourteen shillings a year of the
+town's money, and he was furnished a "new strong drumme;" and the town
+supplied to him also the flax for the drum-cords which he wore out in the
+service of God. Johnson, in his "Wonder Working Providence," tells of the
+Cambridge Church: "Hearing the sound of a drum he was directed toward it by
+a broade beaten way; following this rode he demands of the next man he met
+what the signall of the drum ment; the reply was made they had as yet no
+Bell to call men to meeting and therefore made use of the drum." In 1638
+a platform was made upon the top of the Windsor meeting-house "from the
+Lanthornc to the ridge to walk conveniently to sound a trumpet or a drum to
+give warning to meeting."</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes three guns were fired as a signal for "church-time." The signal
+for religious gathering, and the signal for battle were always markedly
+different, in order to avoid unnecessary fright.</p>
+
+<p>In 1647 Robert Basset was appointed in New Haven to drum "twice upon Lordes
+Dayes and Lecture Dayes upon the meeting house that soe those who live farr
+off may heare the more distinkly." Robert may have been a good drummer, but
+he proved to be a most reprehensible and disreputable citizen; in the local
+Court Records of August 1, 1648, we find a full report of an astounding
+occurrence in which he played an important part. Ten men, who Avere nearly
+all sea-faring men,--gay, rollicking sailors,--went to Bassctt's house and
+asked for strong drink. The magistrates had endeavored zealously, and in
+the main successfully, to prevent all intoxication in the community,
+and had forbidden the sale of liquor save in very small quantities. The
+church-drummer, however, wickedly unmindful of his honored calling,
+furnished to the sailors six quarts of strong liquor, with which they all,
+host and visitors, got prodigiously drunk and correspondingly noisy. The
+Court Record says: "The miscarriage continued till betwixt tenn and eleven
+of the clock, to the great provocation of God, disturbance of the peace,
+and to such a height of disorder that strangers wondered at it." In the
+midst of the carousal the master of the pinnace called the boatswain
+"Brother Loggerheads." This must have been a particularly insulting
+epithet, which no respectable boatswain could have been expected quietly to
+endure, for "at once the two men fell fast to wrestling, then to blowes and
+theirin grew to that feircnes that the master of the pinnace thought the
+boatswain would have puled out his eies; and they toumbled on the ground
+down the hill into the creeke and mire shamefully wallowing theirin."
+In his pain and terror the master called out, "Hoe, the Watch! Hoe, the
+Watch!" "The Watch made hast and for the present stopped the disorder, but
+in his rage and distemper the boatswaine fell a-swearinge Wounds and Hart
+as if he were not only angry with men but would provoke the high
+and blessed God." The master of the pinnace, being freed from his
+fellow-combatant, returned to Basset's house--perhaps to tell his tale
+of woe, perhaps to get more liquor--and was assailed by the drummer with
+amazing words of "anger and distemper used by drunken companions;" in
+short, he was "verey offensive, his noyes and oathes being hearde to
+the other side of the creeke." For aiding and abetting this noisy and
+disgraceful spree, and also for partaking in it, Drummer Basset was fined
+&pound;5, which must have been more than his yearly salary, and in disgrace, and
+possibly in disgust, quitted drumming the New Haven good people to meeting
+and moved his residence to Stamford, doubtless to the relief and delight of
+both magistrates and people of the former town.</p>
+
+<p>Another means of notification of the hour for religious service was by the
+use of a flag, often in addition to the sound of the drum or bell. Thus in
+Plymouth, in 1697, the selectmen were ordered to "procure a flagg to be put
+out at the ringing of the first bell, and taken in when the last bell was
+rung." In Sutherland also a flag was used as a means of announcement of
+"meeting-time," and an old goody was paid ten shillings a year for "tending
+the flagg."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gosse, in his "Early Bells of Massachusetts," gives a full and
+interesting account of the church-bells of the first colonial towns in that
+State. Lechford, in his "Plaine Dealing," wrote in 1641 that they came
+together in Boston on the Lord's Day by "the wringing of a bell," and it is
+thought that that bell was a hand-bell. The first bells, for the lack
+of bell-towers, were sometimes hung on trees by the side of the
+meeting-houses, to the great amazement and distress of the Indians, who
+regarded them with superstitious dread, thinking--to paraphrase Herbert's
+beautiful line--"when the bell did chime 't was devils' music;" but more
+frequently the bells were hung in a belfry or bell-turret or "bellcony,"
+and from this belfry depended a long bell-rope quite to the floor; and thus
+in the very centre of the church the sexton stood when he rung the summons
+for lire or for meeting. This rope was of course directly in front of the
+pulpit; and Jonathan Edwards, who was devoid of gestures and looked always
+straight before him when preaching, was jokingly said to have "looked-off"
+the bell-rope, when it fell with a crash in the middle of his church.</p>
+
+<p>At the first sound of the drum or horn or bell the town inhabitants issued
+from their houses in "desent order," man and wife walking first, and the
+children in quiet procession after them. Often a man-servant and a maid
+walked on either side of the heads of the family. In some communities the
+congregation waited outside the church door until the minister and his wife
+arrived and passed into the house; then the church-attendants followed, the
+loitering boys always contriving to scuffle noisily in from the horse-sheds
+at the last moment, making much scraping and clatter with their heavy boots
+on the sanded floor, and tumbling clumsily up the uucarpeted, creaking
+stairs.</p>
+
+<p>In other churches the members of the congregation seated themselves in
+their pews upon their arrival, but rose reverently when the parson, dressed
+in black skull-cap and Geneva cloak, entered the door; and they stood, in
+token of respect, until after he entered the pulpit and was seated.</p>
+
+<p>It was also the honor-giving and deferential custom in many New England
+churches, in the eighteenth century, for the entire congregation to remain
+respectfully standing within the pews at the end of the serice until the
+minister had descended from his lofty pulpit, opened the door of his wife's
+pew, and led her with stately dignity to the church-porch, where, were he
+and she genial and neighborly minded souls, they in turn stood and greeted
+with carefully adjusted degrees of warmth, interest, respect, or patronage,
+the different members of the congregation as they slowly passed out.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>IV</h1>
+
+<h2>The Old-Fashioned Pews.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow,
+uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks
+placed on legs like milking-stools. They were without any support or rest
+for the back; and perhaps the stiff-backed Pilgrims and Puritans required
+or wished no support. Quickly, as the colonies grew in wealth and the
+colonists in ambition and importance, "Spots for Pues" were sold (or
+"pitts" as they were sometimes called), at first to some few rich or
+influential men who wished to sit in a group together, and finally each
+family of dignity or wealth sat in its own family-pew. Often it was
+stipulated in the permission to build a pew that a separate entrance-door
+should be cut into it through the outside wall of the meeting-house, thus
+detracting grievously from the external symmetry of the edifice, but
+obviating the necessity of a space-occupying entrance aisle within the
+church, where there was little enough sitting-room for the quickly
+increasing and universally church-going population. As these pews were
+either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted,
+and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the
+kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style
+of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted. A man who had
+a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by
+the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were
+individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house
+destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was
+being razed, the old building materials to use in the construction of her
+new home. She was not allowed, however, to remove the wood which formed the
+pews, as they were adjudged to be the property of the members who had built
+them, and those owners only could sell or remove the materials of which
+they were built.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the pews in the old meeting-houses had towering partition walls,
+which extended up so high that only the tops of the tallest heads could be
+seen when the occupants were seated. Permissions to build were often given
+with modifying restrictions to the aspiring pew-builders, as for instance
+is recorded of the Haverhill church, "provided they would not build so high
+as to damnify and hinder the light of them windows," or of the Waterbury
+church, "if the pues will not progodish the hous." Often the floor of the
+pews was several inches and occasionally a foot higher than the floor of
+the "alleys," thus forming at the entrance-door of the pew one or two
+steps, which were great stumbling-blocks to clumsy and to childish feet,
+that tripped again when within the pew over the "crickets" and foot-benches
+which were, if the family were large, the accepted and lowly church-seats
+of the little children. Occasionally one long, low foot-rest stretched
+quite across one side of the pew-floor. I have seen these long benches
+with a tier of three shelves; the lower and broader shelf was used as a
+foot-rest, the second one was to hold the hats of the men, and the third
+and narrower shelf was for the hymn-books and Bibles. Such comfortable and
+luxurious pew-furnishings could never have been found in many churches.</p>
+
+<p>An old New Englander relates a funny story of his youth, in which one of
+these triple-tiered foot-benches played an important part. When he was
+a boy a travelling show visited his native town, and though he was not
+permitted to go within the mystic and alluring tent, he stood longingly at
+the gate, and was prodigiously diverted and astonished by an exhibition of
+tight-rope walking, which was given outside the tent-door as a bait to
+lure pleasure-loving and frivolous townspeople within, and also as a
+tantalization to the children of the saints who were not allowed to enter
+the tent of the wicked. Fired by that bewildering and amazing performance,
+he daily, after the wonderful sight, practised walking on rails, on fences,
+on fallen trees, and on every narrow foothold which he could find, as a
+careful preparation for a final feat and triumph of skill on his mother's
+clothes-line. In an evil hour, as he sat one Sunday in the corner of his
+father's pew, his eyes rested on the narrow ledge which formed the top of
+the long foot-bench. Satan can find mischief for idle boys within church as
+well as without, and the desire grew stronger to try to walk on that
+narrow foothold. He looked at his father and mother, they were peacefully
+sleeping; so also were the grown-up occupants of the neighboring pews;
+the pew walls were high, the minister seldom glanced to right or left; a
+thousand good reasons were whispered in his ear by the mischief-finder,
+and at last he willingly yielded, pulled off his heavy shoes, and softly
+mounted the foot-bench. He walked forward and back with great success
+twice, thrice, but when turning for a fourth tour he suddenly lost his
+balance, and over he went with a resounding crash--hats, psalm-books,
+heavy bench, and all. He crushed into hopeless shapelessness his father's
+gray beaver meeting-hat, a long-treasured and much-loved antique; he nearly
+smashed his mother's kid-slippered foot to jelly, and the fall elicited
+from her, in the surprise of the sudden awakening and intense pain, an
+ear-piercing shriek, which, with the noisy crash, electrified the entire
+meeting. All the grown people stood up to investigate, the children climbed
+on the seats to look at the guilty offender and his deeply mortified
+parents; while the minister paused in his sermon and said with cutting
+severity, "I have always regretted that the office of tithingman has been
+abolished in this community, as his presence and his watchful care
+are sadly needed by both the grown persons and the children in this
+congregation." The wretched boy who had caused all the commotion and
+disgrace was of course uninjured by his fall, but a final settlement at
+home between father and son on account of this sacrilegious piece of church
+disturbance made the unhappy would-be tight-rope walker wish that he had at
+least broken his arm instead of his father's hat and his mother's pride and
+the peace of the congregation.</p>
+
+<p>The seats were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three
+sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the
+minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian
+benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite
+justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in
+one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay,
+"What! must I be shut up in a closet and sit on a shelf?" Often elderly
+people petitioned to build separate small pens of pews with a single wider
+seat as "through the seats being so very narrow" they could not sit in
+comfort.</p>
+
+<p>The seats were, until well into this century, almost universally hung on
+hinges, and could be turned up against the walls of the pew, thus enabling
+the standing congregation to lean for support against the sides of the pews
+during the psalm-singing and the long, long prayers.</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And when at last the loud Amen<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Fell from aloft, how quickly then<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The seats came down with heavy rattle,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Like musketry in fiercest battle."</blockquote>
+
+<p>This noise of slamming pew-seats could easily be heard over half a mile
+away from the meeting-house in the summer time, for the perverse boys
+contrived always in their salute of welcome to the Amen to give vent in
+a most tremendous bang to a little of their pent up and ill-repressed
+energies. In old church-orders such entries as this (of the Haverhill
+church) are frequently seen: "The people are to Let their Seats down
+without Such Nois." "The boyes are not to wickedly noise down there
+pew-seats." A gentleman attending the old church in Leicester heard at
+the beginning of the prayer, for the first time in his life, the noise of
+slamming pew-seats, as the seats were thrust up against the pew-walls. He
+jumped into the aisle at the first clatter, thinking instinctively that the
+gallery was cracking and falling. Another stranger, a Southerner, entering
+rather late at a morning service in an old church in New England, was
+greeted with the rattle of falling seats, and exclaimed in amazement, "Do
+you Northern people applaud in church?"</p>
+
+<p>In many meeting-houses the tops of the pews and of the high gallery
+railings were ornamented with little balustrades of turned wood, which were
+often worn quite bare of paint by childish fingers that had tried them all
+"to find which ones would turn," and which, alas! would also squeak. This
+fascinating occupation whiled away many a tedious hour in the dreary
+church, and in spite of weekly forbidding frowns and whispered reproofs for
+the shrill, ear-piercing squeaks elicited by turning the spindle-shaped
+balusters, was entirely too alluring a time-killer to be abandoned, and
+consequently descended, an hereditary church pastime, from generation to
+generation of the children of the Puritans; and indeed it remained so
+strong an instinct that many a grown person, visiting in after life a
+church whose pews bore balustrades like the ones of his childhood, could
+scarce keep his itching fingers from trying them each in succession "to see
+which ones would turn."</p>
+
+<p>These open balustrades also afforded fine peep-holes through which, by
+standing or kneeling upon "the shelf," a child might gaze at his neighbor;
+and also through which sly missiles--little balls of twisted paper--could
+be snapped, to the annoyance of some meek girl or retaliating boy, until
+the young marksman was ignominiously pulled down by his mother from his
+post of attack. And through these balustrades the same boy a few years
+later could thrust sly missives, also of twisted paper, to the girl whom he
+had once assailed and bombarded with his annoying paper bullets.</p>
+
+<p>Through the pillared top-rail a restless child in olden days often
+received, on a hot summer Sabbath from a farmer's wife or daughter in an
+adjoining pew, friendly and quieting gifts of sprigs of dill, or fennel,
+or caraway, famous anti-soporifics; and on this herbivorous food he would
+contentedly browse as long as it lasted. An uneasy, sermon-tired little
+girl was once given through the pew-rail several stalks of caraway, and
+with them a large bunch of aromatic southernwood, or "lad's-love" which had
+been brought to meeting by the matron in the next pew, with a crudely and
+unconsciously aesthetic sense that where eye and ear found so little to
+delight them, there the pungent and spicy fragrance of the southernwood
+would be doubly grateful to the nostrils. Little Missy sat down delightedly
+to nibble the caraway-seed, and her mother seeing her so quietly and
+absorbingly occupied, at once fell contentedly and placidly asleep in her
+corner of the pew. But five heads of caraway, though each contain many
+score of seeds, and the whole number be slowly nibbled and eaten one seed
+at a time, will not last through the child's eternity of a long doctrinal
+sermon; and when the umbels were all devoured, the young experimentalist
+began upon the stalks and stems, and they, too, slowly disappeared. She
+then attacked the sprays of southernwood, and in spite of its bitter,
+wormwoody flavor, having nothing else to do, she finished it, all but the
+tough stems, just as the long sermon was brought to a close. Her waking
+mother, discovering no signs of green verdure in the pew, quickly drew
+forth a whispered confession of the time-killing Nebuchadnezzar-like feast,
+and frightened and horrified, at once bore the leaf-gorged child from
+the church, signalling in her retreat to the village doctor, who quickly
+followed and administered to the omnivorous young New Englander a bolus
+which made her loathe to her dying day, through a sympathetic association
+and memory, the taste of caraway, and the scent of southernwood.</p>
+
+<p>An old gentleman, lamenting the razing of the church of his childhood,
+told the story of his youthful Sabbaths in rhyme, and thus refers with
+affectionate enthusiasm to the old custom of bringing bunches of esculent
+"sallet" herbs to meeting:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And when I tired and restless grew,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Our next pew neighbor, Mrs. True,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Reached her kind hand the top rail through<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To hand me dill, and fennel too,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And sprigs of caraway.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And as I munched the spicy seeds,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I dimly felt that kindly deeds<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;That thus supply our present needs,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Though only gifts of pungent weeds,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Show true religion.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And often now through sermon trite<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And operatic singer's flight,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I long for that old friendly sight,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The hand with herbs of value light,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To help to pass the time."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Were the dill and "sweetest fennel" chosen Sabbath favorites for their
+old-time virtues and powers?</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Vervain and dill<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Hinder witches of their ill."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And of the charmed fennel Longfellow wrote:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The fennel with its yellow flowers<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;That, in an earlier age than ours,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Was gifted with the wondrous powers,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Lost vision to restore."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And traditions of mysterious powers, dream-influencing, spirit-exorcising,
+virtue-awakening, health-giving properties, hung vaguely around the
+southernwood and made it specially fit to be a Sabbath-day posy. These
+traditions are softened by the influence of years into simply idealizing,
+in the mind of every country-bred New Englander, the peculiar refreshing
+scent of the southernwood as a typical Sabbath-day fragrance. Half a
+century ago, the pretty feathery pale-green shrub grew in every country
+door-yard, humble or great, throughout New England; and every church-going
+woman picked a branch or spray of it when she left her home on Sabbath
+morn. To this day, on hot summer Sundays, many a staid old daughter of
+the Puritans may be seen entering the village meeting-house, clad in
+a lilac-sprigged lawn or a green-striped bar&egrave;ge,--a scanty-skirted,
+surplice-waisted relic of past summers,--with a lace-bordered silk cape
+or a delicate, time-yellowed, purple and white cashmere scarf on her bent
+shoulders, wearing on her gray head a shirred-silk or leghorn bonnet, and
+carrying in her lace-mitted hand a fresh handkerchief, her spectacle-case
+and well-worn Bible, and a great sprig of the sweet, old-fashioned
+"lad's-love." A rose, a bunch of mignonette would be to her too gay a posy
+for the Lord's House and the Lord's Day. And balmier breath than was
+ever borne by blossom is the pure fragrance of green growing
+things,--southernwood, mint, sweet fern, bayberry, sweetbrier. No rose is
+half so fresh, so countrified, so memory-sweet.</p>
+
+<p>The benches and the pew-seats in the old churches were never cushioned.
+Occasionally very old or feeble women brought cushions to meeting to sit
+upon. It is a matter of recent tradition that Colonel Greenleaf caused a
+nine days' talk in Newbury town at the beginning of this century when
+he cushioned his pew. The widow of Sir William Pepperell, who lived in
+imposing style, had her pew cushioned and lined and curtained with
+worsted stuff, and carpeted with a heavy bear-skin. This worn, faded, and
+moth-eaten furniture remained in the Kittery church until the year 1840,
+just as when Lady Pepperell furnished and occupied the pew. Nor were even
+the seats of the pulpit cushioned. The "cooshoons" of velvet or leather,
+which were given by will to the church, and which were kept in the pulpit,
+and were nibbled by the squirrels, were for the Bible, not the minister, to
+rest upon.</p>
+
+<p>In many churches--in Durham, Concord and Sandwich--the pews had
+swing-shelves, "leaning shelves," upon which a church attendant could rest
+his paper and his arm when taking notes from the sermon, as was at one time
+the universal custom, and in which even school-boys of a century ago had
+to take part. Funny stories are told of the ostentatious notes taken by
+pompous parishioners who could neither write nor read, but who could
+scribble, and thus cut a learned figure.</p>
+
+<p>The doors of the pews were usually cut down somewhat lower than the
+pew-walls, and frequently had no top-rails. They sometimes bore the name of
+the pew-owner painted in large white letters. They were secured when
+closed by clumsy wooden buttons. In many country congregations the elderly
+men--stiff old farmers--had a fashion of standing up in the middle of the
+sermon to stretch their cramped limbs, and they would lean against and hang
+over the pew door and stare up and down the aisle. In Andover, Vermont,
+old Deacon Puffer never let a summer Sunday pass without thus resting and
+diverting himself. One day, having ill-secured the wooden button at the
+door of his pew, the leaning-place gave way under his weight, and out he
+sprawled on all-fours, with a loud clatter, into the middle of the aisle,
+to the amusement of the children, and the mortification of his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it may be seen, as an old autobiography phrases it, "diversions was
+frequent in meeting, and the more duller the sermon, the more likely it was
+that some accident or mischief would be done to help to pass the time."</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>V</h1>
+
+<h2>Seating the Meeting.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>Perhaps no duty was more important and more difficult of satisfactory
+performance in the church work in early New England than "seating the
+meeting-house." Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all
+forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was
+the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the
+seat in which each person should sit during public worship. A committee of
+dignified and influential men was appointed to assign irrevocably to each
+person his or her place, according to rank and importance. Whittier wrote
+of this custom:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"In the goodly house of worship, where in order due and fit,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As by public vote directed, classed and ranked the people sit;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mistress first and goodwife after, clerkly squire before the clown,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;From the brave coat, lace embroidered: to the gray frock shading down."</blockquote>
+
+<p>In many cases the members of the committee were changed each year or at
+each fresh seating, in order to obviate any of the effects of partiality
+through kinship, friendship, personal esteem, or debt. A second committee
+was also appointed to seat the members of committee number one, in order
+that, as Haverhill people phrased it, "there may be no Grumbling at them
+for picking and placing themselves."</p>
+
+<p>This seating committee sent to the church the list of all the attendants
+and the seats assigned to them, and when the list had been twice or thrice
+read to the congregation, and nailed on the meeting-house door, it became a
+law. Then some such order as this of the church at Watertown, Connecticut,
+was passed: "It is ordered that the next Sabbath Day every person shall
+take his or her seat appointed to them, and not go to any other seat where
+others are placed: And if any one of the inhabitants shall act contrary, he
+shall for the first offence be reproved by the deacons, and for a second
+pay a fine of two shillings, and a like fine for each offence ever
+after." Or this of the Stratham church: "When the comety have Seatid the
+meeting-house every person that is Seatid shall set in those Seats or pay
+Five Shillings Pir Day for every day they set out of There seats in a
+Disorderly Manner to advance themselves Higher in the meeting-house." These
+two church-laws were very lenient. In many towns the punishments and fines
+were much more severe. Two men of Newbury were in 1669 fined &pound;27 4s.
+each for "disorderly going and setting in seats belonging to others." They
+were dissatisfied with the seats assigned to them by the seating committee,
+and openly and defiantly rebelled. Other and more peaceable citizens
+"entred their Decents" to the first decision of the committee and asked for
+reconsideration of their special cases and for promotion to a higher pew
+before the final orders were "Jsued."</p>
+
+<p>In all the Puritan meetings, as then and now in Quaker meetings, the men
+sat on one side of the meeting-house and the women on the other; and they
+entered by separate doors. It was a great and much-contested change when
+men and women were ordered to sit together "promiscuoslie." In front,
+on either side of the pulpit (or very rarely in the foremost row in the
+gallery), was a seat of highest dignity, known as the "foreseat," in which
+only the persons of greatest importance in the community sat.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a row of square pews was built on three sides of the ground
+floor, and each pew occupied by separate families, while the pulpit was
+on the fourth side. If any man wished such a private pew for himself and
+family, he obtained permission from the church and town, and built it at
+his own expense. Immediately in front of the pulpit was either a long seat
+or a square inclosed pew for the deacons, who sat facing the congregation.
+This was usually a foot or two above the level of the other pews, and was
+reached by two or three steep, narrow steps. On a still higher plane was a
+pew for the ruling elders, when ruling elders there were. The magistrates
+also had a pew for their special use. What we now deem the best seats,
+those in the middle of the church, were in olden times the free seats.</p>
+
+<p>Usually, on one side of the pulpit was a square pew for the minister's
+family. When there were twenty-six children in the family, as at least one
+New England parson could boast, and when ministers' families of twelve
+or fourteen children were far from unusual, it is no wonder that we find
+frequent votes to "inlarge the ministers wives pew the breadth of the
+alley," or to "take in the next pue to the ministers wives pue into her
+pue." The seats in the gallery were universally regarded in the early
+churches as the most exalted, in every sense, in the house, with the
+exception, of course, of the dignity-bearing foreseat and the few private
+pews.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to comprehend what a source of disappointed anticipation,
+heart-burning jealousy, offended dignity, unseemly pride, and bitter
+quarrelling this method of assigning scats, and ranking thereby, must have
+been in those little communities. How the goodwivcs must have hated the
+seating committee! Though it was expressly ordered, when the committee
+rendered their decision, that "the inhabitants are to rest silent and
+sett down satysfyed," who can still the tongue of an envious woman or an
+insulted man? Though they were Puritans, they were first of all men and
+women, and complaints and revolts were frequent. Judge Sewall records that
+one indignant dame "treated Captain Osgood very roughly on account of
+seating the meeting-house." To her the difference between a seat in the
+first and one in the second row was immeasurably great. It was not alone
+the Scribes and Pharisees who desired the highest seats in the synagogue.</p>
+
+<p>It was found necessary at a very early date to "dignify the meeting,"
+which was to make certain seats, though in different localities, equal in
+dignity; thus could peace and contented pride be partially restored. For
+instance, the seating committee in the Sutton church used their "best
+discresing," and voted that "the third seat below be equal in dignity with
+the foreseat in the front gallery, and the fourth seat below be equal in
+dignity with the foreseat in the side gallery," etc., thus making many
+seats of equal honor. Of course wives had to have seats of equal importance
+with those of their husbands, and each widow retained the dignity
+apportioned to her in her husband's lifetime. We can well believe that much
+"discresing" was necessary in dignifying as well as in seating. Often,
+after building a new meeting-house with all the painstaking and thoughtful
+judgment that could be shown, the dissensions over the seating lasted for
+years. The conciliatory fashion of "dignifying the seats" clung long in the
+Congregational churches of New England. In East Hartford and Windsor it was
+not abandoned until 1824.</p>
+
+<p>Many men were unwilling to serve on these seating committees, and refused
+to "medle with the seating," protesting against it on account of the odium
+that was incurred, but they were seldom "let off." Even so influential and
+upright a man as Judge Sewall felt a dread of the responsibility and of
+the personal spleen he might arouse. He also feared in one case lest his
+seat-decisions might, if disliked, work against the ministerial peace of
+his son, who had been recently ordained as pastor of the church. Sometimes
+the difficulty was settled in this way: the entire church (or rather the
+male members) voted who should occupy the foreseat, or the highest pew, and
+the voted-in occupants of this seat of honor formed a committee, who in
+turn seated the others of the congregation.</p>
+
+<p>In the town of Rowley, "age, office, and the amount paid toward building
+the meeting-house were considered when assigning seats." Other towns had
+very amusing and minute rules for seating. Each year of the age counted one
+degree. Military service counted eight degrees. The magistrate's office
+counted ten degrees. Every forty shillings paid in on the church rate
+counted one degree. We can imagine the ambitious Puritan adding up his
+degrees, and paying in forty shillings more in order to sit one seat above
+his neighbor who was a year or two older.</p>
+
+<p>In Pittsfield, as early as the year 1765, the pews were sold by "vandoo"
+to the highest bidder, in order to stop the unceasing quarrels over
+the seating. In Windham, Connecticut, in 1762, the adoption of this
+pacificatory measure only increased the dissension when it was discovered
+that some miserable "bachelors who never paid for more than one head and
+a horse" had bid in several of the best pews in the meeting-house. In New
+London, two women, sisters-in-law, were seated side by side. Each claimed
+the upper or more dignified seat, and they quarrelled so fiercely over the
+occupation of it that they had to be brought before the town meeting.</p>
+
+<p>In no way could honor and respect be shown more satisfactorily in the
+community than by the seat assigned in meeting. When Judge Sewall married
+his second wife, he writes with much pride: "Mr. Oliver in the names of the
+Overseers invites my Wife to sit in the foreseat. I thought to have brought
+her into my pue. I thankt him and the Overseers." His wife died in a few
+months, and he reproached himself for his pride in this honor, and left the
+seat which he had in the men's foreseat. "God in his holy Sovereignty put
+my wife out of the Fore Seat. I apprehended I had Cause to be ashamed of my
+Sin and loath myself for it, and retired into my Pue," which was of course
+less dignified than the foreseat.</p>
+
+<p>Often, in thriving communities, the "pues" and benches did not afford
+seating room enough for the large number who wished to attend public
+worship, and complaints were frequent that many were "obliged to sit
+squeased on the stairs." Persons were allowed to bring chairs and stools
+into the meeting-house, and place them in the "alleys." These extra seats
+became often such encumbering nuisances that in many towns laws were passed
+abolishing and excluding them, or, as in Hadley, ordering them "back of the
+women's seats." In 1759 it was ordered in that town to "clear the Alleys of
+the meeting-house of chairs and other Incumbrances." Where the chairless
+people went is not told; perhaps they sat in the doorway, or, in the summer
+time, listened outside the windows. One forward citizen of Hardwicke had
+gradually moved his chair down the church alley, step by step, Sunday after
+Sunday, from one position of dignity to another still higher, until at last
+he boldly invaded the deacons' seat. When, in the year 1700, this honored
+position was forbidden him, in his chagrin and mortification he committed
+suicide by hanging.</p>
+
+<p>The young men sat together in rows, and the young women in corresponding
+seats on the other side of the house. In 1677 the selectmen of Newbury
+gave permission to a few young women to build a pew in the gallery. It is
+impossible to understand why this should have roused the indignation of the
+bachelors of the town, but they were excited and angered to such a pitch
+that they broke a window, invaded the meeting-house, and "broke the pue in
+pessis." For this sacrilegious act they were fined &pound;10 each, and sentenced
+to be whipped or pilloried. In consideration, however, of the fact that
+many of them had been brave soldiers, the punishment was omitted when they
+confessed and asked forgiveness. This episode is very comical; it exhibits
+the Puritan youth in such an ungallant and absurd light. When, ten years
+later, liberty was given to ten young men, who had sat in the "foure backer
+seats in the gallery," to build a pew in "the hindermost seat in the
+gallery behind the pulpit," it is not recorded that the Salem young women
+made any objection. In the Woburn church, the four daughters of one of the
+most respected families in the place received permission to build a pew in
+which to sit. Here also such indignant and violent protests were made by
+the young men that the selectmen were obliged to revoke the permission.
+It would be interesting to know the bachelors' discourteous objections to
+young women being allowed to own a pew, but no record of their reasons
+is given. Bachelors were so restricted and governed in the colonies that
+perhaps they resented the thought of any independence being allowed to
+single women. Single men could not live alone, but were forced to reside
+with some family to whom the court assigned them, and to do in all respects
+just what the court ordered. Thus, in olden times, a man had to marry to
+obtain his freedom. The only clue to a knowledge of the cause of the fierce
+and resentful objection of New England young men to permitting the young
+women of the various congregations to build and own a "maids pue" is
+contained in the record of the church of the town of Scotland, Connecticut.
+"An Hurlburt, Pashants and Mary Lazelle, Younes Bingham, prudenc Hurlburt
+and Jerusha meachem" were empowered to build a pew "provided they build
+within a year and raise ye pue no higher than the seat is on the Mens
+side." "Never ye Less," saith the chronicle, "ye above said have built said
+pue much higher than ye order, and if they do not lower the same within one
+month from this time the society comitte shall take said pue away." Do you
+wonder that the bachelors resented this towering "maids pue?" that they
+would not be scornfully looked down upon every Sabbath by women-folk,
+especially by a girl named "meachem"? Pashants and Younes and prudenc had
+to quickly come down from their unlawfully high church-perch and take a
+more humble seat, as befitted them; thus did their "vaulting ambition
+o'erleap itself and fall on the other side." Perhaps the Salem maids also
+built too high and imposing a pew. In Haverhill, in 1708, young women were
+permitted to build pews, provided they did not "damnify the Stairway." This
+somewhat profane-sounding restriction they heeded, and the Haverhill maids
+occupied their undamnifying "pue" unmolested. Medford young women, however,
+in 1701, when allowed only one side gallery for seats, while the young men
+were assigned one side and all the front gallery, made such an uproar that
+the town had to call a meeting, and restore to them their "woman's rights"
+in half the front gallery.</p>
+
+<p>Infants were brought to church in their mothers' arms, and on summer days
+the young mothers often sat at the meeting-house door or in the porch,--if
+porch there were,--where, listening to the word of God, they could attend
+also to the wants of their babes. I have heard, too, of a little cage, or
+frame, which was to be seen in the early meeting-houses, for the purpose
+of holding children who were too young to sit alone,--poor Puritan babies!
+Little girls sat with their mothers or elder sisters on "crickets" within
+the pews; or if the family were over-numerous, the children and crickets
+exundated into "the alley without the pues." Often a row of little
+daughters of Zion sat on three-legged stools and low seats the entire
+length of the aisle,--weary, sleepy, young sentinels "without the gates."</p>
+
+<p>The boys, the Puritan boys, those wild animals who were regarded with such
+suspicion, such intense disfavor, by all elderly Puritan eyes, and who were
+publicly stigmatized by the Duxbury elders as "ye wretched boys on ye Lords
+Day," were herded by themselves. They usually sat on the pulpit and gallery
+stairs, and constables or tithingmen were appointed to watch over them and
+control them. In Salem, in 1676, it was ordered that "all ye boyes of ye
+towne are and shall be appointed to sitt upon ye three pair of stairs in ye
+meeting-house on ye Lords Day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look after ye
+boyes yt sitte upon ye pulpit stairs. Reuben Guppy is to look and order soe
+many of ye boyes as may be convenient, and if any are unruly, to present
+their names, as the law directs." Nowadays we should hardly seat boys in a
+group if we wished them to be orderly and decorous, and I fear the man "by
+the name of Guppy" found it no easy task to preserve order and due gravity
+among the Puritan boys in Salem meeting. In fact, the rampant boys behaved
+thus badly for the very reason that they were seated together instead of
+with their respective families; and not until the fashion was universal of
+each family sitting in a pew or group by itself did the boys in meeting
+behave like human beings rather than like mischievous and unruly monkeys.</p>
+
+<p>In Stratford, in 1668, a tithingman was "appointed to watch over the youths
+of disorderly carriage, and see that they behave themselves comelie, and
+use such raps and blows as in his discretion meet."</p>
+
+<p>I like to think of those rows of sober-faced Puritan boys seated on the
+narrow, steep pulpit stairs, clad in knee-breeches and homespun flapped
+coats, and with round, cropped heads, miniature likenesses in dress and
+countenance (if not in deportment) of their grave, stern, God-fearing
+fathers. Though they were of the sedate Puritan blood, they were boys, and
+they wriggled and twisted, and scraped their feet noisily on the sanded
+floor; and I know full well that the square-toed shoes of one in whom
+"original sin" waxed powerful, thrust many a sly dig in the ribs and back
+of the luckless wight who chanced to sit in front of and below him on the
+pulpit stairs. Many a dried kernel of Indian corn was surreptitiously
+snapped at the head of an unwary neighbor, and many a sly word was
+whispered and many a furtive but audible "snicker" elicited when the dread
+tithingman was "having an eye-out" and administering "discreet raps and
+blows" elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>One of these wicked youths in Andover was brought before the magistrate,
+and it was charged that he "Sported and played and by Indecent Gestures and
+Wry Faces caused laughter and misbehavior in the Beholders." The girls were
+not one whit better behaved. One of "ye tything men chosen of ye town of
+Norwich" reported that "Tabatha Morgus of s'd Norwich Did on ye 24th day
+February it being Sabbath on ye Lordes Day, prophane ye Lordes Day in ye
+meeting house of ye west society in ye time of ye forenoone service on s'd
+Day by her rude and Indecent Behaviour in Laughing and Playing in ye time
+of ye s'd Service which Doinges of ye s'd Tabatha is against ye peace of
+our Sovereign Lord ye King, his Crown and Dignity." Wanton Tabatha had to
+pay three shilings sixpence for her ill-timed mid-winter frolic. Perhaps
+she laughed to try to keep warm. Those who laughed at the misdemeanors of
+others were fined as well. Deborah Bangs, a young girl, in 1755 paid a fine
+of five shillings for "Larfing in the Wareham Meeting House in time of
+Public Worship," and a boy at the same time, for the same offence, paid a
+fine of ten shillings. He may have laughed louder and longer. In a law-book
+in which Jonathan Trumbull recorded the minor cases which he tried as
+justice of the peace, was found this entry: "His Majesties Tithing man
+entered complaint against Jona. and Susan Smith, that on the Lords Day
+during Divine Service, they did <i>smile</i>." They were found guilty, and
+each was fined five shillings and costs,--poor smiling Susan and Jonathan.</p>
+
+<p>Those wretched Puritan boys, those "sons of Belial," whittled, too, and cut
+the woodwork and benches of the meeting-house in those early days, just as
+their descendants have ever since hacked and cut the benches and desks in
+country schoolhouses,--though how they ever eluded the vigilant eye and ear
+of the ubiquitous tithingman long enough to whittle will ever remain an
+unsolved mystery of the past. This early forerunning evidence of what
+has become a characteristic Yankee trait and habit was so annoyingly and
+extensively exhibited in Medford, in 1729, that an order was passed to
+prosecute and punish "all who cut the seats in the meeting-house."</p>
+
+<p>Few towns were content to have one tithingman and one staff, but ordered
+that there should be a guardian set over the boys in every corner of the
+meeting-house. In Hanover it was ordered "That there be some sticks set up
+in various places in the meeting-house, and fit persons by them and <i>to
+use them</i>." I doubt not that the sticks were well used, and Hanover boys
+were well rapped in meeting.</p>
+
+<p>The Norwalk people come down through history shining with a halo of gentle
+lenity, for their tithingman was ordered to bear a short, small stick only,
+and he was "Desired to use it with clemency." However, if any boy proved
+"incoridgable," he could be "presented" before the elders; and perhaps he
+would rather have been treated as were Hartford boys by cruel Hartford
+church folk, who ordered that if "any boye shall be taken playing or
+misbehaving himself in the time of publick worship whether in the
+meeting-house or about the walls he shall be examined and punished at the
+present publickly before the assembly depart." Parson Chauncey, of Durham,
+when a boy misbehaved in meeting, and was "punched up" by the tithingman,
+often stopped in his sermon, called the godless young offender by name,
+and asked him to come to the parsonage the next day. Some very tender and
+beautiful lessons were taught to these Durham boys at these Monday morning
+interviews, and have descended to us in tradition; and the good Mr.
+Chauncey stands out a shining light of Christian patience and forbearance
+at a time when every other New England minister, from John Cotton down,
+preached and practised the stern repression and sharp correction of all
+children, and chanted together in solemn chorus, "Foolishness is bound up
+in the heart of a child."</p>
+
+<p>One vicious tithingman invented, and was allowed to exercise on the boys,
+a punishment which was the refinement of cruelty. He walked up to the
+laughing, sporting, or whittling boy, took him by the collar or the arm,
+led him ostentatiously across the meeting-house, and seated him by his
+shamefaced mother on the women's side. It was as if one grandly proud in
+kneebreeches should be forced to walk abroad in petticoats. Far rather
+would the disgraced boy have been whacked soundly with the heavy knob of
+the tithingman's staff; for bodily pain is soon forgotten, while mortifying
+abasement lingers long.</p>
+
+<p>The tithingman could also take any older youth who misbehaved or "acted
+unsivill" in meeting from his manly seat with the grown men, and force him
+to sit again with the boys; "if any over sixteen are disorderly, they shall
+be ordered to said seats." Not only could these men of authority keep the
+boys in order during meeting, but they also had full control during the
+nooning, and repressed and restrained and vigorously corrected the luckless
+boys during the midday hours. When seats in the galleries grew to be
+regarded as inferior to seats and pews on the ground floor, the boys, who
+of course must have the worst place in the house, were relegated from the
+pulpit stairs to pews in the gallery, and these square, shut-off pews grew
+to be what Dr. Porter called "the Devil's play-houses," and turbulent
+outbursts were frequent enough.</p>
+
+<p>The little boys still sat downstairs under their parents' watchful eyes.
+"No child under 10 alowed to go up Gailary." In the Sutherland church, if
+the big boys (who ought to have known better) "behaved unseemly," one of
+the tithing-men who "took turns to set in the Galary" was ordered "to bring
+Such Bois out of the Galary &amp; set them before the Deacon's Seat" with the
+small boys. In Plainfield, Connecticut, the "pestigeous" boys managed to
+invent a new form of annoyance,--they "damnified the glass;" and a church
+regulation had to be passed to prevent, or rather to try to prevent them
+from "opening the windows or in any way damnifying the glass." It was
+doubtless hot work scuffling and wrestling in the close, shut-in pews high
+up under the roof, and they naturally wished to cool down by opening or
+breaking the windows. Grown persons could not inconsiderately open the
+church windows either. "The Constables are desired to <i>take notic</i>
+of the persons that open the windows in the tyme of publick worship." No
+rheumatic-y draughts, no bronchitis-y damps, no pure air was allowed to
+enter the New England meeting-house. The church doubtless took a vote
+before it allowed a single window to be opened.</p>
+
+<p>In Westfield, Massachusetts, the boys became so abominably rampant that the
+church formally decided "that if there is not a Reformation Respecting
+the Disorders in the Pews built on the Great Beam in the time of Publick
+Worship the comite can pul it down."</p>
+
+<p>The fashion of seating the boys in pews by themselves was slow of
+abolishment in many of the churches. In Windsor, Connecticut, "boys' pews"
+were a feature of the church until 1845. As years rolled on, the tithingmen
+became restricted in their authority: they could no longer administer "raps
+and blows;" they were forced to content themselves with loud rappings on
+the floor, and pointing with a staff or with a condemning finger at the
+misdemeanant. At last the deacons usurped these functions, and if rapping
+and pointing did not answer the purpose of establishing order (if the boy
+"psisted"), led the stubborn offender out of meeting; and they had full
+authority soundly to thrash the "wretched boy" on the horse-block. Rev. Dr.
+Dakin tells the story that, hearing a terrible noise and disturbance while
+he was praying in a church in Quincy, he felt constrained to open his eyes
+to ascertain the cause thereof; and he beheld a red-haired boy firmly
+clutching the railing on the front edge of the gallery, while a venerable
+deacon as firmly clutched the boy. The young rebel held fast, and the
+correcting deacon held fast also, until at last the balustrade gave way,
+and boy, deacon, and railing fell together with a resounding crash.
+Then, rising from the wooden debris, the thoroughly subdued boy and the
+triumphant deacon left the meeting-house to finish their little affair;
+and unmistakable swishing sounds, accompanied by loud wails and whining
+protestations, were soon heard from the region of the horse-sheds. Parents
+never resented such chastisings; it was expected, and even desired,
+that boys should be whipped freely by every school-master and person of
+authority who chose so to do.</p>
+
+<p>In some old church-orders for seating, boys were classed with negroes,
+and seated with them; but in nearly all towns the negroes had seats by
+themselves. The black women were all seated on a long bench or in an
+inclosed pew labelled "B.W.," and the negro men in one labelled "B.M." One
+William Mills, a jesting soul, being asked by a pompous stranger where he
+could sit in meeting, told the visitor that he was welcome to sit in Bill
+Mills's pew, and that it was marked "B.M." The man, who chanced to be
+ignorant of the local custom of marking the negro seats, accepted the kind
+invitation, and seated himself in the black men's pew, to the delight of
+Bill Mills, the amusement of the boys, the scandal of the elders, and his
+own disgust.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a little pew or short gallery was built high up among the beams
+and joists over the staircase which led to the first gallery, and was
+called the "swallows' nest," or the "roof pue," or the "second gallery." It
+was reached by a steep, ladder-like staircase, and was often assigned to
+the negroes and Indians of the congregation.</p>
+
+<p>Often "ye seat between ye Deacons seat and ye pulpit is for persons hard of
+hearing to sett in." In nearly every meeting a bench or pew full of aged
+men might be seen near the pulpit, and this seat was called, with Puritan
+plainness of speech, the "Deaf Pew." Some very deaf church members (when
+the boys were herded elsewhere) sat on the pulpit stairs, and even in the
+pulpit, alongside the preacher, where they disconcertingly upturned their
+great tin ear-trumpets directly in his face. The persistent joining in the
+psalm-singing by these deaf old soldiers and farmers was one of the bitter
+trials which the leader of the choir had to endure.</p>
+
+<p>The singers' seats were usually in the galleries; sometimes upon the ground
+floor, in the "hind-row on either side." Occasionally the choir sat in two
+rows of seats that extended quite across the floor of the house, in front
+of the deacons' seat and the pulpit. The men singers then sat facing the
+congregation, while the women singers faced the pulpit. Between them ran a
+long rack for the psalm-books. When they sang they stood up, and bawled and
+fugued in each other's faces. Often a square pew was built for the singers,
+and in the centre of this enclosure was a table, on which were laid, when
+at rest, the psalm-books. When they sang, the choir thus formed a hollow
+square, as does any determined band, for strength.</p>
+
+<p>One other seat in the old Puritan meeting-house, a seat of gloom,
+still throws its darksome shadow down through the years,--the stool of
+repentance. "Barbarous and cruel punishments" were forbidden by the
+statutes of the new colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking,
+sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat,
+crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long
+Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled
+and godly congregation, and the cold rebuke of the pious minister's averted
+face; bearing on the poor sinful head a deep-branding paper inscribed in
+"Capitall Letters" with the name of some dark or mysterious crime, or
+wearing on the sleeve some strange and dread symbol, or on the breast a
+scarlet letter.</p>
+
+<p>Let us thank God that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures--so
+degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,--these foul,
+in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never
+frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long time. In 1681
+two women were sentenced to sit during service on a high stool in the
+middle alley of the Salem meeting-house, having on their heads a paper
+bearing the name of their crime; and a woman in Agamenticus at about the
+same date was ordered "to stand in a white sheet publicly two several
+Sabbath-Days with the mark of her offence on her forehead." These are the
+latest records of this punishment that I have chanced to see.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, from old church and town records, we plainly discover that each laic,
+deacon, elder, criminal, singer, and even the ungodly boy had his alloted
+place as absolutely assigned to him in the old meeting-house as was the
+pulpit to the parson. Much has been said in semi-ridicule of this old
+custom of "seating" and "dignifying," yet it did not in reality differ much
+from our modern way of selling the best pews to whoever will pay the most.
