It is nine o'clock upon a summer Sunday morning, in the year sixteen
hundred and something. The sun looks down brightly on a little forest
settlement, around whose expanding fields the great American wilderness
recedes each day, withdrawing its bears and wolves and Indians into an
ever remoter distance,--not yet so far but that a stout wooden gate at
each end of the village street indicates that there is something outside
which must stay outside, if possible. It would look very busy and
thriving in this little place, to-day, but for the Sabbath stillness
which broods over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the
smoke ascends more faintly than usual from the chimneys of these
abundant log-huts and scanty framed houses, and since three o'clock
yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world's work has been done.
Last night a preparatory lecture was held, and now comes the
consummation of the whole week's life, in the solemn act of worship. In
which settlement of the Massachusetts Colony is the great observance to
pass before our eyes? If it be Cambridge village, the warning drum is
beating its peaceful summons to the congregation. If it be Salem
village, a bell is sounding its more ecclesiastic peal, and a red flag
is simultaneously hung forth from the meeting-house, like the
auction-flag of later periods, but offering in this case goods without
money and beyond price. But if it be Haverhill village, then Abraham
Tyler has been blowing his horn assiduously for half an hour, a service
for which Abraham, each year, receives a half-pound of pork from every
family in town.
Be it drum, bell, or horn, which gives the summons, we will draw near to
this important building, the centre of the village, the one public
edifice,--meeting-house, town-house, school-house, watch-house, all in
one. So important is it, that no one can legally dwell more than a
half-mile from it. And yet the people ride to meeting, short though the
distance be, for at yonder oaken block a wife dismounts from behind her
husband;--and has it not, moreover, been found needful to impose a fine
of forty shillings on fast trotting to and fro? All sins are not modern
ones, young gentlemen.
We approach nearer still, and come among the civic institutions. This is
the pillory, yonder the stocks, and there is a large wooden cage, a
terror to evil-doers, but let us hope empty now. Round the meeting-house
is a high wooden paling, to which the law permits citizens to tie their
horses, provided it be not done too near the passage-way. For at that
opening stands a sentry, clothed in a suit of armor which is painted
black, and cost the town twenty-four shillings by the bill. He bears
also a heavy matchlock musket; his rest, or iron fork, is stuck in the
ground, ready to support the weapon; and he is girded with his
bandoleer, or broad leather belt, which sustains a sword and a dozen tin
cartridge-boxes.
The meeting-house is the second to which the town has treated itself,
the first having been "a timber fort, both strong and comely, with flat
roof and battlements,"--a cannon on top, and the cannonade of the gospel
down below. But this one cost the town sixty-three pounds, hard-earned
pounds, and carefully expended. It is built of brick, smeared outside
with clay, and finished with clay-boards, larger than our clapboards,
outside of all. It is about twenty-five feet square, with a chimney half
the width of the building, and projecting four feet above the thatched
roof. The steeple is in the centre, and the bell-rope, if they have one,
hangs in the middle of the broad aisle. There are six windows, two on
each of the two sides, and two more at the end, part being covered with
oiled paper only, part glazed in numerous small panes. And between the
windows, on the outside, hang the heads of all the wolves that have been
killed in the township within the year. But the Quakers think that the
wolves have cheated the parish and got inside, in sheep's clothing.
The people are assembling. The Governor has passed by, with his four
vergers bearing halberds before him. The French Popish ambassadors, who
have just arrived from Canada, are told the customs of the place, and
left to stay quietly in the Governor's house, with sweetmeats, wines,
and the liberty of a private walk in the garden. The sexton has just
called for the minister, as is his duty twice every Sunday, and,
removing his cocked hat, he walks before his superior officer. The
minister enters and passes up the aisle, dressed in Geneva cloak, black
skull-cap, and black gloves open at thumb and finger, for the better
handling of his manuscript. He looks round upon his congregation, a few
hundred, recently _seated_ anew for the year, arranged according to rank
and age. There are the old men in the pews beneath the pulpit. There are
the young men in the gallery, or near the door, with ruffs, showy belts,
gold and silver buttons, "points" at the knees, and great boots. There
are the young women, with "silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs,"
"embroidered or needle-worked caps," "immoderate great sleeves," "cut
works,"--a mystery,--"slash apparel,"--another mystery,--"immoderate
great vayles, long wings," etc.,--mystery on mystery, but all recorded
in the statutes, which forbid these splendors to persons of mean estate.
