SUNDAY IN THE COLONIES
The first building used as a church at the Plymouth colony was the fort,
and to it the Pilgrim fathers and mothers and children walked on Sunday
reverently and gravely, three in a row, the men fully armed with swords
and guns, till they built a meeting-house in 1648. In other New England
settlements, the first services were held in tents, under trees, or
under any shelter. The settler who had a roomy house often had also the
meeting. The first Boston meeting-house had mud walls, a thatched roof,
and earthen floor. It was used till 1640, and some very thrilling and
inspiring scenes were enacted within its humble walls. Usually the
earliest meeting-houses were log houses, with clay-filled chinks, and
roofs thatched with reeds and long grass, like the dwelling-houses. At
Salem is still preserved one of the early churches. The second and more
dignified form of New England meeting-house was usually a square wooden
building with a truncated pyramidal roof, surmounted often with a
belfry, which served as a lookout station and held a bell, from which
the bell-rope hung down to the floor in the centre of the church aisle.
The old church at Hingham, Massachusetts, still standing and still used,
is a good specimen of this shape. It was built in 1681, and is known as
the "Old Ship," and is a comely and dignified building. As more elegant
and costly dwelling-houses were built, so were better meeting-houses;
and the third form with lofty wooden steeple at one end, in the style
of architecture invented by Sir Christopher Wren, after the great fire
of London, multiplied and increased until every town was graced with an
example. In all these the main body of the edifice remained as bare,
prosaic, and undecorated as were the preceding churches, while all the
ambition of both builders and congregation spent itself in the steeple.
These were so varied and at times so beautiful that a chapter might be
written on New England steeples. The Old South Church of Boston is a
good example of this school of ecclesiastical architecture, and is a
well-known historic building as well.
The earliest meeting-houses had oiled paper in the windows, and when
glass came it was not set with putty, but was nailed in. The windows had
what were termed "heavy current side-shutters." The outside of the
meeting-house was not "colored," or "stained" as it was then termed, but
was left to turn gray and weather-stained, and sometimes moss-covered
with the dampness of the great shadowing hemlock and fir trees which
were usually planted around New England churches. The first
meeting-houses were often decorated in a very singular and grotesque
manner. Rewards were paid by all the early towns for killing wolves; and
any person who killed a wolf brought the head to the meeting-house and
nailed it to the outer wall; the fierce grinning heads and splashes of
blood made a grim and horrible decoration. All kinds of notices were
also nailed to the meeting-house door where all of the congregation
might readily see them,--notices of town-meetings, of sales of cattle or
farms, lists of town-officers, prohibitions from selling guns to the
Indians, notices of intended marriages, vendues, etc. It was the only
meeting-place, the only method of advertisement. In front of the church
was usually a row of stepping-stones or horse-blocks, for nearly all
came on horseback; and often on the meeting-house green stood the
stocks, pillory, and whipping-post.
A verse from an old-fashioned hymn reads thus:
"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 first church at Jamestown, Virginia, gathered the congregation by
beat of drum; but while attendants of the Episcopal, Roman Catholic,
and Dutch Reformed churches in the New World were in general being
summoned to divine service by the ringing of a bell hung either over the
church or in the branches of a tree by its side, New England Puritans
were summoned, as the hymn relates, by drum, or horn, or shell. The
shell was a great conch-shell, and a man was hired to blow it--a
mournful sound--at the proper time, which was usually nine o'clock in
the morning. In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the church-shell was
afterwards used for many years as a signal to begin and stop work in the
haying field. In Windsor, Connecticut, a man walked up and down on a
platform on the top of the meeting-house and blew a trumpet to summon
worshippers. Many churches had a church drummer, who stood on the roof
or in the belfry and drummed; a few raised a flag as a summons, or fired
a gun.
