rocked the Massachusetts Colony to its foundations, and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th, 1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was utterly and unalterably opposed to veils, regarding them as a token of submission to husbands in an unscriptural degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an unscriptural extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such cases; so Paul, veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr. Cotton came to Salem to preach for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his chance to put in his solemn protest against veils; he said they were a custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to meeting without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding visible result from a single sermon within the memory of

man.

Beginning with the veils, the eye of authority was next turned on what was under them. In 1675 it was decided, that, as the Indians had done much harm of late, and the Deity was evidently displeased with something, the General Court should publish a list of the evils of the time. And among the twelve items of contrition stood this: "Long hair like women's hair is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair made into periwigs;—and by some women wearing borders of hair, and their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair," (does this hint at puffcombs ?)" which practice doth increase, especially among the younger sort." Not much was effected, however,—“ divers of the elders' wives," as Winthrop lets out, "being in some measure partners in this disorder." The use of wigs also, at first denounced by the clergy, was at last countenanced by them: in portraits later than 1700 they usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752 the tables had so far turned that a churchmember in Newbury refused communion because "the pastor wears a wigg." Yet Increase Mather thought they played

no small part in producing the Boston Fire. "Monstrous Periwigs, such as some of our church-members indulge in, which make them resemble the Locusts that came out of ye Bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7, 8, and as an eminent Divine calls them, Horrid Bushes of Vanity; such strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and to express Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord to kindle fires in all the towns in the country."

Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a community where every man was expected to have a current supply of religious experiences always ready for circulation. There was a certain hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a seafaring man, who gave much trouble; and E. F.,- for they mostly appear by initials, who, coming to New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in black, was taken for a minister, and asked to preach: he was apparently a little insane, and at first talked "demurely," but at last "railed like Rabshakeh," Cotton Mather says. There was also M. J., a Welsh tanner, who finally stole his employer's leather breeches and set up for a preacher, — less innocently apparelled than George Fox. But the worst of all was one bearing the since sainted name of Samuel May. This vessel of wrath appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel spirit,

though, indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been "a scandalous fire-ship among the churches." Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who knew no Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor even English, for (as he indignantly asserts) "there were eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in one very short note I received from him." This doubtful personage copied his sermons from a volume by his namesake, Dr. Samuel Bolton,

with his parish for their slow payments, and "flew out like a Dragon, spitting this among other fire at them: ‘I see, no longer pipe, no longer dance,'-so that they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had never seen him." Then "the guilty fellow, having bubbled the silly neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a sudden was gone," and Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to have been the worst penalty the man suffered.

It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan ministers, lest the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and have no tithingman to take his part. But however it may be with the regular standards of theology of that period, every one could find a sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies. Eighty-two "pestilent heresies" were counted as having already sprung up in 1637; others say one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept Rhode Island for what housekeepers call an "odd drawer," into which to crowd all these eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened to lose his religious opinion, he might be sure to find it again at some village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists; thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions. Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that the Jewish Sabbath should give place to the modern Sunday. All these, and such as these, were called generally "Seekers" by the Puritans, - who

claimed for themselves that they had found that which they sought. It is the o'd distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be afloat or to be at anchor?

Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with the leadership of the New-England colonies,

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Cotton, Hooker, Norton, Shepard, the Higginsons, the Mathers. To these might be added many an obscurer name, preserved in the quaint epitaphs of the "Magnalia":- Blackman, "in spite of his name, a Nazarene whiter than snow"; - Partridge, a hunted partridge," yet "both a dove and an eagle"; - Ezekiel Rogers, "a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very children might pluck"; -Nathaniel Rogers, "a very lively preacher and a very preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family and he taught his family as if it had been his church";- Warham, the first who preached with notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt respecting the Lord's Supper; - Stone, "both a loadstone and a flint stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of preaching only one hour.

These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,— nobler than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination, — which Puritan divines might do without rebuke. Not one of them has left on record a statement so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams: -"To be content with food and raiment, to mind, not our own, but every man the things of another, yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of God's sake, — this is humanity, this is Christianity; the

rest is but formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of Roger Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the testing of two centuries, less solid or durable than his?