There are the wives of the magistrates in prominent seats, and the
grammar-school master's wife next them; and in each pew, close to the
mother's elbow, is the little wooden cage for the youngest child, still
too young to sit alone. All boys are held too young to sit alone also;
for, though the emigrants left in Holland the aged deaconess who there
presided, birch in hand, to control the rising generation in Sunday
meetings, yet the urchins are now herded on the pulpit- and
gallery-stairs, with four constables to guard them from the allurements
of sin. And there sits Sin itself embodied in the shrinking form of some
humiliated man or woman, placed on a high stool in the principal aisle,
bearing the name of some dark crime written on paper and pinned to the
garments, or perhaps a Scarlet Letter on the breast.
Oh, the silence of this place of worship, after the solemn service sets
in! "People do not sneeze or cough here in public assemblies," says one
writer, triumphantly, "so much as in England." The warning caution, "Be
short," which the minister has inscribed above his study-door, claims no
authority over his pulpit. He may pray his hour, unpausing, and no one
thinks it long; for, indeed, at prayer-meetings four persons will
sometimes pray an hour each,--one with confession, one with private
petitions, a third with petitions for church and kingdom, and a fourth
with thanksgiving,--neither part of the quartette being for an instant
confused with the other. Then he may preach his hour, and, turning his
hour-glass, may say,--but that he will not anticipate the levity to be
born in a later century with Mather Byles,--"Now, my hearers, we will
take another glass."
In short, this is the pomp and circumstance of glorious preaching. Woe
to any one who shall disturb its proprieties! It is written in the
statute, "If any one 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 capitals, 'A Wanton Gospeller.'" Nor this alone, but the
law stands by the minister's doctrine even out of the meeting-house. It
is but a few days since Nathaniel Hadlock was sentenced to be severely
whipped for declaring that he could receive no profit from Mr. H----'s
preaching,--since Thomas Maule was mauled to the extent of ten stripes
for declaring that Mr. H---- preached lies, and that his instruction was
the doctrine of devils,--since even the wife of Nicholas Phelps was
sentenced to pay five pounds or be whipped, for asserting that this same
Mr. H---- sent abroad his wolves and bloodhounds among the sheep and
lambs. Truly, it is a perilous thing to attend public worship in such
reverential days. However, it is equally dangerous to stay at home;
there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any one
unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the
stocks or in the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together.
But we must give our attention to the sermon. It is what the
congregation will pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a
Scriptural discourse,--like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all
backbone and a great deal of that. It may be some very special and
famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is preaching on "The Morning
Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy Winds"; or it may
be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson of
some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking
and partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton
Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a
thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra,"--consisting of seven
separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from
Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural philosophy.
Just as he has proclaimed, "In the thunder there is the voice of the
glorious God," a messenger comes hastening in, as in the Book of Job, to
tell him that his own house has just been struck, and though no person
is hurt, yet the house hath been much torn and filled with the
lightnings. With what joy and power he instantly wields above his
audience this providential surplus of excitement, reminding one
irresistibly of some scientific lecturer who has nearly blown himself up
by his own experiments, and proceeds beaming with fresh confidence, the
full power of his compound being incontestably shown. Rising with the
emergency, he tells them grandly, that, as he once had in his house a
magnet which the thunder changed instantly from north to south, so it
were well if the next bolt could change their stubborn souls from Satan
to God. But afterward he is compelled to own that Satan also is
sometimes permitted to have a hand in the thunder, which is the reason
why it breaks oftener on churches than on any other buildings; and again
he admits, pensively, at last, that churches and ministers' houses have
undoubtedly the larger share.
The sermon is over. The more demoralized among the little boys, whose
sleepy eyes have been more than once admonished by the hare's-foot wand
of the constables,--the sharp paw is used for the boys, the soft fur is
kept for the smooth foreheads of drowsy maidens,--look up thoroughly
awakened now. Bright eyes glance from beneath silk or tiffany hoods, for
a little interlude is coming. Many things may happen in this pause after
the sermon. Questions may be asked of the elders now, which the elders
may answer,--if they can. Some lay brother may "exercise" on a text of
Scripture,--rather severe exercise, it sometimes turns out. Candidates
for the church may be proposed. A baptism may take place. If it be the
proper month, the laws against profaning the Sabbath may be read. The
last town-regulations may be read; or, far more exciting, a new marriage
may be published. Or a darker scene may follow, and some offending
magistrate may be required to stand upon a bench, in his worst garments,
with a foul linen cap drawn close to his eyes, and acknowledge his sins
before the pious people, who reverenced him so lately.
These things done, a deacon says impressively, "Brethren, now there is
time for contribution; wherefore, as God hath prospered you, so freely
offer." Then the people in the galleries come down and march two
abreast, "up one ile and down the other," passing before the desk, where
in a long "pue" sit the elders and deacons. One of these holds a
moneybox, into which the worshippers put their offerings, usually
varying from one to five shillings, according to their ability and
good-will. Some give paper pledges instead; and others give other
valuables, such as "a fair gilt cup, with a cover," for the
communion-service. Then comes a psalm, read, line after line, by some
one appointed, out of the "Bay Psalm-Book," and sung by the people.