+Perhaps the old way was the better, since, in the early churches, age,
+education, dignity, and reputation were considered as well as wealth.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>VI</h1>
+
+<h2>The Tithingman and the Sleepers.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The most grotesque, the most extraordinary, the most highly colored figure
+in the dull New England church-life was the tithingman. This fairly
+burlesque creature impresses me always with a sense of unreality, of
+incongruity, of strange happening, like a jesting clown in a procession of
+monks, like a strain of low comedy in the sober religious drama of early
+New England Puritan life; so out of place, so unreal is this fussy,
+pompous, restless tithingman, with his fantastic wand of office fringed
+with dangling foxtails,--creaking, bustling, strutting, peering around the
+quiet meeting-house, prodding and rapping the restless boys, waking the
+drowsy sleepers; for they slept in country churches in the seventeenth
+century, notwithstanding dread of fierce correction, just as they nod
+and doze and softly puff, unawakened and unrebuked, in village churches
+throughout New England in the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>This absurd and distorted type of the English church beadle, this colonial
+sleep banisher, was equipped with a long staff, heavily knobbed at one end,
+with which he severely and pitilessly rapped the heads of the too sleepy
+men, and the too wide-awake boys. From the other end of this wand of office
+depended a long foxtail, or a hare's-foot, which he softly thrust in the
+faces of the sleeping Priscillas, Charitys, and Hopestills, and which
+gently brushed and tickled them into reverent but startled wakefulness.</p>
+
+<p>One zealous but too impetuous tithingman in his pious ardor of office
+inadvertently applied the wrong end, the end with the heavy knob, the
+masculine end, to a drowsy matron's head; and for this severely ungallant
+mistake he was cautioned by the ruling elders to thereafter use "more
+discresing and less heist."</p>
+
+<p>Another over-watchful Newbury "awakener" rapped on the head a nodding man
+who protested indignantly that he was wide-awake, and was only bowing in
+solemn assent and approval of the minister's arguments. Roger Scott, of
+Lynn, in 1643 struck the tithingman who thus roughly and suddenly wakened
+him; and poor sleepy and bewildered Roger, who is branded through all time
+as "a common sleeper at the publick exercise," was, for this most naturally
+resentful act, but also most shockingly grave offence, soundly whipped, as
+a warning both to keep awake and not to strike back in meeting.</p>
+
+<p>Obadiah Turner, of Lynn, gives in his Journal a sad, sad disclosure of
+total depravity which was exposed by one of these sudden church-awakenings,
+and the story is best told in the journalist's own vivid words:--</p>
+
+<p>"June 3, 1616.--Allen Bridges hath bin chose to wake ye sleepers in
+meeting. And being much proude of his place, must needs have a fox taile
+fixed to ye ende of a long staff wherewith he may brush ye faces of them yt
+will have napps in time of discourse, likewise a sharpe thorne whereby he
+may pricke such as be most sound. On ye last Lord his day, as hee strutted
+about ye meeting-house, he did spy Mr. Tomlins sleeping with much comfort,
+hys head kept steadie by being in ye corner, and his hand grasping ye rail.
+And soe spying, Allen did quickly thrust his staff behind Dame Ballard and
+give him a grievous prick upon ye hand. Whereupon Mr. Tomlins did spring
+vpp mch above ye floore, and with terrible force strike hys hand against
+ye wall; and also, to ye great wonder of all, prophanlie exclaim in a loud
+voice, curse ye wood-chuck, he dreaming so it seemed yt a wood-chuck had
+seized and bit his hand. But on coming to know where he was, and ye greate
+scandall he had committed, he seemed much abashed, but did not speak. And I
+think he will not soon again goe to sleepe in meeting."</p>
+
+<p>How clear the picture! Can you not see it?--the warm June sunlight
+streaming in through the narrow, dusty windows of the old meeting-house;
+the armed watcher at the door; the Puritan men and women in their
+sad-colored mantles seated sternly upright on the hard narrow benches; the
+black-gowned minister, the droning murmur of whose sleepy voice mingles
+with the out-door sounds of the rustle of leafy branches, the song of
+summer birds, the hum of buzzing insects, and the muffled stamping of
+horses' feet; the restless boys on the pulpit-stairs; the tired, sleeping
+Puritan with his head thrown back in the corner of the pew; the vain,
+strutting, tithingman with his fantastic and thorn&eacute;d staff of office; and
+then--the sudden, electric wakening, and the consternation of the whole
+staid and pious congregation at such terrible profanity in the house of
+God. Ah!--it was not two hundred and forty years ago; when I read the
+quaint words my Puritan blood stirs my drowsy brain, and I remember it all
+well, just as I saw it last summer in June.</p>
+
+<p>Another catastrophe from too fierce zeal on the part of the tithingman
+is recorded. An old farmer, worn out with a hard Saturday's work at
+sheep-washing, fell asleep ere the hour-glass had once been turned. Though
+he was a man of dignity, for he sat in his own pew, he could not escape the
+rod of the pragmatical tithingman. Being rudely disturbed, but not wholly
+wakened, the bewildered sheep-farmer sprung to his feet, seized his
+astonished and mortified wife by the shoulders and shook her violently,
+shouting at the top of his voice, "Haw back! haw back! Stand still, will
+ye?" Poor goodman and goodwife! many years elapsed ere they recovered from
+that keen disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>The ministers encouraged and urged the tithingmen to faithfully perform
+their allotted work. One early minister "did not love sleepers in ye
+meeting-house, and would stop short in ye exercise and call pleasantlie to
+wake ye sleepers, and once of a warm Summer afternoon he did take hys hat
+off from ye pegg in ye beam, and put it on, saying he would go home and
+feed his fowles and come back again, and maybe their sleepe would be ended,
+and they readie to hear ye remainder of hys discourse." Another time he
+suggested that they might like better the Church of England service of
+sitting down and standing up, and we can be sure that this "was competent
+to keepe their eyes open for a twelvemonth."</p>
+
+<p>All this was in the church of Mr. Whiting, of Lynn, a somewhat jocose
+Puritan,--if jocularity in a Puritan is not too anomalous an attribute
+to have ever existed. We can be sure that there was neither sleeping nor
+jesting allusion to such an irreverence in Mr. Mather's, Mr. Welde's, or
+Mr. Cotton's meetings. In many rigidly severe towns, as in Portsmouth in
+1662 and in Boston in 1667, it was ordered by the selectmen as a proper
+means of punishment that a "cage be made or some other means invented for
+such as sleepe on the Lord's Daie." Perhaps they woke the offender up and
+rudely and summarily dragged him out and caged him at once and kept him
+thus prisoned throughout the nooning,--a veritable jail-bird.</p>
+
+<p>A rather unconventional and eccentric preacher in Newbury awoke one sleeper
+in a most novel manner. The first name of the sleeping man was Mark, and
+the preacher in his sermon made use of these Biblical words: "I say unto
+you, mark the perfect man and behold the upright." But in the midst of his
+low, monotonous sermon-voice he roared out the word "mark" in a loud shout
+that brought the dozing Mark to his feet, bewildered but wide awake.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Moody, of York, Maine, employed a similar device to awaken and mortify
+the sleepers in meeting. He shouted "Fire, fire, fire!" and when the
+startled and blinking men jumped up, calling out "Where?" he roared back in
+turn, "In hell, for sleeping sinners." Rev. Mr. Phillips, of Andover, in
+1755, openly rebuked his congregation for "sleeping away a great part of
+the sermon;" and on the Sunday following an earthquake shock which was felt
+throughout New England, he said he hoped the "Glorious Lord of the Sabbath
+had given them such a shaking as would keep them awake through one
+sermon-time." Other and more autocratic parsons did not hesitate to call
+out their sleeping parishioners plainly by name, sternly telling them also
+to "Wake up!" A minister in Brunswick, Maine, thus pointedly wakened one of
+his sweet-sleeping church-attendants, a man of some dignity and standing
+in the community, and received the shocking and tautological answer, "Mind
+your own business, and go on with your sermon."</p>
+
+<p>The women would sometimes nap a little without being discovered. "Ye women
+may sometimes sleepe and none know by reason of their enormous bonnets. Mr.
+Whiting doth pleasantlie say from ye pulpit hee doth seeme to be preaching
+to stacks of straw with men among them."</p>
+
+<p>From this seventeenth-century comment upon the size of the women's bonnets,
+it may be seen that objections to women's overwhelming and obscuring
+headgear in public assemblies are not entirely complaining protests of
+modern growth. Other records refer to the annoyance from the exaggerated
+size of bonnets. In 1769 the church in Andover openly "put to vote whether
+the parish Disapprove of the Female sex sitting with their Hats on in the
+Meeting-house in time of Divine Service as being Indecent." The parish did
+Disapprove, with a capital D, for the vote passed in the affirmative. There
+is no record, however, to tell whether the Indecent fashion was abandoned,
+but I warrant no tithingman was powerful enough to make Andover women take
+off their proudly worn Sunday bonnets if they did not want to. Another town
+voted that it was the "Town's Mind" that the women should take off their
+bonnets and "hang them on the peggs," as did the men their headgear. But
+the Town's Mind was not a Woman's Mind; and the big-bonnet wearers, vain
+though they were Puritans, did as they pleased with their own bonnets.
+And indeed, in spite of votes and in spite of expostulations, the female
+descendants of the Puritans, through constantly recurring waves of fashion,
+have ever since been indecently wearing great obscuring hats and bonnets in
+public assemblies, even up to the present day.</p>
+
+<p>The tithingman had other duties than awakening the sleepers and looking
+after "the boyes that playes and rapping those boyes,"--in short, seeing
+that every one was attentive in meeting except himself,--and the duties
+and powers of the office varied in different communities. Several of these
+officers were appointed in each parish. In Newbury, in 1688, there were
+twenty tithingmen, and in Salem twenty-five. They were men of authority,
+not only on Sunday, but throughout the entire week. Each had several
+neighboring families (usually ten, as the word "tithing" would signify)
+under his charge to watch during the week, to enforce the learning of the
+catechism at home, especially by the children, and sometimes he heard them
+"Say their Chatachize." These families he also watched specially on the
+Sabbath, and reported whether all the members thereof attended public
+worship. Not content with mounting guard over the boys on Sundays, he also
+watched on weekdays to keep boys and "all persons from swimming in the
+water." Do you think his duties were light in July and August, when school
+was out, to watch the boys of ten families? One man watching one family
+cannot prevent such "violations of the peace" in country towns now-a-days.
+He sometimes inspected the "ordinaries" and made complaint of any disorders
+which he there discovered, and gave in the names of "idle tiplers and
+gamers," and he could warn the tavern-keeper to sell no more liquor to any
+toper whom he knew or fancied was drinking too heavily. Josselyn complained
+bitterly that during his visit to New England in 1663 at "houses of
+entertainment called ordinaries into which a stranger went, he was
+presently followed by one appointed to that office who would thrust himself
+into his company uninvited, and if he called for more drink than the
+officer thought in his judgment he could soberly bear away, he would
+presently countermand it, and appoint the proportion beyond which he could
+not get one drop." The tithingman had a "spetial eye-out" on all bachelors,
+who were also carefully spied upon by the constables, deacons, elders,
+and heads of families in general. He might, perhaps, help to collect the
+ministerial rate, though his principal duty was by no means the collecting
+of tithes. He "worned peple out of ye towne." This warning was not at all
+because the new-comers were objectionable or undesired, but was simply a
+legal form of precaution, so that the parish would never be liable for the
+keeping of the "worned" ones in case they thereafter became paupers. He
+administered the "oath of fidelity" to new inhabitants. The tithingman
+also watched to see that "no young people walked abroad on the eve of the
+Sabbath,"--that is, on a Saturday night. He also marked and reported all
+those "who lye at home," and others who "prophanely behaved, lingered
+without dores at meeting time on the Lordes Daie," all the "sons of Belial
+strutting about, setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the
+day." These last two classes of offenders were first admonished by the
+tithingman, then "Sett in stocks," and then cited before the Court. They
+were also confined in the cage on the meeting-house green, with the Lord's
+Day sleepers. The tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode at too
+fast a pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who "walked or
+rode unnecessarily on the Sabath." Great and small alike were under his
+control, as this notice from the "Columbian Centinel" of December, 1789,
+abundantly proves. It is entitled "The President and the Tything man:"--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"The President, on his return to New York from his late tour through
+    Connecticut, having missed his way on Saturday, was obliged to ride a
+    few miles on Sunday morning in order to gain the town at which he had
+    previously proposed to have attended divine service. Before he arrived
+    however he was met by a Tything man, who commanding him to stop,
+    demanded the occasion of his riding; and it was not until the President
+    had informed him of every circumstance and promised to go no further
+    than the town intended that the Tything man would permit him to proceed
+    on his journey."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Various were the subterfuges to outwit the tithingman and elude his
+vigilance on the Sabbath. We all remember the amusing incident in "Oldtown
+Folks." A similar one really happened. Two gay young sparks driving through
+the town on the Sabbath were stopped by the tithingman; one offender said
+mournfully in excuse of his Sabbath travel, "My grandmother is lying dead
+in the next town." Being allowed to drive on, he stood up in his wagon when
+at a safe distance and impudently shouted back, "And she's been lying dead
+in the graveyard there for thirty years."</p>
+
+<p>Thus it may be seen that the ancient tithingman was pre-eminently a general
+<i>snook</i>, to use an old and expressive word,--an informer, both in and
+out of meeting,--a very necessary, but somewhat odious, and certainly at
+times very absurd officer. He was in a degree a constable, a selectman, a
+teacher, a tax-collector, an inspector, a sexton, a home-watcher, and above
+all, a Puritan Bumble, whose motto was <i>Hie et ubique</i>. He was, in
+fact, a general law-enforcer and order-keeper, whose various duties,
+wherever still necessary and still performed, are now apportioned to
+several individuals. The ecclesiastical functions and authority of the
+tithingman lingered long after the civil powers had been removed or had
+gradually passed away from his office. Persons are now living who in their
+early and unruly youth were rapped at and pointed at by a New England
+tithingman when they laughed or were noisy in meeting.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>VII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Length of the Service.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Watches were unknown in the early colonial days of New England, and for a
+long time after their introduction both watches and clocks were costly and
+rare. John Davenport of New Haven, who died in 1670, left a clock to his
+heirs; and E. Needham, who died in 1677, left a "Striking clock, a watch,
+and a Larum that dus not Strike," worth &pound;5; these are perhaps the first
+records of the ownership of clocks and watches in New England. The time of
+the day was indicated to our forefathers in their homes by "noon marks" on
+the floor or window-seats, and by picturesque sundials; and in the
+civil and religious meetings the passage of time was marked by a strong
+brass-bound hour-glass, which stood on a desk below or beside the pulpit,
+or which was raised on a slender iron rod and standard, so that all the
+members of the congregation could easily watch "the sands that ran i' the
+clock's behalf." By the side of the desk sat, on the Sabbath, a sexton,
+clerk, or tithingman, whose duty it was to turn the hour-glass as often
+as the sands ran out. This was a very ostentatious way of reminding the
+clergyman how long he had preached; but if it were a hint to bring the
+discourse to an end, it was never heeded; for contemporary historical
+registers tell of most painfully long sermons, reaching up through long
+sub-divisions and heads to "twenty-seventhly" and "twenty-eighthly."</p>
+
+<p>At the planting of the first church in Woburn, Massachusetts, the Rev.
+Mr. Symmes showed his godliness and endurance (and proved that of his
+parishioners also) by preaching between four and five hours. Sermons which
+occupied two or three hours were customary enough. One old Scotch clergyman
+in Vermont, in the early years of this century, bitterly and fiercely
+resented the "popish innovation and Sabbath profanation" of a Sunday-school
+for the children, which some daring and progressive parishioners proposed
+to hold at the "nooning." This canny Parson Whiteinch very craftily and
+somewhat maliciously prolonged his morning sermons until they each occupied
+three hours; thus he shortened the time between the two services to about
+half an hour, and victoriously crowded out the Sunday-school innovators,
+who had barely time to eat their cold lunch and care for their waiting
+horses, ere it was time for the afternoon service to begin. But one man
+cannot stop the tide, though he may keep it for a short time from one
+guarded and sheltered spot; and the rebellious Vermont congregation, after
+two or three years of tedious three-hour sermons, arose in a body and
+crowded out the purposely prolix preacher, and established the wished-for
+Sunday-school. The vanquished parson thereafter sullenly spent the noonings
+in the horse-shed, to which he ostentatiously carried the big church-Bible
+in order that it might not be at the service of the profaning teachers.</p>
+
+<p>An irreverent caricature of the colonial days represents a phenomenally
+long-preaching clergyman as turning the hour-glass by the side of his
+pulpit and addressing his congregation thus, "Come! you are all good
+fellows, we'll take another glass together!" It is recorded of Rev. Urian
+Oakes that often the hour-glass was turned four times during one of his
+sermons. The warning legend, "Be Short," which Cotton Mather inscribed over
+his study door was not written over his pulpit; for he wrote in his diary
+that at his own ordination he prayed for an hour and a quarter, and
+preached for an hour and three quarters. Added to the other ordination
+exercises these long Mather addresses must have been tiresome enough.
+Nathaniel Ward deplored at that time, "Wee have a strong weakness in New
+England that when wee are speaking, wee know not how to conclude: wee make
+many ends before wee make an end."</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Lord of Norwich always made a prayer which was one hour long; and an
+early Dutch traveller who visited New England asserted that he had heard
+there on Fast Day a prayer which was two hours long. These long prayers
+were universal and most highly esteemed,--a "poor gift in prayer" being a
+most deplored and even despised clerical short-coming. Had not the Puritans
+left the Church of England to escape "stinted prayers"? Whitefield prayed
+openly for Parson Barrett of Hopkinton, who could pray neither freely, nor
+well, that "God would open this dumb dog's mouth;" and everywhere in the
+Puritan Church, precatory eloquence as evinced in long prayers was felt to
+be the greatest glory of the minister, and the highest tribute to God.</p>
+
+<p>In nearly all the churches the assembled people stood during prayer-time
+(since kneeling and bowing the head savored of Romish idolatry) and in the
+middle of his petition the minister usually made a long pause in order that
+any who were infirm or ill might let down their slamming pew-seats and sit
+down; those who were merely weary stood patiently to the long and painfully
+deferred end. This custom of standing during prayer-time prevailed in the
+Congregational churches in New England until quite a recent date, and is
+not yet obsolete in isolated communities and in solitary cases. I have seen
+within a few years, in a country church, a feeble, white-haired old deacon
+rise tremblingly at the preacher's solemn words "Let us unite in prayer,"
+and stand with bowed head throughout the long prayer; thus pathetically
+clinging to the reverent custom of the olden time, he rendered tender
+tribute to vanished youth, gave equal tribute to eternal hope and faith,
+and formed a beautiful emblem of patient readiness for the last solemn
+summons.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes tedious expounding of the Scriptures and long "prophesying"
+lengthened out the already too long service. Judge Sewall recorded that
+once when he addressed or expounded at the Plymouth Church, "being afraid
+to look at the glass, ignorantly and unwittingly I stood two hours and a
+half," which was doing pretty well for a layman.</p>
+
+<p>The members of the early churches did not dislike these long preachings and
+prophesyings; they would have regarded a short sermon as irreligious,
+and lacking in reverence, and besides, would have felt that they had not
+received in it their full due, their full money's worth. They often fell
+asleep and were fiercely awakened by the tithingman, and often they could
+not have understood the verbose and grandiose language of the preacher.
+They were in an icy-cold atmosphere in winter, and in glaring, unshaded
+heat in summer, and upon most uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at
+all seasons; but in every record and journal which I have read, throughout
+which ministers and laymen recorded all the annoyances and opposition which
+the preachers encountered, I have never seen one entry of any complaint or
+ill-criticism of too long praying or preaching. Indeed, when Rev. Samuel
+Torrey, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, prayed two hours without stopping, upon
+a public Fast Day in 1696, it is recorded that his audience only wished
+that the prayer had been much longer.</p>
+
+<p>When we consider the training and exercise in prayer that the New England
+parsons had in their pulpits on Sundays, in their own homes on Saturday
+nights, on Lecture Days and Fast Days and Training Days, and indeed upon
+all times and occasions, can we wonder at Parson Boardman's prowess in New
+Milford in 1735? He visited a "praying" Indian's home wherein lay a sick
+papoose over whom a "pow-wow" was being held by a medicine-man at the
+request of the squaw-mother, who was still a heathen. The Christian warrior
+determined to fight the Indian witch-doctor on his own grounds, and while
+the medicine-man was screaming and yelling and dancing in order to cast the
+devil out ol the child, the parson began to pray with equal vigor and power
+of lungs to cast out the devil of a medicine-man. As the prayer and
+pow-wow proceeded the neighboring Indians gathered around, and soon became
+seriously alarmed for the success of their prophet. The battle raged for
+three hours, when the pow-wow ended, and the disgusted and exhausted Indian
+ran out of the wigwam and jumped into the Housatonic River to cool his
+heated blood, leaving the Puritan minister triumphant in the belief, and
+indeed with positive proof, that he could pray down any man or devil.</p>
+
+<p>The colonists could not leave the meeting-house before the long sen ices
+were ended, even had they wished, for the tithingman allowed no deserters.
+In Salem, in 1676, it was "ordered by ye Selectmen yt the three Constables
+doe attend att ye three greate doores of ye meeting-house every Lordes Day
+att ye end of ye sermon, both forenoone and afternoone, and to keep ye
+doores fast and suffer none to goe out before ye whole exercises bee
+ended." Thus Salem people had to listen to no end of praying and
+prophesying from their ministers and elders for they "couldn't get out."</p>
+
+<p>As the years passed on, the church attendants became less referential and
+much more impatient and fearless, and soon after the Revolutionary War one
+man in Medford made a bargain with his minister--Rev. Dr. Osgood--that he
+would attend regularly the church services every Sunday morning, provided
+he could always leave at twelve o'clock. On each Sabbath thereafter, as
+the obstinate preacher would not end his sermon one minute sooner than
+his habitual time, which was long after twelve, the equally stubborn
+limited-time worshipper arose at noon, as he had stipulated, and stalked
+noisily out of meeting.</p>
+
+<p>A minister about to preach in a neighboring parish was told of a custom
+which prevailed there of persons who lived at a distance rising and leaving
+the house ere the sermon was ended. He determined to teach them a lesson,
+and announced that he would preach the first part of his sermon to the
+sinners, and the latter part to the saints, and that the sinners would of
+course all leave as soon as their portion had been delivered. Every soul
+remained until the end of the service.</p>
+
+<p>At last, when other means of entertainment and recreation than church-going
+became common, and other forms of public addresses than sermons were
+frequently given, New England church-goers became so restless and
+rebellious under the regime of hour-long prayers and indefinitely
+protracted sermons that the long services were gradually condensed and
+curtailed, to the relief of both preacher and hearers.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>VIII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>In colonial days in New England the long and tedious services must have
+been hard to endure in the unheated churches in bitter winter weather, so
+bitter that, as Judge Sewall pathetically recorded, "The communion bread
+was frozen pretty hard and rattled sadly into the plates." Sadly down
+through the centuries is ringing in our ears the gloomy rattle of that
+frozen sacramental bread on the Church plate, telling to us the solemn
+story of the austere and comfortless church-life of our ancestors. Would
+that the sound could bring to our chilled hearts the same steadfast and
+pure Christian faith that made their gloomy, freezing services warm with
+God's loving presence!</p>
+
+<p>Again Judge Sewall wrote: "Extraordinary Cold Storm of Wind and Snow. Blows
+much more as coming home at Noon, and so holds on. Bread was frozen at
+Lord's Table. Though 't was so cold John Tuckerman was baptized. At six
+o'clock my ink freezes, so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my
+Wives chamber. Yet was very Comfortable at Meeting." In the penultimate
+sentence of this quotation may be found the clue and explanation of the
+seemingly incredible assertion in the last sentence. The reason why he was
+comfortable in church was that he was accustomed to sit in cold rooms; even
+with the great open-mouthed and open-chimneyed fireplaces full of blazing
+logs, so little heat entered the rooms of colonial dwelling-houses that one
+could not be warm unless fairly within the chimney-place; and thus, even
+while sitting by the fire, his ink froze. Another entry of Judge Sewall's
+tells of an exceeding cold day when there was "Great Coughing" in meeting,
+and yet a new-born baby was brought into the icy church to be baptized.
+Children were always carried to the meeting-house for baptism the first
+Sunday after birth, even in the most bitter weather. There are no entries
+in Judge Sewall's diary which exhibit him in so lovable and gentle a light
+as the records of the baptism of his fourteen children,--his pride when
+the child did not cry out or shrink from the water in the freezing winter
+weather, thus early showing true Puritan fortitude; and also his noble
+resolves and hopes for their future. On this especially cold day when a
+baby was baptized, the minister prayed for a mitigation of the weather,
+and on the same day in another town "Rev. Mr. Wigglesworth preached on the
+text, Who can stand before His Cold? Then by his own and people's sickness
+three Sabbaths passed without public Worship." February 20 he preached from
+these words: "He sends forth his word and thaws them." And the very next
+day a thaw set in which was regarded as a direct answer to his prayer and
+sermon. Sceptics now-a-days would suggest that he chose well the time to
+pray for milder weather.</p>
+
+<p>Many persons now living can remember the universal and noisy turning up
+of great-coat collars, the swinging of arms, and knocking together of the
+heavy-booted feet of the listeners towards the end of a long winter sermon.
+Dr. Hopkins used to say, when the noisy tintamarre began, "My hearers, have
+a little patience, and I will soon close."</p>
+
+<p>Another clergyman was irritated beyond endurance by the stamping,
+clattering feet, a <i>supplosio pedis</i> that he regarded as an irreverent
+protest and complaint against the severity of the weather, rather than as a
+hint to him to conclude his long sermon. He suddenly and noisily closed his
+sermon-book, leaned forward out of his high pulpit, and thundered out these
+Biblical words of rebuke at his freezing congregation, whose startled faces
+stared up at him through dense clouds of vapor. "Out of whose womb came the
+ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are
+hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Knowest thou the
+ordinance of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?
+Great things doth God which we cannot comprehend. He saith to the snow, Be
+thou on the earth. By the breath of God frost is given. He causeth it to
+come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. Hearken unto
+this. <i>Stand still</i>, and consider the wondrous works of God." We can
+believe that he roared out the words "stand still," and that there was no
+more noise in that meeting-house on cold Sundays during the remainder of
+that winter.</p>
+
+<p>The ministers might well argue that no one suffered more from the freezing
+atmosphere than they did. In many records I find that they were forced to
+preach and pray with their hands cased in woollen or fur mittens or heavy
+knit gloves; and they wore long camlet cloaks in the pulpit and covered
+their heads with skull caps--as did Judge Sewall--and possibly wore, as he
+did also, a <i>hood</i>. Many a wig-hating minister must, in the Arctic
+meeting-house, have longed secretly for the grateful warmth to his head and
+neck of one of those "horrid Bushes of Vanity," a full-bottomed flowing
+wig.</p>
+
+<p>On bitter winter days Dr. Stevens of Kittery used to send a servant to the
+meeting-house to find out how many of his flock had braved the piercing
+blasts. If only seven persons were present, the servant asked them to
+return with him to the parsonage to listen to the sermon; but if there were
+eight members in the meeting-house he so reported to the Doctor, who then
+donned his long worsted cloak, tied it around his waist with a great
+handkerchief, and attired thus, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears,
+and with heavy mittens on his hands, ploughed through the deep snow to
+the church, and in the same dress preached his long, knotty sermon in
+his pulpit, while fierce wintry blasts rattled the windows and shook the
+turret, and the eight godly, shivering souls wished profoundly that one of
+their number had "lain at home in a slothfull, lazey, prophane way," and
+thus permitted the seven others and the minister to have the sermon in
+comfort in the parsonage kitchen before the great blazing logs in the open
+fireplace.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, it makes one shiver even to think of those gloomy churches, growing
+colder, and more congealed through weeks of heavy frost and fierce
+northwesters until they bore the chill of death itself. One can but
+wonder whether that fell scourge of New England, that hereditary
+curse--consumption--did not have its first germs evolved and nourished in
+our Puritan ancestors by the Spartan custom of sitting through the long
+winter services in the icy, death-like meeting-houses.</p>
+
+<p>Of the insufficient clothing of the church attendants of olden times it
+is unnecessary to speak with much detail. The goodmen with their heavy
+top-boots or jack-boots, their milled or frieze stockings, their warm
+periwigs surmounted by fur caps or beaver hats or hoods; and with their
+many-caped great-coats or full round cloaks were dressed with a sufficient
+degree of comfort, though they did not possess the warm woollen and silken
+underclothing which now make a man's winter attire so comfortable. They
+carried muffs too, as the advertisements of the times show. The "Boston
+News Letter" of 1716 offers a reward for a man's muff lost on the Sabbath
+day in the street. In 1725 Dr. Prince lost his black bearskin muff, and in
+1740 a "sableskin man's muff" was advertised as having been lost.</p>
+
+<p>But the Puritan goodwives and maidens were dressed in a meagre and scanty
+fashion that when now considered seems fairly appalling. As soon as
+the colonies grew in wealth and fashion, thin silk or cotton hose were
+frequently worn in midwinter by the wives and daughters of well-to-do
+colonists; and correspondingly thin cloth or kid or silk slippers,
+high-channelled pumps, or low shoes with paper soles and "cross-cut" or
+wooden heels were the holiday and Sabbath-day covering for the feet. In wet
+weather clogs and pattens formed an extra and much needed protection
+when the fair colonists walked. Linen underclothing formed the first
+superstructure of the feminine costume and threw its penetrating chill to
+the very marrow of the bones. Often in mid-winter the scant-skirted French
+calico gowns were made with short elbow sleeves and round, low necks, and
+the throat and shoulders were lightly covered with thin lawn neckerchiefs
+or dimity tuckers. The flaunting hooped-petticoat of another decade was
+worn with a silk or brocade sacque. A thin cloth cape or mantle or spencer,
+lined with sarcenet silk, was frequently the only covering for the
+shoulders. In examining the treasured contents of old wardrobes, trunks,
+and high-chests, and in reading the descriptions of women's winter attire
+worn throughout the eighteenth and half through the nineteenth century, I
+am convinced that the only portions of Puritan female anatomy that were
+clothed with anything approaching respectable regard for health in the
+inclement New England climate were the head and the hands. The hands of
+"New English dames" were carefully protected with embroidered kid or
+leather gloves (for the early New Englanders were great glove wearers) or
+with warm knit woollen mittens, though mittens for women's wear were
+always fingerless. The well-gloved hands were moreover warmly ensconced in
+enormous stuffed muffs of bearskin which were almost as large as a
+flour barrel, or in smaller muffs of rabbit-skin or mink or beaver. The
+goodwives' heads bore, besides the close caps so universally worn, mufflers
+and veils and hoods,--hoods of all kinds and descriptions, from the hoods
+of serge and camlet and gauze and black silk that Mistress Estabrook, wife
+of the Windham parson, proudly owned and wore, from the prohibited "silk
+and tiffany hoods" of the earliest planters down through the centuries'
+inflorescence of "hoods of crimson colored persian," "wild bore and hum-hum
+long hoods," "pointed velvet capuchins," "scarlet gipsys," "pinnered
+and tasselled hoods," "shirred lustring hoods," "hoods of rich pptuna,"
+"muskmelon hoods," to the warm quilted "punkin hoods" worn within this
+century in country churches. These "punkin-hoods" were quilted with great
+rolls of woollen wadding and drawn tight between the rolls with strong
+cords. They formed a deafening and heating head-covering which always had
+to be loosened and thrust back when the wearer was within doors. It
+was only equalled in shapeless clumsiness and unique ugliness by its
+summer-sister of the same date, the green silk calash,--that funniest and
+quaintest of all New England feminine headgear,--a great sunshade that
+could not be called a bonnet, always made of bright green silk shirred on
+strong lengths of rattan or whalebone, and extendible after the fashion of
+a chaise top. It could be drawn out over the face by a little green ribbon
+or "bridle" that was fastened to the extreme front at the top; or it could
+be pushed in a close-gathered mass on the back of the head These calashes
+were frequently a foot and a half in diameter, and thus stood well up from
+the head and did not disarrange the hair nor crush the headdress or cap.
+They formed a perfect and easily-adjusted shade from the sun. Masks, too,
+the fair Puritans wore to further protect their heads and faces,--masks of
+green silk or black vehet, with silver mouthpieces to place within the lips
+and thus enable the wearer to keep the mask firmly in place. Sometimes two
+little strings with a silver bead at one end were fastened to the mask, and
+seined as mouthpieces. With a string and bead at either corner of the
+mouth the mask-wearer could talk quite freely while still retaining her
+face-covering in its protecting position. These masks were never worn
+within doors. In the list of goods ordered by George Washington from Europe
+for his fair bride Martha were several of these riding-masks, and the kind
+step-father even ordered a supply of small masks for "Miss Custis," his
+little step-daughter.</p>
+
+<p>In bitter winter weather women carried to meeting little
+foot-stoves,--metal boxes which stood on legs and were filled with hot
+coals at home, and a second time during the morning from the hearthstone of
+a neighboring farm-house or a noon-house. These foot-warmers helped to make
+endurable to the goodwives the icy chill of the meeting-house; and round
+their mother's foot-stove the shivering little children sat on their low
+crickets, warming their half-frozen fingers.</p>
+
+<p>Some of these foot-stoves were really pretentious church-furnishings. I
+have seen one "brassen foot-stove" which had the owner's cipher cut out of
+the sheet metal, and from the side was hung a wrought brass chain. By this
+chain, a century ago, the shining polished brass stove was carried into
+church in the hands of a liveried black man, who held it ostentatiously at
+arms' length, that neither ash nor scorch might touch his scarlet velvet
+breeches. And after he had tucked it under my lady's tiny feet as she sat
+in her pew, he retired to his freezing loft high up among the beams,--the
+"Nigger Pew,"--where, I am sorry to record, he more than once solaced and
+warmed himself with a bottle of "kill-devil" which he had smuggled into
+church, until he fell ignominiously asleep and his drunken snores so
+disturbed the minister and the congregation, that two tithingmen were
+forced to climb the ladder-like staircase and pull him down and out of
+the church and to the neighboring tavern to sleep off the effects of the
+liquor. For being "a man and a brother" and, above all, in spite of his
+petty idiosyncrasies, a very good and cherished servant, he could not be
+thrust out into the snow to freeze to death.</p>
+
+<p>But with the extreme Puritan contempt of comfort even foot-stoves were
+not always allowed. The First Church of Roxbury, after having one church
+edifice destroyed by fire in 1747, prohibited the use of footstoves in
+meeting, and the Roxbury matrons sat with frozen toes in their fine new
+meeting-house. The Old South Church of Boston was not so rigid, though it
+felt the same dread of fire; for we find this entry on the records of the
+church under the date of January 10, 1771: "Whereas, danger is apprehended
+from the [foot] stoves that arc frequently left in the meeting-house after
+the publick worship is over; Voted, that the Saxton make diligent search on
+the Lord's Day evening and in the evening after a lecture, to see if any
+stoves are left in the house, and that if he find any there he take them
+to his own house; and it is expected that the owners of such stoves make
+reasonable satisfaction to the Saxton for his trouble before they take them
+away."</p>
+
+<p>In Hardwicke, in 1792, it was ordered that "no stows be carried into our
+new meeting-house with fire in them." The Hardwicke women may have found
+comfort in a contrivance which is thus described in by an "old inhabitant:"</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"There to warm their feet<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Was seen an article now obsolete,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A sort of basket tub of braided straw<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Or husks, in which is placed a heated stone,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Which does half-frozen limbs superbly thaw.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And warms the marrow of the oldest bone."</blockquote>
+
+<p>In some of the early, poorly built log meeting-houses, fur bags made of
+coarse skins, such as wolf-skin, were nailed or tied to the edges of the
+benches, and into these bags the worshippers thrust their feet for warmth.
+In some communities it was the custom for each family to bring on cold days
+its "dogg" to meeting; where, lying at or on his master's feet, he proved
+a source of grateful warmth. These animal stoves became such an abounding
+nuisance, however, that dog-whippers had to be appointed to serve on
+Sundays to drive out the dogs. All through the records of the early
+churches we find such entries as this: "Whatsoever doggs come into the
+meeting-house in time of public worship, their owners shall each pay
+sixpence." Sixpence seems little, but the thrifty and poor Puritans would
+rather freeze their toes than pay sixpence for their calorific dogs.</p>
+
+<p>The church members made many rules and regulations to keep the cold out of
+the meeting-house during service-time, or perhaps we should say to keep the
+wind out. Thus in Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1725 it was ordered that the
+"several doors of the meeting-house be taken care of and kept shut in very
+cold and windy seasons according to the lying of the wind from time to
+time; and that people in such windy weather come in at the leeward doors
+only, and take care that they are easily shut both to prevent the breaking
+of the doors and the making of a noise." In other churches it was ordered
+that "no doors be opened to the windward and only one door to the leeward"
+during winter weather.</p>
+
+<p>The first church of Salem built a "cattied chimney twelve feet long" in its
+meeting-house in 1662, but five years later it was removed, perhaps through
+the colonists' dread lest the building be destroyed by a conflagration
+caused by the combustible nature of the materials of which the chimney was
+composed. Felt, in his "Annals of Salem," asserts that the First Church of
+Boston was the first New England congregation to have a stove for heating
+the meeting-house at the time of public worship; this was in 1773. This
+statement is incorrect. Mr. Judd says the Hadley church had an iron stove
+in their meeting-house as early as 1734--the Hadley people were such
+sybarites and novelty-lovers in those early days! The Old South Church of
+Boston followed in the luxurious fashion in 1783, and the "Evening Post"
+of January 25, 1783, contained a poem of which these four lines show the
+criticising and deprecating spirit:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Extinct the sacred fire of love,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Our zeal grown cold and dead,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In the house of God we fix a stove<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To warm us in their stead."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Other New England congregations piously froze during service-time well into
+this century. The Longmeadow church, early in the field, had a stove in
+1810; the Salem people in 1815; and the Medford meeting in 1820. The church
+in Brimfield in 1819 refused to pay for a stove, but ordered as some
+sacrifice to the desire for comfort, two extra doors placed on the
+gallery-stairs to keep out draughts; but when in that town, a few years
+later, a subscription was made to buy a church stove, one old member
+refused to contribute, saying "good preaching kept him hot enough without
+stoves."</p>
+
+<p>As all the church edifices were built without any thought of the
+possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best
+they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually
+placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters,
+there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous
+stove-pipes that too often spread, from every leaky and ill-fastened
+joint, smoke and sooty vapors, and sometimes pyroligneous drippings on the
+congregation. Often tin pails to catch the drippings were hung under the
+stove-pipes, forming a further chaste and elegant church-decoration. Many
+serious objections were made to the stoves besides the aesthetic ones.
+It was alleged that they would be the means of starting many destructive
+conflagrations; that they caused severe headaches in the church attendants;
+and worst of all, that the <i>heat warped the ladies' tortoise-shell
+back-combs</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The church reformers contended, on the other hand, that no one could
+properly receive spiritual comfort while enduring such decided bodily
+discomfort. They hoped that with increased physical warmth, fervor in
+religion would be equally augmented,--that, as Cowper wrote,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The churches warmed, they would no longer hold<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Such frozen figures, stiff as they are cold."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Many were the quarrels and discussions that arose in New England
+communities over the purchase and use of stoves, and many were the meetings
+held and votes taken upon the important subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Peter Parley"--Mr. Samuel Goodrich--gave, in his "Recollections," a very
+amusing account of the sufferings endured by the wife of an anti-stove
+deacon. She came to church with a look of perfect resignation on the
+Sabbath of the stove's introduction, and swept past the unwelcome intruder
+with averted head, and into her pew. She sat there through the service,
+growing paler with the unaccustomed heat, until the minister's words about
+"heaping coals of fire" brought too keen a sense of the overwhelming and
+unhealthful stove-heat to her mind, and she fainted. She was carried out of
+church, and upon recovering said languidly that it "was the heat from the
+stove." A most complete and sudden resuscitation was effected, however,
+when she was informed of the fact that no fire had as yet been lighted in
+the new church-furnishing.</p>
+
+<p>Similar chronicles exist about other New England churches, and bear a
+striking resemblance to each other. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in an address
+delivered in New York on December 20, 1853, the anniversary of the Landing
+of the Pilgrims, referred to the opposition made to the introduction of
+stoves into the old meeting-house in Litchfield, Connecticut, during the
+ministry of his father, and gave an amusing account of the results of the
+introgression. This allusion called up many reminiscences of anti-stove
+wars, and a writer in the "New York Enquirer" told the same story of the
+fainting woman in Litchfield meeting, who began to fan herself and at
+length swooned, saying when she recovered "that the heat of the horrid
+stove had caused her to faint." A correspondent of the "Cleveland Herald"
+confirmed the fact that the fainting episode occurred in the Litchfield
+meeting-house. The editor of the "Hartford Daily Courant" thus added his
+testimony:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Violent opposition had been made to the introduction of a stove in the
+    old meeting-house, and an attempt made in vain to induce the soc
+    to purchase one. The writer was one of seven young men who finally
+    purchased a stove and requested permission to put it up in the
+    meeting-house on trial. After much difficulty the committee consented.
+    It was all arranged on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday we took our
+    seats in the Bass, rather earlier than usual, to see the fun. It was a
+    warm November Sunday, in which the sun shone cheerfully and warmly on
+    the old south steps and into the naked windows. The stove stood in the
+    middle aisle, rather in front of the Tenor Gallery. People came in and
+    stared. Good old Deacon Trowbridge, one of the most simple-hearted and
+    worthy men of that generation, had, as Mr. Beecher says, been induced
+    to give up his opposition. He shook his head, however, as he felt the
+    heat reflected from it, and gathered up the skirts of his great
+    as he passed up the broad aisle to the deacon's seat. Old Uncle Noah
+    Stone, a wealthy farmer of the West End, who sat near, scowled and
+    muttered at the effects of the heat, but waited until noon to utter his
+    maledictions over his nut-cakes and cheese at the intermission. There
+    had in fact been <i>no fire in the stove</i>, the day being too warm.