Within the meeting-house all was simple enough: raftered walls, puncheon
and sanded or earthen floors, rows of benches, a few pews, all of
unpainted wood, and a pulpit which was usually a high desk overhung by a
heavy sounding-board, which was fastened to the roof by a slender metal
rod. The pulpit was sometimes called a scaffold. When pews were built
they were square, with high partition walls, and had narrow,
uncomfortable seats round three sides. The word was always spelled
"pue"; and they were sometimes called "pits." A little girl in the
middle of this century attended a service in an old church which still
retained the old-fashioned square pews; she exclaimed, in a loud voice,
"What! must I be shut in a closet and sit on a shelf?" These narrow,
shelf-like seats were usually hung on hinges and could be turned up
against the pew-walls during the long psalm-tunes and prayers; so the
members of the congregation could lean against the pew-walls for support
as they stood. When the seats were let down, they fell with a heavy slam
that could be heard half a mile away in the summer time, when the
windows of the meeting-house were open. Lines from an old poem read:--
"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."
A few of the old-time meeting-houses, with high pulpit, square pews, and
deacons' seats, still remain in New England. The interior of the Rocky
Hill meeting-house at Salisbury, Massachusetts, is here shown. It fully
illustrates the words of the poet:--
"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--"
The seats were carefully and thoughtfully assigned by a church committee
called the Seating Committee, the best seats being given to older
persons of wealth and dignity who attended the church. 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 good wife after, clerkly squire before the clown,
From the brave coat lace-embroidered to the gray coat shading down."
Many of the plans for "seating the meeting-house" have been preserved;
the pews and their assigned occupants are clearly designated. A copy is
shown of one now in Deerfield Memorial Hall.
In the early meeting-houses men and women sat on separate sides of the
meeting-house, as in Quaker meetings till our own time. Sometimes a
group of young women or of young men were permitted to sit in the
gallery together. Little girls sat beside their mothers or on footstools
at their feet, or sometimes on the gallery stairs; and I have heard of a
little cage or frame to hold Puritan babies in meeting. Boys did not sit
with their families, but were in groups by themselves, usually on the
pulpit and gallery stairs, where tithing-men watched over them. In
Salem, in 1676, it was ordered by the town that "all ye boyes of ye
towne are appointed to sitt upon ye three paire of stairs in ye
meeting-house, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look after ye boys upon ye
pulpitt stairs."
In Stratford the tithing-man was ordered to "watch over youths of
disorderly carriage, and see they behave themselves comelie, and use
such raps and blows as is in his discretion meet." In Durham any
misbehaving boy was punished publicly after the service was over. We
would nowadays scarcely seat twenty or thirty active boys together in
church if we wished them to be models of attention and dignified
behavior; but after the boys' seats were removed from the pulpit stairs
they were all turned in together in a "boys' pew" in the gallery. There
was a boys' pew in Windsor, Connecticut, as late as 1845, and pretty
noisy it usually was. A certain small boy in Connecticut misbehaved
himself on Sunday, and his wickedness was specified by the justice of
peace as follows:--
"A Rude and Idel Behaver in the meeting hous. Such as Smiling and
Larfing and Intiseing others to the Same Evil. Such as Larfing or
Smiling or puling the hair of his nayber Benoni Simkins in the time
of Publick Worship. Such as throwing Sister Penticost Perkins on
the Ice, it being Saboth day, between the meeting hous and his
plaes of abode."
I can picture well the wicked scene; poor, meek little Benoni Simpkins
trying to behave well in meeting, and not cry out when the young "wanton
gospeller" pulled her hair, and unfortunate Sister Perkins tripped up on
the ice by the young rascal.
Another vain youth in Andover, Massachusetts, was brought up 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 just as wicked; they slammed down the
pew-seats. Tabatha Morgus of Norwich "prophaned the Lord's daye" by her
"rude and indecent behavior in Laughing and playing in ye tyme of
service." On Long Island godless boys "ran raesses" on the Sabbath and
"talked of vane things," and as for Albany children, they played hookey
and coasted down hill on Sunday to the scandal of every one evidently,
except their parents. When the boys were separated and families sat in
pews together, all became orderly in meeting.