These psalms are sung regularly through, four every Sunday, and some ten
tunes compose the whole vocal range of the congregation. Then come the
words, "Blessed are they who hear the word of the Lord and keep it," and
then the benediction.
And then the reverend divine descends from his desk and walks down the
aisle, bowing gravely right and left to his people, not one of whom
stirs till the minister has gone out; and then the assembly disperses,
each to his own home, unless it be some who have come from a distance,
and stay to eat their cold pork and peas in the meeting-house.
Roll aside the panorama of the three-hours' Sunday service of two
centuries ago, lest that which was not called wearisome in the passing
prove wearisome in the delineation now. It needed all this accumulation
of small details to show how widely the externals of New-England
church-going have changed since those early days. But what must have
been the daily life of that Puritan minister for whom this exhausting
service was but one portion of the task of life! Truly, they were "pious
and painful preachers" then, as I have read upon a stone in the old
Watertown graveyard;--"princely preachers" Cotton Mather calls them. He
relates that Mr. Cotton, in addition to preaching on Sunday and holding
his ordinary lecture every Thursday, preached thrice a week besides, on
Wednesday and Thursday early in the morning, and on Saturday afternoon.
He also held a daily lecture in his house, which was at last abandoned
as being too much thronged, and frequent occasional days occurred, when
he would spend six hours "in the word and in prayer." On his voyage to
this country, he being accompanied by two other ministers, they commonly
had three sermons a day,--one after every meal. He was "an universal
scholar and a walking library,"--he studied twelve hours a day, and
said he liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went
to sleep.
A fearful rate of labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous
life. It seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have
survived to write four thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the
Reverend John Mitchell was called "a truly aged young man" at
thirty,--especially when we consider that he was successor at Cambridge
to "the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing Mr.
Shepard," in continuance of whose labors he kept a monthly lecture,
"wherein he largely handled man's misery by sin and made a most
entertaining exposition of the Book of Genesis."
For the minister's week-days were more arduous than his Sundays, and to
have for each parish both pastor and teacher still left a formidable
duty for each. He must visit families during several afternoons in every
week, sending previous notice, so that children and domestics might be
ready for catechizing. He was "much visited for counsel" in his own
home, and must set apart one day in the week for cases of conscience,
ranging from the most fine-drawn self-tormentings up to the most
unnatural secret crimes. He must often go to lectures in neighboring
towns, a kind of religious dissipation which increased so fast that the
Legislature at last interfered to restrict it. He must have five or six
separate seasons for private prayer daily, devoting each day in the week
to special meditations and intercessions,--as Monday to his family,
Tuesday to enemies, Wednesday to the churches, Thursday to other
societies, Friday to persons afflicted, and Saturday to his own soul. He
must have private fasts, spending whole days locked in his study and
whole nights prostrate on the floor. Cotton Mather "thought himself
starved," unless he fasted once a month at farthest, while he often did
it twice in a week. Then there were public fasts quite frequently,
"because of sins, blastings, mildews, drought, grasshoppers,
caterpillars, small pox," "loss of cattle by cold and frowns of
Providence." Perhaps a mouse and a snake had a battle in the
neighborhood, and the minister must expound it as "symbolizing the
conflict betwixt Satan and God's poor people," the latter being the
mouse triumphant. Then if there were a military expedition, the minister
might think it needful to accompany it. If there were even a muster, he
must open and close it with prayer, or, in his absence, the captain must
officiate instead.
One would naturally add to this record of labors the attendance on
weddings and funerals. It is strange how few years are required to make
a usage seem ancestral, or to reunite a traditional broken one. Who now
remembers that our progenitors for more than a century disused religious
services on both these solemn occasions? Magistrates alone could perform
the marriage ceremony; though it was thought to be carrying the monopoly
quite too far, when Governor Bellingham, in 1641, officiated at his own.
Prayer was absolutely forbidden at funerals, as was done also by Calvin
at Geneva, by John Knox in Scotland, by the English Puritans in the
Westminster Assembly, and by the French Huguenots. The bell might ring,
the friends might walk, two and two, to the grave; but there must be no
prayer uttered. The secret was, that the traditions of the English and
Romish Churches must be avoided at all sacrifices. "Doctor," said King
James to a Puritan divine, "do you go barefoot because the Papists wear
shoes and stockings?" Even the origin of the frequent New-England habit
of eating salt fish on Saturday is supposed to have been the fact that
Roman Catholics eat it on Friday.