+    We were too much upon the broad grin to be very devotional, and smiled
+    rather loudly at the funny things we saw. But when the editor of the
+    village paper, Mr. Bunce, came in (who was a believer in stoves in
+    churches) and with a most satisfactory air warmed his hands by the
+    stove, keeping the skirts of his great-coat carefully between his
+    knees, we could stand it no longer but dropped invisible behind the
+    breastwork. But the climax of the whole was (as the Cleveland man says)
+    when Mrs. Peck went out in the middle of the service. It was, however,
+    the means of reconciling the whole society; for after that first day we
+    heard no more opposition to the warm stove in the meeting-house."</blockquote>
+
+<p>With all this corroborative evidence I think it is fully proved that the
+event really happened in Litchfield, and that the honor was stolen for
+other towns by unveracious chroniclers; otherwise we must believe in an
+amazing unanimity of church-joking and sham-fainting all over New England.</p>
+
+<p>The very nature, the stern, pleasure-hating and trial-glorying Puritan
+nature, which made our forefathers leave their English homes to come, for
+the love of God and the freedom of conscience, to these wild, barren, and
+unwelcoming shores, made them also endure with fortitude and almost with
+satisfaction all personal discomforts, and caused them to cling with
+persistent firmness to such outward symbols of austere contempt of
+luxury, and such narrow-minded signs of love of simplicity as the lack of
+comfortable warmth during the time of public worship. The religion which
+they had endured such bitter hardships to establish, did not, in their
+minds, need any shielding and coddling to keep it alive, but thrived far
+better on Spartan severity and simplicity; hence, it took two centuries of
+gradual and most tardy softening and modifying of character to prepare the
+Puritan mind for so advanced a reform and luxury as proper warmth in the
+meeting-houses in winter.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>IX</h1>
+
+<h2>The Noon-House.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>There might have been seen a hundred years ago, by the side of many an old
+meeting-house in New England, a long, low, mean, stable-like building, with
+a rough stone chimney at one end. This was the "noon-house," or "Sabba-day
+house," or "horse-hows," as it was variously called. It was a place of
+refuge in the winter time, at the noon interval between the two services,
+for the half-frozen members of the pious congregation, who found there the
+grateful warmth which the house of God denied. They built in the rude stone
+fireplace a great fire of logs, and in front of the blazing wood ate their
+noon-day meal of cold pie, of doughnuts, of pork and peas, or of brown
+bread with cheese, which they had brought safely packed in their capacious
+saddlebags. The dining-place smelt to heaven of horses, for often at the
+further end of the noon-house were stabled the patient steeds that, doubly
+burdened, had borne the Puritans and their wives to meeting; but this
+stable-odor did not hinder appetite, nor did the warm equine breaths that
+helped to temper the atmosphere of the noon-house offend the senses of the
+sturdy Puritans. From the blazing fire in this "life-saving station" the
+women replenished their little foot-stoves with fresh, hot coals, and thus
+helped to make endurable the icy rigor of the long afternoon service.</p>
+
+<p>If the winter Sabbath Day were specially severe, a "hired-man," or one of
+the grown sons of the family, was sent at an early hour to the noon-house
+in advance of the other church-attendants, and he started in the rough
+fireplace a fire for their welcome after their long, cold, morning ride;
+and before its cheerful blaze they thoroughly warmed themselves before
+entering the icy meeting-house. The embers were carefully covered over
+and left to start a second blaze at the nooning, covered again during the
+afternoon service, and kindled up still a third time to warm the chilled
+worshippers ere they started for their cold ride home in the winter
+twilight. And when the horses were saddled, or were harnessed and hitched
+into the great box-sleighs or "pungs," and when the good Puritans were well
+wrapped up, the dying coals were raked out for safety and the noon-house
+was left as quiet and as cold as the deserted meeting-house until the
+following Sabbath or Lecture day.</p>
+
+<p>If the meeting-house chanced to stand in the middle of the town (as was
+the universal custom in the earliest colonial days) of course a noon-house
+would be rarely built, for it would plainly not be needed. Nor was a
+"Sabba-day house" always seen in more lonely situations, if the sanctuary
+were placed near the substantial farm-house of a hospitable farmer; for to
+that friendly shelter the whole congregation would at noon-time repair and
+absorb to the fullest degree the welcome cider and warmth.</p>
+
+<p>In Lexington for many years after the Revolutionary War, the winter
+church-goers who came from any distance spent the nooning at the Dudley
+Tavern, where a roaring fire was built in the inn-parlor, and there the
+women and children ate their midday lunch. The men gathered in the bar-room
+and drank flip, and ate the tavern gingerbread and cheese, and talked over
+the horrors and glories of the war. In Haverhill, Derby, and many other
+towns, the school-house, which was built on the village green beside the
+church, was used for a noon-house by the church members, though not by
+their horses. The house of learning was never chimneyless and fireless, as
+was the house of God.</p>
+
+<p>As churches and towns multiplied, a meeting-house was often built to
+accommodate two little settlements or villages (and thus was convenient for
+neither), and was frequently placed in an isolated or inconvenient place,
+the top of a high hill being perhaps the most inconvenient and the most
+favored site. Thus a noon-house became an absolute necessity to Puritan
+health and existence, and often two or three were built near one
+meeting-house; while in some towns, as in Bristol, a whole row of
+disfiguring little "Sabba-day houses" stood on the meeting-house green,
+and in them the farmers (as they quaintly expressed in their petitions for
+permission to erect the buildings) "kept their duds and horses."</p>
+
+<p>In Derby, after several petitions had been granted to build noon-houses, it
+was found necessary, in 1764, to place some restrictions as to the location
+of the buildings, which had hitherto evidently been placed with the
+characteristically Puritanical indifference to general convenience or
+appearance. While the town still permitted the little log-huts to be
+erected, and though they could be placed on either side of the highway, it
+was ordered that the builders must not so locate them as to "incommode any
+highways." As early as 1690 the thoughtful Stonington people built a house
+"14 foot square and seven foot posts" with a chimney at one side, for the
+express purpose of having a place where their minister, Rev. Mr. Noyes,
+could thaw out between services. The New Canaan Church built on the green
+beside their meeting-house a fine "Society House," twenty-one feet long
+and sixteen feet wide, with a big chimney and fireplace. The horses were
+plainly "not in society" in New Canaan, for they were excluded from the
+occupancy and privileges of the Society House.</p>
+
+<p>"James June &amp; all that lives at Larences" were allowed to build a
+"Sabbath-House" on the green near the New Britain meeting-house "as a
+Commodate for their conveniency of comeing to meeting on the Sabbath;" at
+the same time James Slason of the same village was given permission to "set
+yp a house for ye advantage of his having a place to go to" on the Sabbath.
+Frequently the petitions "to build a Sabbath Day House" or a "Housel for
+Shelter for Horss" were made in company by several farmers for their joint
+use and comfort, as shown by entries in the town and church records of
+Norwalk, New Milford, Durham, and Hartford.</p>
+
+<p>Noon-houses were much more frequent in Connecticut than in Massachusetts,
+and in several small towns in the former State they were used weekly
+between Sunday services until within the memory of persons now living;
+and some of the buildings still exist, though changed into granaries or
+stables. There was one also in use for many years and until recent years in
+Topsfield, in Massachusetts. We chanced upon one still standing on a lonely
+Narragansett road. A little enclosed burial-place, with moss-grown and
+weather-smoothed head-stones and neglected graves, was by the side of a
+filled-in cellar, upon which a church evidently had once stood. At a short
+distance from the church-site was a long, low, gray, weather-beaten wooden
+building, with a coarse stone-and-mortar chimney at one end, and a great
+door at the other. Two small windows, destitute of glass, permitted us
+to peer into the interior of this dilapidated old structure, and we saw
+within, a floor of beaten earth, a rough stone fireplace, and a few rude
+horse-stalls. We felt sure that this tumble-down building had been neither
+a dwelling-house nor a stable, but a noon-house; and the occupants of a
+neighboring farm-house confirmed our decision. Too worthless to destroy,
+too out of the way to be of any use to any person, that old noon-house,
+through neglect and isolation, has remained standing until to-day.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until the use of chaises and wagons became universal, and the
+new means of conveyance crowded out the old-fashioned saddle and pillion,
+and the trotting horse superseded the once fashionable but quickly despised
+pacer, that the great stretches of horse-sheds were built which now
+surround and disfigure all our country churches. These sheds protect,
+of course, both horse and carriage from wind and rain. Few churches had
+horse-sheds until after the War of the Revolution, and some not until after
+the War of 1812. In 1796 the Longmeadow Church had "liberty to erect a
+Horse House in the Meeting House Lane." This horse house was a horse-shed.</p>
+
+<p>The "wretched boys" were not permitted even in these noon-houses to talk,
+much less to "sporte and playe." In some parishes it was ordered by the
+minister and the deacons that the Bible should be read and expounded
+to them, or a sermon be read to keep them quiet during the nooning.
+Occasionally some old patriarch would explain to them the notes that he
+had taken during the morning sermon. More unbearable still, the boys were
+sometimes ordered to explain the notes which they had taken themselves. I
+would I had heard some of those explanations! Thus they literally, as was
+written in 1774, throve on the "Good Fare of Brown Bread and the Gospell."</p>
+
+<p>In Andover, Judge Phillips left in his will a silver flagon to the church
+as an expression of interest and hope that the "laudable practice of
+reading between services may be continued so long as even a small number
+shall be disposed to attend the exercise." Mr. Abbott left another silver
+flagon to the Andover Church to encourage reading between services; though
+how this piece of plate encouraged personally, since neither the deacons
+nor the boys got it as a prize, cannot be precisely understood. The
+noon-house in Andover was a large building with a great chimney and open
+fireplace at either end. It has always seemed to me a piece of gratuitous
+posthumous cruelty in Judge Phillips and Mr. Abbott to try to cheat those
+Andover boys of their noon-time rest and relaxation, and to expect them,
+wriggling and twisting with repressed vitality, to listen to a long extra
+sermon, read perhaps by some unskilled reader, or explained by some
+incapable expounder. The Sabbath-school did not then exist, and was not in
+general favor until the noon-houses had begun to disappear. The Reverend
+Jedediah Morse, father of the inventor of the electric telegraph, was
+almost the first New England clergyman who approved of Sabbath-schools and
+established them in his parish. In Salem they were opened in 1808, and the
+scholars came at half-past six on Sunday mornings. Fancy the chill and
+gloom of the unheated, ill-lighted churches at that hour on winter
+mornings. The "Salem Gazette" openly characterized Sunday-schools, when
+first suggested, as profanations of the Sabbath, and for years they were
+not allowed in many Congregational churches. When the Sabbath-schools
+were universally established, and thus the attention and interest of the
+children was gained during the noon interval (the time the schools were
+usually held in country churches), and when each family sat in its own pew,
+and thus the boys were separated, and each under his parents' guardianship,
+the "wretched boys" of the Puritan Sabbath disappeared, and well-behaved,
+quiet, orderly boys were seen instead in the New England churches.</p>
+
+<p>This fashion of sermon-reading at the nooning happily did not obtain in
+all parts of New England. In many villages the meetings in the society
+noon-houses were to the townspeople what a Sunday newspaper is to Sunday
+readers now-a-days, an advertisement and exposition of all the news of the
+past week, and also a suggestion of events to come. At noon they discussed
+and wondered at the announcements and publishings which were tacked on
+the door of the meeting-house or the notices that had been read from the
+pulpit. The men talked in loud voices of the points of the sermon, of the
+doctrines of predestination pedobaptism and antipedobaptism, of original
+sin, and that most fascinating mystery, the unpardonable sin, and in lower
+voices of wolf and bear killing, of the town-meeting, the taxes, the crops
+and cattle; and they examined with keen interest one another's horses,
+and many a sly bargain in horse-flesh or exchange of cows and pigs was
+suggested, bargained over, and clinched in the "Sabba'-day house." Many a
+piece of village electioneering was also discussed and "worked" between the
+services. The shivering women crowded around the blazing and welcome fire,
+and seated themselves on rude benches and log seats while they ate and
+exchanged doughnuts, slices of rusk, or pieces of "pumpkin and Indian mixt"
+pie, and also gave to each other receipts therefor; and they discoursed
+in low voices of their spinning and weaving, of their candle-dipping
+or candle-running, of their success or failure in that yearly trial of
+patience and skill--their soap-making, of their patterns in quilt-piecing,
+and sometimes they slyly exchanged quilt-patterns. A sentence in an old
+letter reads thus: "Anne Bradford gave to me last Sabbath in the Noon House
+a peecing of the Blazing Star; tis much Finer than the Irish Chain or the
+Twin Sisters. I want yelloe peeces for the first joins, small peeces will
+do. I will send some of my lilac flowered print for some peeces of Cicelys
+yelloe India bed vallants, new peeces not washed peeces." They gave one
+another medical advice and prescriptions of "roots and yarbs" for their
+"rheumatiz," "neuralgy," and "tissick;" and some took snuff together, while
+an ancient dame smoked a quiet pipe. And perhaps (since they were women as
+well as Puritans) they glanced with envy, admiration, or disapproval, or
+at any rate with close scrutiny, at one another's gowns and bonnets and
+cloaks, which the high-walled pews within the meeting-house had carefully
+concealed from any inquisitive, neighborly view.</p>
+
+<p>The wood for these beneficent noon-house fires was given by the farmers
+of the congregation, a load by each well-to-do land-owner, if it were a
+"society-house," and occasionally an apple-growing farmer gave a barrel of
+"cyder" to supply internal instead of external warmth. Cider sold in 1782
+for six shillings "Old Tenor" a barrel, so it was worth about the same
+as the wood both in money value and calorific qualities. A hundred years
+previously--in 1679--cider was worth ten shillings a barrel. In 1650, when
+first made in America, it was a costly luxury, selling for &pound;4 4s. a barrel.
+That this thawed-out Sunday barrel of cider would prove invariably a source
+of much refreshment, inspiration, solace, tongue-loosing, and blood-warming
+to the chilled and shivering deacons, elders, and farmers who gathered in
+the noon-house, any one who has imbibed that all-potent and intoxicating
+beverage, oft-frozen "hard" cider, can fervently testify.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a very opulent farmer having built a noon-house for his own and
+his family's exclusive use, would keep in it as part of his "duds" a few
+simple cooking utensils in which his wife or daughters would re-heat or
+partially cook his noon-day Sabbath meal, and mix for him a hot toddy or
+punch, or a mug of that "most insinuating drink"--flip. Flip was made of
+home-brewed beer, sugar, and a liberal dash of Jamaica rum, and was mixed
+with a "logger-head"--a great iron "stirring-stick" which was heated in the
+fire until red hot and then thrust into the liquid. This seething iron made
+the flip boil and bubble and imparted to it a burnt, bitter taste which was
+its most attractive attribute. I doubt not that many a "loggerhead" was
+kept in New England noon-houses and left heating and gathering insinuating
+goodness in the glowing coals, while the pious owner sat freezing in the
+meeting-house, also gathering goodness, but internally keeping warm at the
+thought of the bitter nectar he should speedily brew and gladly imbibe at
+the close of the long service.</p>
+
+<p>The comfort of a hot midday dinner on the Sabbath was not regarded with
+much favor, though perhaps with secret envy, by the neighbors of the
+luxury-loving farmer, who saw in it too close an approach to "profanation
+of the Sabbath." The heating and boiling of the flip with the red hot
+"loggerhead" hardly came under the head of "unnecessary Sabbath cooking"
+even in the minds of the most straight-laced descendants of the Puritans.</p>
+
+<p>When stoves were placed and used in the New England meeting-houses, the
+noon-day lunches were eaten within the pews inside the sanctuary, and the
+noon-houses, no longer being needed, followed the law of cause and effect,
+and like many other institutions of the olden times quickly disappeared.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>X</h1>
+
+<h2>The Deacon's Office.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The deacons in the early New England churches had, besides their regular
+duties on the Lord's Day, and their special duties on communion Sabbaths,
+the charge of prudential concerns, and of providing for the poor of the
+church. They also "dispensed the word" on Sabbaths to the congregation
+during the absence of the ordained minister. Judge Sewall thus describes
+in his diary under the date of November, 1685, the method at that time of
+appointing or ordaining a deacon:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"In afternoon Mr. Willard ordained our Brother Theophilus Frary to the
+    office of a Deacon. Declared his acceptance January 11th first
+    now again. Propounded him to the congregation at Noon. Then in even
+    propounded him if any of the church of other had to object they might
+    speak. Then took the Church's Vote, then call'd him up to the Pulpit,
+    laid his Hand on's head, and said I ordain Thee, etc., etc., gave him
+    his charge, then Prayed &amp; sung 2nd Part of 84th Psalm."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The deacons always sat near the pulpit in a pew, which was generally
+raised a foot or two above the level of the meeting-house floor, and which
+contained, usually, several high-backed chairs and a table or a broad
+swinging-shelf for use at the communion service. These venerable men were
+a group of awe-inspiring figures, who, next to the parson, received the
+respect of the community. In Bristol, Connecticut, the deacons wore
+starched white linen caps in the meeting-house to indicate their office,--a
+singular local custom. One of their duties in many communities was
+naturally to furnish the sacramental wines, and the money for the payment
+thereof was allowed to them from the church-rates, or was raised by special
+taxation. In Farmington, Connecticut, in 1669, each male inhabitant was
+ordered to pay a peck of wheat or one shilling to the deacons of the church
+to defray the expenses of the sacrament. In Groton church, in 1759, "4
+Coppers for every Sacrament for 1 year" was demanded from each communicant.
+In Springfield the "deacon's rate" was paid in "wampam,"--sixpence in
+"wampam" or a peck of Indian corn from each family in the town. This
+special tax was somewhat modified in case a man had no wife, or if he were
+not a church-member, but in the latter case he still had to pay some dues,
+though of course he could not take part in the communion service. In 1734
+the Milton church ordered the deacons to procure "good Canary Wine for
+the Communion Table." Abuses sometimes arose,--abominably poor wines were
+furnished, though full rates were paid for the purchase of wine of
+good quality; and in Newbury the man who was appointed to furnish the
+sacramental wines, sold, under that religious cover, wine and liquors at
+retail.</p>
+
+<p>The deacons also had charge of the vessels used in the communion service.
+These vessels were frequently stored, when not in use, under the pulpit in
+a little closet which opened into "the Ministers wives pue," and which was
+fabled to be at the disposal of the tithingmen and deacons for the darksome
+incarceration of unruly and Sabbath-breaking boys. The communion vessels
+were not always of valuable metal; John Cotton's first church had wooden
+chalices; the wealthier churches owned pieces of silver which had been
+given to them, one piece at a time, by members or friends of the church;
+but communion services of pewter were often seen.</p>
+
+<p>The church in Hanover, Massachusetts, bought a pewter service in 1728, and
+the record of the purchase still exists. It runs thus:--</p>
+
+<pre>  3 Pewter Tankards marked C. T.    10 shillings.
+  5   "    Beakers    "    C. B.    6 sh. 6d. each.
+  2   "    Platters   "    C. P.    5 sh. each.
+  1   "    Basin for Baptisms.</pre>
+
+<p>This pewter service is still owned by the Hanover church, a highly prized
+relic. Until 1753 the church in Andover used a pewter communion service,
+but when a silver service was given to it, the Andover church sent the
+vessels of baser metal to a sister church in Methuen. In Haverhill the will
+of a church-member named White gave to the church absolutely the pewter
+dishes which were used at the sacrament, and which had been his personal
+property. The "ffirst church" of Hartford had "one Puter fflagon, ffower
+pewter dishes, and a bason" left to it by the bequest of one of its
+members. When the Danvers church was burned in 1805, the pewter communion
+vessels were saved while the silver ones were either burnt or stolen. As
+pewter was, in the early days of New England, far from being a despised
+metal, and as pewter dishes and plates were seen on the tables of the
+wealthiest families, were left by will as precious possessions, were
+engraved with initials and stamped with coats of arms, and polished with
+as much care as were silver vessels, a communion service of pewter was
+doubtless felt to be a thoroughly satisfactory acquisition and appointment
+to a Puritan church.</p>
+
+<p>The deacons of course took charge of the church contributions. Lechford,
+in his "Plaine Dealing," thus describes the manner of giving in the Boston
+church in 1641:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Baptism being ended, follows the contribution, one of the deacons
+    saying, 'Brethren of the Congregation, now there is time left for
+    contribution, whereof as God has prospered you so freely offer.' The
+    Magistrates and chief gentlemen first, and then the Elders and all the
+    Congregation of them, and most of them that are not of the church, all
+    single persons, widows and women in absence of their husbands, came up
+    one after another one way, and bring their offering to the deacon at
+    his seat, and put it into a box of wood for the purpose, if it be money
+    or papers. If it be any other Chattel they set or lay it down before
+    the deacons; and so pass on another way to their seats again; which
+    money and goods the Deacons dispose towards the maintenance of the
+    Minister, and the poor of the Church, and the Churches occasions
+    without making account ordinarily."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Lechford also said he saw a "faire gilt cup" given at the public
+contribution; and other gifts of value to the church and minister were
+often made. Libellous verses too were thrown into the contribution boxes,
+and warning and gloomy messages from the Quakers; and John Rogers,
+in derision of a pompous New London minister, threw in the insulting
+contribution of an old periwig. One Puritan goodwife, sternly unforgiving,
+never saw a contribution taken for proselyting the Indians without
+depositing in the contribution-box a number of leaden bullets, the only
+tokens she wished to see ever dispersed among the red men.</p>
+
+<p>Even our pious forefathers were not always quite honest in their church
+contributions, and had to be publicly warned, as the records show, that
+they must deposit "wampum without break or deforming spots," or "passable
+peage without breaches." The New Haven church was particularly tormented by
+canny Puritans who thus managed to dispose of their broken and worthless
+currency with apparent Christian generosity. In 1650 the New Haven "deacons
+informed the Court that the wampum which is putt into the Church Treasury
+is generally so bad that the Elders to whom they pay it cannot pay it
+away."</p>
+
+<p>In 1651, as the bad wampum was still paid in by the pious New Haven
+Puritans, it was ordered that "no money save silver or bills" be accepted
+by the deacons. After this order the deacons and elders found tremendous
+difficulty in getting any contributions at all, and many are the records of
+the actions and decisions of the church in regard to the perplexing matter.
+It should be said, in justice to the New Haven colonists, though they were
+the most opulent of the New England planters, save the wealthy settlers
+of Narragansett, that money of all kinds was scarce, and that the Indian
+money, wampum-peag, being made of a comparatively frail sea-shell, was more
+easily disfigured and broken than was metal coin; and that there was little
+transferable wealth in the community anyway, even in "Country Pay." The
+broken-wampum-giver of the seventeenth century, who contributed with intent
+to defraud and deceive the infant struggling church was the direct and
+lineal ancestor of the sanctimonious button-giver of nineteenth-century
+country churches.</p>
+
+<p>In Revolutionary times, after the divine service, special contributions
+were taken for the benefit of the Continental Army. In New England large
+quantities of valuable articles were thus collected. Not only money, but
+finger-rings, earrings, watches, and other jewelry, all kinds of male
+attire,--stockings, hats, coats, breeches, shoes,--produce and groceries of
+all kinds, were brought to the meeting-house to give to the soldiers. Even
+the leaden weights were taken out of the window-sashes, made into bullets,
+and brought to meeting. On one occasion Madam Faith Trumbull rose up in
+Lebanon meeting-house in Connecticut, when a collection was being made for
+the army, took from her shoulders a magnificent scarlet cloak, which had
+been a present to her from Count Rochambeau, the commander-in-chief of the
+French allied army, and advancing to the altar, gave it as her offering to
+the gallant men, who were fighting not only the British army, but terrible
+want and suffering. The fine cloak was cut into narrow strips and used as
+red trimmings for the uniforms of the soldiers. The romantic impressiveness
+of Madam Trumbull's patriotic act kindled warm enthusiasm in the
+congregation, and an enormous collection was taken, packed carefully, and
+sent to the army.</p>
+
+<p>One early duty of the deacons which was religiously and severely performed
+was to watch that no one but an accepted communicant should partake of the
+holy sacrament. One stern old Puritan, having been officially expelled from
+church-membership for some temporal rather than spiritual offence, though
+ignored by the all-powerful deacon, still refused to consider himself
+excommunicated, and calmly and doggedly attended the communion service
+bearing his own wine and bread, and in the solitude of his own pew communed
+with God, if not with his fellow-men. For nearly twenty years did this
+austere man rigidly go through this lonely and sad ceremonial, until he
+conquered by sheer obstinacy and determination, and was again admitted to
+church-fellowship.</p>
+
+<p>A very extraordinary custom prevailed in several New England churches.
+Through it the deacons were assigned a strange and serious duty which
+appeared to make them all-important and possibly self-important, and
+which must have weighed heavily upon them, were they truly godly, and
+conscientious in the performance of it. In the rocky little town of Pelham
+in the heart of Massachusetts, toward the close of the eighteenth century
+and during the pastorate of the notorious thief, counterfeiter, and forger,
+Rev. Stephen Burroughs, that remarkable rogue organized and introduced to
+his parishioners the custom of giving during the month a metal check to
+each worthy and truly virtuous church-member, on presentation of which the
+check-bearer was entitled to partake of the communion, and without which he
+was temporarily excommunicated. The duty of the deacon in this matter was
+to walk up and down the aisles of the church at the close of each service
+and deliver to the proper persons (proper in the deacon's halting human
+judgment) the significant checks. The deacon had also to see that this
+religionistic ticket was presented on the communion Sabbath. Great must
+have been the disgrace of one who found himself checkless at the end of the
+month, and greater even than the heart-burnings over seating the meeting
+must have been the jealousies and church quarrels that arose over the
+communion-checks. And yet no records of the protests or complaints of
+indignant or grieving parishioners can be found, and the existence of
+the too worldly, too business-like custom is known to us only through
+tradition.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the little chips called "Presbyterian checks" are, however, still
+in existence. They are oblong discs of pewter, about an inch and a half
+long, bearing the initials "P. P.," which stand, it is said, for "Pelham
+Presbyterian." I could not but reflect, as I looked at the simple little
+stamped slips of metal, that in a community so successful in the difficult
+work of counterfeiting coin, it would have been very easy to form a mould
+and cast from it spurious checks with which to circumvent the deacons and
+preserve due dignity in the meeting.</p>
+
+<p>The Presbyterian checks have never been attributed in Massachusetts to
+other than the Pelham church, and are usually found in towns in the
+vicinity of Pelham; and there the story of their purpose and use is
+universally and implicitly believed. A clergyman of the Pelham church gave
+to many of his friends these Presbyterian checks, which he had found among
+the disused and valueless church-properties, and the little relics of the
+old-time deacons and services have been carefully preserved.</p>
+
+<p>In New Hampshire, however, a similar custom prevailed in the churches of
+Londonderry and the neighboring towns.. The Londonderry settlers were
+Scotch-Irish Presbyterians (and the Pelham planters were an off-shoot of
+the Londonderry settlement), and they followed the custom of the Scotch
+Presbyterians in convening the churches twice a year to partake of the
+Lord's Supper. This assembly was always held in Londonderry, and ministers
+and congregations gathered from all the towns around. Preparatory services
+were held on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Long tables were placed in
+the aisles of the church on the Sabbath; and after a protracted and solemn
+address upon the deep meaning of the celebration and the duties of the
+church-members, the oldest members of the congregation were seated at the
+table and partook of the sacrament. Thin cakes of unleavened bread were
+specially prepared for this sacred service. Again and again were the tables
+refilled with communicants, for often seven hundred church-members were
+present. Thus the services were prolonged from early morning until
+nightfall. When so many were to partake of the Lord's Supper, it seemed
+necessary to take means to prevent any unworthy or improper person from
+presenting himself. Hence the tables were fenced off, and each communicant
+was obliged to present a "token." These tokens were similar to the
+"Presbyterian checks;" they were little strips of lead or pewter stamped
+with the initials "L. D.," which may have stood for "Londonderry" or
+"Lord's Day." They were presented during the year by the deacons and elders
+to worthy and pious church-members. This bi-annual celebration of the
+Lord's Supper--this gathering of old friends and neighbors from the rocky
+wilds of New Hampshire to join, in holy communion--was followed on Monday
+by cheerful thanksgiving and social intercourse, in which, as in every
+feast, our old friend, New England rum, played no unimportant part. The
+three days previous to the communion Sabbath were, however, solemnly
+devoted to the worship of God; a Londonderry man was reproved and
+prosecuted for spreading grain upon a Thursday preceding a communion
+Sunday, just as he would have been for doing similar work upon the Sabbath.
+The use of these "tokens" in the Londonderry church continued until the
+year 1830.</p>
+
+<p>In the coin collection of the American Antiquarian Society are little
+pewter communion-checks, or tokens, stamped with a heart. These were used
+in the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, and were delivered to pious
+church-members at the Friday evening prayer-meeting preceding the communion
+Sabbath. Long tables were set in the aisles, as at Londonderry. In
+practice, belief, and origin, the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania churches
+were sisters.</p>
+
+<p>The deacons had many minor duties to perform in the different parishes.
+Some of these duties they shared with the tithingman. They visited the
+homes of the church-members to hear the children say the catechism, they
+visited and prayed with the sick, and they also reported petty offences,
+though they were not accorded quite so powerful legal authority as the
+tithingmen and constables.</p>
+
+<p>It was much desired by several of the first-settled ministers that there
+should be deaconesses in the New England Puritan church, and many good
+reasons were given for making such appointments. It was believed that
+for the special duty of visiting the sick and afflicted in the community
+deaconesses would be more useful than deacons. There had been an aged
+deaconess in the Puritan church in Holland, who with a "little birchen
+rod" had kept the children in awe and order in meeting, and who had also
+exercised "her guifts" in speaking; but when she died no New England
+successor was appointed to fill her place.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XI</h1>
+
+<h2>The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>We read in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," of the fair Priscilla, when
+John Alden came to woo her for his friend, the warlike little captain, that</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,
+    Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together; Rough-hewn,
+    angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and
+    overhung by the running vine of the verses. Such was the book from
+    whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem."</blockquote>
+
+<p>One of these "well-worn psalm-books of Ainsworth" lies now before me,
+perhaps the very one from which the lonely Priscilla sang as she sat
+a-spinning.</p>
+
+<p>There is something especially dear to the lover and dreamer of the olden
+time, to the book-lover and antiquary as well, in an old, worn psalm or
+hymn book. It speaks quite as eloquently as does an old Bible of loving
+daily use, and adds the charm of interest in the quaint verse to reverence
+for the sacred word. A world of tender fancies springs into life as I turn
+over the pages of any old psalm-book "reading between the lines," and as
+I decipher the faded script on the titlepage. But this "psalm-book of
+Ainsworth," this book loved and used by the Pilgrims, brought over in one
+of those early ships, perhaps in the "Mayflower" itself, this book so
+symbolic of those early struggling days in New England, has a romance, a
+charm, an interest which thrills every drop of Puritan blood in my veins.</p>
+
+<p>It is pleasing, too, this "Ainsworth's Version," aside from any thought of
+its historic associations; its square pages of diversified type are well
+printed, and have a quaint unfamiliar look which is intensely attractive,
+and to which the odd, irregular notes of music, the curiously ornamented
+head and tail pieces, and the occasional Hebrew or Greek letters add their
+undefinable charm.</p>
+
+<p>It is a square quarto of three hundred and forty-eight closely printed
+pages, bound in time-stained but well-preserved parchment, and even the
+parchment itself is interesting, and lovely to the touch. The titlepage is
+missing, but I know that this is the edition printed, as was Priscilla's,
+in Amsterdam in 1612 (not "in England in 1600" as a note written in the
+last blank page states). The full title was "The Book of Psalms. Englished
+both in Prose and Metre. With annotations opening the words and sentences
+by conference with other Scriptures. Eph. v: 18,19. Bee yee filled with
+the Spirit speaking to yourselves in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual-Songs
+singing and making melodie in your hearts to the Lord." The book contains
+besides the Psalms and Annotations, on its first pages, a "Preface
+declaring the reason and use of the Book;" and at the last pages a "Table
+directing to some principal things observed in the Annotations of the
+Psalms," a list of "Hebrew phrases observed which are somewhat hard and
+figurative," and also some "General Observations touching the Psalms."</p>
+
+<p>I can well imagine what a pious delight this book was to our Pilgrim
+Fathers; and what a still greater delight it was to our Pilgrim Mothers,
+in that day and country of few books. They possessed in it, not only a
+wonderful new metrical version of the Psalms for singing, but a prose
+version for comparison as well; and the deeply learned and profoundly
+worded annotations placed at the end of each Psalm were doubtless of
+special interest to such "scripturists with all their hearts" as they were.</p>
+
+<p>There were also, "for the use and edification of the saints," printed above
+each psalm the airs of appropriate tunes. The "rough-hewn, angular notes"
+are irregularly lozenge-shaped, like the notes or "pricks" in Queen
+Elizabeth's "Virginal-Book," and are placed on the staff without bars.
+Ainsworth, in his preface, says, "Tunes for the Psalms I find none set of
+God: so that ech people is to use the most grave decent and comfortable
+manner that they know how, according to the general rule. The singing notes
+I have most taken from our Englished psalms when they will fit the mesure
+of the verse: and for the other long verses I have also taken (for the most
+part) the gravest and easiest tunes of the French and Dutch psalmes." Easy
+the tunes certainly are, to the utmost degree of simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>Great diversity too of type did the Pilgrims find in their Psalm-book:
+Roman type, Italics, black-letter, all were used; the verse was printed in
+Italics, the prose in Roman type, and the annotation in black-letter and
+small Roman text with close-spaced lines. This variety though picturesque
+makes the text rather difficult to read; for while one can decipher
+black-letter readily enough when reading whole pages of it, when it is
+interspersed with other type it makes the print somewhat confusing to the
+unaccustomed eye.</p>
+
+<p>One curious characteristic of the typography is the frequent use of the
+hyphen, compound words or rather compound phrases being formed apparently
+without English rule or reason. Such combinations as these are given as
+instances: "highly-him-preferre," "renowned-name," "repose-me-quietlie,"
+"in-mind-uplay," "turn-to-ashes," "my-alonely-soul," "beat-them-final,"
+"pouring-out-them-hard," "inveyers-mak-streight," and "condemn-thou-them-
+as-guilty,"--which certainly would make fit verses to be sung to the
+accompaniment of Master Mace's "excellent-large-plump-lusty-fullspeaking-
+organ."</p>
+
+<p>Ainsworth's Version when read proves to be a scholarly book, exhibiting far
+better grammar and punctuation and more uniformity of spelling than "The
+New England Psalm-book," which at a later date displaced Ainsworth in the
+affections and religious services of the New England Puritans and Pilgrims.
+Both versions are somewhat confused in sense, and of uncouth and grotesque
+versification; though the metre of Ainsworth is better than the rhyme. It
+is all written in "common metre," nearly all in lines of eight and six
+syllables alternately.</p>
+
+<p>The name of the author of this version was Henry Ainsworth; he was the
+greatest of all the Holland Separatists, a typical Elizabethan Puritan,
+who left the church in which he was educated and attached himself to the
+Separatists, or Brownists, as they were called. He went into exile in
+Amsterdam in 1593, and worked for some time as a porter in a book-seller's
+shop, living (as Roger Williams wrote) "upon ninepence in the weeke with
+roots boyled." He established, with the Reverend Mr. Johnson, the new
+church in Holland; and when it was divided by dissension, he became the
+pastor of the "Ainsworthian Brownists" and so remained for twelve years.
+He was a most accomplished scholar, and was called the "rabbi of his age."
+Governor Bradford, in his "Dialogue," written in 1648, says of Ainsworth,
+"He had not his better for the Hebrew tongue in the University nor scarce
+in Europe." Hence, naturally, he was constantly engaged upon some work of
+translating or commentating, and still so highly prized is some of his work
+that it has been reprinted during this century. He also, being a skilful
+disputant, wrote innumerable controversial pamphlets and books, many
+of which still exist. It is said that he once had a long and spirited
+controversy with a brother divine as to whether the ephod of Aaron were
+blue or green. I fear we of to-day have lost much that the final, decisive
+judgment from so learned scholars and students as to the correct color has
+not descended to us, and now, if we wish to know, we shall have to fight it
+all over again.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of his power of argument (or perhaps on account of it) the most
+prominent part which Ainsworth seemed to take in Amsterdam for many years
+was that of peacemaker, as many of his contemporaries testify: for they
+quarrelled fiercely among themselves in the exiled church, though they
+had such sore need of unity and good fellowship; and they had many church
+arguments and judgments and lawsuits. They quarrelled over the exercise of
+power in the church; over the true meaning of the text Matthew xviii. 17;
+whether the members of the congregation should be allowed to look on their
+Bibles during the preaching or on their Psalm-books during the singing;
+whether they should sing at all in their meetings; over the power of the
+office of ruling elder (a fruitful source of dissension and disruption in
+the New England congregations likewise) and above all, they quarrelled long
+and bitterly over the unseemly and gay dress of the parson's wife, Madam
+Johnson. These were the terrible accusations that were brought against that
+bedizened Puritan: that she wore "her bodies tied to the petticote with
+points as men do their doublets and hose; contrary to I Thess. v: 22,
+conferred with Deut. xx: 11;" that she also wore "lawn coives," and
+"busks," and "whalebones in the petticote bodies," and a "veluet hoode,"
+and a "long white brest;" and that she "stood gazing bracing and vaunting
+in the shop dores;" and that "men called her a bounceing girl" (as if
+she could help that!). And one of her worst and most bitterly condemned
+offences was that she wore "a topish hat." This her husband vehemently
+denied; and long discussions and explanations followed on the hat's
+topishness,--"Mr. Ainsworth dilating much upon a greeke worde" (as of
+course so learned a man would). For the benefit of unlearned modern
+children of the Puritans let me give the old Puritan's precise explanation
+and classification of topishness. "Though veluet in its nature were not
+topish, yet if common mariners should weare such it would be a sign of
+pride and topishness in them. Also a gilded raper and a feather are not
+topish in their nature, neither in a captain to weare them, and yet if a
+minister should weare them they would be signs of great vanity topishness
+and lightness." I wonder that topish hat had not undone the whole Puritan
+church in Holland.</p>
+
+<p>In settling all these and many other disputes, in translating,
+commentating, and versifying, did Henry Ainsworth pass his days; until,
+worn out by hard labor, and succumbing to long continued weakness, he died
+in 1623. This romantic story of his death is told by Neal. "It was sudden
+and not without suspicion of violence; for it is reported that, having
+found a diamond of very great value in the streets of Amsterdam, he
+advertised it in print; and when the owner, who was a Jew, came to demand
+it, he offered him any acknowledgment he would desire, but Ainsworth though
+poor would accept of nothing but conference with some of his rabbis upon
+the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the Messiah, which the
+other promised, but not having interest enough to obtain it he was
+poisoned." This rather ambiguous sentence means that Ainsworth was
+poisoned, not the Jew. Brooks's account of the story is that the conference
+took place, the Jews were vanquished, and in revenge poisoned the champion
+of Christianity afterwards. Dexter most unromantically throws cold water on
+this poisoning story, and adduces much circumstantial testimony to prove
+its improbability; but it could hardly have been invented in cold blood by
+the Puritan historians, and must have had some foundation in truth. And
+since he is dead, and the thought cannot harm him, I may acknowledge that I
+firmly believe and I like to believe that he died in so romantic a way.</p>
+
+<p>The Puritans were psalm-singers ever; and in Holland the Brownist division
+of the church came under strong influences from Geneva and Wittenberg, the
+birth-places of psalm-singing, that made them doubly fond of "worship in
+song." Hence the Pilgrim Fathers, Brewster, Bradford, Carver, and Standish,
+for love of music as well as in affectionate testimony to their old pastor
+and friend, brought to the New World copies of his version of the Psalms
+and sang from it with delight and profit to themselves, if not with ease
+and elegance.</p>
+
+<p>Dexter says very mildly of Ainsworth's literary work that "there are
+diversities of gifts, and it is no offence to his memory to conclude that
+he shone more as an exegete than as a poet." Poesy is a gift of the gods
+and cometh not from deep Hebrew study nor from vast learning, and we must
+accept Ainsworth's pious enthusiasm in the place of poetic fervor. Of the
+quality of his work, however, it is best to judge for one's self. Here is
+his rendition of the Nineteenth Psalm, so well known to us in verse by
+Addison's glorious "The spacious firmament on high." The prose version is
+printed in one column and the verse by its side.</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1. To the Mayster of the Musik: A Psalm of David</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2. The heavens, doo tel the glory of God: and the out-spred firmament
+    shevveth; the work of his hand. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>3. Day unto day uttereth speech: and night unto night manifesteth
+    knowledge: </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>4. No speech, and no words: not heard is their voice</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>5. Through all the earth, gone-forth is their line: and unto the
+    utmost-end of the world their speakings: he hath put a tent in them for
+    the sun. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>6. And he; as a bridegroom, going-forth out of his privy-chamber:
+    joyes as a mighty-man to run a race</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>7. From the utmost end of the heavens is his egress; and his
+    compassing-regress is unto the utmost-ends of them: and none <i>is</i>
+    hidd, from his heat. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>2. The heav'ne, doo tel the glory of God and his firmament dooth
+    preach. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>3. work of his hands. Day unto day dooth largely-utter speach and night
+    unto night dooth knowledge shew</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>4. No speach, and words are none. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>5. thier voice it-is not heard. Thier line through all the earth is
+    gone: and to the worlds end, thier speakings: in them he did dispose, </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>6. tent for the Sun. Who-bride-groom-like out of his chamber goes:
+    joyes strong-man-like, to run a race</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>7. From heav'ns end, his egress: and his regress to the end of them
+    hidd from his heat, none is:</blockquote>
+
+<p>In order to show the proportion of annotation in the book, and to indicate
+the mental traits of the author, let me state that this psalm, in both
+prose and metrical versions, occupies about one page; while the closely
+printed annotations fill over three pages; which is hardly "explaining with
+brevitie," as Ainsworth says in his preface. With this psalm the notes
+commence thus:--</p>
+
+<p>"2. (the out-spred-firmament) the whole cope of heaven, with the aier which
+though it be soft and liquid and spred over the Earth, yet it is fast and
+firm and therefore called of us according to the common Greek version a
+firmament: the holy Ghost expresseth it by another term Mid-heaven.
+This out-spred-firmament of expansion God made amidds the waters for a
+separation and named it Heaven, which of David is said to be stretched out
+as courtayn and elsewhere is said to be as firm as moulten glass. So under
+this name firmament be commised the orbs of the heav'ns and the aier and
+the whole spacious country above the earth."</p>
+
+<p>These annotations must have formed to the Pilgrims not only a dictionary
+but a perfect encyclop&aelig;dia of useful knowledge. Things spiritual and things
+temporal were explained therein. Scientific, historic, and religious
+information were dispensed impartially. Much and varied instruction was
+given in Natural History, though viewed of course from a strictly religious
+point of view. The little Pilgrims learned from their Psalm-Book that the
+"Leviathan is the great whalefish or seadragon, so called of the fast
+joyning together of his scales as he is described Job 40: 20, 41 and
+is used to resemble great tyrants." They also learned that "Lions of
+sundry-kinds have sundry-names. Tear-in-pieces like a lion. That he ravin
+not, make-a-prey; called a plueker Renter or Tearer, and elsewhere Laby
+that is, Harty and couragious; Kphir, this lurking, Couchant. The reason
+of thier names is shewed, as The renting-lion as greedy to tear, and the
+lurking-Lion as biding in covert places. Other names are also given to this
+kind as Shachal, of ramping, of fierce nature; and Lajith of subduing his
+prey. Psalm LVI Lions called here Lebain, harty, stowt couragious, Lions.
+Lions are mentioned in the Scriptures for the stowtness of thier hart,
+boldnes, and grimnes of thier countenance."</p>
+
+<p>Here are other annotations taken at hap-hazard. The lines,</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Al they that doo upon me look<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a scoff at me doe make<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;they with the lip do make-a-mow<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the head they scornful-shake,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>Ainsworth thus explains: "Make-a-mow, making-an-opening with the lip
+which may be taken both for mowing and thrusting out of the lip and for
+licentious opening thereof to speak reproach." The expression "Keep thou me
+as the black of the apple of the eye" is thus annotated: "The black, that
+is, the sight in the midds of the eye wherein appeareth the resemblance of
+a little man, and thereupon seemeth to be called in Hebrew Ishon which is a
+man. And as that part is blackish so this word is also used for other black
+things as the blackness of night. The apple so we call that which the
+Hebrew here calleth bath and babath that is the babie or little image
+appearing in the eye." Anger receives this definition: "ire, outward in
+the face, grauue, grimnes or fiercenes of countenance. The original Aph
+signifieth both the nose by which one breatheth, and Anger which appeareth
+in the snuffing or breathing of the nose."</p>
+
+<p>Before the Holland exiles had this version of Ainsworth's to sing from,
+they used the book known as "Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms." They gave it
+up gladly to show honor to the work of their loved pastor, and perhaps also
+with a sense of pleasure in not having to sing any verses which had been
+used and authorized by the Church of England. In doing this they had to
+abandon, however, such spirited lines as Sternhold's--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The earth did shake, for feare did quake<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the hills their bases shook.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Removed they were, in place most fayre<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;at God's right fearfull looks.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"He rode on hye, and did soe flye
+    Upon the cherubins
+  He came in sight and made his flight
+    Upon the winges of windes."</blockquote>
+
+<p>They sung instead,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And th' earth did shake and quake and styrred bee<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;grounds of the mount: &amp; shook for wroth was hee<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Smoke mounted, in his wrath, fyre did eat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;out of his mouth: from it burned-with heat."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Alas, poor Priscilla! how could she sing with ease or reverence such
+confused verses? The tune, too, set in the psalm-book seems absolutely
+unfitted to the metre. I fear when she sang from the pages "the old Puritan
+anthem" that she was forced to turn it into a chant, else the irregular
+lines could never have been brought within the compass of the melody; and
+yet, the metre is certainly better than the sense.</p>
+
+<p>It may be thought that these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for
+their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome
+that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the
+most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the
+reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot be hidden, even by
+the wording of the learned Puritan minister:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;1. Jehovah feedeth me: I shall not lack</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;2. In grassy fields, he downe dooth make me lye: he gently-leads mee,
+    quiet-Waters by. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;3. He dooth return my soul: for his name-sake in paths of justice
+    leads-me-quietly. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;4. Yea, though I walk in dale of deadly-shade ile fear none yll, for
+    with me thou wilt be thy rod, thy staff eke, they shall comfort mee.</blockquote>
+
+<p>But few of these psalm-books of Ainsworth are now in existence; but few
+indeed came to New England. Elder Brewster owned one, as is shown by
+the inventory of the books in his library. Not every member of the
+congregation, not every family possessed one; many were too poor, many
+"lacked skill to read," and in some communities only one psalm-book was
+owned in the entire church. Hence arose the odious custom of "deaconing" or
+"lining" the psalm, by which each line was read separately by the deacon or
+elder and then sung by the congregation. There is no doubt, however,
+that this Ainsworth's Version was used in many of the early New England
+meetings. Reverend Thomas Symmes, in his "Joco-Serious Dialogue," printed
+in 1723, wrote: "Furthermore the Church of Plymouth made use of Ainsworths
+Version of the Psalms until the year 1692. For altho' our New England
+version of the Psalms was compiled by sundry hands and completed by
+President Dunster about the year 1640; yet that church did not use it, it
+seems, 'till two and fifty years after but stuck to Ainsworth; and until
+about 1682 their excellent custom was to sing without reading the lines."</p>
+
+<p>John Cotton's account of the Salem church written in 1760, says, "On June
+19, 1692, the pastor propounded to the church that seeing many of the
+psalms in Mr. Ainsworth's translation which had hitherto been sung in the
+congregation had such difficult tunes that none in the church could set,
+they would consider of some expedient that they might sing all the psalms.