These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held evil,- Satan and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians, negligent parishioners, disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and women in slash apparel. Yet the tenderest private gentleness often lay behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience. Some of them would never chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others would write in Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made the ballad at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day. "Sir," said some one, "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body of people, and there's not seven of them all but loves Mr. Wilson." "Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a thing: here's a mighty body of people, and there 's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men came along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton," and one came and cried in his ear, "Cotton, thou art an old fool,” "I know it, I know it," retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently added, "The Lord make both me and thee wiser!" Mr. Hooker was once reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied, "I see you are in a passion; I will not answer you,” and so ran away. It contradicts all one's notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man, finding afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to apologize, and owned himself to have been wrong.

What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness and zeal, with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their shoulders, and put that iron into the New - England blood which has since supplied the tonic for a continent? It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he was 66 a person who, while doing his Master's work, would put a king in his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket anything but a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound Christians" was a proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers, and sometimes their parishes, but never their independence. I find a hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty laid up against them, but not one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored the tongues of others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues with a bar of gold,- as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to do, and not African tribes alone.

There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day every man of New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous habit they accumulated. And, on the other hand, every man of the many who still stand ready to indorse everything signed by a D. D.—without even adding the commercial E. E., for Errors Excepted is in part the victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there was a kind of democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no separate clerical class, and the "elder was only the highest officer of his own church. Each religious society could choose and ordain its own minister, or dispense with all ordaining services at will, without the slightest aid or hindrance from council or consociation. So the stern theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology of the pews; the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were

- or

recognized as spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the men of their time, whatever they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when asked about the priests' money, said, that, if they were really the leaders of the people, they could not have too much payment, too little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions the Puritan ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year, with a discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads, beaver-skins, and musket-balls. What they took in musket-balls they paid back in the heavier ammunition of moral truth. Here is a specimen of their grape-shot:

"My fathers and brethren,” said John Higginson, "this is never to be forgotten, that our New England is originally a plantation of religion, and not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as are making cent. per cent. remember this. Let others who have come over since at sundry times remember this, that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of New England, but religion. And if any man among us make religion as twelve and the world as thirteen, let such a man know he hath neither the spirit of a true New-England man, nor yet of a sincere Christian."

THE circumstances of a first meeting so color long years of acquaintanceship, that, should these circumstances be comic in their nature, the intercourse which follows partakes much of the grotesque. Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of Edward Martin, apart from the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my memory a smile rather than a sigh.

Some years ago, journeying on foot through Northern Connecticut, it became necessary for me to stop overnight at the quiet inn of Deacon S―.

Sharon I had visited, fair as Berkshire, but less an old story; I had lingered about the twin lakes of Salisbury; I had carried away many sweet memories of Warramaug and its mountain; and I now found myself in the neighborhood of Gramley Bridge, eager for fresh water, clean towels, and the plenty of a country tea-table, -not averse to strawberry short-cake, or the snowy delights of cottage-cheese.

It was rapidly growing dark, when, as I hurried on toward my cheerful welcome, a bend in the road brought me in sight of a figure that filled me with curiosity and amazement.

form,-stooping, squatting, and groping before me.

The man, for such it proved, was performing most wondrous gymnastics upon the ground, smelling here, smelling there, too agile to be tipsy, too silent to be mad. I had no desire to be alone in a lonely road at nightfall with a maniac, and I was not sorry when my nearer approach resolved these strange phenomena into a well-dressed pedestrian on all-fours in the middle of a dusty highway.

He rose as I approached, and I smiled to see that the spectacles astride his handsome nose were minus one lens. He seemed half blind and wholly bewildered. I looked at once for the lost glass, and there it lay shining at me from the very spot where he had been so industriously peering. He laughed grimly as I handed it to him, fitted his treasure into its wonted rim, took out his watch, and with a low chuckle said,

"Twenty-five minutes is a long time to search for a bit of such small circumfe-rence. Thank you. Do you go to the Deacon's?"

"Yes." "So do I."

We walked on together in silence, till we reached our journey's end, I too tired, he too reserved, too preoccupied, or too shy, to speak again; but when, at last, we were seated with our cigars on the Deacon's door-step, he turned suddenly to me and asked, —