But if there were no prayers said on these occasions, there were
sermons. Mr. John Calf, of Newbury, described one specimen of funeral
sermon in immortal verse:--
"On Sabbath day he went his way,
As he was used to do,
God's house unto, that they might know
What he had for to show;
God's holy will he must fulfil,
For it was his desire
For to declare a sermon rare
Concerning Madam Fryer."
The practice of wedding discourses was handed down into the last
century, and sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into rather
startling levities. For instance, when Parson Smith's daughter Mary was
to marry young Mr. Cranch,--(what graceful productions of pen and pencil
have come to this generation from the posterity of that union!)--the
father permitted the saintly maiden to decide on her own text for the
sermon, and she meekly selected, "Mary hath chosen the better part,
which shall not be taken away from her," and the discourse was duly
pronounced. But when her wild young sister Abby was bent on marrying a
certain Squire Adams, called John, whom her father disliked and would
not even invite to dinner, she boldly suggested for _her_ text, "John
came, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he hath a
devil." But no sermon stands recorded under this prefix, though Abby
lived to be the wife of one President of the United States and mother of
another.
The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. "New England being
a country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably
enwrapped in theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest
themselves in politics." Indeed, for many years they virtually
controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could
vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and
imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by
permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their
orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not
democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit
government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their
first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,--that
is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was
afterwards rebuked in England as "fanatical and absurd." But the
government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered
by theological controversy.
In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as
late as 1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon,
on the day appointed by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for
the direction of the town in the work before them." They wrote
state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at town-meetings. At
the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson, minister
of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for
his candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from
among the boughs. Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which
still ornaments the Common; but one sees no chips of that other old
block among its branches now.
One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence
would have been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their
consistency unflinching, their range narrow, and their penalties
severe,--and it certainly was so. Looking at their educational
provisions, they seem all noble; looking at their schedule of sins and
retributions, one wonders how any rational being could endure them for a
day. Communities, like individuals, furnish virtues piecemeal. Roger
Williams, with all his wise toleration, bequeathed to Rhode Island no
such system of schools as his persecutors framed for Massachusetts. But
the children who were watched and trained thus carefully might be put to
death, if they "cursed their orderly parents" after the age of
sixteen;--not that the penalty ever was inflicted, but it was on the
statute-book. Sabbath-breaking was placed on a level with
murder,--though Calvin himself allowed the old men to play at bowls and
the young men to practise military training, after afternoon service,
at Geneva. Down to 1769 not even a funeral could take place on Sunday in
Massachusetts, without license from a magistrate. Then the stocks and
the wooden cage were in frequent use, though "barbarous and cruel"
punishments were forbidden in 1641. Scolds and railers were set on a
ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in running
water, if possible. Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome theologian, was silenced
with a cleft stick applied to her tongue. Thomas Scott, in 1649, was
sentenced for some offence to learn "the chatachise," or be fined ten
shillings, and, after due consideration, paid the fine. Sometimes
offenders, with a refinement of cruelty, were obliged to "go and talk to
the elders." And if any youth made matrimonial overtures to a young
female without the consent of her parents, or, in their absence, of the
County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned. A new etymology
for the word "courting."
An exhibition of this mingled influence was in the relation of the
ministers to the Indian wars. Roger Williams, even when banished and
powerless, could keep the peace with the natives. But when the brave
Miantonimo was to be dealt with for suspected treason, and the civil
authorities decided, that, though it was unsafe to set him at liberty,
they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter being finally
referred to five "elders," Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him
in cold blood. The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated,
and their heroic King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard,
was hunted like a wild beast, his body quartered and set on poles, his
head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on a gibbet in Plymouth, and
one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers returned thanks, and
one said that they had _prayed_ the bullet into Philip's heart. Nay, it
seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, "the women, as they came
out of the meeting-house, fell upon two Indians, that had been brought
in as captives, and in a tumultuous way very barbarously murdered them,"
in revenge for the death of some fishermen: a moral application which
certainly gives a singular impression of the style of gospel prevailing
inside the meeting-house that day. But it is good to know, on the other
side, that, when the Commissioners of the United Colonies had declared
an Indian war, and the Massachusetts Colony had become afterwards
convinced that the war was unrighteous, the troops were recalled, though
already far towards the field, and no pride or policy prevented the
order from being rescinded.