+After some time of consideration on August 7 following, the church voted
+that when the tunes were difficult in the translation then used, they
+would make use of the New England psalm-book, long before received in
+the churches of the Massachusetts colony, not one brother opposing the
+conclusion. But finding it inconvenient to use two psalm-books, they at
+length, in June 1696 agreed wholly to lay aside Ainsworth and with general
+consent introduced the other which is used to this day, 1760. And here it
+will be proper to observe that it was their practice until the beginning of
+October, 1681 to sing the psalms without reading the lines; but then, at
+the motion of a brother who otherwise could not join in the ordinance [I
+suppose because he could not read] they altered the custom, and reading
+was introduced, the elder performing that service after the pastor had
+first expounded the psalm, which were usually sung in course."</p>
+
+<p>On the blank leaf of the copy of Ainsworth now lying before me are written
+these words, "This was used in Salem half-a-century from the first
+settlement." In a record of the Salem church is this entry of a church
+meeting: "4 of 5th month, 1667. The pastor having formerly propounded
+and given reason for the use of the Bay Psalm Book in regard to the
+<i>difficulty of the tunes</i> and that we could not sing them so well
+as formerly and <i>that there was a singularity in our using Ainsworths
+tunes</i>: but especially because we had not the liberty of singing all the
+scripture Psalms according to Col. iii. 16. He did not again propound the
+same, and after several brethren had spoken, there was at last a unanimous
+consent with respect to the last reason mentioned, that the Bay Psalm Book
+should be used together with Ainsworth to supply the defects of it."</p>
+
+<p>It is significant enough of the "low state of the musik in the meetings"
+when we find that the simple tunes written in Ainsworth's Version were too
+difficult for the colonists to sing. To such a condition had church-music
+been reduced by "lining the psalm" and by the lack of musical instruments
+to guide and control the singers. It was not much better in old England;
+for we find in the preface of Rous' Psalms (which were published in
+1643 and authorized to be used in the English Church) references to the
+"difficulty of Ainsworth's tunes."</p>
+
+<p>Hood says, "There is almost a certainty that no other version than
+Ainsworth was ever used in the colonies until the New England Version was
+published. But if any one was used in one or two of the churches it was
+Sternhold and Hopkins." I cannot feel convinced of this, but believe that
+both Ravenscroft's and Sternhold and Hopkins' Versions were used at first
+in many of the Bay settlements. Salem church had a peculiar connection in
+its origin with the church of Plymouth, which would account, doubtless,
+for its protracted use of the version so loved by the Pilgrims; but the
+Puritans of the Bay, coming directly from England, must have brought with
+them the version which they had used in England, that of Sternhold and
+Hopkins; and they would hardly have wished, nor would it have been possible
+for them to acquire speedily in the new land the Ainsworth's Version used
+by the Pilgrims from Holland.</p>
+
+<p>The second edition of Ainsworth's Version was printed in 1617, a third
+in 1618; the fourth, in London in 1639, was a folio; and the sixth, in
+Amsterdam in 1644, was an octavo. A little 24mo copy is in the Essex
+Institute in Salem, and an octavo is in the Prince Library, now in the
+custody of the Public Library of the City of Boston. The latter copy has
+a note in it written by the Rev. Thomas Prince: "Plymouth, May 1, 1732. I
+have seen an edition of this version of 1618; and this version was sung
+in Plymouth Colony and I suppose in the rest of New England 'till the New
+England Version was printed."</p>
+
+<p>There is a copy of the first edition of Ainsworth in the Bodleian Library
+and one in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The American Antiquarian
+Society and the Lenox Library are the only public libraries in America that
+possess copies, so far as I know. The one in the library of the American
+Antiquarian Society was presented to it in 1815 by the Rev. William Bentley
+of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom also belonged the copy of the Bay Psalm
+Book now in the library at Worcester. He was a divine and a bibliophile and
+an antiquary, but there also ran in his veins blood of warmer flow. During
+the war of 1812, when the report came, in meeting-time, that the frigate
+"Constitution" was being chased into Marblehead harbor, the loyal parson
+Bentley locked up his church, and tucked up his gown, and sallied forth
+with his whole flock of parishioners to march to Marblehead with the
+soldiers, ready to "fight unto death" if necessary. Being short and fat,
+and the mercury standing at eighty-five degrees, the doctor's physical
+strength gave out, and he had to be hoisted up astride a cannon to ride to
+the scene of conflict,--martial in spirit though weak in the legs.</p>
+
+<p>But this association with the old book is comparatively of our own day; and
+the most pleasing fancy which the "psalm-book of Ainsworth" brings to my
+mind, the most sacred and reverenced thought, is of a far more remote, a
+more peaceful and quiet scene; though men of warlike blood and fighting
+stock were there present and took part therein. It is with that Sabbath Day
+before the Landing at Plymouth which was spent by the Pilgrims, as Mather
+says, "in the devout and pious exercises of a sacred rest." And though
+Matthew Arnold thought that the Mayflower voyagers would have been
+intolerable company for Shakespeare and Virgil, yet in that quiet day of
+devout prayer and praise they show a calm religious peace and trust that
+is, perhaps, the highest spiritual type of "sweetness and light." And from
+this quaint old book their lips found words and music to express in song
+their pure and holy faith.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Bay Psalm-Book.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>It seems most proper that the first book printed in New England should be
+now its rarest one, and such is the case. It was also meet that the first
+book published by the Puritan theocracy should be a psalm-book. This New
+England psalm-book, being printed by the colony at Massachusetts Bay, is
+familiarly known as "The Bay Psalm-Book," and was published two hundred
+and fifty years ago with this wording on the titlepage: "The Whole Book of
+Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre. Whereunto is prefixed a
+discourse declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the
+Heavenly Ordinance of Singing Psalmes in the Churches of God.</p>
+
+<p>"Coll. III. Let the word of God dwell plenteously in you in all wisdome,
+teaching, and exhorting one another in Psalmes, Himnes, and spirituall
+Songs, singing to the Lord with grace in your hearts.</p>
+
+<p>"James V. If any be afflicted, let him pray; and if any be merry let him
+sing psalmes. Imprinted 1640."</p>
+
+<p>The words "For the Use, Edification, and Comfort of the Saints in Publick
+and Private especially in New England," though given in Thomas's "History
+of Printing," Lowndes's "Bibliographers Manual," Hood's "History of Music
+in New England," and many reliable books of reference, as part of the
+correct title, were in fact not printed upon the titlepage of this first
+edition, but appeared on subsequent ones. Mr. Thomas, at the time he wrote
+his history, knew of but one copy of the first edition; "an entire copy
+except the title-page is now in the possession of rev. mr. Bentley of
+Salem." The titlepage being missing, he probably fell into the error of
+copying the title of a later edition, and other cataloguers and manualists
+have blindly followed him.</p>
+
+<p>There were in 1638 thirty ministers in New England, all men of intelligence
+and education; and to three of them, Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and John
+Eliot was entrusted the literary part of the pious work. They managed to
+produce one of the greatest literary curiosities in existence. The book
+was printed in the house of President Dunster of Harvard College upon a
+"printery," or printing-press, which had cost &pound;50, and was the gift of
+friends in Holland to the new community in 1638, the name-year of Harvard
+College. Governor Winthrop in his journal tells us that the first sheet
+printed on this press was the Freeman's Oath, certainly a characteristic
+production; the second an almanac for New England, and the third, "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." Some, who deem an almanac a book, call this psalm-book the
+second book printed in British America.</p>
+
+<p>A printer named Steeven Daye was brought over from England to do the
+printing on this new press. Now Steeven must have been given entire charge
+of the matter, and could not have been a very literate fellow (as we
+know positively he was a most reprehensible one), or the three reverend
+versifiers must have been most uncommonly careless proof-readers, for
+certainly a worse piece of printer's work than "The Bay Psalm Book" could
+hardly have been struck off. Diversity and grotesqueness of spelling were
+of course to be expected, and paper might have been coarse without reproof,
+in that new and poor country; but the type was good and clear, the paper
+strong and firm, and with ordinary care a very presentable book might have
+been issued. The punctuation was horrible. A few commas and periods and
+a larger number of colons were "pepered and salted" <i>&agrave; la</i> Timothy
+Dexter, apparently quite by chance, among the words. Periods were placed
+in the middle of sentences; words of one syllable were divided by hyphens;
+capitals and italics were used after the fashion of the time, apparently
+quite at random; and inverted letters were common enough. The pages were
+unnumbered, and on every left-hand page the word "Psalm" in the title was
+spelled correctly, while on the right-hand page it is uniformly spelled
+"Psalme." But after all, these typographical blemishes might be forgiven if
+the substance, the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification
+was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the
+sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with
+the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical
+construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct.
+Such amazing verses as these may be found:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And sayd He would not them waste: had not<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Moses stood (whom He chose)<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;'fore him i' th' breach; to turne his wrath<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;lest that he should waste those."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Cotton Mather, in his "Magnalia," gives thus the full story of the
+production of "The Bay Psalm-book":--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"About the year 1639, the New-English reformers, considering that their
+    churches enjoyed the other ordinances of Heaven in their scriptural
+    purity were willing that the 'The singing of Psalms' should be restored
+    among them unto a share of that <i>purity</i>. Though they blessed God
+    for the religious endeavours of them who translated the Psalms into the
+    <i>meetre </i>usually annexed at the end of the Bible, yet they beheld
+    in the translation so many <i>detractions </i>from, <i>additions
+    </i>to, and <i>variations </i>of, not only the text, but the very
+    <i>sense </i>of the psalmist, that it was an offense unto them.
+    Resolving then upon a new translation, the chief divines in the country
+    took each of them a portion to be translated; among whom were Mr. Welds
+    and Mr. Eliot of Eoxbury, and Mr. Mather of Dorchester. These like the
+    rest were so very different a <i>genius</i> for their poetry that Mr.
+    Shephard, of Cambridge, on the occasion addressed them to this purpose:</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;You Roxb'ry poets keep clear of the crime<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of missing to give us very good rhime.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And you of Dorchester, your verses lengthen<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And with the text's own words, you will them strengthen.</blockquote></blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Psalms thus turned into <i>meetre</i> were printed at Cambridge, in
+    the year 1640. But afterwards it was thought that a little more of art
+    was to be employed upon them; and for that cause they were committed
+    unto Mr. Dunster, who revised and refined this translation; and (with
+    some assistance from Mr. Richard Lyon who being sent over by Sir Henry
+    Mildmay as an attendant unto his, son, then a student at Harvard
+    College, now resided in Mr. Dunster's house:) he brought it
+    the condition wherein our churches have since used it. Now though
+    I heartily join with those gentlemen who wish that the <i>poetry</i>
+    thereof were mended, yet I must confess, that the Psalms have never
+    yet seen a <i>translation</i> that I know of nearer to the Hebrew
+    original; and I am willing to receive the excuse which our translators
+    themselves do offer us when they say: 'If the verses are not always so
+    elegant as some desire or expect, let them consider that God's
+    altar needs not our pollishings; we have respected rather a plain
+    translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any
+    paraphrase. We have attended conscience rather than elegance, fidelity
+    rather than ingenuity, that so we may sing in Zion the Lord's songs of
+    praise, according unto his own will, until he bid us enter into our
+    Master's joy to sing eternal hallelujahs.'"</blockquote>
+
+<p>I have never liked Cotton Mather so well as after reading this calm
+and kindly account of the production of "The Bay-Psalm-Book." He was a
+scholarly man, and doubtless felt keenly and groaned inwardly at the
+inelegance, the appalling and unscholarly errors in the New England
+version; and yet all he mildly said was that "it was thought that a little
+more of art was to be employed upon them," and that he "wishes the poetry
+hereof was mended." Such justice, such self-repression, such fairness
+make me almost forgive him for riding around the scaffold on which his
+fellow-clergyman was being executed for witchcraft, and urging the crowd
+not to listen to the poor martyr's dying words. I can even almost overlook
+the mysterious fables, the outrageous yarns which he imposed upon us under
+the guise of history.</p>
+
+<p>The three reverend versifiers who turned out such questionable poetry are
+known to have been writers of clear, scholarly, and vigorous prose. They
+were all graduated at Emanuel College, Cambridge, the nursery of Puritans.
+Mr. Welde soon returned to England and published there two intelligent
+tracts vindicating the purity of the New England worship. Richard Mather
+was the general prose-scribe for the community; he drafted the "Cambridge
+Platform" and other important papers, and was clear and scholarly enough
+in all his work <i>except</i> the "Bay Psalm-Book." From his pen came the
+tedious, prolix preface to the work; and the first draft of it in his own
+handwriting is preserved in the Prince Library. The other co-worker was
+John Eliot, that glory of New England Puritanism, the apostle to the
+Indians. His name heads my list of the saints of the Puritan calendar; but
+I confess that when I consider his work in "The Bay Psalm-Book," I have
+sad misgivings lest the hymns which he wrote and published in the Indian
+language may not have proved to the poor Massachusetts Indians all that our
+loving and venerating fancy has painted them. It is said also that Francis
+Quarles, the Puritan author of "Divine Emblems," sent across the Atlantic
+some of his metrical versions of the psalms as a pious contribution to the
+new version of the new church in the new land.</p>
+
+<p>The "little more of art" which was bestowed by the improving President
+Dunster left the psalms still improvable, as may be seen by opening at
+random at any page of the revised editions. Mr. Lyon conferred also upon
+the New England church the inestimable boon of a number of hymns or
+"Scripture-Songs placed in order as in the Bible." They were printed in
+that order from the third until at least the sixteenth edition, but in
+subsequent editions the hymns were all placed at the end of the book after
+the psalms. I doubt not that the Puritan youth, debarred of merry catches
+and roundelays, found keen delight in these rather astonishing renditions
+of the songs of Solomon, portions of Isaiah, etc. Those Scripture-Songs
+should be read quite through to be fully appreciated, as no modern
+Christian could be full enough of grace to sing them. Here is a portion of
+the song of Deborah and Barak:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;24. Jael the Kenite Hebers wife<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;'bove women blest shall be:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Above the women in the tent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;a blessed one is she.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;25. He water ask'd: she gave him milk<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;him butter forth she fetch'd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;26. In lordly dish: then to the nail<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;she forth her left hand stretched.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;Her right the workman's hammer held<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and Sisera struck dead:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;She pierced and struck his temple through<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and then smote off his head.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;27. He at her feet bow'd, fell, lay down<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;he at her feet bow'd, where<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;He fell: ev'n where he bowed down<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;he fell destroyed there.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;28. Out of a window Sisera<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;his mother looked and said<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The lattess through in coming why<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;so long his chariot staid?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;His chariot wheels why tarry they?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;29.   her wise dames, answered<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Yea she turned answer to herself<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;30.   and what have they not sped?</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;31. The prey by poll; a maid or twain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;what parted have not they?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Have they not parted, Sisera,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;a party-colour'd prey<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A party-colour'd neildwork prey<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of neildwork on each side<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;That's party-colour'd meet for necks<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of them that spoils divide?</blockquote>
+
+<p>Our Pilgrim Fathers accepted these absurd, tautological verses gladly, and
+sang them gratefully; but we know the spirit of poesy could never have
+existed in them, else they would have fought hard against abandoning such
+majestic psalms as Sternhold's--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The Lord descended from above<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and bow'd the heavens hye<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And underneath his feete he cast<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the darkness of the skye.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"On cherubs and on cherubines<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;full royally he road<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And on the winges of all the windes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;came flying all abroad."</blockquote>
+
+<p>They gave up these lines of simple grandeur, to which they were accustomed,
+for such wretched verses as these of the New England version:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;9.  Likewise the heavens he downe-bow'd and he descended, &amp; there was
+      under his feet a gloomy cloud<br />
+  10. And he on cherub rode and flew; yea, he flew on the wings of winde.<br />
+  11. His secret place hee darkness made his covert that him round confide.</blockquote>
+
+<p>I cannot understand why they did not sing the psalms of David just as
+they were printed in the English Bible; it would certainly be quite as
+practicable as to sing this latter selection.</p>
+
+<p>President Dunster's improving hand and brain evolved this rendition:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Likewise the heavens he down-bow'd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and he descended: also there<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Was at his feet a gloomy cloud<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and he on cherubs rode apace.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Yea on the wings of wind he flew<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;he darkness made his secret place<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;His covert round about him drew."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Though the grotesque wording and droll errors of these old psalm-books can,
+after the lapse of centuries, be pointed out and must be smiled at, there
+is after all something so pathetic in the thought of those good, scholarly
+old New England saints, hampered by poverty, in dread of attack of Indians,
+burdened with hard work, harassed by "eighty-two pestilent heresies," still
+laboring faithfully and diligently in their strange new home at their
+unsuited work,--something so pathetic, so grand, so truly Christian, that
+when I point out any of the absurdities or failures in their work, I dread
+lest the shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather, of Eliot, brand me as of
+old, "in capitall letters," as "AN OPEN AND OBSTINATE CONTEMNER OF GOD'S
+HOLY ORDINANCES," or worse still, with that mysterious, that dread name, "A
+WANTON GOSPELLER."</p>
+
+<p>The second edition of the "New England Psalm-Book" was published in 1647;
+the one copy known to exist has sold for four hundred and thirty-five
+dollars. The third edition was the one revised by President Dunster and
+Mr. Lyon, and was printed in 1650. In 1691 the unfortunate book was again
+"pollished" by a committee of ministers, who thus altered the last two
+stanzas of the Song of Deborah and Barak:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;28. Out of a window Sisera<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;His mother look'd and said<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The lattess through in coming why<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;So long's chariot staid?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;His chariot-wheels why tarry they?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Her ladies wise reply'd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;29. Yea to herself the answer made,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;30.     Have they not speed? she cry'd.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;31. The prey to each a maid or twain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Divided have not they?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To Sisera have they not shar'd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A divers-colour'd prey?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of divers-colour'd needle-work<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Wrought curious on each side<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of various colours meet for necks<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of those who spoils divide?</blockquote>
+
+<p>Rev. Elias Nason wittily says of "The Bay Psalm-Book," "Welde, Eliot, and
+Mather mounted the restive steed Pegasus, Hebrew psalter in hand, and
+trotted in warm haste over the rough roads of Shemitic roots and metrical
+psalmody. Other divines rode behind, and after cutting and slashing,
+mending and patching, twisting and turning, finally produced what must ever
+remain the most unique specimen of poetical tinkering in our literature."</p>
+
+<p>Other editions quickly followed these "pollishings" until, in 1709, sixteen
+had been printed. Mr. Hood stated that at least seventy editions in all
+were brought out. Some of these were printed in England and Scotland, in
+exceedingly fine and illegible print, and were intended to be bound up with
+the Bible; and occasionally duodecimo Bibles were sent from Scotland to
+New England with "The Bay Psalm-Book" bound at the back part of the book.
+Strange as it may seem, the poor, halting New England version was used in
+some of the English dissenting congregations and Scotch kirks, instead of
+the smoother verses composed in England for the English churches.</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Thomas Prince, after two years of careful work thereon,
+published in 1758 a revised edition of the much-published book, and it was
+adopted by his church, the Old South, of Boston, the week previous to his
+death. It was used by his congregation until 1786. He clung closely to the
+form of the old editions, changing only an occasional word. In his preface
+Dr. Prince says that "The Bay Psalm-Book" "had the honor of being the
+first book printed in North America, and as far as I can find, in this
+New World." We have fuller means of information now-a-days than had the
+reverend reviser, and we know that as early as 1535 a book called "The
+Book of St. John Climacus or The Spiritual Ladder" had been printed in the
+Spanish tongue, in Mexico; and no less than one hundred and sixteen other
+Spanish works in the sixteenth century, as the "Bibliografia Mexicana"
+testifies.</p>
+
+<p>If the printing of all these various editions was poor, and the diction
+worse, the binding certainly was good and could be copied in modern times
+to much advantage. No flimsy cloth or pasteboard covers, no weak paper
+backs, no ill-pasted leaves, no sham-work of any kind was given; securely
+sewed, firmly glued, with covers of good strong leather, parchment, kid, or
+calfskin, these psalm-books endured constant <i>daily</i> (not weekly) use
+for years, for decades, for a century, and are still whole and firm.
+They were carried about in pockets, in saddle-bags, and were opened, and
+handled, and conned, as often as were the Puritan Bibles, and they bore the
+usage well. They were distinctively characteristic of the unornamental,
+sternly pious, eminently honest, and sturdily useful race that produced
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Sewall makes frequent mention in his famous diary of "the New Psalm
+Book." He bought one "bound neatly in Kids Leather" for "3 shillings &amp;
+sixpence" and gave it to a widow whom he was wooing. Rather a serious
+lover's gift, but characteristic of the giver, and not so gloomy as
+"Dr. Mathers Vials of Wrath," "Dr. Sibbs Bowels," "Dr. Preston's Church
+Carriage," and "Dr. Williard's Fountains opened," all of which he likewise
+presented to her.</p>
+
+<p>The Judge frequently gave a copy as a bridal gift, after singing from it
+"Myrrh aloes," to the gloomy tune of Windsor, at the wedding.</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;8. Myrrh Aloes and Cussias <i>smell</i><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;all of thy garments <i>had</i><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Out of the yvory pallaces<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;whereby they made thee glad:</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;9. Amongst thine honourable maids<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;kings daughters present were<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Queen is set at thy right hand<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;in fine gold of Ophir.</blockquote>
+
+<p>But his most frequent mention of the "new psalm-book" is in his "Humbell
+acknowledgement" made to God of the "great comfort and merciful kindness
+received through singing of His Psalmes;" and the pages of the diary bear
+ample testimony that whatever the book may appear to us now, it was to the
+early colonists the very Word of God.</p>
+
+<p>As years passed on, however, and singing-schools multiplied, it became much
+desired, and even imperative that there should be a better style and manner
+of singing, and open dissatisfaction arose with "The Bay Psalm-Book;" the
+younger members of the congregations wished to adopt the new and smoother
+versions of Tate and Brady, and of Watts. Petitions were frequently made in
+the churches to abolish the century-used book. Here is an opening sentence
+of one church-letter which is still in existence; it was presented to the
+ministers and elders of the Roxbury church September 11th, 1737, and was
+signed by many of the church members:--</p>
+
+<p>"The New England Version of Psalms however useful it may formerly have
+been, has now become through the natural variableness of Language, not only
+very uncouth but in many Places unintelligible; whereby the mind instead
+of being Raised and spirited in Singing The Praises of Almighty God and
+thereby being prepared to Attend to other Parts of Divine Service is Damped
+and made Spiritless in the Performance of the Duty at least such is the
+Tendency of the use of that Version," etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>Great controversy arose over the abolition of the accustomed book, and
+church-quarrels were rife; but the end of the century saw the dearly loved
+old version consigned to desuetude, uever again to be opened, alas! but by
+critical or inquisitive readers.</p>
+
+<p>There is owned by the American Antiquarian Society, and kept carefully
+locked in the iron safe in the building of that Society in Worcester, a
+copy of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm Book." It is a quarto (not
+octavo, as Thomas described it in his "History of Printing") and is in very
+good condition, save that the titlepage is missing. It is in the original
+light-colored, time-stained parchment binding, and contains the autograph
+of Stephen Sewall. It also bears on the inside of the front cover the
+book-plate of Isaiah Thomas, and at the back, in the veteran printer's
+clear and beautiful handwriting, this statement: "After advertising for
+another copy of this book and making enquiry in many places in New England
+&amp;c. I was not able to obtain or even hear of another. This copy is
+therefore invaluable and must be preserved with the greatest care. Isaiah
+Thomas, Sep. 20. 1820." His "History of Printing," was published in 1810,
+and the Society had acquired through the gift of "the rev. mr. Bentley" the
+copy which Thomas mentioned in his book.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange that Thomas should have been ignorant of the existence of
+other copies of the first edition of "The Bay Psalm-Book," for there were
+at that time six copies belonging to the Prince Library in the possession
+of the Old South Church of Boston. One would fancy that the Prince Library
+would have been one of his first objective points of search, save that a
+dense cloud of indifference had overshadowed that collection for so long
+a time. Five of those copies remained in the custody of the deacons and
+pastor of the Old South Church until 1860, and they were at one time all
+deposited in the Public Library of the City of Boston. Two still remain in
+that suitable place of deposit; they are almost complete in paging, but are
+in modern bindings. The other three copies were surrendered by Lieut-Gov.
+Samuel Armstrong (who, as one of the deacons of the Old South Church,
+had joint custody of the Prince Library), severally, to Mr. Edward
+Crowninshield of Boston, Dr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff of Boston, and Mr.
+George Livermore of Cambridge. Governor Armstrong surrendered these three
+books in consideration of certain modern books being given to the Prince
+Library, and of the modern bindings bestowed on the two other copies; which
+seems to us hardly a brilliant or judicious exchange.</p>
+
+<p>In Dr. Shurtleff "The Bay Psalm-Book" found a congenial and loving owner;
+and under his careful superintendence an exact reprint was published in
+1862 in the Riverside Press at Cambridge. He wrote for it a preface. It was
+published by subscription; one copy on India paper, fifteen on thick paper,
+and fifty on common paper. Copies on the last named paper have sold readily
+for thirty dollars each. All the typographical errors of the original were
+carefully reproduced in this reprint.</p>
+
+<p>At Dr. Shurtleffs death, his "Bay Psalm-Book" was catalogued with the rest
+of his library, which was to be sold on Dec. 2, 1875; but an injunction was
+obtained by the deacons of the Old South Church, to prevent the sale of the
+old psalm-book. They were rather late in the day however, to try to obtain
+again the too easily parted with book, and the ownership of it was adjudged
+to the estate. The book was sold Oct. 12, 1876, at the Library salesroom,
+Beacon Street, Boston, for one thousand and fifty dollars. It is now in the
+library of Mrs. John Carter Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island. Special
+interest attaches to this copy, because it was "Richard Mather, His Book"
+as several autographs in it testify; and the author's own copy is always of
+extra value. Cotton Mather, a grandson of Richard, was the close friend of
+the Reverend Thomas Prince, who founded the Prince Library, and who left it
+by will to the Old South Church in 1758. Mr. Prince's book-plate is on the
+reverse of the titlepage of this copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book," and is in
+itself a rarity. It reads thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"This Book belongs to<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The New England Library<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Begun to be collected by Thomas Prince<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;upon his ent'ring Harvard-College July 6<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;1703, and was given by said Prince, to<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;remain therein forever."</blockquote>
+
+<p>There was a sixth copy of "The Bay Psalm-Book" in the Prince Library in
+1830 when Dr. Wisner wrote his four sermons on the Old South Church of
+Boston,--a copy annotated by Dr. Prince and used by him while he was
+engaged on his revision. It has disappeared, together with many other
+important books and manuscripts belonging to the same library. The
+vicissitudes through which this most valuable collection has passed--lying
+neglected for years on shelves, in boxes, and in barrels in the
+steeple-room of the Old South Church, depleted to use for lighting fires,
+injured by British soldiery, but injured still more by the neglect and
+indifference of its custodians--are too painful to contemplate or relate.
+They contribute to the scholarly standing and honor of neither pastors nor
+congregations during those years. It is enough to state, however, that it
+is to the noble and ill-requited forethought of Dr. Prince that we owe all
+but three of the copies of the Bay Psalm-Book which are now known to be in
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>There is also a perfect copy of the first edition of the old book in the
+Lenox Library in New York, and the manner in which it was acquired (and
+also some further accounts of two of our old friends of the Prince Library,
+the acquisitions of Messrs. Crowninshield and Liverraore) is told so
+entertainingly by Henry Stevens, of Vermont, in his charming book,
+"Recollections of Mr. James Lenox" that it is best to quote his account in
+full:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"For nearly ten years Mr. Lenox had entertained a longing de
+    to possess a perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book.' He gave me to
+    understand that if an opportunity occurred of securing a copy for him I
+    might go as far as one hundred guineas. Accordingly from 1847 till his
+    death, six years later, my good friend William Pickering and I put our
+    heads and book-hunting forces together to run down this rarity. The
+    only copy we knew of on this side the Atlantic was a spotless one in
+    the Bodleian Library, which had lain there unrecognized for ages, and
+    even in the printed catalogue of 1843 its title was recorded without
+    distinction among the common herd of Psalms in verse. I had handled it
+    several times with great reverence, and noted its many peculiar points,
+    but, as agreed with Mr. Pickering, without making any sign or imparting
+    any information to our good and obliging friend Dr. Bandinel, Bodley's
+    Librarian. We thought that when we had secured a copy for oursel
+    it would be time enough to acquaint the learned Doctor that he was
+    entertaining unawares this angel of the New World. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Under these circumstances, therefore, only an experienced collector
+    can judge of my surprise and inward satisfaction, when on the 12
+    January, 1855, at Sotheby's, at one of the sales of Pickering's stock,
+    after untying parcel after parcel to see what I might chance to see,
+    and keeping ahead of the auctioneer, Mr. Wilkinson, on resolving to
+    prospect in one parcel more before he overtook me, my eye rested
+    an instant only on the long-lost Benjamin, clean and unspotted. I
+    instantly closed the parcel (which was described in the Catalogue as
+    Lot '531 Psalmes, other editions, 1630 to 1675 black letter, a parcel')
+    and tightened the string just as Alfred came to lay it on the table. A
+    cool-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing to the table behind Mr.
+    Lilly I quietly bid, in a perfectly natural tone, 'Sixpence,' and so
+    the bids went on increasing by sixpence until half a crown was reached,
+    and Mr. Lilly had loosened the string. Taking up this very volume he
+    turned to me and remarked that 'This looks a rare edition, Mr. Stevens,
+    don't you think so? I do not remember having seen it before,' and
+    raised the bid to five shillings. I replied that I had little doubt of
+    its rarity though comparatively a late edition of the Psalms,
+    at the same time gave Mr. Wilkinson a six-penny nod. Thenceforth a
+    'spirited competition' arose between Mr. Lilly and myself, until
+    finally the lot was knocked down to 'Stevens' for nineteen shillings. I
+    then called out with perhaps more energy than discretion, 'Delivered!'
+    On pocketing this volume, leaving the other seven to take the usual
+    course, Mr. Lilly and others inquired with some curiosity, 'What rarity
+    have you got now?' 'Oh, nothing,' said I, 'but the first English book
+    printed in America.' There was a pause in the sale, while all had a
+    good look at the little stranger. Some said jocularly, 'There has
+    evidently been a mistake; put up the lot again.' Mr. Stevens, with the
+    book again safely in his pocket, said, 'Nay, if Mr. Pickering, whose
+    cost mark of [3s] did not recognize the prize he had won, certainly the
+    cataloguer might be excused for throwing it away into the hands of the
+    right person to rescue, appreciate, and preserve it. I am now fully
+    rewarded for my long and silent hunt of seven years.'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"On reaching Morley's I eagerly collated the volume, and at first found
+    it right witli all the <i>usual</i> signatures correct. The leaves were
+    not paged or folioed. But on further collation I missed sundry of the
+    Psalms, enough to fill four leaves. The puzzle was finally solved when
+    it was discovered that the inexperienced printer had marked the sheet
+    with the signature w after v, which is very unusual. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"This was a very disheartening disappointment, but I held my tongue,
+    and knowing that my old friend and correspondent, George Liverm
+    of Cambridge, N. E., possessed an imperfect copy, which he and Mr.
+    Crowninshield, after the noble example of the 'Lincoln Nosegay,' had
+    won from the Committee of the 'Old South' together with another and
+    perfect copy, I proposed an advantageous exchange and obtained
+    four missing leaves. Mr. Crowninshield strongly advised Mr. Livermore
+    against parting with his four leaves, because, as he said, 'They would
+    enable Stevens to complete his copy and to place it in the library of
+    Mr. Lenox, who would then crow over us because he also had a perfect
+    copy of "The Bay-Psalm Book."'</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Having thus completed my copy and had it bound by Francis Bedford in
+    his best style, I sent it to Mr. Lenox for &pound;80. Five years later I
+    bought the Crowninshield Library in Boston for $10,000, mainly to
+    obtain his perfect copy of 'The Bay Psalm Book,' and brought the whole
+    library to London. This second copy, after being held several months,
+    was at the suggestion of Mr. Thomas Watts, offered to the British
+    Museum for &pound;150. The Keeper of the Printed Books, however, never had
+    the courage to send it before the Trustees for approval and payment; so
+    after waiting five or six years longer the volume was withdrawn, bound
+    by Bedford, taken to America in 1868, and sold to Mr. George Brinley
+    for 150 guineas. At the Brinley sale, in March, 1878, it was bought by
+    Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for $1200, or more than three times the cost
+    of my first copy to Mr. Lenox."</blockquote>
+
+<p>We hear the expression of a book being "worth its weight in gold." "The Bay
+Psalm-Book," in the Library of the American Antiquarian Society, weighs
+nine ounces, hence Mr. Vanderbilt paid at least seven times its weight in
+gold for his precious book. Lowndes's "Bibliographers' Manual" says, "This
+volume, which is extremely rare and would at an auction in America produce
+from four to six thousand dollars, is familiarly termed 'The Bay Psalm
+Book.'" This must have been intended to be printed four to six hundred
+dollars, and is about as correct as the remainder of the description in
+that manual.</p>
+
+<p>The copy which is spoken of by Mr. Stevens as being in the Bodleian Library
+at Oxford was once the property of Bishop Tanner, the famous antiquary.
+Thus it is seen that there are seven copies at least of the first edition
+of "The Bay Psalm-Book" now in existence in America, instead of "five or
+at the most six," as a recent writer in "The Magazine of American History"
+states.</p>
+
+<p>And of all the manifold later editions of the New England Psalm-Book
+comparatively few copies now remain. Occasionally one is discovered in an
+old church library or seen in the collection of an antiquary. It is usually
+found to bear on its titlepage the name of its early owner, and often,
+also, in a different handwriting, the simple record and date of his death.
+Tender little memorial postils are frequently written on the margins of
+the pages: "Sung this the day Betty was baptized"--"This Psalm was sung at
+Mothers Funeral" "Gods Grace help me to heed this word." Sometimes we see
+on the blank pages, in a fine, cramped handwriting, the record of the
+births and deaths of an entire family. More frequently still we find the
+familiar and hackneyed verses of ancient titlepage lore, such as are
+usually seen on the blank leaves of old Bibles. This script was written in
+a "Bay Psalm-Book" of the sixteenth edition, and with the characteristic
+indifference of our New England forefathers for tiresome repetition, or
+possibly with their disdain of novelty, was seen on each and every blank
+page of the book:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Israel Balch, His Book,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;God give him Grace theirin to look<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And when the Bell for him doth toal<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;May God have mearcy on his Sole."</blockquote>
+
+<p>What the diction lacked in variety is quite made up, however, in the
+spelling, which was painstakingly different on each page.</p>
+
+<p>Another Psalm-Book bore, inscribed in an elegant, minute handwriting, these
+lines, which were probably intended for verse, since the first word of each
+line commenced with a capital letter:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Abednego Prime His Book<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When he withein these pages looks<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;May he find Grace to sing therein<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Seventeen hundred and forty-seven."</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is certainly pretty bad poetry,--bad enough to be worthy a place in
+"The Bay Psalm Book,"--but is also a most noble, laudable, and necessary
+aspiration; for power of Grace was plainly needed to enable Abednego or any
+one else to sing from those pages; and our pious New England forefathers
+must have been under special covenant of grace when they persevered against
+such obstacles and under such overwhelming disadvantages in having singing
+in their meetings.</p>
+
+<p>Another copy of the old New England Psalm-Book was thus inscribed:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Elam Noyes His Book<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;You children of the name of Noyes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Make Jesus Christ your only choyse."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The early members of the Noyes family all seemed to be exceedingly and
+properly proud of this rhyming couplet; it formed a sort of patent of
+nobility. They wrote the pious injunction to their descendants in their
+Psalm-Books and their Bibles, in their wills, their letters; and they,
+with the greatest unanimity of feeling, had it cut upon their several
+tombstones. It was their own family motto,--their totem, so to speak.</p>
+
+<p>In a New England Psalm-Book in the possession of the American Antiquarian
+Society there is written in the distinct handwriting of Isaiah Thomas these
+explanatory words:--</p>
+
+<p>"This was the Pocket Psalm-book of John Symmons who died at Salem at
+100 years. He was born at North Salem went a-fishing in his youth was a
+prisoner with the Indians in Nova Scotia afterwards followed his labours in
+a Shipyard and till great old age laboured upon his lands and died
+without pain Aet 100. 31 October, 1791. He was a worthy conscientious and
+well-informed man and agreeable until the last hour of his life."</p>
+
+<p>I can think of no pleasanter tribute to be given to the character of any
+one than the simple words, "He was agreeable until the last hour of his
+life." What share in the production and maintenance of that amiable and
+enviable condition of disposition may be attributed to the ever-present
+influence of the Pocket Psalm-Book cannot be known; but the constant
+study of the holy though clumsy verses may have largely caused that sweet
+agreeability which so characterized John Symmons.</p>
+
+<p>There lies now before me a copy of one of the early editions of "The Bay
+Psalm-Book." As I open the little dingy octavo volume, with its worn
+and torn edges, I am conscious of that distinctive, penetrating,
+<i>old-booky</i> smell,--that ancient, that fairly <i>obsolete</i> odor that
+never is exhaled save from some old, infrequently opened, leather-bound
+volume, which has once in years far past been much used and handled. A book
+which has never been familiarly used and loved cannot have quite the same
+antique perfume. The mouldering, rusty, flaky leather comes off in a
+yellow-brown powder on my fingers as I take up the book; and the cover
+nearly breaks off as I open it, though with tender, book-loving usage. The
+leather, though strong and honest, has rotted or disintegrated until it has
+almost fallen into dust. Across the yellow, ill-printed pages there runs,
+zig-zagging sideways and backwards crab-fashion on his crooked brown legs,
+one of those pigmy book-spiders,--those ugly little bibliophiles that seem
+flatter even than the close-pressed pages that form their home.</p>
+
+<p>Fair Puritan hands once held this dingy little book, honest Puritan eyes
+studied its ill-expressed words, and sweet Puritan lips sang haltingly but
+lovingly from its pages. This was "Cicely Morse Her Book" in the year 1710,
+and bears on many a page her name and the simple little couplet:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"In youth I praise<br />
+  And walk thy ways."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And pretty it were to see Cicely in her praiseful and godly-walking youth,
+as she stood primly clad in her sad-colored gown and long apron, with a
+quoif or ciffer covering her smooth hair, and a red whittle on her slender
+shoulders, a-singing in the old New England meeting-house through the
+long, tedious psalms, which were made longer and more tedious still by the
+drawling singing and the deacons' "lining." Truly that were a pretty sight
+for our eyes, and for other eyes than ours, without doubt. Staid Puritan
+youth may have glanced soberly across the old meeting-house at the fair
+girl as she sung the Song of Solomon, with its ardent wording, without any
+very deep thought of its symbolic meaning:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Let him with kisses of his mouth<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;be pleased me to kiss,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Because much better than the wine<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thy loving-kindness is.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To troops of horse in Pharoahs coach,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;my love, I thee compare,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Thy neck with chains, with jewels new,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thy cheeks full comely are.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Borders of gold with silver studs<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for thee make up we will,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Whilst that the king at's table sits<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;my spikenard yields her smell.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;Like as of myrrh a bundle is<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;my well-belov'd to be,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Through all the night betwixt my breasts<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;his lodging-place shall be;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;My love as in Engedis vines<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;like camphire-bunch to me,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;So fair, my love, thou fair thou art<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thine eyes as doves eyes be."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school--that
+safety-valve of young New England life--had not then been established or
+even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical
+love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old
+meeting-house at Cicely as she sung.</p>
+
+<p>But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book. She may
+have been stately and prosperous and seated in the dignified "foreseat;"
+she may have been feeble and infirm in her place in the "Deaf Pue;" and she
+may have been careworn and sad, tired of fighting against poverty, worn
+with dread of fierce Indians, weary of the howls of the wolves in the dense
+forests so near, and home-sick and longing for the yonderland, her "faire
+Englishe home;" but were she sad or careworn or heartsick, in her treasured
+psalm-book she found comfort,--comfort in the halting verses as well as
+in the noble thoughts of the Psalmist. And the glamour of eternal,
+sweet-voiced youth hangs around the gentle Cicely, through the power of the
+inscription in the old psalm-book,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"In youth I praise<br />
+  And walk thy ways,"--</blockquote>
+
+<p>the romance of the time when Cicely, the Puritan commonwealth, the whole
+New World was young.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XIII</h1>
+
+<h2>Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The metrical translation of the Psalms known as Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was doubtless used in the public worship of God in many of the
+early New England settlements, especially those of the Connecticut River
+Valley, though the old register of the town of Ipswich is the only local
+record that gives positive proof of its use in the Puritan church. In
+1693 an edition of Sternhold and Hopkins was printed in Cambridge,
+Massachusetts. It was not a day nor a land where a whole edition of such a
+book would be printed for reference or comparison only; and to thus publish
+the work of the English psalmists in the very teeth of the popularity of
+"The Bay Psalm Book" is to me a proof that Sternhold and Hopkins' Version
+was employed far more extensively in the colonial churches and homes than
+we now have records of, and than many of our church historians now fancy.
