Atlantic Monthly | Page 5

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