These were some of the labors of the clergy. But no human being lives
without relaxation, and they may have had theirs. True, "ministers have
little to joy in in this world," wrote old Norton; and one would think
so, to read the dismal diaries, printed or manuscript, of those days. "I
can compare with any man living for fears," said Hooker. "I have sinned
myself into darkness," said Bailey. "Many times have I been ready to lay
down my ministry, thinking God had forsaken me." "I was almost in the
suburbs of hell all day." Yet who can say that this habit of agonizing
introspection wholly shut out the trivial enjoyments of daily life? Who
drank, for instance, that twelve gallons of sack and that six gallons of
white wine which the General Court thought it convenient that the
Auditor should send, "as a small testimony of the Court's respect, to
the reverend assembly of Elders at Cambridge," in 1644? Did the famous
Cambridge Platform rest, like the earth in the Hebrew cosmology, upon
the waters,--strong waters? Was it only the Derry Presbyterians who
would never give up a p'int of doctrine, nor a pint of rum? It is
startling to remember that in 1685 it was voted, on occasion of a public
funeral, that "some person be appointed to look after the burning of the
wine and the heating of the cider," and to hear that on this occasion
there were thirty-two gallons of wine and still more of cider, with one
hundred and four pounds of that ensnaring accessory, sugar. Francis
Higginson, in writing back to the mother country that one sup of New
England's air was better than a whole draught of Old England's ale, gave
convincing proof that he had tasted both beverages. But, after all, the
very relaxations of the Puritan minister were more spiritual than
spirituous, and to send forth a good Nineteenthly from his own lips was
more relishing than to have the best Double X go in.
In spite of the dignity of this influential class, they were called only
Elders for a long time. Titles were carefully adjusted in those days.
The commonalty bore the appellations of Goodman and Goodwife, and one of
Roger William's offences was his wishing to limit these terms to those
who gave some signs of deserving them. The name "Mr." was allowed to
those who had taken the degree of Master of Arts at College, and also to
professional men, eminent merchants, military officers, and mates of
vessels, and their wives and daughters monopolized the epithet "Mrs."
Mr. Josiah Plastow, when he had stolen four baskets of corn from the
Indians, was degraded into plain Josiah. "Mr." seems to have meant
simply "My Sir," and the clergy were often called "Sir" merely, a title
given also to college graduates, on Commencement programmes, down to the
time of the Revolution. And so strong was the Puritan dislike to the
idolatry of saints' names, that the Christian Apostles were sometimes
designated as Sir Paul, Sir Peter, and Sir James.
In coming to the private affairs of the Puritan divines, it is
humiliating to find that anxieties about salary are of no modern origin.
The highest compensation I can find recorded is that of John Higginson
in 1671, who had £160 voted him "in country produce," which he was glad,
however, to exchange for £120 in solid cash. Solid cash included
beaver-skins, black and white wampum, beads, and musket-balls, value one
farthing. Mr. Woodbridge in Newbury at this same time had £60, and Mr.
Epes preached in Salem for twenty shillings a Sunday, half in money and
half in provisions. Holy Mr. Cotton used to say that nothing was cheap
in New England but milk and ministers. Down to 1700, Increase Mather
says, most salaries were less than £100, which he thinks "might account
for the scanty harvests enjoyed by our farmers." He and his son Cotton
both tell the story of a town where "two very eminent ministers were
only allowed £30 per annum" and "the God who will not be mocked made
them lose £300 worth of cattle that year." The latter also complains
that the people were very willing to consider the ministers the stars,
rather than the mere lamps, of the churches, provided they, like the
stars, would shine without earthly contributions.
He also calls the terms of payment, in one of his long words,
"Synecdotical Pay,"--in allusion to that rhetorical figure by which a
part is used for the whole. And apparently various causes might produce
this Synecdoche. For I have seen an anonymous "Plea for Ministers of the
Gospel," in 1706, which complains that "young ministers have often
occasion in their preaching to speak things offensive to some of the
wealthiest people in town, on which occasion they may withhold a
considerable part of their maintenance." It is a comfort to think how
entirely this source of discomfort, at least, is now eradicated from the
path of the clergy; and it is painful to think that there ever was a
period when wealthy parishioners did not enjoy the delineation of their
own sins.
However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of
rhetorical tropes and malecontent millionnaires. The Puritan divine
could commonly afford not only to keep house, but to keep horse
likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional felicity of printing his own
sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been no great
trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as
1677,--not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors
are,--and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two
different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that
day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries
are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society
at Worcester,--without whose treasures, let me add, this modest
monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse,
the moral sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man
was fined in Newbury for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good
beast she was." The minister's house was built by the town; in Salem it
was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies and no gable-ends,"--so that
the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else;--and the
Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put
the minister's grounds in order.
Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev.
Ezekiel Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,--"Much ado I
have with my own family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or
family duties. I had a rare blessing of servants in England, and those I
brought over were a blessing; but the young brood doth much afflict me."
Probably the minister's wife had the worst of this; but she seems to
have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint, and could
bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase
for a model female,--"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of
the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old
gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate
love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an
"ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his parish thought by no means
a model female, but from whom it took three days of solitary fasting and
prayer to wean him at last.