+Certainly the familiar English psalm-books must have been brought across
+the ocean and used temporarily until the newly landed colonists could
+acquire the version of Ainsworth or of the New England divines.</p>
+
+<p>An everlasting interest attaches to this metrical arrangement of the
+Psalms, to Americans as well as to Englishmen, because it was the earliest
+to be adopted in public worship in England. According to Strype, in his
+Memorial, the singing of psalms was allowed in England as early as 1548,
+but it was not until 1562 that the versified psalms of Sternhold and
+Hopkins were appended to the Book of Common Prayer. Sternhold and Hopkins'
+Version was also the first to give all the psalms of David in English verse
+to the English public.</p>
+
+<p>Very little is known of the authors of this version. Sternhold was educated
+at Oxford; was Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., was a
+"bold and busy Calvinist," and died in 1549. The little of interest told
+of John Hopkins is that he was a minister and schoolmaster, and that he
+assisted the work of Sternhold.</p>
+
+<p>The full reason for Sternhold's pious work is thus given by an old English
+author, Wood: "Being a most zealous reformer and a very strict liver he
+became so scandalyzed at the loose amorous songs used in the court that he
+forsooth turned into English metre fifty-one of Davids Psalms, and caused
+musical notes to be set to them, thinking thereby that the courtiers
+would sing them instead of their sonnets; but they did not, only some few
+excepted." The preface printed in the book stated Sternhold's wish and
+intention that the verses should be sung by Englishmen, not only in church,
+but "moreover in private houses for their godly solace and comfort; laying
+apart all ungodly Songs &amp; Ballads which tend only to the nourishment of
+vice &amp; corrupting of youth."</p>
+
+<p>The first edition contained nineteen psalms only, which were all versified
+by Sternhold. It was published in 1548 or 1549, under this title, "Certayn
+Psalmes chosen out of the Psalter of Daid and drawen into English Metre by
+Thomas Sternhold Groom of ye Kynges Maiesties Roobes." I believe no copy of
+this edition is now known to exist.</p>
+
+<p>The praise which Sternhold received for his pious rhymes had the same
+effect upon him as did similar encomiums upon his predecessor, the French
+psalm-writer Marot,--it encouraged him to write more psalm-verses.</p>
+
+<p>The second edition was printed in 1549, and contained thirty-seven psalms
+by Sternhold and seven by Hopkins. It bore this title, "Al such Psalmes of
+David as Thomas Sternehold late grome of his maiesties robes did in his
+lyfe tyme drawe into English metre." It was a well-printed book and copies
+are still preserved in the British Museum and the Public Library of
+Cambridge, England. This second and enlarged edition was dedicated, in a
+four-page preface, to King Edward VI., and a pretty story is told of the
+young king's interest in the verses. The delicate and gentle boy of twelve
+heard Sternhold when "singing them to his organ" as Strype says, and
+wandered in to hear the music and listen to the words. So great was his
+awakened interest in the sacred songs that Sternhold resolved to write in
+verse for him still further of the psalms. The dedication reads: "Seeing
+that your tender and godly zeale dooth more delight in the holye songs of
+veritie than in any fayncd rymes of vanytie, I am encouraged to travayle
+further in the said booke of Psalmes." This young king restored to the
+English people the free reading of the Bible, which his wicked father,
+Henry VIII., had forbidden them, and he was of a sincerely religious
+nature. He also was a music-lover, and encouraged the art as much as his
+short life and troubled reign permitted.</p>
+
+<p>Hopkins also wrote a preface for his share of the work, in which he spoke
+with much modesty of himself and much praise of Sternhold. He said his own
+verses were not "in any parte to bee compared with his [Sternhold's] most
+exquisite dooynges." He thinks, however, that his owne are "fruitfull
+though they bee not fyne."</p>
+
+<p>The third edition, in 1556, contained fifty-one psalms; the fourth, in
+1560, had sixty-seven psalms; the fifth, in 1561, increased the number to
+eighty-seven; and in 1562 or 1563 the whole book of psalms appeared. Other
+authors had some share in this work: Norton, Whyttyngham (a Puritan divine
+who married Calvin's sister), Kethe, who wrote the 100th Psalm, "All people
+that on earth do dwell," which is still seen in some of our hymn-books. Of
+all these men, sly old Thomas Fuller truthfully and quaintly said, "They
+were men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more
+of Jordan than of Helicon."</p>
+
+<p>For over one hundred years from the first publication there was a steady
+outpour of editions of these Psalms. Before the year 1600 there were
+seventy-four editions,--a most astonishing number for the times; and from
+1600 to 1700 two hundred and thirty-five editions. In 1868 six hundred and
+one editions were known, including twenty-one in this nineteenth century
+and doubtless there were still others uncatalogued and forgotten. Among
+other editions this version had in the time of Charles II. two in
+shorthand, one printed by "Thos. Cockerill at the Three Legs and Bible in
+the Poultry." Two copies of these editions are in the British Museum. They
+are tiny little 64mos, of which half a dozen could be laid side by side on
+the palm of the hand. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version had also in 1694 the
+honor of having arranged for it a Concordance.</p>
+
+<p>Upon no production of the religious Muse in the English tongue has greater
+diversity of criticism been displayed or more extraordinary or varied
+judgment been rendered than upon Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. A world of
+testimony could be adduced to fortify any view which one chose to take
+of them. At the time of their early publication they induced a swarm of
+stinging lampoons and sneering comments, that often evince most plainly
+that a difference in religious belief or scorn for an opposing sect brought
+them forth. The poetry of that and the succeeding century abounds in
+allusions to them. Phillips wrote:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>      "Singing with woful noise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Like a crack'd saints bell jarring in the steeple,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Tom Sternhold's wretched prick-song for the people."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Another poet, a courtier, wrote:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms<br />
+When they translated David's psalms."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But I see no signs of qualmishness; they show to me rather a healthy
+sturdiness as one of their strongest characteristics.</p>
+
+<p>Pope at a later day wrote:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Not but there are who merit other palms<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The boys and girls whom charity maintains<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Implore your help in these pathetic strains.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;How could devotion touch the country pews<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Unless the gods bestowed a proper muse."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Wesley sneered at this version, saying, "When it is seasonable to sing
+praises to God we do it, not in the scandalous doggrel of Hopkins and
+Sternhold, but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry, such
+as would provoke a <i>critic</i> to turn <i>Christian</i> rather than a
+<i>Christian</i> to turn <i>critic</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The edition of 1562 was printed with the notes of melodies that were then
+called Church Tunes. They formed the basis of all future collections of
+psalm-music for over a century. They soon were published in harmony in four
+parts, "which may be sung to all musical instrumentes set forth for the
+encrease of vertue and abolyshing of other vayne and tryfling ballads." In
+1592 a very important collection of psalm-tunes was published to use with
+Sternhold and Hopkins' words. It is called "The Whole Booke of Psalmes:
+with their wonted tunes as they are sung in Churches composed into four
+parts." This book is noteworthy because in it the tunes are for the first
+time named after places, as is still the custom. The music contained square
+or oblong notes and also lozenge-shaped notes. The square note was a
+"semy-brave," the lozenge-shaped note was a "prycke" or a "mynymme," and
+"when there is a prycke by the square note, that prycke is half as much as
+the note that goeth before."</p>
+
+<p>Music at that time was said to be pricked, not printed,--the word being
+derived from the prick or dot which formed the head of the note. Any song
+which was printed in various parts was called a prick-song, to distinguish
+it from one sung extemporaneously or by ear. The word prick-song occurs not
+only in all the musical books, but in the literature of the time, and in
+Shakespeare. "Tom Sternhold's" songs were entitled to be called prick-songs
+because they had notes of music printed with them. Many of the tunes
+in this collection were taken from the Genevan Psalter and Luther's
+Psalm-Book, or from Marot and Beza's French Book of Psalms. Hence they were
+irreverently called "Genevan Jiggs," and "Beza's Ballets."</p>
+
+<p>There is much difference shown in the wording of these various editions of
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms. The earlier ones were printed as Sternhold
+wrote them; but with the Genevan editions began great and astonishing
+alterations. Warton, who was no lover of Sternhold and Hopkins' verses,
+calling them "the disgrace of sacred poetry," said of these attempted
+improvements, with vehemence, that "many stanzas already too naked and weak
+like a plain old Gothic edifice stripped of its signatures of antiquity,
+have lost that little and almost only strength and support which they
+derived from ancient phrases." Other old critics thought that Sternhold,
+could he return to life, would hardly know his own verses.</p>
+
+<p>This is Sternhold's rendering of the Psalm in the edition of 1549:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;1.  The heavens &amp; the fyrmamente<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;do wondersly declare<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The glory of God omnipotent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;his workes and what they are.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;2.  Ech daye declareth by his course<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;an other daye to come<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And By the night we know lykwise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a nightly course to run.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;3.  There is no laguage tong or speche<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;where theyr sound is not heard,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In al the earth and coastes thereof<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;theyr knowledge is conferd.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;4.  In them the lord made royally<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a settle for the sunne<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Where lyke a Gyant joyfully<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;he myght his iourney runne.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;5.  And all the skye from ende to ende<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;he compast round about<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;No man can hyde hym from his heate<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;but he wll fynd hym out</blockquote>
+
+<p>In order to show the liberties taken with the text we can compare with it
+the Genevan edition printed in 1556. The second verse of that presumptuous
+rendering reads,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The wonderous works of God appears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;by every days success<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The nyghts which likewise their race runne<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the selfe same thinges expresse."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The fourth,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"In them the lorde made for the sunne<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a place of great renoune<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Who like a bridegrome rady-trimed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;doth from his chamber come."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The expression "rady-trimed," meaning close-shaven, is often instanced as
+one of the inelegancies of Sternhold, but he surely ought not to be held
+responsible for the "improvements" of the Genevan edition published after
+his death.</p>
+
+<p>The Genevan editors also invented and inserted an extra verse:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And as a valiant champion<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;who for to get a prize<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;With joye doth hast to take in hande<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;some noble enterprise."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The fifth verse is thus altered:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And al the skye from ende to ende<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;he compasseth about,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Nothing can hyde it from his heate<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;but he wil finde it out."</blockquote>
+
+<p>I cannot express the indignation with which I read these belittling and
+weakening alterations and interpolations; they are so unjust and
+so degrading to the reputation of Sternhold. It seems worse than
+forgery--worse than piracy; for instead of stealing from the defenceless
+dead poet, it foists upon him a spurious and degrading progeny; there is no
+word to express this tinkering libellous literary crime.</p>
+
+<p>Cromwell had a prime favorite among these psalms; it was the one hundred
+and ninth and is known as the "cursing psalm." Here are a few lines from
+it:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>  "As he did cursing love, it shall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;betide unto him so,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And as he did not blessing love<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;it shall be farre him fro,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As he with cursing clad himselfe<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;so it like water shall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Into his bowels and like oyl<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Into his bones befall.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As garments let it be to him<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to cover him for aye<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And as a girdle wherewith he<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;may girded be alway."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Another authority gives the "cursing psalm" as the nineteenth of King
+James's version; but there is nothing in "The heavens declare the glory of
+God," &amp;c. to justify the nickname of "cursing."</p>
+
+<p>It is said when the tyrannical ruler Andros visited New Haven and attended
+church there that (Sternhold and Hopkins' Version being used) the fearless
+minister very inhospitably gave out the fifty-second psalm to be sung. The
+angry governor, who took it as a direct insult, had to listen to the lining
+and singing of these words, and I have no doubt they were roared out with a
+lusty will:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;1.  Why dost thou tyrant boast thyself<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thy wicked deeds to praise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Dost thou not know there is a God<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;whose mercies last alwaies?</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;2.  Why doth thy mind yet still deuise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;such wisked wiles to warp?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thy tongue untrue, in forging lies<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;is like a razer sharp.</blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;4.  Thou dost delight in fraude &amp; guilt<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;in mischief bloude and wrong:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thy lips have learned the flattering stile<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;O false deceitful tongue.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;5.  Therefore shall God for eye confounde<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and pluck thee from thy place.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thy seed and root from out the grounde<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and so shall thee deface;</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;6.  The just when they behold thy fall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;with feare will praise the Lord:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And in reproach of thee withall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;cry out with one accord.</blockquote>
+
+<p>When the unhappy King Charles fled from Oxford to a camp of troops he also
+was insulted by having the same psalm given out in his presence by the
+boorish chaplain of the troops. After the cruel words were ended the
+heartsick king rose and asked the soldiers to sing the fifty-sixth psalm.
+Whenever I read the beautiful and pathetic words, as peculiarly appropriate
+as if they had been written for that occasion only, I can see it all before
+me,--the great camp, the angry minister, the wretched but truly royal king;
+and I can hear the simple and noble song as it pours from the lips of
+hundreds of rude soldiers:</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;1.  Have mercy Lord on mee I pray<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for man would mee devour.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;He fighteth with me day by day<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and troubleth me each hour.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;2.  Mine enemies daily enterprise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to swallow mee outright<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To fight against me many rise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;O thou most high of might</blockquote>
+
+<hr />
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;5.  What things I either did or spake<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;they wrest them at thier wil:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And all the councel that they take<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;is how to work me il.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;6.  They all consent themselves to hide<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;close watch for me to lay:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;They spie my pathes, and snares have layd<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to take my life away.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;7.  Shall they thus scape on mischief set,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thou God on them wilt frowne:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For in his wrath he will not let<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to throw whole kingdomes downe.</blockquote>
+
+<p>It would perhaps be neither just nor conducive to proper judgment to gather
+only a florilege of noble verses from Sternhold and Hopkins' Version and
+point out none of the "weedy-trophies," the quaint and even uncouth lines
+which disfigure the work. We must, however, in considering and judging
+them, remember that many words and even phrases which at present
+seem rather ludicrous or undignified had, in the sixteenth century,
+significations which have now become obsolete, and which were then neither
+vulgar nor unpoetical. I also have been forced to take my selections from
+a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins printed in 1599, and bound up with a
+"Breeches Bible;" for I have access to no earlier edition. Sternhold
+and Hopkins themselves may not be in truth responsible for many of
+the crudities. Hopkins, in his rendition of the 12th verse of the
+seventy-fourth Psalm, thus addresses the Deity:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Why doost withdraw thy hand abacke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and hide it in thy lappe?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;O pluck it out and bee not slacke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to give thy foes a rap."</blockquote>
+
+<p>"Rap" may have meant a heavier, a mightier blow then than it does
+now-a-days.</p>
+
+<p>Here is another curious verse from the seventieth psalm,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Confounde them that apply<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and seeke to make my shame<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And at my harme doe laugh &amp; crye<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;So So there goeth the game."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The sixth verse of the fifty-eighth psalm is rendered thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"O God breake thou thier teeth at once<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;within thier mouthes throughout;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The tuskes that in thier great jawbones<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;like Lions whelpes hang out."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Another verse reads thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The earth did quake, the raine pourde down<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Heard men great claps of thunder<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And Mount Sinai shooke in such state<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As it would cleeve in sunder."</blockquote>
+
+<p>One verse of the thirty-fifth psalm reads thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"The belly-gods and flattering traine<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;that all good things deride<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;At me doe grin with greate disdaine<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and pluck thier mouths aside.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Lord when wilt thou amend this geare<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;why dost thou stay &amp; pause?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;O rid my soul, my onely deare,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;out of these Lions clawes."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The word tush occurs frequently and quaintly: "Tush I an sure to fail;"
+"Tush God forgetteth this."</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And with a blast doth puff against<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;such as would him correct<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Tush Tush saith he I have no dread."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Here are some of the curious expressions used:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Though gripes of grief and pangs full sore<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;shall lodge with us all night."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"For why their hearts were nothing lent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to Him nor to His trade."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Our soul in God hath joy and game."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"They are so fed that even for fat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thier eyes oft-times out start."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"They grin they mow they nod thier heads."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"While they have war within thier hearts."<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;as butter are thier words."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Divide them Lord &amp; from them pul<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;thier devilish double-tongue."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"My silly soul uptake."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"And rained down Manna for them to eat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a food of mickle-wonder."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"For joy I have both gaped &amp; breathed."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But it is useless to multiply these selections, which, viewed individually,
+are certainly absurd and inelegant. They often indicate, however, the exact
+thought of the Psalmist, and are as well expressed as the desire to be
+literal as well as poetic will permit them to be. Sternhold's verses
+compare quite favorably, when looked at either as a whole or with regard to
+individual lines, with those of other poets of his day, for Chaucer was the
+only great poet who preceded him.</p>
+
+<p>I must acknowledge quite frankly in the face of critics of both this and
+the past century that I always read Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms with a
+delight, a satisfaction that I can hardly give reasons for. Many of the
+renderings, though unmelodious and uneven, have a rough vigor and a
+sweeping swing that is to me wonderfully impressive, far more so than many
+of the elegant and polished methods of modern versifiers. And they are so
+thoroughly antique, so devoid of any resemblance to modern poems, that I
+love them for their penetrating savor of the olden times; and they seem no
+more to be compared and contrasted with modern verses than should an old
+castle tower be compared with a fine new city house. We prefer the latter
+for a habitation, it is infinitely better in every way, but we can admire
+also the rough grandeur of the old ruin.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XIV</h1>
+
+<h2>Other Old Psalm-Books.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>There are occasionally found in New England on the shelves of old
+libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old
+farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a
+pile of dusty books in a barrel,--there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered
+psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly
+used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed
+in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some
+colonist, in affectionate remembrance of the church of his youth, and sung
+from only with tender reminiscent longing in his own home. But when groups
+of settlers who were neighbors and friends in their old homes came to
+America and formed little segregated communities by themselves, there is no
+doubt that they sung for a time from the psalm-books that they brought with
+them.</p>
+
+<p>A rare copy is sometimes seen of Marot and Beza's French Psalm-book,
+brought to America doubtless by French Huguenot settlers, and used by them
+until (and perhaps after) the owners had learned the new tongue. Some of
+the Huguenots became members of the Puritan churches in America, others
+were Episcopalians. In Boston the Fancuils, Baudoins, Boutineaus,
+Sigourneys, and Johannots were all Huguenots, and attended the little brick
+church built on School Street in 1704, which was afterwards occupied by
+the Twelfth Congregational Society of Boston, and in 1788 became a Roman
+Catholic church.</p>
+
+<p>The pocket psalm-book of Gabriel Bernon, the builder of the old French Fort
+at Oxford, is one of Marot and Beza's Version, and is still preserved and
+owned by one of his descendants; other New England families of French
+lineage cherish as precious relics the French psalm-books of their Huguenot
+ancestors. There has been in France no such incessant production of new
+metrical versions of the psalms as in England. From the time of the
+publication of the first versified psalms in 1540, through nearly three
+centuries the psalm-book of all French Protestants has been that of Marot
+and Beza. This French version of the psalms is of special interest to all
+thoughtful students of the history of Protestantism, because it was the
+first metrical translation of the psalms ever sung and used by the people;
+and it was without doubt one of the most powerful influences that assisted
+in the religious awakening of the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>Clement Marot was the "Valet of the Bed-chamber to King Francis I.," and
+was one of the greatest French poets of his time; in fact, he gave his
+name to a new school of poetry,--"Marotique." He had tried his hand at
+an immense variety of profane verse, he had written ballades, chansons,
+pastourelles, vers &eacute;quivoques, eclogues, laments, complaints, epitaphs,
+chants-royals, blasons, contreblasons, dizains, huitains, envois; he had
+been, Warton says, "the inventor of the rondeau and the restorer of the
+madrigal;" and yet, in spite of his well-known ingenuity and versatility,
+it occasioned much surprise and even amusement when it was known that the
+gay poet had written psalm-songs and proposed to substitute them for the
+love-songs of the French court. I doubt if Marot thought very deeply of the
+religious influence of his new songs, in spite of Mr. Morley's belief in
+the versifier's serious intent. He was doubtless interested and perhaps
+somewhat infected by "Lutheranisme," though perhaps he was more of a
+free-thinker than a Protestant. He himself said of his faith:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"I am not a Lutherist<br />
+Nor Zuinglian and less Anabaptist,<br />
+I am of God through his son Jesus Christ.<br />
+I am one who has many works devised<br />
+From which none could extract a single line<br />
+Opposing itself to the law divine."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And again:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Luther did not come down from heaven for me<br />
+Luther was not nailed to the cross to be<br />
+My Saviour; for my sins to suffer shame,<br />
+And I was not baptized in Luther's name.<br />
+The name I was baptized in sounds so sweet<br />
+That at the sound of it, what we entreat<br />
+The Eternal Father gives."</blockquote>
+
+<p>In the year 1540, at the instigation of King Francis, Marot presented a
+manuscript copy of his thirty new psalm-songs to Charles V., king of Spain,
+receiving therefor two hundred gold doubloons. Francis encouraged him by
+further gifts, and so praised his work that the author soon published the
+thirty in a book which he dedicated to the king; and to which he also
+prefixed a metrical address to the ladies of France, bidding these fair
+dames to place their</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"doigts sur les espinettes<br />
+Pour dire sainctes chansonnettes."</blockquote>
+
+<p>These "sainctes chansonnettes" became at once the rage; courtiers and
+princes, lords and ladies, ever ready for some new excitement, seized at
+once upon the novel psalm-songs, and having no special or serious music for
+them, cheerfully sang the sacred words to the ballad-tunes of the times,
+and to their gailliards and measures, without apparently any very deep
+thought of their religious meaning. Disraeli says that each of the royal
+family and each nobleman chose for his favorite song a psalm expressive of
+his own feeling or sentiments. The Dauphin, as became a brave huntsman,
+chose</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre," </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"As the hart panteth after the water-brook,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>and he gayly and noisily sang it when he went to the chase. The Queen chose</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Ne vueilles pas, &ocirc; sire,<br />
+  Me reprendre en ton ire."</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Rebuke me not in thine indignation."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Antony, king of Navarre, sung</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Revenge moy prens la querelle,"</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Stand up, O Lord! to revenge my quarrel,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>to the air of a dance of Poitou. Diane de Poictiers chose</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Du fond de ma pens&eacute;e." </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"From the depth of my heart."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But when from interest in her psalm-song she wished to further read and
+study the Bible, she was warned from the danger with horror by the Cardinal
+of Lorraine. This religious awakening and inquiry was of course deprecated
+and dreaded by the Romish Church; to the Sorbonne all this rage for
+psalm-singing was alarming enough. What right had the people to sing God's
+word, "I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall be continually
+in my mouth"? The new psalm-songs were soon added to the list of "Heretical
+Books" forbidden by the Church, and Marot fled to Geneva in 1543. He had
+ere this been under ban of the Church, even under condemnation of death;
+had been proclaimed a heretic at all the cross-ways throughout the kingdom,
+and had been imprisoned. But he had been too good a poet and courtier to be
+lost, and the king had then interested himself and obtained the release of
+the versatile song writer. The fickle king abandoned for a second time the
+psalm versifier, who never again returned to France.</p>
+
+<p>The austere and far-seeing Calvin at once adopted Marot's version of the
+Psalms, now enlarged to the number of fifty, and added them to the Genevan
+Confession of Faith,--recommending however that they be sung with the grave
+and suitable strains written, for them by Guillaume Frane.</p>
+
+<p>The collection was completed with the assistance of Theodore Beza, the
+great theologian, and the demand for the books was so great that the
+printers could not supply them quickly enough. Ten thousand copies were
+sold at once,--a vast number for the times.</p>
+
+<p>But Marot was not happy in Geneva with Calvin and the Calvinists, as we can
+well understand. Beza, in his "History of the French Reformed Churches"
+said, "He (Marot) had always been bred up in a very bad school, and could
+not live in subjection to the reformation of the Gospel, and therefore
+went and spent the rest of his days in Piedmont, which was then in the
+possession of the king, where he lived in some security under the favor of
+the governor." He lived less than a year, however, dying in 1544.</p>
+
+<p>These psalms of Marot's passed through a great number and variety of
+editions. In addition to the Genevan publications, an immense number were
+printed in England. Nearly all the early editions were elegant books;
+carefully printed on rich paper, beautifully bound in rich moroccos and
+leathers, often emblazoned with gold on the covers, and with corners and
+clasps of precious metals,--they show the wealth and fashion of the owners.
+When, however, it came to be held an infallible sign of "Lutheranisme" to
+be a singer of psalms, simpler and cheaper bindings appear; hence the dress
+of the French Psalm-Book found in New England is often dull enough, but
+invariably firm and substantial.</p>
+
+<p>These psalms of Marot's are written in a great variety of song-measures,
+which seem scarcely as solemn and religious as the more dignified and even
+metres used by the early English writers. Some are graceful and smooth,
+however, and are canorous though never sonorous. They are pleasing to read
+with their quaint old spelling and lettering.</p>
+
+<p>In the old Sigourney psalm-book the nineteenth psalm was thus rendered:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Les cieux en chaque lieu<br />
+La puissance de Dieu<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Racourent aux humains<br />
+Ce grand entour espars<br />
+Publie en toutes parts<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;L'ouvrage de ses mains.</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Iour apres iour coulant<br />
+Du Saigneur va parlant<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Par longue experience.<br />
+La nuict suivant la nuict,<br />
+Nous presche et nous instruicst<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;De sa gr&aacute;d sapience"</blockquote>
+
+<p>Another much-employed metre was this, of the hundred and thirty-third
+psalm:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Asais aux bors do ce superbe fleuve<br />
+Que de Babel les campagnes abreuve,<br />
+Nos tristes coeurs ne pensoient qu' &agrave; Sion.<br />
+Chacun, helas, dans cette affliction<br />
+Les yeux en pleurs la morte peinte au visage<br />
+Pendit sa harpe aux saules du rivage."</blockquote>
+
+<p>A third and favorite metre was this:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Mais sa montagne est un sainct lieu:<br />
+Qui viendra done au mont de Dieu?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Qui est-ce qui l&agrave; tiendra place?<br />
+Le homine de mains et coeur lav&eacute;,<br />
+En vanit&eacute; non &eacute;slev&eacute;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Et qui n'a jur&eacute; en fallace."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Marot wrote in his preface to the psalms:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Thrice happy they who shall behold<br />
+And listen in that age of gold<br />
+As by the plough the laborer strays<br />
+And carman 'mid the public ways<br />
+And tradesman in his shop shall swell<br />
+The voice in psalm and canticle,<br />
+Sing to solace toil; again<br />
+From woods shall come a sweeter strain,<br />
+Shepherd and shepherdess shall vie<br />
+In many a tender Psalmody,<br />
+And the Creator's name prolong<br />
+As rock and stream return their song."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Though these words seem prophetic, the gay and volatile Marot could never
+have foreseen what has proved one of the most curious facts in religious
+history,--that from the airy and unsubstantial seed sown by the French
+courtier in such a careless, thoughtless manner, would spring the
+great-spreading and deep-rooted tree of sacred song.</p>
+
+<p>Little volumes of the metrical rendering of the Psalms, known as "Tate and
+Brady's Version," are frequently found in New England. It was the first
+English collection of psalms containing any smoothly flowing verses. Many
+of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal
+renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were
+"tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were
+certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate.
+It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able
+to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too
+modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write
+an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel.
+Brady--equally modest--translated the Aeneid in rivalry of Dryden. "This
+translation," says Johnson, "when dragged into the world did not live long
+enough to cry."</p>
+
+<p>Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a
+stable foundation or promise of long existence. But few of Tate and Brady's
+hymns are now seen in our church-collections of Hymns and Psalms. To them
+we owe, however, these noble lines, which were written thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Be thou, O God, exalted High,<br />
+And as thy glory fills the Skie<br />
+So let it be on Earth displaid<br />
+Till thou art here as There obeyed."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The hymn commencing,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"My soul for help on God relies,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;From him alone my safety flows,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>is also of their composition.</p>
+
+<p>The first edition of these psalms was printed in 1696, and bore this
+title, "The Book of Psalms, a new version in metre fitted to the tunes used
+in Churches. By N. Tate and N. Brady." It was dedicated to King William,
+and though its use was permitted in English churches, it never supplanted
+Sternhold and Hopkins' Version. In New England Tate and Brady's Psalms
+became more universally popular,--not, however, without fierce opposing
+struggles from the older church-members at giving up the venerated "Bay
+Psalm-Book."</p>
+
+<p>Another version of Psalms which is occasionally found in New England is
+known as "Patrick's Version." The title is "The Psalms of David in Metre
+Fitted to the Tunes used in Parish Churches by John Patrick, D.D. Precentor
+to the Charter House London." A curious feature of this octavo edition of
+1701, which I have, is, "An Explication of Some Words of less Common
+Use For the Benefit of the Common People." Here are a few of the
+"explications:"--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Celebrate--Make renown'd.<br />
+Climes--Countries differing in length of days.<br />
+Detracting--Lessening one's credit.<br />
+Fluid--Yielding.<br />
+Infest--Annoy.<br />
+Theam--Matter of Discourse.<br />
+Uncessant--Never ceasing.<br />
+Stupemlious--Astonishing."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Baxter said of Patrick, "His holy affection and harmony hath so far
+reconciled the Nonconformists that diverse of them use his Psalms in
+their congregation." I doubt if the version were used in New England
+Nonconformist congregations. Some of his verses read thus:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Lord hear the pray'rs and mournfull cries<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of mine afflicted estate,<br />
+And with thy Comforts chear my soul,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Before it is too late. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"My days consume away like Smoak<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mine anguish is so great,<br />
+My bones are not unlike a hearth<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Parched &amp; dry with heat. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Such is my grief I little else<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Can do but sigh and groan.<br />
+So wasted is my flesh I'm left<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Nothing but skin and bone. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Like th' Owl and Pelican that dwell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In desarts out of sight,<br />
+I sadly do bemoan myself,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In solitude delight. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"The wakeful bird that on Housetops<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Sits without company<br />
+And spends the night in mournful cries<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Leads such a life as I. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"The Ashes I rowl in when I eat<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Are tasted with my bread,<br />
+And with my Drink are mixed the tears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I plentifully shed."</blockquote>
+
+<p>A version of the Psalms which seems to have demanded and deserved more
+attention than it received was written by Cotton Mather. He was doomed to
+disappointment in seeing his version adopted by the New England churches
+just as his ambitions and hopes were disappointed in many other ways. This
+book was published in 1718. It was called "Psalterium Americanum. A Book
+of Psalms in a translation exactly conformed unto the Original; but all
+in blank verse. Fitted unto the tunes commonly used in the Church." By a
+curious arrangement of brackets and the use of two kinds of print these
+psalms could be divided into two separate metres and could be sung to
+tunes of either long or short metre. After each psalm were introduced
+explanations written in Mather's characteristic manner,--a manner both
+scholarly and bombastic. I have read the "Psalterium Americanum" with care,
+and am impressed with its elegance, finish, and dignity. It is so popular,
+however, even now-a-days, to jibe at poor Cotton Mather, that his Psalter
+does not escape the thrusts of laughing critics. Mr. Glass, the English
+critic, holds up these lines as "one of the rich things:"--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"As the Hart makes a panting cry<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;For cooling streams of water,<br />
+So my soul makes a panting cry<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;For thee--O Mighty God."</blockquote>
+
+<p>I have read these lines over and over again, and fail to see anything very
+ludicrous in them, though they might be slightly altered to advantage.
+Still they may be very absurd and laughable from an English point of view.</p>
+
+<p>So superior was Cotton Mather's version to the miserable verses given in
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" that one wonders it was not eagerly accepted by the
+New England churches. Doubtless they preferred rhyme--even the atrocious
+rhyme of "The Bay Psalm Book." And the fact that the "Psalterium
+Americanum" contained no musical notes or directions also militated against
+its use.</p>
+
+<p>Other American clergymen prepared metrical versions of the psalms that were
+much loved and loudly sung by the respective congregations of the writers.
+The work of those worthy, painstaking saints we will neither quote nor
+criticise,--saying only of each reverend versifier, "Truly, I would
+the gods had made thee poetical." Rev. John Barnard, who preached for
+fifty-four years in Marblehead, published at the age of seventy years a
+psalm-book for his people. Though it appeared in 1752, a time when "The Bay
+Psalm Book" was being shoved out of the New England churches, Barnard's
+Version of the Psalms was never used outside of Marblehead. Rev. Abijah
+Davis published another book of psalms in which he copied whole pages from
+Watts without a word of thanks or of due credit, which was apparently
+neither Christian, clerical nor manly behavior.</p>
+
+<p>Watts's monosyllabic Hymns, which were not universally used in America
+until after the Revolution, are too well known and are still too frequently
+seen to need more than mention. Within the last century a flood of new
+books of psalms of varying merit and existence has poured out upon the New
+England churches, and filled the church libraries and church, pews, the
+second-hand book shops, the missionary boxes, and the paper-mills.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XV</h1>
+
+<h2>The Church Music.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>Of all the dismal accompaniments of public worship in the early days of New
+England, the music was the most hopelessly forlorn,--not alone from the
+confused versifications of the Psalms which were used, but from the
+mournful monotony of the few known tunes and the horrible manner in which
+those tunes were sung. It was not much better in old England. In 1676
+Master Mace wrote of the singing in English churches, "'T is sad to
+hear what whining, toling, yelling or shreaking there is in our country
+congregations."</p>
+
+<p>A few feeble efforts were made in America at the beginning of the
+eighteenth century to attempt to guide the singing. The edition of 1698 of
+"The Bay Psalm-Book" had "Some few Directions" regarding the singing added
+on the last pages of the book, and simple enough they were in matter if not
+in form. They commence, "<i>First</i>, observe how many note-compass the
+tune is next the place of your first note, and how many notes above and
+below that so as you may begin the tune of your first note, as the rest may
+be sung in the compass of your and the peoples voices without Squeaking
+above or Grumbling below."</p>
+
+<p>This "Squeaking above and Grumbling below" had become far too frequent in
+the churches; Judge Sewall writes often with much self-reproach of his
+failure in "setting the tune," and also records with pride when he "set the
+psalm well." Here is his pathetic record of one of his mistakes: "He spake
+to me to set the tune. I intended Windsor and fell into High Dutch, and
+then essaying to set another tune went into a Key much to high. So I pray'd
+to Mr. White to set it which he did well. Litchfield Tune. The Lord Humble
+me and Instruct me that I should be the occasion of any interruption in the
+worship of God."</p>
+
+<p>The singing at the time must have been bad beyond belief; how much of its
+atrocity was attributable to the use of "The Bay Psalm-Book," cannot now
+be known. The great length of many of the psalms in that book was a fatal
+barrier to any successful effort to have good singing. Some of them were
+one hundred and thirty lines long, and occupied, when lined and sung, a
+full half-hour, during which the patient congregation stood. It is told of
+Dr. West, who preached in Dartmouth in 1726, that he forgot one Sabbath Day
+to bring his sermon to meeting. He gave out a psalm, walked a quarter of a
+mile to his house, got his sermon, and was back in his pulpit long before
+the psalm was finished. The irregularity of the rhythm in "The Bay Psalm
+Book" must also have been a serious difficulty to overcome. Here is the
+rendering given of the 133d Psalm:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>1. How good and sweet to see<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;i'ts for bretheren to dwell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;together in unitee: </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>2. Its like choice oyle that fell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the head upon<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;that down did flow<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the beard unto<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;beard of Aron:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The skirts of his garment<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;that unto them went down: </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>3. Like Hermons dews descent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sions mountains upon<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for there to bee<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the Lords blessing<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;life aye lasting<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;commandeth hee.</blockquote>
+
+<p>How this contorted song could have been sung even to the simplest tune by
+unskilled singers who possessed no guiding notes of music is difficult
+to comprehend. Small wonder that Judge Sewall was forced to enter in his
+diary, "In the morning I set York tune and in the second going over, the
+gallery carried it irresistibly to St. Davids which discouraged me very
+much." We can fancy him stamping his foot, beating time, and roaring York
+at the top of his old lungs, and being overcome by the strong-voiced
+gallery, and at last sadly succumbing to St. David's. Again he writes: "I
+set York tune and the Congregation went out of it into St. Davids in the
+very 2nd going over. They did the same 3 weeks before. This is the 2nd
+Sign. It seems to me an intimation for me to resign the Praecentor's Place
+to a better Voice. I have through the Divine Long suffering and Favour done
+it for 24 years and now God in his Providence seems to call me off, my
+voice being enfeebled." Still a third time he "set Windsor tune;" they "ran
+over into Oxford do what I would." These unseemly "running overs" became
+so common that ere long each singer "set the tune" at his own will and the
+loudest-voiced carried the day. A writer of the time, Rev. Thomas Walter,
+says of this reign of <i>concordia discors</i>: "The tunes are now
+miserably tortured and twisted and quavered, in some Churches, into a
+horrid Medly of confused and disorderly Voices. Our tunes are left to the
+Mercy of every unskilful Throat to chop and alter, to twist and change,
+according to their infinitely divers and no less Odd Humours and Fancies.
+I have myself paused twice in one note to take breath. No two Men in the
+Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good
+Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with
+perpetual Interfearings with one another."</p>
+
+<p>Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and
+unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they
+possessed,--a foretaste of heaven;</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"for all we know<br />
+Of what the blessed do above<br />
+Is that they sing and that they love."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous
+melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal.</p>
+
+<p>Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the
+early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering
+and holding the colonists together in love. And they reverenced their poor
+halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever
+a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a
+psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he
+doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must
+believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged,
+    I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved
+to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words.
+"The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears
+at the words, <i>bought with thy blood</i>." He also, with a vehemence of
+language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that
+he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of
+his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield,
+Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs.</p>
+
+<p>About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously
+prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing
+Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These
+thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound
+often with "The Bay Psalm-Book." They were reprinted from Playford's "Book
+of Psalms" and the notes of the staff were replaced with letters and dots,
+and the bars marking the measures were omitted. To the Puritans, this great
+number of new tunes appeared fairly monstrous, and formed the signal for
+bitter objections and fierce quarrels.</p>
+
+<p>In 1647 a tract had appeared on church-singing which had attracted much
+attention. It was written by Rev John Cotton to attempt to influence the
+adoption and universal use of "The Bay Psalm-Book." This tract thoroughly
+considered the duty of singing, the matter sung, the singers, and the
+manner of singing, and, like all the literature of the time, was full of
+Biblical allusion and quotation. It had been said that "man should sing
+onely and not the women. Because it is not permitted to a woman to speake
+in the Church, how then shall they sing? Much lesse is it permitted to them
+to prophecy in the church and singing of Psalms is a kind of Prophecying."
+Cotton fully answered and contradicted these false reasoners, who would
+have had to face a revolution had they attempted to keep the Puritan women
+from singing in meeting. The tract abounds in quaint expressions, such as,
+"they have scoffed at Puritan Ministers as calling the people to sing one
+of <i>Hopkins-Jiggs</i> and so <i>hop</i> into the pulpit." Though he wrote
+this tract to encourage good singing in meeting, his endorsement of "lining
+the Psalm" gave support to the very element that soon ruined the singing.
+His reasons, however, were temporarily good, "because many wanted books and
+skill to read." At that time, and for a century later, many congregations
+had but one or two psalm-books, one of which was often bound with the
+church Bible and from which the deacon lined the psalm.</p>
+
+<p>So villanous had church-singing at last become that the clergymen arose in
+a body and demanded better performances; while a desperate and disgusted
+party was also formed which was opposed to all singing. Still another band
+of old fogies was strong in force who wished to cling to the same way of
+singing that they were accustomed to; and they gave many objections to the
+new-fangled idea of singing by note, the chief item on the list being the
+everlasting objection of all such old fossils, that "the old way was good
+enough for our fathers," &amp;c. They also asserted that "<i>the names of
+the notes were blasphemous</i>;" that it was "popish;" that it was a
+contrivance to get money; that it would bring musical instruments into the
+churches; and that "no one could learn the tunes any way." A writer in the
+"New England Chronicle" wrote in 1723, "Truly I have a great jealousy
+that if we begin to <i>sing</i> by <i>rule</i>, the next thing will be
+to <i>pray</i> by rule and <i>preach</i> by rule and <i>then comes popery</i>."</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to overestimate the excitement, the animosity, and the
+contention which arose in the New England colonies from these discussions
+over "singing by rule" or "singing by rote." Many prominent clergymen wrote
+essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of
+Regular Singing," also a "Joco-serious Dialogue on Singing," by Reverend
+Mr. Symmes; "Cases of Conscience," compiled by several ministers; "The
+Accomplished Singer," by Cotton Mather, were the most important. "Singing
+Lectures" also were given in many parts of New England by various prominent
+ministers. So high was party feud that a "Pacificatory Letter" was
+necessary, which was probably written by Cotton Mather, and which soothed
+the troubled waters. The people who thought the "old way was the best" were
+entirely satisfied when they were convinced that the oldest way of all was,
+of course, by note and not by rote.</p>
+
+<p>This naive extract from the records of the First Church of Windsor,
+Connecticut, will show the way in which the question of "singing by rule"
+was often settled in the churches, and it also gives a very amusing glimpse
+of the colonial manner of conducting a meeting:--</p>
+
+<p>"July 2. 1736. At a Society meeting at which Capt. Pelatiah Allyn
+Moderator. The business of the meeting proceeded in the following manner
+Viz. the Moderator proposed as to the consideration of the meeting in the
+1st Place what should be done respecting that part of publick Woiship
+called Singing viz. whether in their Publick meetings as on Sabbath day,
+Lectures &amp;c they would sing the way that Deacon Marshall usually sung in
+his lifetime commonly called the 'Old Way' or whether they would sing the
+way taught by Mr. Beal commonly called 'Singing by Rule,' and when the
+Society had discoursed the matter the Moderator pioposed to vote for said
+two ways as followeth viz. that those that were for singing in publick in
+the way practiced by Deacon Marshall should hold up their hands and be
+counted, and then that those that were desirous to sing in Mr. Beals way
+called 'by Rule' would after show their minds by the same sign which method
+was proceeded upon accordingly. But when the vote was passed there being
+many voters it was difficult to take the exact number of votes in order to
+determine on which side the major vote was; whereupon the Moderator ordered
+all the voters to go out of the seats and stand in the alleys and then
+those that were for Deacon Marshalls way should go into the mens seats and
+those that were for Mr. Beals way should go into the womens seat and
+after much objections made against that way, which prevailed not with the
+Moderator, it was complied with, and then the Moderator desired that those
+that were of the mind that the way to be practiced for singing for the
+future on the Sabbath &amp;c should be the way sung by Deacon Marshall as
+aforesaid would signify the same by holding up their hands and be counted,
+and then the Moderator and myself went and counted the voters and the
+Moderator asked me how many there was. I answered 42 and he said there was
+63 or 64 and then we both counted again and agreed the number being 43.
+Then the Moderator was about to count the number of votes for Mr. Beals
+way of Singing called 'by Rule' but it was offered whether it would not be
+better to order the voters to pass out of the Meeting House door and there
+be counted who did accordingly and their number was 44 or 45. Then the
+Moderator proceeded and desired that those who were for singing in Public
+the way that Mr. Beal taught would draw out of their seats and pass out of
+the door and be counted. They replied they were ready to show their minds
+in any proper way where they were if they might be directed thereto but
+would not go out of the door to do the same and desired that they might be
+led to a vote where they were and they were ready to show their minds which
+the Moderator refused to do and thereupon declared that it was voted that
+Deacon Marshalls way of singing called the 'Old Way' should be sung in
+Publick for the future and ordered me to record the same as the vote of the
+Said Society which I refused to do under the circumstances thereof and have
+recorded the facts and proceedings."</p>
+
+<p>Good old lining, droning Deacon Marshall! though you were dead and gone,
+you and your years of psalm-singings were not forgotten. You lived, an
+idealized memory of pure and pious harmony, in the hearts of your old
+church friends. Warmly did they fight for your "way of singing;" with
+most undeniable and open partiality, with most dubious ingenuousness and
+rectitude, did your old neighbor, Captain Pelatiah Allyn, conduct that hot
+July music-meeting, counting up boldly sixty-three votes in favor of your
+way, when there were only forty-three voters on your side of the alley, and
+crowding a final decision in your favor. It is sad to read that when icy
+winter chilled the blood, warm partisanship of old friends also cooled, and
+innovative Windsor youth carried the day and the music vote, and your good
+old way was abandoned for half the Sunday services, to allow the upstart
+new fashion to take control.</p>
+
+<p>One happy result arose throughout New England from the victory of the
+ardent advocates of the "singing by rule,"--the establishment of the New
+England "singing-school,"--that outlet for the pent-up, amusement-lacking
+lives of young people in colonial times. What that innocent and
+happy gathering was in the monotonous existence of our ancestors and
+ancestresses, we of the present pleasure-filled days can hardly comprehend.</p>
+
+<p>Extracts from the records of various colonial churches will show how soon
+the respective communities yielded to the march of improvement and "seated
+the taught singers" together, thus forming choirs. In 1762 the church
+at Rowley, Massachusetts, voted "that those who have learned the art of
+Singing may have liberty to sit in the front gallery." In 1780 the same
+parish "requested Jonathan Chaplin and Lieutenant Spefford to assist the
+deacons in Raising the tune in the meeting house." In Sutton, in 1791, the
+Company of Singers were allowed to sit together, and $13 was voted to pay
+for "larning to sing by Rule." The Roxbury "First Church" voted in 1770
+"three seats in the back gallery for those inclined to sit together for
+the purpose of singing" The church in Hanover, in 1742, took a vote to
+see whether the "church will sing in the new way" and appoint a tuner. In
+Woodbury, Connecticut, in 1750 the singers "may sitt up Galery all day if
+they please but to keep to there own seat &amp; not to Infringe on the Women
+Pues." In 1763, in the Ipswich First Parish, the singers were allowed to
+sit "two back on each side of the front alley." Similar entries may be
+found in nearly every record of New England churches in the middle or
+latter part of that century.</p>
+
+<p>The musical battle was not finished, however, when the singing was at last
+taught by rule, and the singers were allowed to sit together and form a
+choir. There still existed the odious custom of "lining" or "deaconing"
+the psalm. To this fashion may be attributed the depraved condition of
+church-singing of which Walters so forcibly wrote, and while it continued
+the case seemed hopeless, in spite of singing-schools and singing-teachers.
+It would be trying to the continued uniformity of pitch of an ordinary
+church choir, even now-a-days, to have to stop for several seconds between
+each line to listen to a reading and sometimes to an explanation of the
+following line.</p>
+
+<p>The Westminster Assembly had suggested in 1664 the alternate reading and
+singing of each line of the psalm to those churches that were not well
+supplied with psalm-books. The suggestion had not been adopted without
+discussion, It was in 1680 much talked over in the church in Plymouth, and
+was adopted only after getting the opinion of each male church member.
+When once taken into general use the custom continued everywhere, through
+carelessness and obstinacy, long after the churches possessed plenty of
+psalm-books. An early complaint against it was made by Dr. Watts in the
+preface of his hymns, which were published by Benjamin Franklin in 1741. As
+Watts' Psalms and Hymns were not, however, in general use in New England
+until after the Revolution, this preface with its complaint was for a long
+time little seen and little heeded.</p>
+
+<p>It is said that the abolition came gradually; that the impetuous and
+well-trained singers at first cut off the last word only of the deacon's
+"lining;" they then encroached a word or two further, and finally sung
+boldly on without stopping at all to be "deaconed." This brought down
+a tempest of indignation from the older church-members, who protested,
+however, in vain. A vote in the church usually found the singers
+victorious, and whether the church voted for or against the "lining," the
+choir would always by stratagem vanquish the deacon. One old soldier took
+his revenge, however. Being sung down by the rampant choir, he still showed
+battle, and rose at the conclusion of the psalm and opened his psalm-book,
+saying calmly, "<i>Now</i> let the <i>people of the Lord sing</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The Rowley church tried diplomacy in their struggle against "deaconing,"
+by instituting a gradual abolishing of the custom. In 1785 the choir was
+allowed "to sing once on the Lord's Day without reading by the Deacon." In
+five years the Rowley singers were wholly victorious, and "lining out" the
+psalm was entirely discontinued.</p>
+
+<p>In 1770, dissatisfaction at the singing in the church was rife in
+Wilbraham, and a vote was taken to see whether the town would be willing
+to have singing four times at each service; and it was voted to "take into
+consideration the Broken State of this Town with regard to singing on the
+Sabbath Day." Special and bitter objection was made against the leader
+beating time so ostentatiously. A list of singers was made and a
+singing-master appointed. The deacon was allowed to lead and line and beat
+time in the forenoon, while the new school was to have control in the
+afternoon; and "whoever leads the singing shall be at liberty to use the
+motion of his hand while singing for the space of three months only." It is
+needless to state who came off victorious in the end. The deacon left as a
+parting shot a request to "make Inquiry into the conduct of those who call
+themselves the Singers in this town."</p>
+
+<p>In Worcester, in 1779, a resolution adopted at the town meeting was "that
+the mode of singing in the congregation here be without reading the psalms
+line by line." "The Sabbath succeeding the adoption of this resolution,
+after the hymn had been read by the minister, the aged and venerable Deacon
+Chamberlain, unwilling to abandon the custom of his fathers and his own
+honorable prerogative, rose and read the first line according to his usual
+practice. The singers, previously prepared to carry the desired alteration
+into effect, proceeded in their singing without pausing at the conclusion
+of the line. The white-haired officer of the church with the full power
+of his voice read on through the second line, until the loud notes of the
+collected body of singers overpowered his attempt to resist the progress
+of improvement. The deacon, deeply mortified at the triumph of the musical
+reformation, then seized his hat and retired from the meeting-house in
+tears." His conduct was censured by the church, and he was for a time
+deprived of partaking in the communion, for "absenting himself from the
+public services of the Sabbath;" but in a few weeks the unhouselled deacon
+was forgiven, and never attempted to "line" again.</p>
+
+<p>Though the opponents of "lining" were victorious in the larger villages and
+towns, in smaller parishes, where there were few hymn-books, the lining
+of the psalms continued for many years. Mr. Hood wrote, in 1846, the
+astonishing statement that "the habit of lining prevails to this day over
+three-fourths of the United States." This I can hardly believe, though I
+know that at present the practice obtains in out of the way towns with poor
+and ignorant congregations. The separation of the lines often gives a very
+strange meaning to the words of a psalm; and one wonders what the Puritan
+children thought when they heard this lino of contradictions that Hood
+points out:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"The Lord will come and He will not,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>and after singing that line through heard the second line,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Keep silence, but speak out."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Many new psalm-books appeared about the time of the Revolutionary War, and
+many church petitions have been preserved asking permission to use the
+new and more melodious psalm and hymn books. Books of instruction also
+abounded,--books in which the notes were not printed on the staff, and
+books in which there were staffs but no notes, only letters or other
+characters (these were called "dunce notes"); books, too, in which the
+notes were printed so thickly that they could scarcely be distinguished one
+from the other.</p>
+
+<blockquote>"A dotted tribe with ebon heads<br />
+That climb the slender fence along,<br />
+As black as ink, as thick as weeds,<br />
+Ye little Africans of song."</blockquote>
+
+<p>One book--perhaps the worst, since it was the most pretentious--was "The
+Compleat Melody or Harmony of Sion," by William Tansur,--"Ingenious
+Tans'ur Skilled in Musicks Art." It was a most superficial, pedantic, and
+bewildering composition. The musical instruction was given in the form of a
+series of ill-spelled dialogues between a teacher and pupil, interspersed
+with occasional miserable rhymes. It was ill-expressed at best, and
+such musical terms as "Rations of Concords," "Trilloes," "Trifdiapasons,"
+"Leaps," "Binding cadences," "Disallowances," "Canons," "Prime Flower
+of Florid," "Consecutions of Perfects," and "Figurates," make the book
+exceedingly difficult of comprehension to the average reader, though
+possibly not to a student of obsolete musical phraseology.</p>
+
+<p>A side skirmish on the music field was at this time fought between the
+treble and the tenor parts. Ravenscroft's Psalms and Walter's book had
+given the melody, or plain-song, to the tenor. This had, of course, thrown
+additional difficulties in the way of good singing; but when once the
+trebles obtained the leading part, after the customary bitter opposition,
+the improved singing approved the victory.</p>
+
+<p>Many objections, too, were made to the introduction of "triple-time" tunes.
