Chapter 2

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the troops were recalled, though already far towards the field, and no pride or policy prevented the order from being rescinded.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.