He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat
strangely. Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard
at Cambridge, as aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow "on the
general recommendation of her," and the college students were greatly
delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, in 1691,
wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have seen in
manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,--one of which treats
of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care.
She having children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of
his own children "out of the way," if necessary,--a hint which becomes
formidable when one remembers that he was the author of that once famous
theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which he relentingly assigned to
infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the easiest room in
hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as if
he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little
heart-shaped locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart
and "Thine forever."
Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister.
First came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's
followers were exasperating enough; they had to be confined in irons
separately, one in each town, on pain of death, if they preached their
doctrines,--and of course they preached them. But their offences and
penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken
open,--a thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do
to any one,--they might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury,
for the first offence be fined, for the second lose one ear, for the
third lose the other ear, and for the fourth be bored with red-hot iron
through the tongue,--though this last penalty remained a dead letter.
They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped through
town after town,--three women were whipped through eleven towns, eighty
miles,--but afterwards the number was limited to three. Their testimony
was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless
among wolves and bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic,
and R for Rogue; they could be sold as slaves; and their graves must not
be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest their poor afflicted bodies
should find rest there.
Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta
and to Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan
must have looked on the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have
since regarded the Bloomer costume,--and the Inquisition imprisoned the
missionaries, though the Sultan did not. But meanwhile the Quaker women
in New England might be walking to execution with their male
companions,--like Mary Dyer in Boston,--under an armed guard of two
hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for
every year. When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus
hand in hand between two young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an
hour of the greatest joy I could enjoy in this world. No tongue could
utter and no heart understand the sweet influence of the Spirit which
now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and covered her face
with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman; and
when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying
that she would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at
last, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.
It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat
of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow
wormy. It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on,
the Quakers called it a retribution for these things. But let us be
just, even to the unjust. Toleration was a new-born virtue in those
days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or
asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did not wish to
be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of
legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"--a
doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or
the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it
persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is,
therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised
intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely
blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their
largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims
of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your
death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an
alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties
were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to
death from the beginning;--of course, four too many.
Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not
theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the
Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered
no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best
possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their
modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly
approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain
Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the
Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,--coming into meeting
dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their
feet,--or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and
fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the
vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body. The
Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and
so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed,
the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in
Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,--playing over again upon George
Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and
imprisonment from which they had just escaped;--as minorities have
persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.
Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the
majority. Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as
these: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and
grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal
but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou
whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion!
thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth!
thou best to be spared of all mankind!"--all of which are genuine
epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton
Mather, who collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even
Dr. Chauncy's catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and
Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be
tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so
comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major
Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.
There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the
Quaker feud in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends
wished to espouse a fair Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his
marrying out of their society, and the Congregationalists his marrying
into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed her:--"Ruth, let us break
from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my religion, and thou
shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of
England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the
resolution, the Puritan historian says, _so far_ as going into the
Church, and marrying, and staying there for life. But probably the
ministers thought it to be another case of synecdoche.
With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the
astonishing part played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It
must be remembered that the belief in this visitation was no new or
peculiar thing in New England. The Church, the Scriptures, the mediæval
laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had been laws against it in
England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen
Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas
Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and
judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described
this crime as definitely and seriously as any other. In Scotland four
thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg,
Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl
was burnt alive in Würtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that
wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is
in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there
were no witches on the earth, nor devils,--except" (as they profanely
added) "the New-England ministers, and such as they."
John Higginson sums it up best:--"They proceeded in their integrity with
a zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and
evidence." "_But there is a question_," he wisely adds, "whether some of
the laws, customs, and privileges used by judges and juries in England,
which were followed as patterns here, were not insufficient." Cotton
Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a
conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long
list of the legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally,
that the fact of fifty confessions was, after all, the one irresistible
vindication of their strong measures.
It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every
other evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the
authorities to do, when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural
precedents, the prisoners insisted on entering a plea of guilty? When
Goody E---- testified that she and two others rode from Andover to a
witch-meeting on a broomstick, and the stick broke and she fell and was
still lame from it,--when her daughter testified that she rode on the
same stick, and confirmed all the details of the casualty,--when the
grand-daughter confirmed them also, and added, that she rode on another
stick, and they all signed Satan's book together,--when W. B----, aged
forty, testified that Satan assembled a hundred fine blades near Salem
Meeting-House, and the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine were carried
round, and Satan was like a black sheep, and wished them to destroy the
minister's house, (by thunder probably,) and set up his kingdom, and
"then all would be well,"--when one woman summoned her three children
and some neighbors and a sister and a domestic, who all testified that
she was a witch and so were they all,--what could be done for such
prisoners by judge or jury, in an age which held witchcraft a certainty?