The deacons sat in a "Deacons' Pue" just in front of the pulpit;
sometimes also there was a "Deaf Pue" in front for those who were hard
of hearing. After choirs were established the singers' seats were
usually in the gallery; and high up under the beams in a loft sat the
negroes and Indians.
If any person seated himself in any place which was not assigned to him,
he had to pay a fine, usually of several shillings, for each offence.
But in old Newbury men were fined as high as twenty-seven pounds each
for persistent and unruly sitting in seats belonging to other members.
The churches were all unheated. Few had stoves until the middle of this
century. The chill of the damp buildings, never heated from autumn to
spring, and closed and dark throughout the week, was hard for every one
to bear. In some of the early log-built meeting-houses, fur bags made of
wolfskins were nailed to the seats; and in winter church attendants
thrust their feet into them. Dogs, too, were permitted to enter the
meeting-house and lie on their masters' feet. Dog-whippers or
dog-pelters were appointed to control and expel them when they became
unruly or unbearable. Women and children usually carried foot-stoves,
which were little pierced metal boxes that stood on wooden legs, and
held hot coals. During the noon intermission the half-frozen church
attendants went to a neighboring house or tavern, or to a noon-house to
get warm. A noon-house or "Sabba-day house," as it was often called, was
a long low building built near the meeting-house, with horse-stalls at
one end and a chimney at the other. In it the farmers kept, says one
church record, "their duds and horses." A great fire of logs was built
there each Sunday, and before its cheerful blaze noonday luncheons of
brown bread, doughnuts, or gingerbread were eaten, and foot-stoves were
filled. Boys and girls were not permitted to indulge in idle talk in
those noon-houses, much less to play. Often two or three families built
a noon-house together, or the church built a "Society-house," and there
the children had a sermon read to them by a deacon during the "nooning";
sometimes the children had to explain aloud the notes they had taken
during the sermon in the morning. Thus they throve, as a minister wrote,
on the "Good Fare of brown Bread and the Gospel." There was no nearer
approach to a Sunday-school until this century.
The services were not shortened because the churches were uncomfortable.
By the side of the pulpit stood a brass-bound hour-glass which was
turned by the tithing-man or clerk, but it did not hasten the closing of
the sermon. Sermons two or three hours long were customary, and prayers
from one to two hours in length. When the first church in Woburn was
dedicated, the minister preached a sermon nearly five hours long. A
Dutch traveller recorded a prayer four hours long on a Fast Day. Many
prayers were two hours long. The doors were closed and watched by the
tithing-man, and none could leave even if tired or restless unless with
good excuse. The singing of the psalms was tedious and unmusical, just
as it was in churches of all denominations both in America and England
at that date. Singing was by ear and very uncertain, and the
congregation had no notes, and many had no psalm-books, and hence no
words. So the psalms were "lined" or "deaconed"; that is, a line was
read by the deacon, and then sung by the congregation. Some psalms when
lined and sung occupied half an hour, during which the congregation
stood. There were but eight or nine tunes in general use, and even these
were often sung incorrectly. There were no church organs to help keep
the singers together, but sometimes pitch-pipes were used to set the
key. Bass-viols, clarionets, and flutes were played upon at a later date
in meeting to help the singing. Violins were too associated with dance
music to be thought decorous for church music. Still the New England
churches clung to and loved their poor confused psalm-singing as one of
their few delights, and whenever a Puritan, even in road or field, heard
the distant sound of a psalm-tune he removed his hat and bowed his head
in prayer.
Contributions at first were not collected by the deacons, but the entire
congregation, one after another, walked up to the deacons' seat and
placed gifts of money, goods, wampum, or promissory notes in a box. When
the services were ended, all remained in the pews until the minister and
his wife had walked up the aisle and out of the church.
