Atlantic Monthly | Page 7

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