It was only the rapid rate of increase which finally stopped the
convictions.
One thing is certain, that this strange delusion, a semi-comedy to
us,--though part of the phenomena may find their solution in laws not
yet unfolded,--was the sternest of tragedies to those who lived in it.
Conceive, for an instant, of believing in the visible presence and
labors of the arch-fiend in a peaceful community. Yet from the bottom of
their souls these strong men held to it, and they waged a hand-to-hand
fight with Satan all their days. Very inconveniently the opponent
sometimes dealt his blows, withal. Surely it could not be a pleasant
thing to a sound divine, just launched upon his seventeen-headed
discourse, to have a girl with wild eyes and her hair about her ears
start up and exclaim, "Parson, your text is too long,"--or worse yet,
"Parson, your sermon is too long,"--or most embarrassing of all,
"There's a great yellow bird sitting on the parson's hat in the pulpit."
But these formidable interruptions veritably happened, and received the
stern discipline in such cases made and provided.
But beside Quakers and witches, the ministers had other female
tormentors to deal with. There was the perpetual anxiety of the
unregenerated toilet. "Immodest apparel, laying out of hair, borders,
naked necks and arms, or, as it were, pinioned with superfluous
ribbons,"--these were the things which tried men's souls in those days,
and the statute-books and private journals are full of such plaintive
inventories of the implements of sin. Things known as "slash apparel"
seem to have been an infinite source of anxiety; there must be only one
slash on each sleeve and one in the back. Men also must be prohibited
from shoulderbands of undue width, double ruffs and cuffs, and
"immoderate great breeches." Part of the solicitude was for modesty,
part for gravity, part for economy: none must dress above their
condition. In 1652, three men and a woman were fined ten shillings each
and costs for wearing silver-lace, another for broad bone-lace, another
for tiffany, and another for a silk hood. Alice Flynt was accused of a
silk hood, but, proving herself worth more than two hundred pounds,
escaped unpunished. Jonas Fairbanks, about the same time, was charged
with "great boots," and the evidence went hard against him; but he was
fortunately acquitted, and the credit of the family saved.
The question of veils seems to have rocked the Massachusetts Colony to
its foundations, and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th,
1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was utterly and unalterably opposed to veils,
regarding them as a token of submission to husbands in an unscriptural
degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an unscriptural
extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and
Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such
cases; so Paul, veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr.
Cotton came to Salem to preach for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his
chance to put in his solemn protest against veils; he said they were a
custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to meeting
without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding
visible result from a single sermon within the memory of man.
Beginning with the veils, the eye of authority was next turned on what
was under them. In 1675 it was decided, that, as the Indians had done
much harm of late, and the Deity was evidently displeased with
something, the General Court should publish a list of the evils of the
time. And among the twelve items of contrition stood this: "Long hair
like women's hair is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair
made into periwigs;--and by some women wearing borders of hair, and
their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair," (does
this hint at puff-combs?) "which practice doth increase, especially
among the younger sort." Not much was effected, however,--"divers of the
elders' wives," as Winthrop lets out, "being in some measure partners in
this disorder." The use of wigs also, at first denounced by the clergy,
was at last countenanced by them: in portraits later than 1700 they
usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752 the
tables had so far turned that a church-member in Newbury refused
communion because "the pastor wears a wigg." Yet Increase Mather thought
they played no small part in producing the Boston Fire. "Monstrous
Periwigs, such as some of our church-members indulge in, which make them
resemble the Locusts that came out of y'e Bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7,
8,--and as an eminent Divine calls them, _Horrid Bushes of Vanity_; such
strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord
to kindle fires in all the towns in the country."
Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a
community where every man was expected to have a current supply of
religious experiences always ready for circulation. There was a certain
hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a seafaring man, who gave much
trouble; and E.F.,--for they mostly appear by initials,--who, coming to
New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in black, was taken
for a minister, and asked to preach: he was apparently a little insane,
and at first talked "demurely," but at last "railed like Rabshakeh,"
Cotton Mather says. There was also M.J., a Welsh tanner, who finally
stole his employer's leather breeches and set up for a preacher,--less
innocently apparelled than George Fox. But the worst of all was one
bearing the since sainted name of Samuel May. This vessel of wrath
appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel spirit,--though,
indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been "a scandalous fire-ship
among the churches." Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after
this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who
knew no Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,--for (as he indignantly
asserts) "there were eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in
one very short note I received from him." This doubtful personage copied
his sermons from a volume by his namesake, Dr. Samuel Bolton,--"Sam the
Doctor and Sam the Dunce," Mather calls them. Finally, "this eminent
worthy stranger," Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled with his
parish for their slow payments, and "flew out like a Dragon, spitting
this among other fire at them:--'I see, no longer pipe, no longer
dance,'--so that they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had
never seen him." Then "the guilty fellow, having bubbled the silly
neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a sudden was gone," and
Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to have been
the worst penalty the man suffered.