The strict observance of Sunday as a holy day was one of the
characteristics of the Puritans. Any profanation of the day was
severely punished by fine or whipping. Citizens were forbidden to fish,
shoot, sail, row, dance, jump, or ride, save to and from church, or to
perform any work on the farm. An infinite number of examples might be
given to show how rigidly the laws were enforced. The use of tobacco was
forbidden near the meeting-house. These laws were held to extend from
sunset on Saturday to sunset on Sunday; for in the first instructions
given to Governor Endicott by the company in England, it was ordered
that all in the colony cease work at three o'clock in the afternoon on
Saturday. The Puritans found support of this belief in the Scriptural
words, "The evening and the morning were the first day."
A Sabbath day in the family of Rev. John Cotton was thus described by
one of his fellow-ministers:--
"He 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 to
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 (where he had preached and prayed some hours),
he returned again into his study (the place of his labor and
prayer), unto his favorite devotion; where having a small repast
carried him up for his dinner, he continued until the tolling of
the bell. The public service of the afternoon 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 toward
bedtime betaking himself again to his study he closed the day with
prayer. Thus he spent the Sabbath continually."
The Virginia Cavaliers were strict Church of England men and the first
who came to the colony were strict Sunday-keepers. Rules were laid down
to enforce Sunday observance. Journeys were forbidden, boat-lading was
prohibited, also all profanation of the day by sports, such as shooting,
fishing, game-playing, etc. The offender who broke the Sabbath laws had
to pay a fine and be set in the stocks. When that sturdy watch-dog of
religion and government--Sir Thomas Dale--came over, he declared absence
from church should be punishable by death; but this severity never was
executed. The captain of the watch was made to play the same part as the
New England tithing-man. Every Sunday, half an hour before service-time,
at the last tolling of the bell, the captain stationed sentinels, then
searched all the houses and commanded and forced all (except the sick)
to go to church. Then, when all were driven churchwards before him, he
went with his guards to church himself.
Captain John Smith, in his _Pathway to erect a Plantation_, thus vividly
described the first places of divine worship in Virginia:--
"Wee did hang an awning, which is an old saile, to three or foure
trees to shadow us from the Sunne; our walls were railes of wood;
our seats unhewed trees till we cut plankes; our Pulpit a bar of
wood nailed to two neighbouring trees. In foul weather we shifted
into an old rotten tent; this came by way of adventure for new.
This was our Church till we built a homely thing like a barne set
upon Cratchets, covered with rafts, sedge, and earth; so also was
the walls; the best of our houses were of like curiosity, that
could neither well defend from wind nor rain.
"Yet we had daily Common Prayer morning and evening; every Sunday
two sermons; and every three months a holy Communion till our
Minister died: but our Prayers daily with an Homily on Sundays we
continued two or three years after, till more Preachers came."
A timber church sixty feet long took the place of this mud and clay
chapel, and this was in turn replaced by the brick one whose ruined
arches are still standing. The wooden church saw the most pompous
ceremony of the day when the governor, De La Warre, or Delaware as we
now call it, in full dress, attended by all his councillors and officers
and fifty halbert-bearers in scarlet cloaks, filed within its
flower-decked walls.
This decoration of flowers was significant of the difference between the
church edifices of the Puritans and of the Cavaliers. The churches of
the Southern colonies were, as a rule, much more richly furnished. Many
were modelled in shape after the old English churches and were built of
stone, though Jonathan Boucher, the colonial clergyman, could write that
the greater number of the Southern churches were, at the time of the
Revolution, "composed of wood, without spires, or towers or steeples or
bells, placed in retired and solitary spots and contiguous to springs or
wells." Many of the churches and the chapels-of-ease stood by the
waterside, and to the services came the church attendants in canoes,
periaugers, dugouts, etc. It made an animated scene upon the water, as
the boats came rowing in and as they departed after the service.