+It gave great offence to the older Puritans, who wished to drawl out all
+the notes of uniform length; and some persons thought that marking and
+accenting the measure was a step toward the "Scarlet Woman." The time was
+called derisively, "a long leg and a short one."</p>
+
+<p>These old bigots must have been paralyzed at the new style of psalm-singing
+which was invented and introduced by a Massachusetts tanner and
+singing-master named Billings, and which was suggested, doubtless, by the
+English anthems. It spread through the choirs of colonial villages and
+towns like wild-fire, and was called "fuguing." Mr. Billings' "Fuguing
+Psalm Singer" was published in 1770. It is a dingy, ill-printed book with
+a comically illustrated frontispiece, long pages of instruction, and this
+motto:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"O, praise the Lord with one consent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And in this grand design<br />
+Let Britain and the Colonies<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Unanimously join."</blockquote>
+
+<p>The succeeding hymn-books, and the patriotic hymns of Billings in
+post-Revolutionary years have no hint of "Britain" in them. The names
+"Federal Harmony," "Columbian Harmony," "Continental Harmony," "Columbian
+Repository," and "United States Sacred Harmony" show the new nation.
+Billings also published the "Psalm Singer's Amusement," and other
+singing-books. The shades of Cotton, of Sewall, of Mather must have groaned
+aloud at the suggestions, instructions, and actions of this unregenerate,
+daring, and "amusing" leader of church-singing.</p>
+
+<p>It seems astonishing that New England communities in those times of anxious
+and depressing warfare should have so delightedly seized and adopted this
+unusual and comparatively joyous style of singing, but perhaps the new
+spirit of liberty demanded more animated and spirited expression; and
+Billings' psalm-tunes were played with drum and fife on the battlefield to
+inspire the American soldiers. Billings wrote of his fuguing invention, "It
+has more than twenty times the power of the old slow tunes. Now the solemn
+bass demands their attention, next the manly tenor, now the lofty counter,
+now the volatile treble. Now here! Now there! Now here again! Oh ecstatic,
+push on, ye sons of harmony!" Dr. Mather Byles wrote thus of fuguing:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>  "Down starts the Bass with Grave Majestic Air,<br />
+And up the Treble mounts with shrill Career,<br />
+With softer Sounds in mild melodious Maze<br />
+Warbling between, the Tenor gently plays<br />
+And, if th' inspiring Altos joins the Force<br />
+See! like the Lark it Wings its towering Course<br />
+Thro' Harmony's sublimest Sphere it flies<br />
+And to Angelic Accents seems to rise."</blockquote>
+
+<p>A more modern poet in affectionate remembrance thus sings the fugue:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"A fugue let loose cheers up the place,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;With bass and tenor, alto, air,<br />
+The parts strike in with measured grace,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And something sweet is everywhere. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"As if some warbling brood should build<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of bits of tunes a singing nest;<br />
+Each bringing that with which it thrilled<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And weaving it with all the rest."</blockquote>
+
+<p>All public worshippers in the meetings one hundred years ago did not,
+however, regard fuguing as "something sweet everywhere," nor did they agree
+with Billings and Byles as to its angelic and ecstatic properties. Some
+thought it "heartless, tasteless, trivial, and irreverent jargon." Others
+thought the tunes were written more for the absurd inflation of the singers
+than for the glory of God; and many fully sympathized with the man who
+hung two cats over Billings's door to indicate his opinion of Billings's
+caterwauling. An old inhabitant of Roxbury remembered that when fuguing
+tunes were introduced into his church "they produced a literally fuguing
+effect on the older people, who went out of the church as soon as the first
+verse was sung." One scandalized and belligerent old clergyman, upon the
+Sabbath following the introduction of fuguing into his church, preached
+upon the prophecy of Amos, "The songs of the temple shall be turned
+into howling," while another took for his text the sixth verse of the
+seventeenth chapter of Acts, "Those that have turned the world upside down,
+are come hither also." One indignant and disgusted church attendant thus
+profanely recorded in church his views:--</p>
+
+<p>"Written out of temper on a Pannel in one of the Pues in Salem Church:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Could poor King David but for once<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To Salem Church repair;<br />
+And hear his Psalms thus warbled out,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Good Lord, how he would swear</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"But could St Paul but just pop in,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;From higher scenes abstracted,<br />
+And hear his Gospel now explained,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;By Heavens, he'd run distracted."</blockquote>
+
+<p>These lines were reprinted in the "American Apollo" in 1792.</p>
+
+<p>The repetition of a word or syllable in fuguing often lead to some
+ridiculous variations in the meanings of the lines. Thus the words--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"With reverence let the saints appear<br />
+  And bow before the Lord,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>were forced to be sung, "And bow-wow-wow, And bow-ow-ow," and so on until
+bass, treble, alto, counter, and tenor had bow-wowed for about twenty
+seconds; yet I doubt if the simple hearts that sung ever saw the absurdity.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible while speaking of fuguing to pass over an extraordinary
+element of the choir called "singing counter." The counter-tenor parts in
+European church-music were originally written for boys' voices. From
+thence followed the falsetto singing of the part by men; such was also
+the "counter" of New England. It was my fortune to hear once in a country
+church an aged deacon "sing counter". Reverence for the place and song, and
+respect for the singer alike failed to control the irrepressible start
+of amazement and smile of amusement with which we greeted the weird and
+apparently demented shriek which rose high over the voices of the choir,
+but which did not at all disconcert their accustomed ears. Words, however
+chosen, would fail in attempting to describe the grotesque and uncanny
+sound.</p>
+
+<p>It is very evident, when once choirs of singers were established and
+attempts made for congregations to sing the same tune, and to keep
+together, and upon the same key, that in some way a decided pitch must be
+given to them to start upon. To this end pitch-pipes were brought into the
+singers' gallery, and the pitch was given sneakingly and shamefacedly to
+the singers. From these pitch-pipes the steps were gradual, but they led,
+as the Puritan divines foresaw, to the general introduction of musical
+instruments into the meetings.</p>
+
+<p>This seemed to be attacking the very foundations of their church; for the
+Puritans in England had, in 1557, expressly declared "concerning singing of
+psalms we allow of the people joining with one voice in a plain tune, but
+not in tossing the psalms from one side to the other with mingling of
+organs." The Round-heads had, in 1664, gone through England destroying the
+noble organs in the churches and cathedrals. They tore the pipes from the
+organ in Westminster Abbey, shouting, "Hark! how the organs go!" and, "Mark
+what musick that is, that is lawful for a Puritan to dance," and they sold
+the metal for pots of ale. Only four or five organs were left uninjured in
+all England. 'Twas not likely, then, that New England Puritans would take
+kindly to any musical instruments. Cotton Mather declared that there was
+not a word in the New Testament that authorized the use of such aids to
+devotion. The ministers preached often and long on the text from the
+prophecy of Amos, "I will not hear the melody of thy viols;" while,
+Puritan-fashion, they ignored the other half of the verse, "Take thou away
+from me the noise of thy songs." Disparaging comparisons were made with
+Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut,
+and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical
+knowledge, hurled text after text at the "fiddle-players."</p>
+
+<p>Some of the first pitch-pipes were comical little apple-wood instruments
+that looked like mouse-traps, and great pains was taken to conceal them as
+they were passed surreptitiously from hand to hand in the choir. I have
+seen one which was carefully concealed in a box that had a leather binding
+like a book, and which was ostentatiously labelled in large gilt letters
+"Holy Bible;" a piece of barefaced and unnecessary deception on the part of
+some pious New England deacon or chorister.</p>
+
+<p>Little wooden fifes were also used, and then metal tuning-forks. A canny
+Scotchman, who abhorred the thought of all musical instruments anywhere,
+managed to have one fling at the pitch-pipe. The pitch had been given but
+was much too high, and before the first verse was ended the choir had to
+cease singing. The Scotchman stood up and pointed his long finger to the
+leader, saying in broad accents of scorn, "Ah, Johnny Smuth, now ye can
+have a chance to blaw yer braw whustle agaen." At a similar catastrophe
+owing to the mistake of the leader in Medford, old General Brooks rose in
+his pew and roared in an irritated voice of command, "Halt! Take another
+pitch, Bailey, take another pitch."</p>
+
+<p>In 1713 there was sent to America an English organ, "a pair of organs" it
+was called, which had chanced, by being at the manufacturers instead of in
+a church, to have escaped the general destruction by the Round-heads. It
+was given by Thomas Brattle to the Brattle Street Church in Boston. The
+congregation voted to refuse the gift, and it was then sent to King's
+Chapel, where it remained unpacked for several months for fear of hostile
+demonstrations, but was finally set up and used. In 1740 a Bostonian named
+Bromfield made an organ, and it was placed in a meeting-house and used
+weekly. In 1794 the church in Newbury obtained an organ, and many
+unpleasant and disparaging references were made by clergymen of other
+parishes to "our neighbor's box of whistles," "the tooting tub."</p>
+
+<p>Violoncellos, or bass-viols, as they were universally called, were almost
+the first musical instruments that were allowed in the New England
+churches. They were called, without intentional irreverence, "Lord's
+fiddles." Violins were widely opposed, they savored too much of low, tavern
+dance-music. After much consultation a satisfactory compromise was agreed
+upon by which violins were allowed in many meetings, if the performers
+"would play the fiddle wrong end up." Thus did our sanctimonious
+grandfathers cajole and persuade themselves that an inverted fiddle was
+not a fiddle at all, but a small bass-viol. An old lady, eighty years old,
+wrote thus in the middle of this century, of the church of her youth:
+"After awhile there was a bass-viol Introduced and brought into meeting and
+did not suit the Old people; one Old Gentleman got up, took his hat off
+the peg and marched off. Said they had begun fiddling and there would be
+dancing soon." Another church-member, in derisive opposition to a clarinet
+which had been "voted into the choir," brought into meeting a fish-horn,
+which he blew loud and long to the complete rout of the clarinet-player and
+the singers. When reproved for this astounding behavior he answered stoutly
+that "if one man could blow a horn in the Lord's House on the Sabbath day
+he guessed he could too," and he had to be bound over to keep the peace
+before the following Sunday. A venerable and hitherto decorous old deacon
+of Roxbury not only left the church when the hated bass-viol began its
+accompanying notes, but he stood for a long time outside the church door
+stridently "caterwauling" at the top of his lungs. When expostulated with
+for this unseemly and unchristianlike annoyance he explained that he was
+"only mocking the banjo." To such depths of rebellion were stirred the
+Puritan instincts of these religious souls.</p>
+
+<p>Many a minister said openly that he would like to walk out of his pulpit
+when the obnoxious and hated flutes, violins, bass-viols, and bassoons were
+played upon in the singing gallery. One clergyman contemptuously announced
+"We will now sing and fiddle the forty-fifth Psalm." Another complained of
+the indecorous dress of the fiddle-player. This had reference to the almost
+universal custom, in country churches in the summer time, of the bass-viol
+player removing his coat and playing "in his shirt sleeves." Others hated
+the noisy tuning of the bass-viol while the psalm was being read. Mr.
+Brown, of Westerly, sadly deplored that "now we have only catgut and resin
+religion."</p>
+
+<p>In 1804 the church in Quincy, being "advanced," granted the singers the
+sum of twenty-five dollars to buy a bass-viol to use in meeting, and a few
+other churches followed their lead. From the year 1794 till 1829 the
+church in Wareham, Massachusetts, was deeply agitated over the question of
+"Bass-Viol, or No Bass-Viol." They voted that a bass-viol was "expedient,"
+then they voted to expel the hated abomination; then was obtained "Leave
+for the Bass Viol to be brought into ye meeting house to be Played On every
+other Sabbath &amp; to Play if chosen every Sabbath in the Intermission between
+meetings &amp; not to Pitch the Tunes on the Sabbaths that it don't Play" Then,
+they tried to bribe the choir for fifty dollars not to use the "bars-vile,"
+but being unsuccessful, many members in open rebellion stayed away from
+church and were disciplined therefor. Then they voted that the bass-viol
+could not be used unless Capt. Gibbs were previously notified (so he and
+his family need not come to hear the hated sounds); but at last, after
+thirty years, the choir and the "fiddle-player" were triumphant in Wareham
+as they were in other towns.</p>
+
+<p>We were well into the present century before any cheerful and also simple
+music was heard in our churches; fuguing was more varied and surprising
+than cheerful. Of course, it was difficult as well as inappropriate to
+suggest pleasing tunes for such words as these:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Far in the deep where darkness dwells,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The land of horror and despair,<br />
+Justice hath built a dismal hell,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And laid her stores of vengeance there: </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Eternal plagues and heavy chains,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Tormenting racks and fiery coals,<br />
+And darts to inflict immortal pains,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Dyed in the blood of damned souls."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But many of the words of the old hymns were smooth, lively, and
+encouraging; and the young singers and perhaps the singing-masters craved
+new and less sober tunes. Old dance tunes were at first adapted; "Sweet
+Anne Page," "Babbling Echo," "Little Pickle" were set to sacred words. The
+music of "Few Happy Matches" was sung to the hymn "Lo, on a narrow neck
+of land;" and that of "When I was brisk and young" was disguised with
+the sacred words of "Let sinners take their course." The jolly old tune,
+"Begone dull care," which began,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"My wife shall dance, and I will sing,<br />
+And merrily pass the day."</blockquote>
+
+<p>was strangely appropriated to the solemn words,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"If this be death, I soon shall be<br />
+From every pain and sorrow free,"</blockquote>
+
+<p>and did not seem ill-fitted either.</p>
+
+<p>"Sacred arrangements," "spiritual songs," "sacred airs," soon followed, and
+of course demanded singers of capacity and education to sing them. From
+this was but a step to a paid quartette, and the struggle over this last
+means of improvement and pleasure in church music is of too recent a date
+to be more than referred to.</p>
+
+<p>I attended a church service not many years ago in Worcester, where an old
+clergyman, the venerable "Father" Allen, of Shrewsbury, then too aged
+and feeble to preach, was seated in the front pew of the church. When a
+quartette of singers began to render a rather operatic arrangement of a
+sacred song he rose, erect and stately, to his full gaunt height, turned
+slowly around and glanced reproachfully over the frivolous, backsliding
+congregation, wrapped around his spare, lean figure his full cloak
+of quilted black silk, took his shovel hat and his cane, and stalked
+indignantly and sadly the whole length of the broad central aisle, out
+of the church, thus making a last but futile protest against modern
+innovations in church music. Many, in whom the Puritan instincts and blood
+are still strong, sympathize internally with him in this feeling; and all
+novelty-lovers must acknowledge that the sublime simplicity and deep piety
+in which the old Puritan psalm-tunes abound, has seldom been attained in
+the modern church-songs. Even persons of neither musical knowledge, taste,
+nor love, feel the power of such a tune as Old Hundred; and more modern and
+more difficult melodies, though they charm with their harmony and novelty,
+can never equal it in impressiveness nor in true religious influence.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XVI</h1>
+
+<h2>The Interruptions of the Services.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>Though the Puritans were such a decorous, orderly people, their religious
+meetings were not always quiet and uninterrupted. We know the torment they
+endured from the "wretched boys," and they were harassed by other
+annoying interruptions. For the preservation of peace and order they made
+characteristic laws, with characteristic punishments. "If any interrupt
+or oppose a preacher in season of worship, they shall be reproved by the
+Magistrate, and on repetition, shall pay &pound;5, or stand two hours on a block
+four feet high, with this inscription in Capitalls, 'A WANTON GOSPELLER.'"
+As with other of their severe laws the rigid punishment provoked the crime,
+for Wanton Gospellers abounded. The Baptists did not hesitate to state
+their characteristic belief in the Puritan meetings, and the Quakers or
+"Foxians," as they were often called, interrupted and plagued them sorely.
+Judge Sewall wrote, in 1677, "A female quaker, Margaret Brewster, in
+sermon-time came in, in a canvass frock, her hair dishevelled loose like a
+Periwig, her face as black as ink, led by two other quakers, and two other
+quakers followed. It occasioned the greatest and most amazing uproar that I
+ever saw." More grievous irruptions still of scantily clad and even naked
+Quaker women were made into other Puritan meetings; and Quaker men shouted
+gloomily in through the church windows, "Woe! Woe! Woe to the people!"
+and, "The Lord will destroy thee!" and they broke glass bottles before
+the minister's very face, crying out, "Thus the Lord will break thee in
+pieces!" and they came into the meeting-house, in spite of the fierce
+tithingman, and sat down in other people's seats with their hats on their
+heads, in ash-covered coats, rocking to and fro and groaning dismally, as
+if in a mournful obsession. Quaker women managed to obtain admission to the
+churches, and they jumped up in the quiet Puritan assemblies screaming out,
+"Parson! thou art an old fool," and, "Parson! thy sermon is too long," and,
+"Parson! sit down! thee has already said more than thee knows how to say
+well," and other unpleasant, though perhaps truthful personalities. It is
+hard to believe that the poor, excited, screaming visionaries of those
+early days belonged to the same religious sect as do the serene,
+low-voiced, sweet-faced, and retiring Quakeresses of to-day. And there is
+no doubt that the astounding and meaningless freaks of these half-crazed
+fanatics were provoked by the cruel persecutions which they endured from
+our much loved and revered, but alas, intolerant and far from perfect
+Puritan Fathers. These poor Quakers were arrested, fined, robbed, stripped
+naked, imprisoned, laid neck and heels, chained to logs of wood, branded,
+maimed, whipped, pilloried, caged, set in the stocks, exiled, sold
+into slavery and hanged by our stern and cruel ancestors. Perhaps some
+gentle-hearted but timid Puritan souls may have inwardly felt that the
+Indian wars, and the destructive fires, and the earthquakes, and the dead
+cattle, blasted wheat, and wormy peas, were not judgments of God for small
+ministerial pay and periwig-wearing, but punishments for the heartrending
+woes of the persecuted Quakers.
+
+Others than the poor Quakers spoke out in colonial meetings. In Salem
+village and in other witch-hunting towns the crafty "victims" of the
+witches were frequently visited with their mock pains and sham fits in the
+meeting-houses, and they called out and interrupted the ministers most
+vexingly. Ann Putnam, the best and boldest actress among those cunning
+young Puritan witch-accusers, the protagonist of that New England tragedy
+known as the Salem Witchcraft, shouted out most embarrassingly, "There is
+a yellow-bird sitting on the minister's hat, as it hangs on the pin in the
+pulpit." Mr. Lawson, the minister, wrote with much simplicity that "these
+things occurring in the time of public worship did something interrupt me
+in my first prayer, being so unusual." But he braced himself up in spite
+of Ann and the demoniacal yellow-bird, and finished the service. These
+disorderly interruptions occurred on every Lord's Day, growing weekly
+more constant and more universal, and must have been unbearable. Some few
+disgusted members withdrew from the church, giving as reason that "the
+distracting and disturbing tumults and noises made by persons under
+diabolical power and delusions, preventing sometimes our hearing and
+understanding and profiting of the word preached; we having after many
+trials and experiences found no redress in this case, accounted ourselves
+under a necessity to go where we might hear the word in quiet." These
+withdrawing church-members were all of families that contained at least
+one person that had been accused of practising witchcraft. They were thus
+severely intolerant of the sacrilegious and lawless interruptions of the
+shy young "victims," who received in general only sympathy, pity, and even
+stimulating encouragement from their deluded and excited neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>One very pleasing interruption,--no, I cannot call it by so severe a
+name,--one very pleasing diversion of the attention of the congregation
+from the parson was caused by an innocent custom that prevailed in many a
+country community. Just fancy the flurry on a June Sabbath in Killingly, in
+1785, when Joseph Gay, clad in velvet coat, lace-frilled shirt, and white
+broadcloth knee-breeches, with his fair bride of a few days, gorgeous in a
+peach-colored silk gown and a bonnet trimmed "with sixteen yards of white
+ribbon," rose, in the middle of the sermon, from their front seat in the
+gallery and stood for several minutes, slowly turning around in order to
+show from every point of view their bridal finery to the eagerly gazing
+congregation of friends and neighbors. Such was the really delightful and
+thoughtful custom, in those fashion-plateless days, among persons of
+wealth in that and other churches; it was, in fact, part of the wedding
+celebration. Even in midwinter, in the icy church, the blushing bride would
+throw aside her broadcloth cape or camblet roquelo and stand up clad in a
+sprigged India muslin gown with only a thin lace tucker over her neck, warm
+with pride in her pretty gown, her white bonnet with ostrich feathers and
+embroidered veil, and in her new husband.</p>
+
+<p>The services in the meeting-house on the Sabbath and on Lecture days
+were sometimes painfully varied, though scarcely interrupted, by a very
+distressing and harrowing custom of public abasement and self-abnegation,
+which prevailed for many years in the nervously religious colonies. It was
+not an enforced punishment, but a voluntary one. Men and women who had
+committed crimes or misdemeanors, and who had sincerely repented of their
+sins, or who were filled with remorse for some violation of conscience, or
+even with regret for some neglect of religious ethics, rose in the Sabbath
+meeting before the assembled congregation and confessed their sins, and
+humbly asked forgiveness of God, and charity from their fellows. At
+other times they stood with downcast heads while the minister read their
+confession of guilt and plea for forgiveness. A most graphic account of one
+of those painful scenes is thus given by Governor Winthrop in his "History
+of New England:"--</p>
+
+<blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;"Captain Underhill being brought by the blessing of God in this
+    church's censure of excommunication, to remorse for his foul sins,
+    obtained, by means of the elders, and others of the church of Boston, a
+    safe conduct under the hand of the governor and one of the council to
+    repair to the church. He came at the time of the court of assistants,
+    and upon the lecture day, after sermon, the pastor called him forth and
+    declared the occasion, and then gave him leave to speak: and in
+    it was a spectacle winch caused many weeping eyes, though it afforded
+    matter of much rejoicing to behold the power of the Lord Jesus in his
+    ordinances, when they are dispensed in his own way, holding forth the
+    authority of his regal sceptre in the simplicity of the gospel
+    came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great pride in his
+    bravery and neatness) without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close
+    to his eyes; and standing upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs
+    and abundance of tears, lay open his wicked course, his adultery, his
+    hypocrisy, his persecution of God's people here, and especially his
+    pride (as the root of all which caused God to give him over to his
+    other sinful courses) and contempt of the magistrates.... He spake
+    well save that his blubbering &amp;c interrupted him, and all along he
+    discovered a broken and melting heart and gave good exhortations to
+    take heed of such vanities and beginnings of evil as had occasioned his
+    fall; and in the end he earnestly and humbly besought the church to
+    have compassion of him and to deliver him out of the hands of Satan."</blockquote>
+
+<p>What a picture! what a story! "Of all tales 'tis the saddest--and more sad
+because it makes us smile."</p>
+
+<p>Captain John Underhill was a brave though somewhat bumptious soldier, who
+had fought under the Prince of Orange in the War of the Netherlands, and
+had been employed as temporal drill-master in the church-militant in New
+England. He did good service for the colonists in the war with the Pequot
+Indians, and indeed wherever there was any fighting to be done. "He thrust
+about and justled into fame" He also managed to have apparently a very good
+time in the new land, both in sinning and repenting. When he stood up on
+the church-seat before the horrified, yet wide-open eyes of pious Boston
+folk, in his studiously and theatrically disarranged garments, and
+blubbered out his whining yet vain-glorious repentance, he doubtless acted
+his part well, for he had twice before been through the same performance,
+supplementing his second rehearsal by kneeling down before an injured
+husband in the congregation, and asking earthly forgiveness. I wish I
+could believe that this final repentance of the resilient captain were
+sincere--but I cannot. Nor did Boston people believe it either, though that
+noble and generous-minded man, Winthrop, thought he saw at the time of
+confession evidences of a truly contrite heart. The Puritans sternly and
+eagerly cast out the gay captain to the Dutch when he became an Antinomian,
+and he came to live and fight and gallant in a town on the western end of
+Long Island, where he perhaps found a church-home with members less severe
+and less sharp-eyed than those of his Boston place of martyrdom, and a
+people less inclined to resent and punish his frailties and his ways of
+amusing himself.</p>
+
+<p>In justice to Underhill (or perhaps to show his double-dealing) I will say
+that he left behind him a letter to Hanserd Knollys, complaining of the
+ill-treatment he had received; and in it he gives a very different account
+of this little affair with the Boston Church from that given us by Governor
+Winthrop. The offender says nothing about his hypocrisy, his public and
+self-abasing confession, nor of his sanctimonious blubbering and wishes for
+death. He explains that his offence was mild and purely mental, that in an
+infaust moment he glanced (doubtless stared soldier-fashion) at "Mistris
+Miriam Wildbore" as she sat in her "pue" at meeting. The elders, noting his
+admiring and amorous glances, thereupon accused him of sin in his heart,
+and severely asked him why he did not look instead at Mistress Newell or
+Mistress Upham. He replied very spiritedly and pertinently that these dames
+were "not desiryable women as to temporal graces," which was certainly
+sufficient and proper reason for any man to give, were he Puritan or
+Cavalier. Then acerb old John Cotton and some other Boston ascetics
+(perhaps Goodman Newell and Goodman Upham, resenting for their wives the
+<i>spret&aelig; injuria form&aelig;</i>) at once hunted up some plainly applicable
+verses from the Bible that clearly proved him guilty of the alleged
+sin--and summarily excommunicated him. He also wrote that the pious church
+complained that the attractive, the temporally graced Mistress Wildbore
+came vainly and over-bravely clad to meeting, with "wanton open-worked
+gloves slitt at the thumbs and fingers for the purpose of taking snuff,"
+and he resented this complaint against the fair one, saying no harm could
+surely come from indulging in the "good creature called tobacco." He would
+naturally feel that snuff-taking was a proper and suitable church-custom,
+since his own conversion,--dubious though it was,--his religious belief had
+come to him, "the spirit fell home upon his heart" while he was indulging
+in a quiet smoke.</p>
+
+<p>The story of his offences as told b his contemporaries does not assign to
+him so innocuous a diversion as staring across the meeting-house, but the
+account is quite as amusing as his own plaintive and deeply injured version
+of his arraignment.</p>
+
+<p>Other letters of his have been preserved to us,--letters blustering as
+was Ancient Pistol, and equally sanctimonious, letters fearfully and
+phonetically spelt. Here is the opening of a letter written while he
+was under sentence of excommunication from the Boston Church, and of
+banishment. It is to Governor Winthrop, his friend and fellow-emigrant:--</p>
+
+<p>"Honnored in the Lord,--</p>
+
+<p>"Your silenc one more admirse me. I Youse chrischan playnnes. I know you
+love it.... Silene can not reduce the hart of youer lovd brother: I would
+the rightchous would smite me espechah youerslfe &amp; the honnered Depoti to
+whom I also dereckt this letter.... I would to God you would tender me
+soule so as to youse playnnes with me. I wrot to you both but now answer: &amp;
+here I am dayli abused by malishous tongue. John Baker I here hath wrot to
+the honnored depoti how as I was drouck &amp; like to be cild &amp; both falc, upon
+okachon I delt with Wannerton for intrushon &amp; finddmg them resolutli bent
+to rout all gud a mong us &amp; advanc there superstischous ways &amp; by boystrous
+words indeferd to fritten men to accomplish his end. &amp; he abusing me to
+my face, dru upon him with intent to corb his insolent &amp; dastardli
+sperrite.... Ister daye on Pickeren their Chorch Warden caim up to us with
+intent to make some of ourse drone as is sospeckted but the Lord sofered
+him so to misdemen himslfe as he is likli to li by the hielse this too
+month.... My homble request is that you will be charitable of me.... Let
+justies and merci be goyned.... You may plese to soggest youer will to this
+barrer you will find him tracktabel."</p>
+
+<p>My sense of drollery is always most keenly tickled when I read Underhill's
+epistles, with their amazing and highly-varied letter concoctions, and
+remember that he also--wrote a book. What that seventeenth-century printer
+and proof-reader endured ere they presented his "edited" volume to the
+public must have been beyond expression by words. It was a pretty good book
+though, and in it, like many another man of his ilk, he tendered to his
+much-injured wife loud and diffuse praise, ending with these sententious
+words, "Let no man despise advice and counsel of his wife--though she be a
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>And yet, upon careful examination we find a method, a system, in
+Underhill's orthography, or rather in his cacography. He thinks a final
+tion should be spelt chon--and why not? "proposichon," "satisfackchon,"
+"oblegachon," "persekuchon," "dereckchon," "himelyachon"--thus he spells
+such words. And his plurals are plain when once you grasp his laws:
+"poseschouse" and "considderachonse," "facktse," and "respecktse." And
+his ly is alwajs li, "exacktli," "thorroli," "fidelliti," "charriti,"
+"falsciti." And why is not "indiered," as good as 'endeared,' "pregedic,"
+as 'prejudice,' "obstrucktter" as 'obstructer,' "pascheges," and
+"prouydentt," and "antyentt," just as clear as our own way of spelling
+these words? A "painful" speller you surely were, my gay Don Juan
+Underbill, as your pedantic "writtingse" all show, and the most dramatic
+and comic figure among all the early Puritans as well, though you scarcely
+deserve to be called a Puritan; we might rather say of you, as of Malvolio,
+"The devil a Puritan that he was, or anything constantly but a
+time-pleaser ... his ground of faith that all who looked on him loved him."</p>
+
+<p>In keen contrast to this sentimental excitement is the presence of noble
+Judge Sewall, white-haired and benignant, standing up calmly in Boston
+meeting, with dignified face and demeanor, but an aching and contrite
+heart, to ask through the voice of his minister humble forgiveness of God
+and man for his sad share as a judge in the unjust and awful condemnation
+and cruel sentencing to death of the poor murdered victims of that terrible
+delusion the Salem Witchcraft. Years of calm and unshrinking reflection, of
+pleading and constant communion with God had brought to him an overwhelming
+sense of his mistaken and over-influenced judgment, and a horror and
+remorse for the fatal results of his error. Then, like the steadfast and
+upright old Puritan that he was, he publicly acknowledged his terrible
+mistake. It is one of the finest instances of true nobility of soul and of
+absolute self-renunciation that the world affords. And the deep strain, the
+sharp wrench of the step is made more apparent still by the fact of the
+disapproval of his fellow-judges of his public confession and recantation.
+The yearly entries in his diary, simply expressed yet deeply speaking,
+entries of the prayerful fasts which he spent alone in his chamber when
+the anniversary of the fatal judgment-day returned, show that no half-vain
+bigotry, no emotional excitement filled and moved him to the open words of
+remorse. The lesson of his repentance is farther reaching than he
+dreamed, when the story of his confession can so move and affect this
+nineteenth-century generation, and fill more than one soul with a nobler
+idea of the Puritan nature, and with a higher and fuller conception of the
+absolute truth of the Puritan Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>Some very prosaic and earthly interruptions to the church services are
+recorded as being made, and possibly by the church-members themselves. In
+one church, in 1661, a fine of five shillings was imposed on any one "who
+shot off a gun or led a horse into the meeting-house." These seem to me
+quite as unseemly, irreverent, and disagreeable disturbances as shouting
+out, Quaker-fashion, "Parson, your sermon is too long;" but possibly the
+house of God was turned into a stable on week-days, not on the Sabbath.</p>
+
+<p>In many parishes church-attendants were fined who brought their "doggs"
+into the meeting-house. Dogs swarmed in the colony, for they had been
+imported from England, "sufficient mastive dogs, hounds and beagles," and
+also Irish wolf-hounds; and they caused an interruption in one afternoon
+service by chasing into the meeting-house one of those pungently offensive,
+though harmless, animals that abounded even in the earliest colonial
+days, and whose mephitic odor, in this case, had power to scatter the
+congregation as effectively as would have a score of armed Indian braves.
+Officially appointed "Dogg-whippers" and the never idle tithingman expelled
+the intruding and unwelcome canine attendants from the meeting-house with
+fierce blows and fiercer yelps. The swarming dogs, though they were trained
+to hunt the Indians and wolves and tear them in pieces, were much fonder of
+hunting and tearing the peaceful sheep, and thus became such unmitigated
+nuisances, out of meeting as well as in, that they had to be muzzled and
+hobbled, and killed, and land was granted (as in Newbury in 1703) on
+condition that no dog was ever kept thereon. As late as the year 1820, it
+was ordered in the town of Brewster that any dog that came into meeting
+should be killed unless the owner promised to thenceforth keep the intruder
+out.</p>
+
+<p>Alarms of fire in the neighborhood frequently disturbed the quiet of
+the early colonial services; for the combustible catted chimneys were
+a constant source of conflagration, especially on Sundays, when the
+fireplaces with their roaring fires were left unwatched; and all the men
+rushed out of the meeting at sound of the alarm to aid in quenching the
+flames, which could however be ill-fought with the scanty supply of
+water that could be brought in a few leathern fire-buckets and
+milk-pails,--though at a very early date as an aid in extinguishing
+fires each New England family was ordered by law to own a fire-ladder.
+Occasionally the town's ladder and poles and hooks and cedar-buckets were
+kept in the meeting-house, and thus were handy for Sunday fires.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes armed men, bearing rumors of wars and of hostile attacks, rode
+clattering up to the church-door, and strode with jingling spurs and
+rattling swords into the excited assembly with appeal for more soldiers to
+bear arms, or for more help for those already in the army, and the whole
+congregation felt it no interruption but a high religious privilege and
+duty, to which they responded in word and deed. On some happy Sabbaths the
+armed riders bore good news of great victories, and great was the rejoicing
+thereat in prayer and praise in the old meeting-house.</p>
+
+<p>But usually through the Sabbath services, though the quiet was not that
+of our modern carpeted, cushioned, orderly churches, but few interrupting
+sounds were heard. The cry of a waking infant, the scraping of restless
+feet on the sanded floor, the lumbering noise of the motions of a cramped
+farmer as he stood up to lean over the pew-door or gallery-rail, the
+clatter of an overturned cricket, the twittering of swallows in the
+rafters, and in the summer-time the bumping and buzzing of an invading
+bumble-bee as he soared through the air and against the walls, were
+the only sounds within the meeting-house that broke the monotonous
+"thirteenthly" and "fourteenthly" of the minister's sermon.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XVII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Observances of the Day.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The so-called "False Blue Laws" of Connecticut, which were foisted upon the
+public by the Reverend Samuel Peter, have caused much indignation among all
+thoughtful descendants and all lovers of New England Puritans. Three of
+his most bitterly resented false laws which refer to the observance of the
+Sabbath read thus:--</p>
+
+<p>"No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or
+shave on the Sabbath Day.</p>
+
+<p>"No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.</p>
+
+<p>"No one shall ride on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere
+except reverently to and from meeting."</p>
+
+<p>Though these laws were worded by Dr. Peters, and though we are disgusted to
+hear them so often quoted as historical facts, still we must acknowledge
+that though in detail not correct, they are in spirit true records of the
+old Puritan laws which were enacted to enforce the strict and decorous
+observance of the Sabbath, and which were valid not only in Connecticut and
+Massachusetts, but in other New England States. Even a careless glance at
+the historical record of any old town or church will give plenty of details
+to prove this.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in New London we find in the latter part of the seventeenth century a
+wicked fisherman presented before the Court and fined for catching eels on
+Sunday; another "fined twenty shillings for sailing a boat on the Lord's
+Day;" while in 1670 two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused
+of and tried for "sitting together on the Lord's Day under an apple tree in
+Goodman Chapman's Orchard,"--so harmless and so natural an act. In Plymouth
+a man was "sharply whipped" for shooting fowl on Sunday; another was fined
+for carrying a grist of corn home on the Lord's Day, and the miller who
+allowed him to take it was also fined. Elizabeth Eddy of the same town was
+fined, in 1652, "ten shillings for wringing and hanging out clothes." A
+Plymouth man, for attending to his tar-pits on the Sabbath, was set in the
+stocks. James Watt, in 1658, was publicly reproved "for writing a note
+about common business on the Lord's Day, <i>at least in the evening
+somewhat too soon.</i>" A Plymouth man who drove a yoke of oxen was
+"presented" before the Court, as was also another offender, who drove some
+cows a short distance "without need" on the Sabbath.</p>
+
+<p>In Newbury, in 1646, Aquila Chase and his wife were presented and fined for
+gathering peas from their garden on the Sabbath, but upon investigation the
+fines were remitted, and the offenders were only admonished. In Wareham,
+in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the
+Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham
+citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five
+shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put
+in his shoe" to protect his foot--for doing this piece of heavy work on the
+Lord's Day, was fined, and paid forty shillings.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Kemble of Boston was in 1656 set for two hours in the public stocks
+for his "lewd and unseemly behavior," which, consisted in his kissing his
+wife "publicquely" on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, when
+he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years. The lewd
+offender was a man of wealth and influence, the father of Madam Sarah
+Knights, the "fearfull female travailler" whose diary of a journey from
+Boston to New York and return, written in 1704, rivals in quality if not in
+quantity Judge Sewall's much-quoted diary. A traveller named Burnaby tells
+of a similar offence of an English sea-captain who was soundly whipped for
+kissing his wife on the street of a New England town on Sunday, and of his
+retaliation in kind, by a clever trick upon his chastisers; but Burnaby's
+narrative always seemed to me of dubious credibility.</p>
+
+<p>Abundant proof can be given that the act of the legislature in 1649 was not
+a dead letter which ordered that "whosoever shall prophane the Lords daye
+by doeing any seruill worke or such like abusses shall forfeite for euery
+such default ten shillings or be whipt."</p>
+
+<p>The Vermont "Blue Book" contained equally sharp "Sunday laws." Whoever was
+guilty of any rude, profane, or unlawful conduct on the Lord's Day, in
+words or action, by clamorous discourses, shouting, hallooing, screaming,
+running, riding, dancing, jumping, was to be fined forty shillings and
+whipped upon the naked back not to exceed ten stripes. The New Haven code
+of laws, more severe still, ordered that "Profanation of the Lord's Day
+shall be punished by fine, imprisonment, or corporeal punishment; and
+if proudly, and with a high hand against the authority of God--<i>with
+death</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Lists of arrests and fines for walking and travelling unnecessarily on the
+Sabbath might be given in great numbers, and it was specially ordered
+that none should "ride violently to and from meeting." Many a pious New
+Englander, in olden days, was fined for his ungodly pride, and his desire
+to "show off" his "new colt" as he "rode violently" up to the meeting-house
+green on Sabbath morn. One offender explained in excuse of his unnecessary
+driving on the Sabbath that he had been to visit a sick relative, but
+his excuse was not accepted. A Maine man who was rebuked and fined for
+"unseemly walking" on the Lord's Day protested that he ran to save a man
+from drowning. The Court made him pay his fine, but ordered that the money
+should be returned to him when he could prove by witnesses that he had
+been on that errand of mercy and duty. As late as the year 1831, in
+Lebanon, Connecticut, a lady journeying to her father's home was arrested
+within sight of her father's house for unnecessary travelling on the
+Sabbath; and a long and fiercely contested lawsuit was the result, and
+damages were finally given for false imprisonment. In 1720 Samuel Sabin
+complained of himself before a justice in Norwich that he visited on
+Sabbath night some relatives at a neighbor's house. His morbidly tender
+conscience smote him and made him "fear he had transgressed the law,"
+though he felt sure no harm had been done thereby. In 1659 Sam Clarke, for
+"Hankering about on men's gates on Sabbath evening to draw company out
+to him," was reproved and warned not to "harden his neck" and be "wholly
+destrojed." Poor stiff-necked, lonely, "hankering" Sam! to be so harshly
+reproved for his harmlessly sociable intents. Perhaps he "hankered" after
+the Puritan maids, and if so, deserved his reproof and the threat of
+annihilation.</p>
+
+<p>Sabbath-breaking by visiting abounded in staid Worcester town to a most
+base extent, but was severely punished, as local records show. In Belfast,
+Maine, in 1776, a meeting was held to get the "Towns Mind" with regard to
+a plan to restrain visiting on the Sabbath. The time had passed when such
+offences could be punished either by fine or imprisonment, so it was voted
+"that if any person makes unnecessary Vizits on the Sabeth, They shall be
+Look't on with Contempt." This was the universal expression throughout the
+Puritan colonies; and looked on with contempt are Sabbath-breakers and
+Sabbath-slighters in New England to the present day. Even if they committed
+no active offence, the colonists could not passively neglect the Church
+and its duties. As late as 1774 the First Church of Roxbury fined
+non-attendance at public worship. In 1651 Thomas Scott "was fyned ten
+shillings unless he have learned Mr. Norton's 'Chatacise' by the next
+court" In 1760 the legislature of Massachusetts passed the law that "any
+person able of Body who shall absent themselves from publick worship of God
+on the Lord's Day shall pay ten shillings fine." By the Connecticut code
+ten shillings was the fine, and the law was not suspended until the year
+1770. By the New Haven code five shillings was the fine for non-attendance
+at church, and the offender was often punished as well. Captain Dennison,
+one of New Haven's most popular and respected citizens, was fined fifteen
+shillings for absence from church. William Blagden, who lived in New Haven
+in 1647, was "brought up" for absence from meeting. He pleaded that he had
+fallen into the water late on Saturday, could light no fire on Sunday to
+dry his clothes, and so had lain in bed to keep warm while his only suit of
+garments was drying. In spite of this seemingly fair excuse, Blagden was
+found guilty of "sloathefuluess" and sentenced to be "publiquely whipped."
+Of course the Quakers contributed liberally to the support of the Court,
+and were fined in great numbers for refusing to attend the church which
+they hated, and which also warmly abhorred them; and they were zealously
+set in the stocks, and whipped and caged and pilloried as well,--whipped
+if they came and expressed any dissatisfaction, and whipped if they stayed
+away.</p>
+
+<p>Severe and explicit were the orders with regard to the use of the "Creature
+called Tobacko" on the Sabbath. In the very earliest days of the colony
+means had been taken to present the planting of the pernicious weed
+except in very small quantities "for meere necessitie, for phisick, for
+preseruaceon of health, and that the same be taken privatly by auncient
+men." In Connecticut a man could by permission of the law smoke once if
+he went on a journey of ten miles (as some slight solace for the arduous
+trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house.
+Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the
+law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a
+long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor
+buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men
+love it now, they somehow invoked or spirited it into their pipes, though
+they never could smoke it in public unfined and unpunished. The shrewd and
+thrifty New Haven people permitted the raising of it for purposes of trade,
+though not for use, thus supplying the "devil's weed" to others, chiefly
+the godless Dutch, but piously spurning it themselves--in public. Its use
+was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on the Sabbath within two
+miles of the meeting-house, which (since at that date all the homes were
+clustered around the church-green) was equivalent to not smoking it at all
+on the Lord's Day, if the lav were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed,
+poor slaves of habit, who were in Duxbury fined ten shillings for each
+offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it
+told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage. In Sandwich and in Boston
+the fine for "drinking tobacco in the meeting-house" was five shillings for
+each drink, which I take to mean chewing tobacco rather than smoking it;
+many men were fined for thus drinking, and solacing the weary hours, though
+doubtless they were as sly and kept themselves as unobserved as possible.
+Four Yarmouth men--old sea-dogs, perhaps, who loved their pipe--were, in
+1687, fined four shillings each for smoking tobacco around the end of the
+meeting-house. Silly, ostrich-brained Yarmouth men! to fancy to escape
+detection by hiding around the corner of the church; and to think that the
+tithingman had no nose when he was so Argus-eyed. Some few of the ministers
+used the "tobacco weed." Mr. Baily wrote with distress of mind and
+abasement of soul in his diary of his "exceeding in tobacco." The hatred of
+the public use of tobacco lingered long in New England, even in large towns
+such as Providence, though chiefly on account of universal dread lest
+sparks from the burning weed should start conflagrations in the towns.