It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan
ministers, lest the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and
have no tithingman to take his part. But however it may be with the
regular standards of theology of that period, every one could find a
sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies. Eighty-two "pestilent
heresies" were counted as having already sprung up in 1637; others say
one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept
Rhode Island for what housekeepers call an "odd drawer," into which to
crowd all these eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened
to lose his religious opinion, he might be sure to find it again at some
village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists;
thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that
extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by
her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and
converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions.
Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who
proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and
hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the
ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and
chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that
the Jewish Sabbath should give place to the modern Sunday. All these,
and such as these, were called generally "Seekers" by the Puritans,--who
claimed for themselves that they had found that which they sought. It is
the old distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be afloat or to
be at anchor?
Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with
the leadership of the New-England colonies,--Cotton, Hooker, Norton,
Shepard, the Higginsons, the Mathers. To these might be added many an
obscurer name, preserved in the quaint epitaphs of the
"Magnalia":--Blackman, "in spite of his name, a Nazarene whiter than
snow";--Partridge, "a hunted partridge," yet "both a dove and an
eagle";--Ezekiel Rogers, "a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very
children might pluck";--Nathaniel Rogers, "a very lively preacher and a
very preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family
and he taught his family as if it had been his church";--Warham, the
first who preached with notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt
respecting the Lord's Supper;--Stone, "both a loadstone and a flint
stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of preaching only one
hour.
These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,--nobler
than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The
most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been
disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern
successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his
family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination,--which Puritan divines
might do without rebuke. Not one of them has left on record a statement
so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:--"To be content with food
and raiment,--to mind, not our own, but every man the things of
another,--yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be
right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many
as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of
God's sake,--this is humanity, this is Christianity; the rest is but
formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish
blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of Roger
Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and
in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the
testing of two centuries, less solid or durable than his?
These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held
evil,--Satan and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians,
negligent parishioners, disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and
women in slash apparel. Yet the tenderest private gentleness often lay
behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience. Some of them would never
chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others would write in
Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on
the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made
the ballad at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day.
"Sir," said some one, "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body
of people, and there's not seven of them all but loves Mr. Wilson."
"Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a thing: here's a mighty
body of people, and there's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves
him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men
came along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton,"
and one came and cried in his ear, "Cotton, thou art an old fool,"--"I
know it, I know it," retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently
added, "The Lord make both me and thee wiser!" Mr. Hooker was once
reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied, "I see you are in a
passion; I will not answer you," and so ran away. It contradicts all
one's notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man,
finding afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to
apologize, and owned himself to have been wrong.
What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness
and zeal, with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their
shoulders, and put that iron into the New-England blood which has since
supplied the tonic for a continent? It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he
was "a person who, while doing his Master's work, would put a king in
his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket anything but
a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They
flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound
Christians" was a proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers,
and sometimes their parishes, but never their independence. I find a
hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty laid up against them, but not
one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored the tongues of
others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues
with a bar of gold,--as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to
do, and not African tribes alone.
There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day
every man of New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous
habit they accumulated. And, on the other hand, every man of the many
who still stand ready to indorse everything signed by a D.D.--without
even adding the commercial E.E., for Errors Excepted--is in part the
victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there was a kind of
democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more
thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no
separate clerical class, and the "elder" was only the highest officer of
his own church. Each religious society could choose and ordain its own
minister, or dispense with all ordaining services at will, without the
slightest aid or hindrance from council or consociation. So the stern
theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology of the pews;
the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were
recognized as spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the
men of their time, whatever they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when
asked about the priests' money, said, that, if they were really the
leaders of the people, they could not have too much payment,--or too
little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions the Puritan
ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year, with a
discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads, beaver-skins, and
musket-balls. What they took in musket-balls they paid back in the
heavier ammunition of moral truth. Here is a specimen of their
grape-shot:--"My fathers and brethren," said John Higginson, "this is
never to be forgotten, that our New England is originally a plantation
of religion, and not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as
are making cent. per cent. remember this. Let others who have come over
since at sundry times remember this, that worldly gain was not the end
and design of the people of New England, but religion. And if any man
among us make religion as twelve and the world as thirteen, let such a
man know he hath neither the spirit of a true New-England man, nor yet
of a sincere Christian."
* * * * *