Sometimes the seats were comfortably cushioned, and they were carefully
assigned as in the Puritan meetings. In some Virginia churches seats in
the galleries were deemed the most dignified. There was a pew for the
magistrates, another for the magistrates' ladies; pews for the
representatives and church-wardens, vestrymen, etc. Persons crowded into
pews above their stations, just as in New England, and were promptly
displaced. Groups of men built pews together, and there were schoolboys'
galleries and pews.
The first clergyman in Virginia, Robert Hunt, a true man of God, came as
a missionary, and he and others were men of marked intellect and
religion, but in the eighteenth century the pay was too small and
uncertain to attract any great men from the Church of England, and
church attendance dwindled and became irregular. For in Virginia the
parish was expected to receive any clergyman sent them from England, a
rule which often proved unsatisfactory; and deservedly so, since some
very disreputable offshoots of English families were thrust upon the
Virginia churches. In the Carolinas, where the church chose its own
clergyman, harmony and affection prevailed in the parishes as it did
among the New England Puritans. Though the Virginians did not always
love their clergymen, still they were ever steadfast in their affection
to their church, and regarded it as the only church.
Sunday was not observed with as much rigidity in New Netherland as in
New England, but strict rules and laws were made for enforcing quiet
during service-time. Fishing, gathering berries or nuts, playing in the
streets, working, going on pleasure trips, all were forbidden. On Long
Island shooting of wild fowl, carting of grain, travelling for pleasure,
all were punished. In Revolutionary times a cage was set up in City Hall
Park, near the present New York Post-office, in which boys were confined
who did not properly regard the Sabbath.
Before the Dutch settlers had any churches or domines, as they called
their ministers, they had _krankbesoeckers_, or visitors of the sick,
who read sermons to an assembled congregation every Sunday. The first
church at Albany was much like the Plymouth fort, simply a blockhouse
with loop-holes through which guns could be fired. The roof was mounted
with three cannon. It had a seat for the magistrates and one for the
deacons, and a handsome octagonal pulpit which had been sent from
Holland, and which still exists. The edifice had a chandelier and candle
sconces and two low galleries. The first church in New Amsterdam was of
stone, and was seventy-two feet long.
A favorite form of the Dutch churches was six or eight sided, with a
high pyramidal roof, topped with a belfry and a weather-vane. Usually
the windows were so small and of glass so opaque that the church was
very dark. A few of the churches were poorly heated with high stoves
perched up on pillars, the Albany and Schenectady churches among them,
but all the women carried foot-stoves, and some of the men carried
muffs.
Almost as important as the domine was the _voorleezer_ or chorister, who
was also generally the bell-ringer, sexton, grave-digger, funeral
inviter, schoolmaster, and sometimes town clerk. He "tuned the psalm";
turned the hour-glass; gave out the psalms on a hanging board to the
congregation; read the Bible; gave up notices to the domine by sticking
the papers in the end of a cleft stick and holding it up to the high
pulpit.
The deacons had control of all the church money. In the middle of the
sermon they collected contributions by passing _sacjes_. These were
small cloth or velvet bags hung on the end of a pole six or eight feet
long. A French traveller told that the Dutch deacons passed round "the
old square hat of the preacher" on the end of a stick for the
contributions. Usually there was a little bell on the _sacje_ which rung
when a coin was dropped in.
In many Dutch churches the men sat in a row of pews around the wall
while the women were seated on chairs in the centre of the church. There
were also a few benches or pews for persons of special dignity, or for
the minister's wife.
There were many other colonists of other religious faiths: the Roman
Catholics in Maryland and the extreme Southern colonies; the Quakers in
Pennsylvania; the Baptists in Rhode Island; the Huguenots, Lutherans,
Moravians; but all enjoined an orderly observance of the Sabbath day.
And it may be counted as one of the great blessings of the settlement of
America, one of the most ennobling conditions of its colonization, that
it was made at a time when the deepest religious feeling prevailed
throughout Europe, when devotion to some religion was found in every
one, when the Bible was a newly found and deeply loved treasure; when
the very differences of religious belief and the formation of new sects
made each cling more lovingly and more earnestly to his own faith.