We were carelessly looking over a genealogy of the "Minot Family" in
the second number of the "New England Historical and Genealogical
Register," when suddenly our eyes were suffused with tears, as they
rested on the following sentence in the catalogue of the children of
Capt. John Minot, who died in Dorchester, 1669:
"Martha, born Sept. 22, 1657; died, single, Nov. 23, 1678, aged
21. She was engaged to be married, but died unmarried, leaving
a will in which she directed that at her funeral her betrothed
husband, 'John Morgan, Jr. be all over mourning, and follow next
after me.'"
What a history is there in these few words about Martha Minot, who
lived almost two centuries ago! The mind runs back in a moment to
those times, when almost all New England was a wilderness--to those
days of the old Indian wars, when no man could be a "captain" without
being a man of some rank and consequence. Just after the close of
King Philip's war, when the villages of New England were all in
peace, Capt. John Minot's daughter Martha, twenty-one years of age,
and having come into possession of her share of her father's estate,
had plighted her troth to one she loved, and was expecting to be
married too, when disease fastened upon her young frame, and would
not be repelled. In the chill November air, when
"The melancholy days were come, the saddest of the year,"
she faded like a leaf. And at her burial there followed, nearer
than brother or sister, nearest to the hearse, the one whom, of all
the living, she loved most, from whom to part had been to her more
painful than the death-pang, and who had been in her thoughts till
"the love-light in her eye" was extinguished. That single item in
her directions for her funeral, that "John Morgan, Jr., be all over
mourning, and follow next after me," tells the whole story.
Nothing seems, at first sight, less interesting or less instructive,
than a genealogical table, a mere register of names and dates. But
such a passage as that which we have quoted--so picturesque, so
suggestive, so touching, so dramatic--when it occurs in the midst
of these dry records, throws out an electric light at every link
in the chain of generations. Each of those names in the table is
the memorial--perhaps the only memorial--of a human heart that once
lived and loved; a heart that kept its steady pulsations through some
certain period of time, and then ceased to beat and mouldered into
dust. Each of those names is the memorial of an individual human life
that had its joys and sorrows, its cares and burthens, its affections
and hopes, its conflicts and achievements, its opportunities wasted
or improved, and its hour of death. Each of those dates of "birth,"
"marriage," "death,"--O how significant! What a day was each of those
dates to some human family, or to some circle of loving human hearts!
To read a genealogy then may be, to a thinking mind, like walking in
a cemetery, and reading the inscriptions on the gravestones. As we
read, we may say with the poet--
"To a mysteriously-consorted pair,
This place is consecrate--to Death and Life."
The presence of death drives the mind to thoughts of immortality.
Memorials of the dead are memorials not of death only, but of
life. They lived, and therefore they died; and as the mind thinks
of the dead gathered to their fathers, it cannot but think of the
unseen worlds which they inhabit. All these names are memorials of
human spirits that have passed from time into eternity. Ready or
unprepared, in youth or in maturity, in childhood or in old age, they
went into eternity, as we are going.
"The nursling, and the tottering little one
Taken from air and sunshine when the rose
Of infancy first blooms upon his cheek;
The thinking, thoughtless schoolboy; the bold youth
Of soul impetuous, and the bashful maid,
Smitten when all the promises of life
Are opening round her; those of middle age,
Cast down while confident in strength they stand,
Like pillars fixed more firmly, as might seem,
And more secure, by very weight of all
That for support rests on them; the decayed
And burthensome; and lastly that poor few
Whose light of reason is with age extinct;
The hopeful and the hopeless, first and last,
The earliest summoned and the longest spared,
Are here deposited."
The genealogical chapters in Genesis and Chronicles are commonly and
very naturally regarded as being almost if not quite an exception
to the testimony, "All Scripture is profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." But the
story is told of a man who had long been irreligious and thoughtless,
that in some vacant hour he happened to open his Bible, and began
to read the catalogue of antediluvians, in the fifth chapter of
Genesis. As he read that one lived so many years and he _died_, and
another lived so many years and he died, the uniformity of the record
arrested his attention, his mind was awakened to new thoughts of the
significancy of death and life, and thus he was led to realize the
ends of his existence, and to dedicate himself, in penitence and
trust, to a forgiving God.--_New York Evangelist._