Atlantic Monthly | Page 4

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