+Until within a few years, in small towns in western Massachusetts,
+Easthampton and neighboring villages, tobacco-smoking on the street was not
+permitted either on weekdays or Sundays.</p>
+
+<p>Not content with strict observance of the Sabbathday alone, the Puritans
+included Saturday evening in their holy day, and in the first colonial
+years these instructions were given to Governor Endicott by the New England
+Plantation Company: "And to the end that the Sabeth may be celebrated in
+a religious man ner wee appoint that all may surcease their labor every
+Satterday throughout the yeare at three of the clock in the afternoone, and
+that they spend the rest of the day in chatechizing and preparacoon for
+the Sabeth as the ministers shall direct." Cotton Mather wrote thus of his
+grandfather, old John Cotton: "The Sabbath he begun the evening before, for
+which keeping from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming
+to New England, and I suppose 't was from his reason and practice that the
+Christians of New England have generally done so too." He then tells of the
+protracted religious services held in the Cotton household every Saturday
+night,--services so long that the Sabbath-day exercises must have seemed in
+comparison like a light interlude.</p>
+
+<p>John Norton described these Cotton Sabbaths more briefly thus: "He [John
+Cotton] began the Sabbath at evening; therefore then performed family-duty
+after supper, being longer than ordinary in Exposition. After which he
+catechized his children and servants and then returned unto his study. The
+morning following, family-worship being ended, he retired into his study
+until the bell called him away. Upon his return from meeting he returned
+again into his study (the place of his labor and prayer) unto his private
+devotion; where, having a small repast carried him up for his dinner, he
+continued until the tolling of the bell. The public service being over, he
+withdrew for a space to his pre-mentioned oratory for his sacred addresses
+to God, as in the forenoon, then came down, <i>repeated the sermon in the
+family</i>, prayed, after supper sang a Psalm, and towards bedtime betaking
+himself again to his study he closed the day with prayer. Thus he spent the
+Sabbath continually." Just fancy the Cotton children and servants listening
+to his long afternoon sermon a second time!</p>
+
+<p>All the New England clergymen were rigid in the prolonged observance of
+Sunday. From sunset on Saturday until Sunday night they would not shave,
+have rooms swept, nor beds made, have food prepared, nor cooking utensils
+and table-ware washed. As soon as their Sabbath began they gathered their
+families and servants around them, as did Cotton, and read the Bible and
+exhorted and prayed and recited the catechism until nine o'clock, usually
+by the light of one small "dip candle" only; on long winter Saturdays it
+must have been gloomy and tedious indeed. Small wonder that one minister
+wrote back to England that he found it difficult in the new colony to get a
+servant who "<i>enjoyed catechizing and family duties</i>." Many clergymen
+deplored sadly the custom which grew in later years of driving, and even
+transacting business, on Saturday night. Mr. Bushnell used to call it
+"stealing the time of the Sabbath," and refused to countenance it in any
+way.</p>
+
+<p>It was very generally believed in the early days of New England that
+special judgments befell those who worked on the eve of the Sabbath.
+Winthrop gives the case of a man who, having hired help to repair a
+milldam, worked an hour on Saturday after sunset to finish what he had
+intended for the day's labor. The next day his little child, being left
+alone for some hours, was drowned in an uncovered well in the cellar of his
+house. "The father freely, in open congregation, did acknowledge it the
+righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day."</p>
+
+<p>Visitors and travellers from other countries were forced to obey the rigid
+laws with regard to Saturday-night observance. Archibald Henderson, the
+master of a vessel which entered the port of Boston, complained to the
+Council for Foreign Plantations in London that while he was in sober Boston
+town, being ignorant of the laws of the land, and having walked half an
+hour after sunset on Saturday night, as punishment for this unintentional
+and trivial offence, a constable entered his lodgings, seized him by the
+hair of his head, and dragged him to prison. Henderson claimed &pound;800 damages
+for the detention of his vessel during his prosecution. I have always
+suspected that the gay captain may have misbehaved himself in Boston
+on that Saturday night in some other way than simply by walking in
+the streets, and that the Puritan law-enforcers took advantage of the
+Sabbath-day laws in order to prosecute and punish him. We know of
+Bradford's complaint of the times; that while sailors brought "a greate
+deale" of money from foreign parts to New England to spend, they also
+brought evil ways of spending it--"more sine I feare than money."</p>
+
+<p>The Puritans found in Scripture support for this observance of Saturday
+night, in these words, "The evening and the morning were the first day,"
+and they had many followers in their belief. In New England country towns
+to this day, descendants of the Puritans regard Saturday night, though in
+a modified way, as almost Sunday, and that evening is never chosen for any
+kind of gay gathering or visiting. As late as 1855 the shops in Hartford
+were never open for customers upon Saturday night.</p>
+
+<p>Much satire was directed against this Saturday night observance both by
+English and by American authors. In the "American Museum" for February,
+1787, appeared a poem entitled, "The Connecticut Sabbath." After saying at
+some length that God had thought one day in seven sufficient for rest, but
+New England Christians had improved his law by setting apart a day and a
+half, the poet thus runs on derisively:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"And let it be enacted further still<br />
+That all our people strict observe our will;<br />
+Five days and a half shall men, and women, too,<br />
+Attend their bus'ness and their mirth pursue,<br />
+But after that no man without a fine<br />
+Shall walk the streets or at a tavern dine.<br />
+One day and half 'tis requisite to rest<br />
+From toilsome labor and a tempting feast.<br />
+Henceforth let none on peril of their lives<br />
+Attempt a journey or embrace their wives;<br />
+No barber, foreign or domestic bred,<br />
+Shall e'er presume to dress a lady's head;<br />
+No shop shall spare (half the preceding day)<br />
+A yard of riband or an ounce of tea."</blockquote>
+
+<p>And many similar rhymes might be given.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday night, being shut out of the Sabbath hours, became in the eighteenth
+century a time of general cheerfulness and often merry-making. This sudden
+transition from the religious calm and quiet of the afternoon to the noisy
+gayety of the evening was very trying to many of the clergymen, especially
+to Jonathan Edwards, who preached often and sadly against "Sabbath evening
+dissipations and mirth-making." In some communities singing-schools were
+held on Sunday nights, which afforded a comparatively decorous and orderly
+manner of spending the close of the day.</p>
+
+<p>Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm
+Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath,--sign and token to them,
+not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal
+rest to come. The universal quiet and peace of the community showed the
+primitive instinct of a pure, simple devotion, the sincere religion which
+knew no compromise in spiritual things, no half-way obedience to God's
+Word, but rested absolutely on the Lord's Day--as was commanded. No work,
+no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was
+seen except the necessary care of the patient cattle and other dumb beasts,
+the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the nooning,
+a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead. This
+absolute obedience to the letter as well as to the spirit of God's Word
+was one of the most typical traits of the character of the Puritans, and
+appeared to them to be one of the most vital points of their religion.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XVIII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Authority of the Church and the Ministers.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>Severely were the early colonists punished if they ventured to criticise
+or disparage either the ministers or their teachings, or indeed any of the
+religious exercises of the church. In Sandwich a man was publicly whipped
+for speaking deridingly of God's words and ordinances as taught by the
+Sandwich minister. Mistress Oliver was forced to stand in public with a
+cleft stick on her tongue for "reproaching the elders." A New Haven man was
+severely whipped and fined for declaring that he received no profit from
+the minister's sermons. We also know the terrible shock given the Windham
+church in 1729 by the "vile and slanderous expressions" of one unregenerate
+Windhamite who said, "I had rather hear my dog bark than Mr. Bellamy
+preach." He was warned that he would be "shakenoff and givenup," and
+terrified at the prospect of so dire a fate he read a confession of his
+sorrow and repentance, and promised to "keep a guard over his tongue," and
+also to listen to Mr. Bellamy's preaching, which may have been a still more
+difficult task. Mr. Edward Tomlins, of Boston, upon retracting his opinion
+which he had expressed openly against the singing in the churches, was
+discharged without a fine. William Howes and his son were in 1744 fined
+fifty shillings "apeece for deriding such as sing in the congregation,
+tearming them fooles." The church music was as sacred to the Puritans as
+were the prayers, but it must have been a sore trial to many to keep still
+about the vile manner and method of singing. In 1631 Phillip Ratcliffe,
+for "speaking against the churches," had his ears cut off, was whipped and
+banished. We know also the consternation caused in New Haven in 1646 by
+Madam Brewster's saying that the custom of carrying contributions to
+the Deacons' table was popish--was "like going to the High Alter,"
+and "savored of the Mass." She answered her accusers in such a bold,
+highhanded, and defiant manner that her heinous offence was considered
+worthy of trial in a higher court, whose decision is now lost.</p>
+
+<p>The colonists could not let their affection and zeal for an individual
+minister cause them to show any disrespect or indifference to the Puritan
+Church in general. When the question of the settlement of the Reverend Mr.
+Lenthal in the church of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was under discussion, the
+tyranny of the Puritan Church over any who dared oppose or question it was
+shown in a marked manner, and may be cited as a typical case. Mr. Lenthal
+was suspected of being poisoned with the Anne Hutchinson heresies, and he
+also "opposed the way of gathering churches." Hence his ordination over the
+church in the new settlement was bitterly opposed by the Boston divines,
+though apparently desired by the Weymouth congregation. One Britton, who
+was friendly towards Lenthal and who spoke "reproachfully" and slurringly
+of a book which defended the course of the Boston churches, was whipped
+with eleven stripes, as he had no money to pay the imposed fine. John
+Smythe, who "got hands to a blank" (which was either canvassing for
+signatures to a proxy vote in favor of Lenthal or obtaining signatures
+to an instrument declaring against the design of the churches), for thus
+"combining to hinder the orderly gathering" of the Weymouth church at this
+time, was fined &pound;2. Edward Sylvester for the same offence was fined and
+disfranchised. Ambrose Martin, another friend of Lenthal's, for calling
+the church covenant of the Boston divines "a stinking carrion and a human
+invention," was fined &pound;10, while Thomas Makepeace, another Weymouth
+malcontent, was informed by those in power that "they were weary of him,"
+or, in modern slang, that "he made them tired." Parson Lenthal himself,
+being sent for by the convention, weakened at once in a way his church
+followers must have bitterly despised; he was "quickly convinced of his
+error and evil." His conviction was followed with his confession, and in
+open court he gave under his hand a laudable retraction, which retraction
+he was ordered also to "utter in the assembly at Weymouth, and so no
+further censure was passed on him." Thus the chief offender got the
+lightest punishment, and thus did the omnipotent Church rule the whole
+community.</p>
+
+<p>The names of loquacious, babbling Quakers and Baptists who spoke
+disrespectfully of some or all of the ordinances of the Puritan church
+might be given, and would swell the list indefinitely; they were fined and
+punished without mercy or even toleration.</p>
+
+<p>All profanity or blaspheming against God was severely punished. One very
+wicked man in Hartford for his "fillthy and prophane expressions," namely,
+that "hee hoped to meet some of the members of the Church in Hell before
+long, and he did not question but hee should," was "committed to prison,
+there to be kept in safe custody till the sermon, and then to stand the
+time thereof in the pillory, and after sermon to be severely whipped." What
+a severe punishment for so purely verbal an offence! New England ideas of
+profanity were very rigid, and New England men had reason to guard well
+their temper and tongue, else that latter member might be bored with a
+hot iron; for such was the penalty for profanity. We know what horror Mr.
+Tomlins's wicked profanity, "Curse ye woodchuck!" caused in Lynn meeting,
+and Mr. Dexter was "putt in ye billboes ffor prophane saying dam ye cowe."
+The Newbury doctor was sharply fined also for wickedly cursing. When
+drinking at the tavern he raised his glass and said,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"I'll pledge my friends, and for my foes<br />
+  A plague for their heels, and a poxe for their toes."</blockquote>
+
+<p>He acknowledged his wickedness and foolishness in using the "olde proverb,"
+and penitently promised to curse no more.</p>
+
+<p>Sad to tell, Puritan women sometimes lost their temper and their
+good-breeding and their godliness. Two wicked Wells women were punished in
+1669 "for using profane speeches in their common talk; as in making answer
+to several questions their answer is, The Devil a bit." In 1640, in
+Springfield, Goody Gregory, being grievously angered, profanely abused an
+annoying neighbor, saying, "Before God I coulde breake thy heade!" But she
+acknowledged her "great sine and faulte" like a woman, and paid her fine
+and sat in the stocks like a man, since she swore like the members of that
+profane sex.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the sins of the fathers were visited on the children in a most
+extraordinary manner. One man, "for abusing N. Parker at the tavern," was
+deprived of the privilege of bringing his children to be baptized, and was
+thus spiritually punished for a very worldly offence. For some offences,
+such as "speaking deridingly of the minister's powers," as was done in
+Plymouth, "casting uncharitable reflexions on the minister," as did an
+Andover man; and also for absenting one's self from church services; for
+"sloathefulness," for "walking prophanely," for spoiling hides when tanning
+and refusing explanation thereof; for selling short weight in grain,
+for being "given too much to Jearings," for "Slanndering," for being a
+"Makebayte," for "ronging naibors," for "being too Proude," for "suspitions
+of stealing pinnes," for "pnishouse Squerilouse Odyouse wordes," and for
+"lyeing," church-members were not only fined and punished but were deprived
+of partaking of the sacrament. In the matter of lying great distinction was
+made as to the character and effect of the offence. George Crispe's wife,
+who "told a lie, not a pernicious lie, but unadvisedly," was simply
+admonished and remonstrated with. Will Randall, who told a "plain lie," was
+fined ten shillings. While Ralph Smith, who "lied about seeing a whale,"
+was fined twenty shillings and excommunicated.</p>
+
+<p>In some communities, of which Lechford tells us New Haven was one, these
+unhouselled Puritans were allowed, if they so desired, to stand outside the
+meeting-house door at the time of public worship and catch what few words
+of the service they could. This humble waiting for crumbs of God's word was
+doubtless regarded as a sign of repentance for past deeds, for it was often
+followed by full forgiveness. As excommunicated persons were regarded with
+high disfavor and even abhorrence by the entire pious and godly walking
+community, this apparently spiritual punishment was more severe in its
+temporal effects than at first sight appears. From the Cambridge Platform,
+which was drawn up and adopted by the New England Synod in 1648, we learn
+that "while the offender remains excommunicated the church is to refrain
+from all communion with him in civil things," and the members were
+specially "to forbear to eat and drink with him;" so his daily and even his
+family life was made wretched. And as it was not necessary to wait for the
+action of the church to pronounce excommunication, but the "pastor of a
+church might by himself and authoritatively suspend from the Lord's table
+a brother <i>suspected</i> of scandal" until there was time for full
+examination, we can see what an absolute power the church and even the
+minister had over church-members in a New England community.</p>
+
+<p>Nor could the poor excommunicate go to neighboring towns and settlements to
+start afresh. No one wished him or would tolerate him. Lancaster, in 1653,
+voted not to receive into its plantation "any excommunicat or notoriously
+erring agt the Docktrin &amp; Discipline of churches of this Commonwealth."
+Other towns passed similar votes. Fortunately, Rhode Island--the island of
+"Aquidnay" and the Providence Plantations--opened wide its arms as a place
+of refuge for outcast Puritans. Universal freedom and religious toleration
+were in Rhode Island the foundations of the State. Josiah Quincy said that
+liberty of conscience would have produced anarchy if it had been permitted
+in the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century, but the
+flourishing Narragansett, Providence, and Newport plantations seem to prove
+the absurdity of that statement. Liberty of conscience was there allowed,
+as Dr. MacSparran, the first clergyman of the Narragansett Church,
+complained in his "America Dissected," "to the extent of no religion at
+all." The Gortonians, the Foxians, and Hutchinsonians, the Anabaptists, the
+Six Principle Baptists, the Church of England, apparently all the followers
+of the eighty-two "pestilent heresies" so sadly enumerated and so bitterly
+hated and "cast out to Satan" by the Massachusetts Puritan divines,--all
+the excommunicants and exiles found in Rhode Island a home and
+friends--other friends than the Devil to whom they had been consigned.</p>
+
+<p>Though the early Puritan ministers had such powerful influence in every
+other respect, they were not permitted to perform the marriage-service
+nor to raise their voices in prayer or exhortation at a funeral. Sewall
+jealously notes when the English burial-service began to be read at
+burials, saying, "the office for Burial is a Lying very bad office makes no
+difference between the precious and the vile." The office of marriage was
+denied the parson, and was generally relegated to the magistrate. In this,
+Governor Bradford states, they followed "ye laudable custome of ye Low
+Countries." Not rulers and magistrates only were empowered to perform the
+marriage ceremony; squires, tavern-keepers, captains, various authorized
+persons might wed Puritan lovers; any man of dignity or prominence in the
+community could apparently receive authority to perform that office except
+the otherwise all-powerful parson.</p>
+
+<p>As years rolled on, though the New Englanders still felt great reverence
+and pride for their church and its ordinances, the minister was no longer
+the just man made perfect, the oracle of divine will. The church-members
+escaped somewhat from ecclesiastical power, and some of them found fault
+with and openly disparaged their ministers in a way that would in early
+days have caused them to be pilloried, whipped, caged, or fined; and often
+the derogatory comments were elicited by the most trivial offences. One
+parson was bitterly condemned because he managed to amass eight hundred
+dollars by selling the produce of his farm. Another shocking and severely
+criticised offence was a game of bowls which one minister played and
+enjoyed. Still another minister, in Hanover, Massachusetts, was reproved
+for his lack of dignity, which was shown in his wearing stockings "footed
+up with another color;" that is, knit stockings in which the feet were
+colored differently from the legs. He also was found guilty of having
+jumped over the fence instead of decorously and clerically walking through
+the gate when going to call on one of his parishioners. Rev. Joseph Metcalf
+of the Old Colony was complained of in 1720 for wearing too worldly a wig.
+He mildly reproved and shamed the meddlesome women of his church by asking
+them to come to him and each cut off a lock of hair from the obnoxious
+wig until all the complainers were satisfied that it had been rendered
+sufficiently unworldly. Some Newbury church-members, in 1742, asserted that
+their minister unclerically wore a colored kerchief instead of a band. This
+he indignantly denied, saying that he "had never buried a babe even in most
+tempestuous weather," when he rode several miles, but he always wore a
+band, and he complained in turn that members of his congregation turned
+away from him on the street, and "glowered" at him and "sneered at him."
+Still more unseemly demonstrations of dislike were sometimes shown, as in
+South Hadley, in 1741, when a committee of disaffected parishioners
+pulled the Rev. Mr Rawsom out of the pulpit and marched him out of the
+meeting-house because they did not fancy his preaching. But all such
+actions were as offensive to the general community then as open expressions
+of dissatisfaction and contempt are now.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XIX</h1>
+
+<h2>The Ordination of the Minister.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The minister's ordination was, of course, an important social as well as
+spiritual event in such a religious community as was a New England colonial
+town. It was always celebrated by a great gathering of people from far and
+near, including all the ministers from every town for many miles around;
+and though a deeply serious service, was also an excuse for much
+merriment. In Connecticut, and by tradition also in Massachusetts, an
+"ordination-ball" was frequently given. It is popularly supposed that at
+this ball the ministers did not dance, nor even appear, nor to it in any
+way give their countenance; that it was only a ball given at the time of
+the ordination because so many people would then be in the town to take
+part in the festivity. That this was not always the case is proved by
+a letter of invitation still in existence written by Reverend Timothy
+Edwards, who was ordained in Windsor in 1694; it was written to Mr. and
+Mrs. Stoughton, asking them to attend the ordination-ball which was to be
+given in his, the minister's house. But whether the parsons approved and
+attended, or whether they strongly discountenanced it, the ordination-ball
+was always a great success. It is recorded that at one in Danvers a young
+man danced so vigorously and long on the sanded floor that he entirely wore
+out a new pair of shoes. The fashion of giving ordination-balls did not die
+out with colonial times. In Federal days it still continued, a specially
+gay ball being given in the town of Wolcott at an ordination in 1811.</p>
+
+<p>There was always given an ordination supper,--a plentiful feast, at which
+visiting ministers and the new pastor were always present and partook with
+true clerical appetite. This ordination feast consisted of all kinds of New
+England fare, all the mysterious compounds and concoctions of Indian corn
+and "pompions," all sorts of roast meats, "turces" cooked in various ways,
+gingerbread and "cacks," and--an inevitable feature at the time of every
+gathering of people, from a corn-husking or apple-bee to a funeral--a
+liberal amount of cider, punch, and grog was also supplied, which latter
+compound beverages were often mixed on the meeting-house green or even in
+punch-bowls on the very door-steps of the church. Beer, too, was specially
+brewed to honor the feast. Rev. Mr. Thatcher, of Boston, wrote in his diary
+on the twentieth of May, 1681, "This daye the Ordination Beare was brewed."
+Portable bars were sometimes established at the church-door, and strong
+drinks were distributed free of charge to the entire assemblage. As late
+as 1825, at the installation of Dr. Leonard Bacon over the First
+Congregational Church in New Haven, free drinks were furnished at an
+adjacent bar to all who chose to order them, and were "settled for" by the
+generous and hospitable society. In considering the extravagant amount of
+moneys often recorded as having been paid out for liquor at ordinations,
+one must not fail to remember that the seemingly large sums were often
+spent in Revolutionary times during the great depreciation of Continental
+money. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars were disbursed for the
+entertainment of the council at the ordination of Mr. Kilbourn, of
+Chesterfield; but the items were really few and the total amount of liquor
+was not great,--thirty-eight mugs of flip at twelve dollars per mug; eleven
+gills of rum bitters at six dollars per gill, and two mugs of sling at
+twenty-four dollars per mug. The church in one town sent the Continental
+money in payment for the drinks of the church-council in a wheelbarrow to
+the tavern-keeper, and he was not very well paid either.</p>
+
+<p>It gives one a strange sense of the customs and habits of the olden times
+to read an "ordination-bill" from a tavern-keeper which is thus endorsed,
+"This all Paid for exsept the Minister's Rum." To give some idea of the
+expense of "keeping the ministers" at an ordination in Hartford in 1784,
+let me give the items of the bill:--</p>
+
+<pre>                          &pound;  s. d.
+  To keeping Ministers    0  2  4
+  2 Mugs tody             0  5 10
+  5 Segars                0  3  0
+  1 Pint wine             0  0  9
+  3 lodgings              0  9  0
+  3 bitters               0  0  9
+  3 breakfasts            0  3  6
+  15 boles Punch          1 10  0
+  24 dinners              1 16  0
+  11 bottles wine         0  3  6
+  5 mugs flip             0  5 10
+  3 boles punch           0  6  0
+  3 boles tody            0  3  6</pre>
+
+<p>One might say with Falstaff, "O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread
+to this intolerable deal of sack!" I sadly fear me that at that Hartford
+ordination our parson ancestors got grievsously "gilded," to use a choice
+"red-lattice phrase."</p>
+
+<p>Many accounts of gay ordination parties have been preserved in diaries for
+us. Reverend Mr. Smith, who was settled in Portland in the early part of
+the eighteenth century, wrote thus in his journal of an ordination which
+he attended: "Mr. Foxcroft ordained at New Gloucester. We had a pleasant
+journey home. Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry. A <i>jolly ordination</i>.
+We lost all sight of decorum." The Mr. L. referred to was Mr. Stephen
+Longfellow, greatgrandfather of the poet.</p>
+
+<p>Bills for ordination-expenses abound in items of barrels of rum and cider
+and metheglin, of bowls of flip and punch and toddy, of boxes of lemons and
+loaves of sugar, in punches, and sometimes broken punchbowls, and in one
+case a large amount of Malaga and Canary wine, spices and "ross water,"
+from which was brewed doubtless an appetizing ordination-cup which may have
+rivalled Josselyn's New England nectar of "cyder, Maligo raisins, spices,
+and sirup of clove-gillyflowers."</p>
+
+<p>In Massachusetts, in January, 1759, the subject of the frequent disorders
+and irregularities in connection with ordination-services, especially in
+country towns, came before the council of the province, who referred
+its consideration to a convention of ministers. The ministers at that
+convention were recommended to each give instruction, exhortation, and
+advice against excesses to the members of his congregation whenever an
+ordination was about to take place in the vicinity of his church. In this
+way it was hoped that the reformation would be aided, and temperance,
+order, and decorum established. The newspapers were free in their
+condemnation of the feasting and roistering at ordination-services. When
+Dr. Cummings was ordained over the Old South Church of Boston in February,
+1761, a feast took place at the Rev. Dr. Sewall's house which occasioned
+much comment. A four-column letter of criticism appeared in the Boston
+Gazette of March 9, 1761, over the signature of "Countryman," which
+provoked several answers and much newspaper controversy. As Dr. Sewall had
+been moderator of the meeting of ministers held only two years previously
+with the hope, and for the purpose of abolishing ordination revelries, it
+is not strange that the circumstance of the feast being given in his house
+should cause public comment and criticism.</p>
+
+<p>"Countryman" complained that "the price of provisions was raised a quarter
+cart in Boston for several days before the instalment by reason of the
+great preparations therefor, and the readiness of the ecclesiastical
+caterers to give almost any price that was demanded. Many Boston people
+complained the town had, by this means, in a few days lost a large sum of
+money; which was, as it were, levied on and extorted from them. If the
+poor were the <i>better for what remained of so plentiful and splendid a
+feast</i> I am very glad but yet think it is a pity the charity were not
+better timed." He reprovingly enumerates, "There were six tables that held
+one with another eighteen persons each, upon each table a good rich plumb
+pudding, a dish of boil'd pork and fowls, and a corn'd leg of pork with
+sauce proper for it, a leg of bacon, a piece of alamode beef, a leg of
+mutton with caper sauce, a roast line of veal, a roast turkey, a venison
+pastee, besides chess cakes and tarts, cheese and butter. Half a dozen
+cooks were employed upon this occasion, upwards of twenty tenders to wait
+upon the tables; they had the best of old cyder, one barrel of Lisbon wine,
+punch in plenty before and after dinner, made of old Barbados spirit. The
+cost of this moderate dinner was upwards of fifty pounds lawful money."
+This special ordination-feast, even as detailed by the complaining
+"Countryman," does not seem to me very reprehensible. The standing of the
+church, the wealth of the congregation, the character of the guests (among
+whom were the Governor and the judges of the Superior Court) all make
+this repast appear neither ostentatious nor extravagant. Fifty pounds was
+certainly not an enormous sum to spend for a dinner with wine for over one
+hundred persons, and such a good dinner too. Nor is it probable that a city
+as large as was Boston at that date could through that dinner have been
+swept of provisions to such an extent that prices would be raised a quarter
+part. I suspect some personal malice caused "Countryman's" attacks, for he
+certainly could have found in other towns more flagrant cases to complain
+of and condemn.</p>
+
+<p>Though no record exists to prove that "the poor were the better for
+what remained" after this Boston feast, in other towns letters
+and church-entries show that any fragments remaining after the
+ordination-dinner were well disposed of. Sometimes they furnished forth the
+new minister's table. In one case they were given to "a widowed family"
+("widowed" here being used in the old tender sense of bereaved). In
+Killingly "the overplush of provisions" was sold to help pay the arrearages
+of the salary of the outgoing minister, thus showing a laudable desire to
+"settle up and start square."</p>
+
+<p>If the church were dedicated at the time of the ordination, that would
+naturally be cause for additional gayety. A very interesting and graphic
+account of the feast at the dedication of the Old Tunnel Meeting-House of
+Lynn in the year 1682 has been preserved. It thus describes the scene:--</p>
+
+<p>"Ye Deddication Dinner was had in ye greate barne of Mr. Hoode which by
+reason of its goodly size was deemed ye most fit place. It was neatly
+adorned with green bows and other hangings and made very faire to look
+upon, ye wreaths being mostly wrought by ye young folk, they meeting
+together, both maides and young men, and having a merry time in doing ye
+work. Ye rough stalls and unbowed posts being gaily begirt and all ye
+corners and cubbies being clean swept and well aired, it truly did appear
+a meet banquetting hall. Ye scaffolds too from which ye provinder had been
+removed were swept cleane as broome could make them. Some seats were put up
+on ye scaffoldes whereon might sitt such of ye antient women as would see &amp;
+ye maides and children. Ye greate floor was all held for ye company which
+was to partake of ye feast of fat things, none others being admitted there
+save them that were to wait upon ye same. Ye kine that were wont to be
+there were forced to keep holiday in the field."</p>
+
+<p>Then follows a minute account of how the fowls persisted in flying in
+and roosting over the table, scattering feathers and hay on the parsons
+beneath.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Shepard's face did turn very red and he catched up an apple and hurled
+it at ye birds. But he thereby made a bad matter worse for ye fruit being
+well aimed it hit ye legs of a fowl and brought him floundering and
+flopping down on ye table, scattering gravy, sauce and divers things upon
+our garments and in our faces. But this did not well please some, yet with
+most it was a happening that made great merryment. Dainty meats were on ye
+table in great plenty, bear-stake, deer-meat, rabbit, and fowle, both wild
+and from ye barnyard. Luscious puddings we likewise had in abundance,
+mostly apple and berry, but some of corn meal with small bits of sewet
+baked therein; also pyes and tarts. We had some pleasant fruits, as apples,
+nuts and wild grapes, and to crown all, we had plenty of good cider and ye
+inspiring Barbadoes drink. Mr. Shepard and most of ye ministers were
+grave and prudent at table, discoursing much upon ye great points of ye
+deddication sermon and in silence laboring upon ye food before them. But I
+will not risque to say on which they dwelt with most relish, ye discourse
+or ye dinner. Most of ye young members of ye Council would fain make a
+jolly time of it. Mr. Gerrish, ye Wenham minister, tho prudent in his
+meat and drinks, was yet in right merry mood. And he did once grievously
+scandalize Mr. Shepard, who on suddenly looking up from his dish did spy
+him, as he thot, winking in an unbecoming way to one of ye pretty damsels
+on ye scaffold. And thereupon bidding ye godly Mr. Rogers to labor with him
+aside for his misbehavior, it turned out that ye winking was occasioned by
+some of ye hay seeds that were blowing about, lodging in his eye; whereat
+Mr. Shepard felt greatly releaved.</p>
+
+<p>"Ye new Meeting house was much discoursed upon at ye table. And most thot
+it as comely a house of worship as can be found in the whole Collony save
+only three or four. Mr. Gerrish was in such merry mood that he kept ye end
+of ye table whereby he sat in right jovial humour. Some did loudly laugh
+and clap their hands. But in ye middest of ye merryment a strange disaster
+did happen unto him. Not having his thots about him he endeavored ye
+dangerous performance of gaping and laughing at the same time which he must
+now feel is not so easy or safe a thing. In doing this he set his jaws open
+in such wise that it was beyond all his power to bring them together again.
+His agonie was very great, and his joyful laugh soon turned to grievous
+gioaning. Ye women in ye scaffolds became much distressed for him. We did
+our utmost to stay ye anguish of Mr. Gerrish, but could make out little
+till Mr. Rogers who knoweth somewhat of anatomy did bid ye sufferer to sit
+down on ye floor, which being done Mr. Rogers took ye head atween his legs,
+turning ye face as much upward as possible and then gave a powerful blow
+and then sudden press which brot ye jaws into working order. But Mr.
+Geirish did not gape or laugh much more on that occasion, neither did he
+talk much for that matter.</p>
+
+<p>"No other weighty mishap occurred save that one of ye Salem delegates, in
+boastfully essaying to crack a walnut atween his teeth did crack, instead
+of ye nut, a most usefull double tooth and was thereby forced to appear at
+ye evening with a bandaged face."</p>
+
+<p>This ended this most amusing chapter of disasters to the ministers, though
+the banquet was diversified by interrupting crows from invading roosters,
+fierce and undignified counter-attacks with nuts and apples by the
+clergymen, a few mortifyingly "mawdlin songs and much roistering laughter,"
+and the account ends, "so noble and savoury a banquet was never before
+spread in this noble town, God be praised." What a picture of the good old
+times! Different times make different manners; the early Puritan ministers
+did not, as a rule, drink to excess, any more than do our modern clergymen;
+but it is not strange that though they were of Puritan blood and belief,
+they should have fallen into the universal custom of the day, and should
+have "gone to their graves full of years, honor, simplicity, and rum." The
+only wonder is, when the ministers had the best places at every table, at
+every feast, at every merry-making in New England, that stories of their
+roistering excesses should not have come down to us as there have of the
+intemperate clergy of Virginia.</p>
+
+<p>The ordination services within the meeting-houses were not always decorous
+and quiet scenes. In spite of the reverence which our forefathers had for
+their church and their ministers, it did not prevent them from bitterly
+opposing the settlement of an unwished-for clergyman over them, and many
+towns were racked and divided, then as now, over the important question.
+As years passed on the church members grew bold enough to dare to offer
+personal and bodily opposition. At the ordination of the Rev. Peter
+Thatcher in the New North Church in Boston, in 1720, there were two
+parties. The members who did not wish him to be settled over the church
+went into the meeting-house and made a great disorder and clamor. They
+forbade the proceedings, and went into the gallery, and threw from thence
+water and missiles on the friends of the clergymen who were gathered around
+him at the altar. Perhaps they obtained courage for these sacrilegious acts
+from the barrels of rum and the bowls of strong punch. And this was in
+Puritanical Boston, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of the landing
+of the Mayflower. Thus had one century changed the absolute reverence and
+affectionate regard of the Pilgrims for their church, their ministers,
+and their meeting-houses, to irreverent and obstinate desire for personal
+satisfaction. No wonder that the ministers at that date preached and
+believed that Satan was making fresh and increasing efforts to destroy the
+Puritan church. The hour was ready for Whitefield, for Edwards, for any
+new awakening; and was above all fast approaching for the sadly needed
+temperance reform.</p>
+
+<p>In the seventeenth century a minister was ordained and re-ordained at
+each church over which he had charge; but after some years the name of
+installation was given to each appointment after the first ordination, and
+the ceremony was correspondingly changed.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XX</h1>
+
+<h2>The Ministers.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The picture which Colonel Higginson has drawn of the Puritan minister is so
+well known and so graphic that any attempt to add to it would be futile.
+All the succeeding New England parsons, as years rolled by, were not,
+however, like the black-gowned, black-gloved, stately, and solemn man whom
+he has so clearly shown us. Men of rigid decorum, and grave ceremony there
+were, such as Dr. Emmons and Jonathan Edwards; but there were parsons also
+of another type,--eccentric, unconventional, and undignified in demeanor
+and dress. Parson Robinson, of Duxbury, persisted in wearing in the pulpit,
+as part of his clerical attire, a round jacket instead of the suitable
+gown or Geneva cloak, and he was known thereby as "Master Jack." With
+astonishing inconsistency this Master Jack objected to the village
+blacksmith's wearing his leathern apron into the church, and he assailed
+the offender again and again with words and hints from his pulpit. He was
+at last worsted by the grimaces of the victorious smith (where was the
+Duxbury tithingman?), and indignantly left the pulpit, ejaculating, "I'll
+not preach while that man sits before me." A remonstrating parishioner
+said afterward to Master Jack, "I'd not have left if the Devil sat there."
+"Neither would I" was the quick answer.</p>
+
+<p>Another singular article of attire was worn in the pulpit by Father Mills,
+of Torrington, though neither in irreverence nor indifference. When his
+dearly loved wife died he pondered how he, who always wore black, could
+express to the world that he was wearing mourning; and his simple heart hit
+upon this grotesque device: he left off his full-flowing wig, and tied
+up his head in a black silk handkerchief, which he wore thereafter as a
+trapping of woe.</p>
+
+<p>Parson Judson, of Taunton, was so lazy that he used to preach while sitting
+down in the pulpit; and was so contemptibly fond of comfort that he would
+on summer Sundays give out to the sweltering members of his congregation
+the longest psalm in the psalm-book, and then desert them--piously
+perspiring and fuguing--and lie under a tree enjoying the cool outdoor
+breezes until the long psalm was ended, escaping thus not only the heat but
+the singing; and when we consider the quantity and quality of both, and
+that he condemned his good people to an extra amount of each, it seems
+a piece of clerical inhumanity that would be hard to equal. Surely this
+selfish Taunton sybarite was the prosaic ideal of Hamlet's words:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Some ungracious pastors do<br />
+Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven,<br />
+Whilst like a puff'd and reckless libertine<br />
+Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,<br />
+And recks not his own rede."</blockquote>
+
+<p>But lazy and slothful ministers were fortunately rare in New England. No
+primrose path of dalliance was theirs; industrious and hard-working were
+nearly all the early parsons, preaching and praying twice on the Sabbath,
+and preaching again on Lecture days; visiting the sick and often giving
+medical and "chyrurgycal" advice; called upon for legal counsel and
+adjudication; occupied in spare moments in teaching and preparing young
+men for college; working on their farms; hearing the children say their
+catechism; fasting and praying long, weary hours in their own study,--truly
+they were "pious and painful preachers," as Colonel Higginson saw recorded
+on a gravestone in Watertown. Though I suspect "painful" in the Puritan
+vocabulary meant "painstaking," did it not? Cotton Mather called John
+Fiske, of Chelmsford, a "plaine but able painful and useful preacher,"
+while President Dunster, of Harvard College, was described by a
+contemporary divine as "pious painful and fit to teach." Other curious
+epithets and descriptions were applied to the parsons; they were called
+"holy-heavenly," "sweet-affecting," "soul-ravishing," "heaven-piercing,"
+"angel-rivalling," "subtil," "irrefragable," "angelical," "septemfluous,"
+"holy-savoured," "princely," "soul-appetizing," "full of antic tastes"
+(meaning having the tastes of an antiquary), "God-bearing." Of two of the
+New England saints it was written:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Thier Temper far from Injucundity,<br />
+Thier tongues and pens from Infecundity."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Many other fulsome, turgid, and even whimsical expressious of praise might
+be named, for the Puritans were rich in classic sesquipedalian adjectives,
+and their active linguistic consciences made them equally fertile in
+producing new ones.</p>
+
+<p>Ready and unexpected were the solemn Puritans in repartee. A party of gay
+young sparks, meeting austere old John Cotton, determined to guy him. One
+of the young reprobates sent up to him and whispered in his ear, "Cotton,
+thou art an old fool." "I am, I am," was the unexpected answer; "the Lord
+make both thee and me wiser than we are." Two young men of like intent met
+Mr. Haynes, of Vermont, and said with mock sad faces, "Have you heard the
+news? the Devil is dead." Quick came the answer, "Oh, poor, fatherless
+children! what will become of you?"</p>
+
+<p>Gloomy and depressed of spirits they were often. The good Warham, who could
+take faithful and brave charge of his flock in the uncivilized wilds
+of Connecticut among ferocious savages, was tortured by doubts and
+"blasphemous suggestions," and overwhelmed by unbelief, enduring specially
+agonizing scruples about administering and partaking of the Lord's Supper,
+and was thus perplexed and buffeted until the hour of his sad death. The
+ministers went through various stages of uncertainty and gloom, from the
+physical terror of Dr. Cogswell in a thunderstorm, through vacillating and
+harassing convictions about the Half Way Covenant, through doubt of God,
+of salvation, of heaven, of eternite, particularly distressing suspicions
+about the reality of hell and the personality of the Devil, to the stage
+of deep melancholy which was shown in its highest type in "Handkerchief
+Moody," who preached and prayed and always appeared in public with a
+handkerchief over his face, and gave to Hawthorne the inspiration for his
+story of "The Black Veil." Rev. Mr. Bradstreet, of the First Church of
+Charlestown, was so hypochondriacal that he was afraid to preach in the
+pulpit, feeling sure that he would die if he entered therein; so he always
+delivered his sermons to his patient congregation from the deacons' pew.
+Mr. Bradstreet was unconventional in many other respects, and was far from
+being a typical Puritan minister. He seldom wore a coat, but generally
+appeared in a plaid gown, and was always seen with a pipe in his mouth,--a
+most disreputable addition to the clerical toilet at that date, or, in
+truth, at any date. He was a learned and pious man, however, and was thus
+introduced to a fellow clergyman, "Here is a man who can whistle Greek."</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely one of the early Puritan ministers was free from the sad shadow of
+doubt and fear. No "rose-pink or dirty-drab views of humanity" were theirs;
+all was inky-black. And it is impossible to express the gloom and the
+depression of spirit which fall on one now, after these centuries of
+prosperous and cheerful years, when one considers thoughtfully the deep and
+despairing agony of mind endured by these good, brave, steadfast, godly
+Puritan ministers. Read, for instance, the sentences from the diary of the
+Rev. John Baily, or of Nathaniel Mather, as given by Cotton Mather in his
+"Magnalia." Mather says that poor, sad, heart-sick Baily was filled with
+"desponding jealousies," "disconsolate uneasinesses," gloomy fears, and
+thinks the words from his diary "may be profitable to some discouraged
+minds." Profitable! Ah, no; far from it! The overwhelming blackness
+of despair, the woful doubts and fears about destruction and utter
+annihilation which he felt so deeply and so continually, fall in a heavy,
+impenetrable cloud upon us as we read, until we feel that we too are in the
+"Suburbs of hell" and are "eternally damned."</p>
+
+<p>But in succeeding years they were not always gloomy and not always staid,
+as we know from the stories of the cheerful parties at ordination-times;
+and I doubt not the reverend Assembly of Elders at Cambridge enjoyed to the
+full degree the twelve gallons of sack and six gallons of white wine sent
+to them by the Court as a testimony of deep respect. And the group of
+clergymen who were painted over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of
+Newbury, must have been far from gloom, as the punch-bowl and drinking-cups
+and tobacco and pipes would testify, and their cheerful motto likewise: "In
+essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." And
+the Rev. Mr. ---- no, I will not tell his name--kept an account with
+one Jerome Ripley, a storekeeper, and on one page of this account-book,
+containing thirty-nine entries, twenty-one were for New England rum.
+It somewhat lessens in our notions the personal responsibility, or the
+personal potatory capability of the parson, to discover that there was
+an ordination in town during that rum-paged week, and that the visiting
+ministers probably drank the greater portion of Jerome Ripley's liquor.
+But I wish the store-keeper had--to save this parson's reputation among
+succeeding generations--called and entered the rum as hay, or tea, or
+nails, or anything innocent and virtuous and clerical. When we read of all
+these doings and drinkings of the old New England ministers,--"if ancient
+tales say true, nor wrong these ancient men"--we feel that we cannot so
+fiercely resent nor wonder at the degrading coupling in Byron's sneering
+lines:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms,<br />
+As rum and true religion."</blockquote>
+
+<p>All the cider made by the New England elders did not tend to gloom,
+and they were celebrated for their fine cider. The best cider in
+Massachusetts--that which brought the highest price--was known as the
+Arminian cider, because the minister who furnished it to the market was
+suspected of having Arminian tendencies. A very telling compliment to the
+cider of one of the first New England ministers is thus recorded: "Mr.
+Whiting had a score of appill-trees from which he made delicious cyder.
+And it hath been said yt an Indyan once coming to hys house and Mistress
+Whiting giving him a drink of ye cyder, he did sett down ye pot and smaking
+his lips say yt Adam and Eve were rightlie damned for eating ye appills in
+ye garden of Eden, they should have made them into cyder." This perverse
+application of good John Eliot's teaching would have vexed the apostle
+sorely. Of so much account were the barrels of cider, and so highly were
+they prized by the ministers, that one honest soul did not hesitate to
+thank the Lord in the pulpit for the "many barrels of cider vouchsafed to
+us this year."</p>
+
+<p>Stronger liquors than cider were also manufactured by the ministers,--and
+by God-fearing, pious ministers also. They did not hesitate to own and
+operate distilleries. Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church of
+Hartford and author of the hymn "Swell the anthem, raise the song," was
+engaged in the distilling business and did not make a success of it either.
+Having become bankrupt, he did not dare show his head anywhere in public
+for some time, except on Sunday, for fear of arrest. This disreputable and
+most unclerical affair did not operate against him in the minds of the
+contemporaneous public, for ten years later he received the degree of
+Doctor of Divinity from Princeton College; and he did not hesitate to joke
+about his liquor manufacturing, saying to two of his brother-clergymen,
+"Oh, we are all three in the same boat together,--Brother Prime raises the
+grain, I distil it, and Brother Flint drinks it."</p>
+
+<p>Impostors there were--false parsons--in the early struggling days of New
+England (since "the devil was never weary and never ceasing in disturbing
+the peace of the new English church"), and they plagued the colonists
+sorely. The very first shepherd of the wandering flock--Mr. Lyford, who
+preached to the planters in 1624--was, as Bradford says, "most unsavory
+salt," a most agonizing and unbearable thorn in the flesh and spirit of the
+poor homesick Pilgrims; and he was finally banished to Virginia, where it
+was supposed that he would find congenial and un-Puritanlike companions.
+Another bold-faced cheat preached to the colonists a most impressive sermon
+on the text, "Let him that stole steal no more," while his own pockets were
+stuffed out with stolen money. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth
+speaketh."</p>
+
+<p>Dicky Swayn, "after a thousand rogueries," set up as a parson in Boston.
+But, unfortunately for him, he prayed too loud and too long on one
+occasion, and his prayer attracted the attention of a woman whose servant
+he had formerly been. She promptly exposed his false pretensions and past
+villanies, and he left Boston and an army of cheated creditors. In 1699
+two other attractive and plausible scamps--Kingsbury and May--garbed and
+curried themselves as ministers, and went through a course of unchecked
+villany, building only on their agreeable presence. Cotton Mather wrote
+pertinently of one of these charmers, "Fascination is a thing whereof
+mankind has more Experience than Comprehension;" and he also wrote very
+despitefully of the adventurer's scholarly attainments saying there were
+"eighteen horrid false spells and not one point in one very short note I
+received from him." As the population increased, so also did the list of
+dishonest impostors, who made a cloak of religion most effectively to
+aid them in deceiving the religious community; and sometimes, alas! the
+ordained clergymen became sad backsliders.</p>
+
+<p>Nor were the pious and godly Puritan divines above the follies and
+frailties of other men in other places and in other times. It can be said
+of them, as of the Jew, had they not "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions,
+senses, affections, passions?"--were they not as other men? It is recorded
+of Rev. Samuel Whiting, of Lynn, that "once coming among a gay partie of
+yong people he kist all ye maides and said yt he felt all ye better for
+it." And who can doubt it? Even that extreme type, that highest pinnacle
+of American Puritanical bigotry,--solemn and learned Cotton Mather,--had,
+when he was a mourning widower, a most amusing amorous episode with a
+rather doubtful, a decidedly shady, young Boston woman, whom he styled an
+"Ingenious Child," but who was far from being an ingenuous child. "She," as
+he proudly stated, "became charmed with my person to such a degree that she
+could not but break in upon me with her most importunate requests." And a
+very handsome and thoroughly attractive person does his portrait show
+even to modern eyes. Poor Cotton resisted the wiles of the devil in this
+alluring form, though he had to fast and pray three consecutive nights ere
+the strong Puritan spirit conquered the weak flesh, and he could consent
+and resolve to give up the thought of marrying the siren. His self-denial
+and firmness deserved a better reward than the very trying matrimonial
+"venture" that he afterwards made.</p>
+
+<p>Many another Puritan parson has left record of his wooings that are warm
+to read. And well did the parsons' wives deserve their ardent wooings and
+their tender love-letters. Hard as was the minister's life, over-filled as
+was his time, highly taxed as were his resources, all these hardships were
+felt in double proportion by the minister's wife. The old Hebrew standard
+of praise quoted by Cotton Mather, "A woman worthy to be the wife of a
+priest," was keenly epigrammatic; and ample proof of the wise insight
+of the standard of comparison may be found in the lives of "the pious,
+prudent, and prayerful" wives of New England ministers. What wonder that
+their praises were sung in many loving though halting threnodies, in
+long-winded but tender eulogies, in labored anagrams, in quaintly spelled
+epitaphs?--for the ministers' wives were the saints of the Puritan
+calendar.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XXI</h1>
+
+<h2>The Ministers' Pay.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>The salaries of New England clergymen were not large in early days, but the
+&pound;60 or &pound;70 which they each were yearly voted was quite enough to suitably
+support them in that new country of plain ways and plain living, if they
+only received it, which was, alas! not always the case. The First Court of
+Massachusetts, in 1630, set the amount of the minister's annual stipend
+to be &pound;20 or &pound;30 according to the wealth of the community, and made it a
+public charge. In 1659 the highest salary paid in Suffolk County was &pound;100
+to Mr. Thatcher, and the lowest was &pound;40 to the clergyman at Hull. The
+minister of the Andover church was voted a salary of &pound;60, and "when he
+shall have occacion to marry, &pound;10 more." He was very glad, however, to take
+&pound;42 in hard cash instead of &pound;60 in corn and labor, which were at that time
+the most popular forms of ministerial remuneration; even though the "hard
+cash" were in the form of wampum, beaver-skins, or leaden bullets.</p>
+
+<p>Many congregations, though the members were so pious and godly, were pretty
+sharp in bargaining with their preachers; for instance, the church in New
+London made its new parson sign a contract that "in case he remove before
+the year is out, he returneth the &pound;80 paid him." Often clergymen would
+"supply" (or "Sipploye," or "syploy" or "sipply," or "sciploy," as various
+records have it) from month to mouth without "settling." As they got the
+"keepe of a hors," and their own board for Saturday and Sunday, and on
+Monday morning a cash payment for preaching (though often the amount was
+only twelve shillings), they were richer than with a small yearly salary
+that was irregularly and inconveniently paid. Often too they entered by
+preference into a yearly contract with a church, without any wish for
+regular settlement or ordination.</p>
+
+<p>A large portion of the stipends in early parishes being paid in corn and
+labor, the amounts were established by fixed rate upon the inhabitants;
+and the amount of land owned and cultivated by each church-member was
+considered in reckoning his assessment. These amounts were called voluntary
+contributions. If, however, any citizen refused to "contribute," he
+was taxed; and if he refused to pay his church-tax he could be fined,
+imprisoned, or pilloried. For one hundred years the ministers' salaries
+in Boston were paid by these so-called "voluntary contributions." In one
+church it was voted that "the Deacons have liberty for a quarter of a yeare
+to git in every mans sume either in a Church way or in a Christian way."
+I would the process employed in the "Church way" were recorded, since it
+differed so from the Christian way.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the Puritan paradoxes that abounded in New England, that the
+community of New Haven, a "State whose Desire was Religion," and religion
+alone, was particularly backward in paying the minister who had spiritual
+charge there. After much trouble in deciding about the form and quality
+of the currency which should be used in pay, since so much bad wampum was
+thrust upon the deacons at the public contributions, it was in 1651 enacted
+that "whereas it is taken notice of that Divers give not into the Treasury
+at all on the Lords Day, it is decreed that all such if they give not
+freely, of themselves be rated according to the Jurisdiction order for the
+Ministers Maintaynance." The delinquents were ordered to bring their "rate"
+to the Deacon's house at once. A presuming young man ventured to suggest
+that the recreant members who would not pay in the face of the whole
+congregation would hardly rush to the Deacon's door to give in their
+"rate." He was severely ordered to keep silence in the company of wiser and
+elder people; but time proved his simply wise supposition to be correct;
+and many and various were the devices and forces which the deacons were
+obliged to use to obtain the minister's rate in New Haven.</p>
+
+<p>Some few bold Puritan souls dared to protest against being forced to pay
+the church rate whether they wished to or not. Lieutenant Fuller, of
+Barnstable, was fined fifty shillings for "prophanely" saying "that the law
+enacted about the ministers maintenance was a wicked and devilish one, and
+that the devil sat at the helm when the law was made." Such courageous
+though profane expressions of revolt but little availed; for not only
+were members and attendants of the Puritan churches taxed, but Quakers,
+Baptists, and Church-of-England men were also "rated," and if they refused
+to pay to help support the church that they abhorred, they were fined and
+imprisoned. One man, of Watertown, named Briscoe, dared to write a book
+against the violent enforcement of "voluntary" subscriptions. He was fined
+&pound;10 for his wickedness; and the printer of the book was also punished. A
+virago in New London, more openly courageous, threw scalding water on the
+head of the tithingman who came to collect the minister's rate. Old John
+Cotton preached long and earnestly upon the necessity and propriety of
+raising the money for the minister's salary, and for other expenses of the
+church, wholly by voluntary and eagerly given contributions,--the "Lord
+having directed him to make it clear by Scripture." He believed that tithes
+and church-taxes were productive of "pride, contention and sloth," and
+indicated a declining spiritual condition of the church. But it was a
+strange voluntary gift he wished, that was forced by dread of the pillory
+and cage!</p>
+
+<p>Since, as Higginson said, "New England was a plantation of Religion, not a
+plantation of Trade," the church and its support were of course the first
+thought in laying out a new town-settlement, and some of the best town-lots
+were always set aside for the "yuse of the minister." Sometimes these lots
+were a gift outright to the first settled preacher, in other townships they
+were set aside as glebes, or "ministry land" as it was called. It was a
+universal custom to build at once a house for the minister, and some very
+queer contracts and stipulations for the size, shape, and quality of the
+parson's home-edifice may be read in church-records. To the construction
+of this house all the town contributed, as also to the building of the
+meeting-house; some gave work; some, the use of a horse or ox-team; some,
+boards; some, stones or brick; some, logs; others, nails; and a few, a very
+few, money. At the house-raising a good dinner was provided, and of course,
+plenty of liquor. Some malcontents rebelled against being forced to work on
+the minister's house. Entries of fines are common enough for "refusing
+to dig on the Minister's Selor," for neglecting to send "the Minister's
+Nayles," for refusing to "contribute clay-boards," etc. As with the
+town-lot, the house sometimes was a gift outright to the clergyman, and
+ofttimes the ownership was retained by the church, and the free use only
+was given to each minister.</p>
+
+<p>It was a universal custom to allow free pasturage for the minister's
+horse, for which the village burial-ground was assigned as a favorite
+feeding-ground. Sometimes this privilege of free pasturage was abused. In
+Plymouth, in 1789, Rev. Chandler Robbins was requested "not to have more
+horses than shall be necessary, for his many horses that had been pastured
+on 'Burial Hill'" had sadly damaged and defaced the gravestones,--perhaps
+the very headstones placed over the bones of our Pilgrim Fathers.</p>
+
+<p>The "strangers' money," which was the money contributed by visitors who
+chanced to attend the services, and which was sometimes specified as "all
+the silver and black dogs given by strangers," was usually given to the
+minister. A "black dog" was a "dog dollar."</p>
+
+<p>Often a settlement or a sum of money was given outright to the clergyman
+when he was first ordained or settled in the parish. At a town meeting in
+Sharon, January 8, 1755, which was held with regard to procuring a new
+minister, it was voted "that a committe confer with Mr. Smith, and know
+which will be more acceptable to him, to have a larger settlement and a
+smaller salary, or a larger salary and a smaller settlement, and make
+report to this meeting." On Jan. 15th it was voted "that we give to said
+Mr. Smith 420 ounces of silver or equivalent in old Tenor bills, for a
+settlement, to be paid in three years after settlement. That we give to
+said Mr. Smith 220 Spanish dollars or an equivalent in old Tenor bills for
+his yearly salary." Mr. Smith was very generous to his new parish, for his
+acceptance of its call contains this clause: "As it will come heavy upon
+some perhaps to pay salary and settlement together I have thought of
+releasing part of the payment of the salary for a time to be paid to me
+again. The first year I shall allow you out of the salary you have voted me
+40 dollars, the 2nd 30 dollars, the 3rd 15, the 4th year 20 to be repaid
+to me again, the 5th year 20 more, the 6th year 20 more and the 25 dollars
+that remain, I am willing that the town should keep 'em for its own use."
+He was apparently "willing to live very low," as Parson Eliot humbly and
+pathetically wrote in a petition to his church.</p>
+
+<p>The Puritan ministers in New England in the eighteenth century were all
+good Whigs; they hated the English kings, fully believing that those stupid
+rulers, who really cared little for the Church of England, were burning
+with pious zeal to make Episcopacy the established church of the colonies,
+and knowing that were that deed accomplished they themselves would probably
+lose their homes and means of livelihood. They were the most eager of
+Republicans and patriots, and many of them were good and brave soldiers in
+the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>When the minister acquired the independence he so longed and fought for,
+it was not all his fancy painted it. He found himself poor
+indeed,--practically penniless. He complained sadly that he was paid his
+salary in the worthless continental paper money, and he refused to take it.
+Often he cannily took merchandise of all kinds instead of the low-valued
+paper money, and he became a good and sharp trader, exchanging his various
+goods for whatever he needed--and could get. Merchandise was, indeed, far
+preferable to money. The petition of Rev. Mr. Barnes to his Willsborough
+people has been preserved, and he thus speaks of his salary: "In 1775 the
+war comenced &amp; Paper money was emitted which soon began to depreciate and
+the depreciation was so rappid that in may 1777 your Pastor gave the whole
+of his years Salary for one sucking Calf, the next year he gave the whole
+for a small store pig. Your Pastor has not asked for any consideration
+being willing to try to Scrabble along with the people while they are in
+low circumstances." His neighbor, Rev. Mr. Sprague, of Dublin, formally
+petitioned his church not to increase his salary, "as I am plagued to death
+to get what is owing to me now," or to buy anything with it when he got it.
+The minister in Scarborough had to be paid &pound;5,400 in paper money to make
+good his salary of &pound;60 in gold which had been voted him.</p>
+
+<p>"Living low" and "scrabbling along" seems to have been the normal and
+universal condition of the New England minister for some time after the War
+of Independence. He was obliged to go without his pay, or to take it in
+whatever shape it might chance to be tendered. Indeed, from the earliest
+colonial days it was true that of whatever they had, the church-members
+gave; meal, maize, beans, cider, lumber, merchantable pork, apples,
+"English grains," pumpkins,--all were paid to the parson. Part of the
+stipend of a minister on Cape Cod was two hundred fish yearly from each
+parishioner, with which to fertilize his sandy corn-land. In Plymouth,
+in 1662, the following method of increasing the minister's income was
+suggested: "The Court Proposeth it as a thing that they judge would be very
+commendable and beneficiall to the townes where God's providence shall cast
+any whales, if they should agree to set aparte some p'te of every such fish
+or oyle for the Incouragement of an able and godly minister among them." In
+Sandwich, also, the parson had a part of every whale that came ashore.</p>
+
+<p>Various gifts, too, came to the preachers. In Newbury the first salmon
+caught each year in the weir was left by will to the parson. Judge Sewall
+records that he visited the minister and "carried him a Bushel of
+Turnips, cost me five shillings, and a Cabbage cost half a Crown." Such a
+high-priced cabbage!</p>
+
+<p>That New England country institution--the "donation party" to the
+minister--was evolved at a later date. At these donation parties the
+unfortunate shepherd of the flock often received much that neither he
+nor the wily donors could use, while more valuable and useful gifts were
+lacking.</p>
+
+<p>A very material plenishing of the minister's house was often furnished in
+the latter part of the eighteenth century by the annual "Spinning Bee." On
+a given day the women of the parish, each bearing her own spinning-wheel
+and flax, assembled at the minister's house and spun for his wife great
+"runs" of linen thread, which were afterward woven into linen for the use
+of the parson and his family. In Newbury, April 20,1768, "Young ladies met
+at the house of the Rev. Mr. Parsons, who preached to them a sermon from
+Proverbs 31-19. They spun and presented to Mrs. Parsons two hundred and
+seventy skeins of good yarn." They drank "liberty tea." This makeshift of
+a beverage was made of the four-leaved loosestrife. The herb was pulled
+up like flax, its stalks were stripped of the leaves and were boiled. The
+leaves were put in a kettle and basted with the liquor distilled from the
+stalks. After this the leaves were dried in an oven to use in the same
+manner as tea-leaves. Liberty tea sold readily for sixpence a pound. In
+1787 these same Newbury women spun two hundred and thirty-six skeins
+of thread and yarn for the wife of the Rev. Mr. Murray. Some were busy
+spinning, some reeling and carding, and some combing the flax, while the
+minister preached to them on the text from Exodus xxxv. 25: "And all
+the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands." These
+spinning-bees were everywhere in vogue, and formed a source of much profit
+to the parson, and of pleasure to the spinners, in spite of the sermons.</p>
+
+<p>Pieced patchwork bed-quilts for the minister's family were also given by
+the women of the congregation. Sometimes each woman furnished a neatly
+pieced square, and all met at the parsonage and joined and quilted the
+coverlet. At other times the minister's wife made the patchwork herself,
+but the women assembled and transformed it into quilts for her. The parson
+was helped also in his individual work. When the rye or wheat or grain on
+the minister's land was full grown and ready for reaping and mowing, the
+men in his parish gave him gladly a day's work in harvesting, and in turn
+he furnished them plenty of good rum to drink, else there were "great
+uneasyness." The New England men were not forced to drink liberty tea.</p>
+
+<p>One universal contribution to the support of the minister all over New
+England was cord-wood; and the "minister's wood" is an institution up to
+the present day in the few thickly wooded districts that remain. A load of
+wood was usually given by each male church-member, and he was expected to
+deliver the gift at the door of the parsonage. Sixty loads a year were a
+fair allowance, but the number sometimes ran up to one hundred, as was
+furnished to Parson Chauncey, of Durham. Rev. Mr. Parsons, of East Hadley,
+was the greatest wood-consumer among the old ministers of whom I have
+chanced to read. Good, cheerful, roaring fires must the Parsons family have
+kept; for in 1774 he had eighty loads of wood supplied to him; in 1751 he
+was furnished with one hundred loads; in 1763 the amount had increased to
+one hundred and twenty loads, when the parish was glad to make a compromise
+with their extravagant shepherd and pay him instead &pound;13 6s 8d annually
+in addition to his regular salary, and let him buy or cut his own wood.
+Firewood at that time in that town was worth only the expense of cutting
+and hauling to the house. A "load" of wood contained about three quarters
+of a cord, and until after the Revolutionary War was worth in the vicinity
+of Hadley only three shillings a load. The minister's loads were expected
+to be always of good "hard-wood." One thrifty parson, while watching a
+farmer unload his yearly contribution, remarked, "Isn't that pretty soft
+wood?" "And don't we sometimes have pretty soft preaching?" was the answer.
+It was well that the witty retort was not made a century earlier; for the
+speaker would have been punished by a fine, since they fined so sharply
+anything that savored of "speaking against the minister." In some towns a
+day was appointed which was called a "wood-spell," when it was ordered that
+all the wood be delivered at the parson's door; and thus the farmers formed
+a cheerful gathering, at which the minister furnished plentiful flip, or
+grog, to the wood-givers. Rev. Stephen Williams, of Longmeadow, never
+failed to make a note of the "wood-sleddings" in his diary. He wrote on
+Jan. 25, 1757, "Neighbors sledded wood for me and shewed a Good Humour.
+I rejoice at it. The Lord bless them that are out of humour and brot no
+wood." In other towns the wood did not always come in when it was wanted or
+needed, and winter found the parsonage woodshed empty. Rev. Mr. French, of
+Andover, gave out this notice in his pulpit one Sunday in November: "I will
+write two discourses and deliver them in this meeting-house on Thanksgiving
+Day, <i>provided I can manage to write them without a fire</i>." We can be
+sure that Monday morning saw several loads of good hard wood deposited at
+the parson's door.</p>
+
+<p>Other ministers did not hesitate to demand their cord-wood most openly,
+while still others became adepts in hinting and begging, not only for wood,
+but for other supplies. It is told of a Newbury parson that he rode from
+house to house one winter afternoon, saying in each that he "wished he had
+a slice of their good cheese, for his wife expected company." On his way
+home his sleigh, unfortunately, upset, and the gathering darkness could not
+conceal from the eyes of the astonished townspeople, who ran to "right the
+minister," the nine great cheeses that rolled out into the snow.</p>
+
+<p>Another source of income to New England preachers was the sale of the
+gloves and rings which were given to them (and indeed to all persons of
+any importance) at weddings, funerals, and christenings. In reading Judge
+Sewall's diary one is amazed at the extraordinary number of gloves he thus
+received, and can but wonder what became of them all, since, had he had
+as many hands as Briareus, he could hardly have worn them. The manuscript
+account-book of the Rev. Mr. Elliot, who was ordained pastor of the New
+North Church of Boston in 1742, shows that he, having a frugal mind, sold
+both gloves and rings. He kept a full list of the gloves he received, the
+kid gloves, the lambswool gloves, and the long gloves,--which were for his
+wife. It seems incredible, but in thirty-two years he received two thousand
+and nine hundred and forty pairs of gloves. Of these, though dead men's
+gloves did not have a very good market, he sold through various salesmen
+and dealers about six hundred and forty dollars worth. One wonders that he
+did not "combine" with the undertaker or sexton who furnished the gloves to
+mourners, and thus do a very thrifty business.</p>
+
+<p>The parson, especially in a low-salaried, rural district, had to practise a
+thousand petty and great economies to eke out his income. He and his family
+wore homespun and patched clothing, which his wife had spun and wove and
+cut and made. She knitted woollen mittens and stockings by the score. She
+unfortunately could not make shoes, and to keep the large family shod was a
+serious drain on the clerical purse, one minister declaring vehemently
+that he should have died a rich man if he and his family could have gone
+barefoot. The pastors of seaboard and riverside parishes set nets, like the
+Apostles of old, and caught fish with which they fed their families until
+the over-phosphorized brains and stomachs rebelled. They set snares and
+traps and caught birds and squirrels and hare, to replenish their tables,
+and from the skins of the rabbits and woodchucks and squirrels, the
+parsons' wives made fur caps for the husbands and for the children.</p>
+
+<p>The whole family gathered in large quantities from roadsides and pastures
+the oily bayberries, and from them the thrifty and capable wife made scores
+of candles for winter use, patiently filling and refilling her few moulds,
+or "dipping" the candles again and again until large enough to use. These
+pale-green bayberry tallow candles, when lighted in the early winter
+evening, sent forth a faint spicy fragrance--a true New England
+incense--that fairly perfumed and Orientalized the atmosphere of the
+parsonage kitchen. They were very saving, however, even of these home-made
+candles, blowing them out during the long family prayers.</p>
+
+<p>Some parsons could not afford always to use candles. In the home of one
+well-known minister the wife always knitted, the children ciphered and
+studied, and the husband wrote his sermon by the flickering fire-light (for
+they always had wood in plenty), with his scraps of sermon paper placed on
+the side of the great leathern bellows as it lay in his lap; a pretty home
+scene that was more picturesque to behold than comfortable to take part in.</p>
+
+<p>Country ministers could scarcely afford paper to write on, as it was taxed
+and was high priced. They bought their sermon paper by the pound; but they
+made the first drafts of their addresses, in a fine, closely written hand,
+on wrapping-paper, on the backs of letters, on the margins of their few
+newspapers, and copied them when finished in their sermon-books with a
+keen regard for economy of space and paper. The manuscript sermons of New
+England divines are models of careful penmanship, and may be examined with
+interest by a student of chirography. The letters are cramped and crabbed,
+like the lives of many of the writers, but the penmanship is methodical,
+clear, and distinct, without wavering lines or uncertain touch.</p>
+
+<p>As every parsonage had some glebe land, the parson could raise at least a
+few vegetables to supply his table. One minister, prevented by illness from
+planting his garden, complained with bitterness that, save for a few rare
+gifts of vegetables from his parishioners, his family had no green thing
+all summer save "messes of dandelion greens" which he had dug by the
+roadside, and the summer's succession of wild berries and mushrooms. The
+children had gathered the berries and had sold them when they could, but of
+course no one would buy the mushrooms, hence they had been forced to eat
+them at the parsonage; and he spoke despitefully and disdainfully of the
+mean, unnourishing, and doubtfully healthful food.</p>
+
+<p>In winter the parson's family fared worse; one minister declared that he
+had had nothing but mush and milk with occasional "cracker johnny-cakes"
+all winter, and that he had not once tasted meat in that space of time,
+save at a funeral or ordination-supper, where I doubt not he gorged with
+the composure and capacity of a Sioux brave at a war feast.</p>
+
+<p>Often the low state of the parsonage larder was quite unknown to the
+unthinking members of the congregation, who were not very luxuriously fed
+themselves; and in the profession of preaching as in all other walks of
+life much depended on the way the parson's money was spent,--economy and
+good judgment in housekeeping worked wonders with the small salary. Dr.
+Dwight, in eulogizing Abijah Weld, pastor at Attleborough, declared that
+on a salary of two hundred and twenty dollars a year Mr. Weld brought up
+eleven children, kept a hospitable house, and gave liberally in charity to
+the poor. I fear if we were to ask some carnal-minded person, who knew not
+the probity of Dr. Dwight, how Mr. Weld could possibly manage to accomplish
+such wonderful results with so little money, that we should meet with
+scepticism as to the correctness of the facts alleged. Such cases were,
+however, too common to be doubted. My answer to the puzzling financial
+question would be this: examine and study the story of the home life, the
+work of <i>Mrs</i>. Weld, that unsalaried helper in clerical labor; therein
+the secret lies.</p>
+
+<p>In many cases, in spite of the never failing and never ceasing economy,
+care, and assistance of the hard-working, thrifty wife, in spite of
+tributes, tithes and windfalls--in country parishes especially--the
+minister, unless he fortunately had some private wealth, felt it incumbent
+upon him to follow some money-making vocation on week-days. Many were
+farmers on week-days. Many took into their families young men who wished
+to be taught, or fitted for college. Rev. Mr. Halleck in the course of his
+useful and laborious life educated over three hundred young Puritans in his
+own household. It is not recorded how Mrs. Halleck enjoyed the never ending
+cooking for this regiment of hungry young men. Some parsons learned to draw
+up wills and other legal documents, and thus became on a small scale the
+lawyers of the town. Others studied the mystery of medicine, and bought a
+small stock of the nauseous drugs of the times, which they retailed
+with accompanying advice to their parishioners. Some were coopers, some
+carpenters, rope-makers, millers, or cobblers. One cobbler clergyman in
+Andover, Vermont, worked at his shoe-mending all the week with his Bible
+open on his bench before him, and he marked the page containing any text
+which bore on the subject of his coming sermon, with a marker of waxed
+shoe-thread. Often the Bible, in his pulpit on Sunday, had thirty or forty
+of these shoe-thread guides hanging down from it.</p>
+
+<p>One minister, having been reproved for his worldliness in amassing a large
+enough fortune to buy a good farm, answered his complaining congregation
+thus: "I have obtained the money to buy this farm by neglecting to follow
+the maxim to 'mind my own business.' My business was to study the word of
+God and attend to my parish duties and preach good sermons. All this I
+acknowledge I have not done, for I have been meddling with your business.
+<i>That</i> was to support me and my family; that <i>you</i> have not done.
+But remember this: while I have performed your duties, you have not done
+mine, so I think you cannot complain."</p>
+
+<p>Some of the early ministers, in addition to preaching in the meeting-house,
+did not disdain to take care of the edifice. Parson Everitt of Sandwich was
+paid three dollars a year for sweeping out the meeting-house in which he
+preached; and after he resigned this position of profit, the duties were
+performed by the town physician "as often as there shalbe ocation to keepe
+it deesent." The thrifty Mr. Everitt had a pleasing variety of occupations;
+he was also a successful farmer, a good fence-builder, and he ran a
+fulling-mill.</p>
+
+<p>So, altogether, as they were wholly exempt from taxation, the New England
+parsons did not fare ill, though Mr. Cotton said that "ministers and milk
+were the only cheap things in New England," and he deemed various ills,
+such as attacks by fierce Indians, loss of cattle, earthquakes, and failure
+of crops, to be divine judgments for the small ministerial pay; while
+Cotton Mather, in one of his pompous and depressing jokes, called the
+minister's stipend "Synecdotical Pay." A search in a treatise on rhetoric
+or in a dictionary will discover the point of this witticism--if it be
+worth searching for.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XXII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>One thing which always interests and can but amuse every reader of the
+old Puritan sermons is the astonishingly familiar way in which these New
+England divines publicly shared their domestic joys and sorrows with
+the members of their congregations; and we are equally surprised at the
+ingenuity which they displayed in finding texts that were suitable for
+the various occasions and events. The Reverend Mr. Turell was specially
+ingenious. Of him Dr. Holmes wrote,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"You've heard, no doubt, of Parson Turell;<br />
+Over at Medford he used to dwell,--<br />
+Married one of the Mathers' folks."</blockquote>
+
+<p>His wife, Jane Coleman, was a handsome brunette. The bridegroom preached
+his first sermon after his wedding on this text, "I am black but comely, O
+ye daughters of Jerusalem." When he married a second time he chose as his
+text, "He is altogether lovely, this is my beloved, and this my friend, O
+daughters of Jerusalem!" It is possible that each of Parson Turell's brides
+may have chosen the text from which he preached her honeymoon sermon. It
+was the universal custom for many years thoughout New England to allow a
+bride the privilege of selecting for the parson who had solemnized her
+marriage, or at whose church she first appeared after the wedding, the text
+from which he should preach on the bridal Sabbath. Thus when John Physick
+and Mary Prescott were married in Portland, on July 4, 1770, the bride gave
+to Rev. Mr. Deane this text: "Mary hath chosen that good part;" and from it
+Parson Deane preached the "wedding sermon." When Abby Smith, daughter of
+Parson Smith, married 'Squire John Adams, whom her father disliked and
+would not invite home to dinner, she chose this text for her wedding
+sermon: "John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he
+hath a devil." The high-spirited bride had the honor of living to be the
+wife of one President of the United States, and mother of another.</p>
+
+<p>Another ingenious clergyman gave out one morning as his text, "Unto us a
+son is born;" and thus notified the surprised congregation of an event
+which they had been awaiting for some weeks. Another preached on the text,
+"My servant lieth at home sick," which was literally true. Another, a
+bachelor, dared to announce this abbreviated text: "A wonder was seen in
+heaven--a woman." Dr. Mather Byles, of Boston, being disappointed through
+the non-appearance of a minister named Prince, who had been expected to
+deliver the sermon, preached himself upon the text, "Put not your trust
+in princes." But Dr. Byles was one who would always "court a grin when he
+should win a soul."</p>
+
+<p>One minister felt it necessary to reprove a money-making parishioner who
+had stored and was holding in reserve (with the hope of higher prices) a
+large quantity of corn which was sadly needed for consumption in the town.
+The parson preached from this appropriate text, Proverbs xi. 26. "He that
+withholdeth his corn, the people shall curse him; but blessings shall be
+upon the head of him that selleth it." As the minister grew warmer in his
+explanation and application of the text, the money-seeking corn-storer
+defiantly and unregenerately sat up stiff and unmoved, until at last the
+preacher, provoked out of prudence and patience, roared out, "Colonel
+Ingraham, Colonel Ingraham! you know I mean you; why don't you hang down
+your head?" In a similar case another stern parson employed the text,
+"Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone;" though the personalities
+of the sermon made unnecessary the open reference in the text to the
+offender's name.</p>
+
+<p>The ministers were such autocrats in the Puritan community that they never
+hesitated to show their authority in any manner in the pulpit. Judge Sewall
+records with much bitterness a libel which his pastor, Mr. Pemberton,
+launched at him in the meeting through the medium of the psalm which
+he gave out to be sung. They had differed over the adjustment of some
+church-matter and on the following Sunday the clergyman assigned to be sung
+the libellous and significant psalm. Such lines as these must have been
+hard indeed for Judge Sewall to endure:--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Speak, oh ye Judges of the Earth<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;if just your Sentence be<br />
+Or must not Innocence appeal<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;to Heav'n from your decree</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Your Wicked Hearts and Judgments are<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;alike by Malice sway'd<br />
+Your griping Hands by mighty Bribes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;to violence betrayed. </blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"No Serpent of parch'd Afric's breed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;doth Ranker poison bear<br />
+The drowsy Adder will as soon<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;unlock his Sullen Ear</blockquote>
+
+<blockquote>"Unmov'd by good Advice, and dead<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As Adders they remain<br />
+From whom the skilful Charmer's voice<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;can no attention gain."</blockquote>
+
+<p>Small wonder that Judge Sewall writhed under the infliction of these lines
+as they were doubly thrust upon him by the deacon's "lining" and the
+singing of the congregation; and the words, "The drowsy Adder will as soon
+unlock his Sullen Ear" seemed to particularly irritate him; doubtless he
+felt sure that no one could doubt his integrity, but feared that some might
+think him stupid and obstinate.</p>
+
+<p>Another arbitrary clergyman, having had an altercation with some unruly
+singers in the choir, gave out with much vehemence on the following Sunday
+the hymn beginning,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"And are you wretches yet alive<br />
+And do you yet rebel?"</blockquote>
+
+<p>with a very significant glower towards the singers' gallery. In a similar
+situation another minister gave out to the rebellious choir the hymn
+commencing,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Let those refuse to sing<br />
+Who never knew our God."</blockquote>
+
+<p>A visiting clergyman, preaching in a small and shabby church built in a
+parish of barren and stony farm-land, very spitefully and sneeringly read
+out to be sung the hymn of Watts' beginning,--</p>
+
+<blockquote>"Lord, what a wretched land is this,<br />
+That yields us no supplies!"</blockquote>
+
+<p>But his malicious intent was frustrated and the tables were adroitly turned
+by the quick-witted choir-master, who bawled out in a loud voice as if
+in answer, "Northfield,"--the name of the minister's own home and
+parish,--while he was really giving out to the choir, as was his wont, the
+name of the tune to which the hymn was to be sung.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did the parsons hesitate to be personal even in their prayers. Rev. Mr.
+Moody, who was ordained pastor at York in the year 1700, reproved in an
+extraordinary manner a young man who had called attention to some fine new
+clothing which he wore by coming in during prayer time and thus attracting
+the notice of the congregation. Mr. Moody, in an elevated tone of voice,
+at once exclaimed, "And O Lord! we pray Thee, cure Ned Ingraham of that
+ungodly strut," etc. Another time he prayed for a young lady in the
+congregation and ended his invocation thus, "She asked me not to pray for
+her in public, but I told her I would, and so I have, Amen."</p>
+
+<p>Rev. Mr. Miles, while praying for rain, is said to have used this
+extraordinary phraseology: "O Lord, Thou knowest we do not want Thee to
+send us a rain which shall pour down in fury and swell our streams and
+carry away our hay-cocks, fences, and bridges; but, Lord, we want it to
+come drizzle-drozzle, drizzle-drozzle, for about a week, Amen."</p>
+
+<p>They did not think it necessary always to give their congregations novel
+thoughts and ideas nor fresh sermons. One minister, after being newly
+ordained in his parish, preached the same sermon three Sundays in
+succession; and a deacon was sent to him mildly to suggest a change. "Why,
+no," he answered, "I can see no evidence yet that this one has produced any
+effect."</p>
+
+<p>Rev. Mr. Daggett, of Yale College, had an entire system of sermons which
+took him four years to preach throughout. And for three successive years he
+delivered once a year a sermon on the text, "Is Thy servant a dog that he
+should do this thing?" And the fourth year he varied it with, "And the dog
+did it."</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Coggswell, of Canterbury, Connecticut, had a sermon which he thrust
+upon his people every spring for many years as being suitable to the time
+when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. In it he soberly
+reproved the young church attendants for gazing so much at each other in
+the meeting. This annual anti-amatory advice never failed to raise a smile
+on the face of each father and son in the congregation as he listened to
+the familiar and oft-repeated words.</p>
+
+<p>The Puritan ministers gave advice in their sermons upon most personal and
+worldly matters. Roger Williams instructed the women of his parish to wear
+veils when they appeared in public; but John Cotton preached to them
+one Sunday morning and proved to them that veils were a sign of undue
+subjection to their husbands; and in the afternoon the fair Puritans
+appeared with bare faces and showed that women had even at that early day
+"rights."</p>
+
+<p>How the varieties of headgear did torment the parsons! They denounced
+from many a pulpit the wearing of wigs. Mr. Noyes preached long and often
+against the fashion. Eliot, the noble preacher and missionary to the
+Indians, found time even in the midst of his arduous and incessant duties
+to deliver many a blast against "prolix locks,"--"with boiling zeal," as
+Cotton Mather said,--and he labelled them a "luxurious feminine protexity;"
+but lamented late in life that "the lust for wigs is become insuperable."
+He thought the horrors in King Philip's War were a direct punishment from
+God for wig-wearing. Increase Mather preached warmly against wigs, saying
+that "such Apparel is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture," and that "Monstrous Perriwigs such as some of our church
+members indulge in make them resemble ye locusts that came out of ye
+Bottomless Pit." To learn how these "Horrid Bushes of Vanity" were
+despised by a real live Puritan wig-hater one needs only to read the
+many disparaging, regretful, and bitter references to wig-wearing and
+wig-wearers in Judge Sewall's diary, which reached a culmination when a
+widow whom he was courting suggested most warmly that he ought to wear,
+what his very soul abominated, a periwig.</p>
+
+<p>Eliot had also a strong aversion to tobacco, and denounced its use in
+severe terms; but his opposition in this case was as ineffectual as it was
+against wigs. Allen said, "In contempt of all his admonitions the head
+would be adorned with curls of foreign growth, and the pipe would send up
+volumes of smoke."</p>
+
+<p>Rev. Mr. Rogers preached against long natural hair,--the "disguisement of
+long ruffianly hair,"--as did also President Chauncey of Harvard College;
+while Mr. Wigglesworth's sermon on the subject has often been reprinted,
+and is full of logical arguments. This offence was named on the list of
+existing evils which was made by the General Court: that "the men wore long
+hair like women's hair," while the women were complained of for "cutting
+and curling and laying out of hair, especially among the younger sort."
+Still, the Puritan magistrates, omnipotent as they were, did not dare to
+force the be-curled citizens to cut their long love-locks, though they
+instructed and bribed them to do so. A Salem man was, in 1687, fined ten
+shillings for a misdemeanor, but "in case he shall cutt off his long har of
+his head into a sevill (civil?) frame in the mean time shall have abated
+five shillings of his fine." John Eliot hated long natural hair as well
+as false hair. Cotton Mather said of him, in a very unpleasant figure of
+speech, "The hair of them that professed religion grew too long for him to
+swallow." Other fashions and habits brought forth denunciations from the
+pulpit,--hooped petticoats, gold-laced coats (unless worn by gentlemen),
+pointed shoes, chaise-owning, health-drinking, tavern-visiting, gossiping,
+meddling, tale-bearing, and lying.</p>
+
+<p>Political and business and even medical and sanitary subjects were popular
+in the early New England pulpit. Mr. Peters preached many a long sermon
+to urge the formation of a stock company for fishing, and canvassed all
+through the commonwealth for the same purpose. Cotton Mather said plainly
+that ministers ought to instruct themselves and their congregations in
+politics; and in Connecticut it was ordered by law that each minister
+should give sound and orthodox advice to his congregation at the time of
+civil elections.</p>
+
+<p>Every natural phenomenon, every unusual event called forth a sermon, and
+the minister could find even in the common events of every-day life plain
+manifestations of Divine wrath and judgment. He preached with solemn
+delight upon comets, and earthquakes, and northern lights, and great storms
+and droughts, on deaths and diseases, and wonders and scandals (for there
+were scandals even in puritanical New England), on wars both at home and
+abroad, on shipwrecks, on safe voyages, on distinguished visitors, on noted
+criminals and crimes,--in fact, upon every subject that was of spiritual or
+temporal interest to his congregation or himself. And his people looked
+for his religious comment upon passing events just as now-a-days we read
+articles upon like subjects in the newspaper. Thus was the Puritan minister
+not only a preacher, but a teacher, adviser, and friend, and a pretty
+plain-spoken one too.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>XXIII</h1>
+
+<h2>The Early Congregations.</h2>
+
+
+
+<p>On Sunday morning in New England in the olden time, the country
+church-members whose homes were near the meeting-house walked reverently
+and slowly across the green meadows or the snowy fields to meeting.
+Townspeople, at the sound of the bell or drum or horn, walked decorously
+and soberly along the irregular streets to the house of God. Farmers who
+lived at a greater distance were up betimes to leave their homes and ride
+across the fields and through the narrow bridle-paths, which were then the
+universal and almost the only country roads. These staid Puritan planters
+were mounted on sturdy farmhorses, and a pillion was strapped on behind
+each saddle, and on it was seated wife, daughter, or perhaps a young
+child--I should like to have seen the church-going dames perched up proudly
+in all their Sunday finery, masked in black velvet, a sober Puritan
+travesty of a gay carnival fashion. Riding-habits were hardly known until
+a century ago, and even after their introduction were never worn
+a-pillion-riding, so the Puritan women rode in their best attire.
+Sometimes, in unusually muddy or dusty weather, a very daintily dressed
+"nugiperous" dame would don a linen "weather skirt" to protect her fine
+silken petticoats.</p>
+
+<p>The wealthier Puritans were mounted on fine pacing horses, "once so highly
+prized, now so odious deemed;" for trotting horses were not in much demand
+or repute in America until after the Revolutionary War. There were, until
+that date, professional horse-trainers, whose duties were to teach horses
+to pace; though by far the best saddle-horses were the natural-gaited
+"Narragansett Pacers," the first distinctively American race of horses.
+These remarkably easy-paced animals were in such demand in the West Indies
+for the use of the wives and daughters of the wealthy sugar-planters, and
+in Philadelphia and New York for rich Dutch and Quaker colonists, that
+comparatively few of them were allowed to remain in New England, and they
+were, indeed too high-priced for poor New England colonists. The natural
+and singular pace of these Narragansett horses, which did not incline the
+rider from side to side, nor jolt him up and down, and their remarkable
+sureness of foot and their great endurance, rendered them of much value
+in those days of travel in the saddle. They were also phenomenally
+broad-backed,--shaped by nature for saddle and pillion.</p>
+
+<p>When trotting-horses became fashionable, the trainers placed logs of wood
+at regular intervals across the road, and by exercising the animals
+over this obstructed path forced them to raise their feet at the proper
+intervals, and thus learn to trot.</p>
+
+<p>Long distances did many of the pre-revolutionary farmers of New England
+have to ride to reach their churches, and long indeed must have been the
+time occupied in these Sunday trips, for a horse was too well-burdened with
+saddle and pillion and two riders to travel fast. The worshippers must
+often have started at daybreak. When we see now an ancient pillion--a relic
+of olden times--brought out in jest or curiosity, and strapped behind a
+saddle on a horse's back, and when we see the poor steed mounted by two
+riders, it seems impossible for the over-burdened animal to endure a long
+journey, and certainly impossible for him to make a rapid one.</p>
+
+<p>Horse-flesh, and human endurance also, was economized in early days by what
+was called the "ride and tie" system. A man and his wife would mount saddle
+and pillion, ride a couple of miles, dismount, tie the steed, and walk
+on. A second couple, who had walked the first two miles, soon mounted the
+rested horse, rode on past the riders for two or three miles, dismounted,
+and tied the animal again. In that way four persons could ride very
+comfortably and sociably half-way to meeting, though they must have had
+to make an early start to allow for the slow gait and long halts. At the
+church the disburdened horses were tied during the long services to palings
+and to trees near the meeting-house (except the favored animals that found
+shelter in the noon-houses) and the scene must have resembled the outskirts
+of a gypsy camp or an English horse-fair. Such obedience did the Puritans
+pay to the letter of the law that when the Newbury people were forbidden,
+in tying their horses outside the church paling, to leave them near enough
+to the footpath to be in the way of church pedestrians, it did not prevent
+the stupid or obstinate Newburyites from painstakingly bringing their
+steeds within the gates and tying them to the gate-posts where they were
+much more seriously and annoyingly in the way.</p>
+
+<p>It is usual to describe and to think of the Puritan congregations as like
+assemblies of Quakers, solemn, staid, and uniform and dull of dress; but
+I can discover in historical records nothing to indicate simplicity,
+soberness, or even uniformity of apparel, except the uniformity of fashion,
+which was powerful then as now. The forbidding rules and regulations
+relating to the varied and elaborate forms of women's dress--and of men's
+attire as well--would never have been issued unless such prohibited apparel
+had been common and universally longed-for, and unless much diversity and
+elegance of dress had abounded.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed the daughters of the Pilgrims were true "daughters of Zion, walking
+with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, and mincing as they go." Save
+for the "nose jewels," the complaining and exhaustive list of the prophet
+Isaiah might serve as well for New England as for Judah and Jerusalem:
+"their cauls and their round tires like moons; the chains and the bracelets
+and the mufflers; the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the head
+bands, and the tablets, and the ear-rings; the rings and nose jewels; the
+changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the
+crisping pins; the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods and the
+veils." Nor has the day yet come to pass in the nineteenth century when the
+bravery of the daughters has been taken away.</p>
+
+<p>Pleasant it is to think of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and
+goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have
+been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote,"
+a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with
+"Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and
+a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or
+ciffer" (New England French for coiffure) with "long wings" at the side,
+and a silk or tiffany hood on her drooping head,--Priscilla in this attire
+were pretty indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did sober John Alden and doughty Miles Standish lack for variety in
+their dress; besides their soldier's garb, their sentinel's armor, they
+had a vast variety of other attire to choose from; they could select their
+head-wear from "redd knitt capps" or "monmouth capps" or "black hats lyned
+at the browes with leather." They could have a "sute" of "dublett and hose
+of leather lyned with oyled-skin-leather," fastened with hooks and eyes
+instead of buttons; or one of "hampshire kerseys lyned." They could have
+"mandillions" (whatever they may have been) "lyned with cotton," and
+"wast-coats of greene cotton bound about with red tape," and breeches of
+oiled leather and leathern drawers (I do not know whether these leathern
+drawers were under-garments or leathern draw-strings at the knees of the
+breeches). They could wear "gloves of sheeps or calfs leather" or of kid,
+and fine gold belts, and "points" at the knees. In fact, the invoices of
+goods to the earliest settlers show that they had a choice of various
+materials for garments, including "gilford and gedleyman, holland and
+lockerum and buckerum, fustian, canvass, linsey-woolsey, red ppetuna,
+cursey, cambrick, calico-stuff, loom-work, Dutch serges, and English
+jeans"--enough for diversity, surely. Sad-colored mantles the goodmen wore,
+but their doublets were scarlet, and with their green waistcoats and red
+caps, surely the Puritan men were sufficiently gayly dressed to suit any
+fancy save that of a cavalier. Later in the history of the colony, when
+hooped petticoats and laced hoods and mantles, and long, embroidered gloves
+fastened with horsehair "glove tightens," and when velvet coats and satin
+breeches and embroidered waistcoats, gold lace, sparkling buckles, and
+cocked hats with full bottomed wigs were worn, the gray, sombre old
+meeting-house blossomed like a tropical forest, and vied with the worldly
+Church of England in gay-garbed church attendants.</p>
+
+<p>Stern and severe of face were many of the members of these early New
+England congregations, else they had not been true Puritans in heart, and
+above all, they had not been Pilgrims. Long and thin of feature were they,
+rarely smiling, yet not devoid of humor. Some handsome countenances
+were seen,--austere, bigoted Cotton Mather being, strangely enough, the
+handsomest and most worldly looking of them all. What those brave, stern
+men and women were, as well as what they looked, is known to us all, and
+cannot be dwelt upon here, any more than can here be shown and explained
+the details of their religious faith and creed. Patient, frugal,
+God-fearing, and industrious, cruel and intolerant sometimes, but never
+cowardly, sternly obeying the word of God in the spirit and the letter, but
+erring sometimes in the interpretation thereof,--surely they had no traits
+to shame us, to keep us from thrilling with pride at the drop of their
+blood which runs in our backsliding veins. Nothing can more plainly show
+their distinguishing characteristics, nothing is so fully typical of the
+motive, the spirit of their lives, as their reverent observance of the
+Lord's day.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sabbath in Puritan New England
+by Alice Morse Earle
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND ***
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+</body>
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