"A boy was early taught a profound respect for his parents, teachers, and guardians, and implicit prompt obedience. If he undertook to rebel his will was broken by persistent and adequate punishment. He was taught that it was a sin to find fault with his meals, his apparel, his tasks or his lot in life. Courtesy was enjoined as a duty. He must be silent among his superiors. If addressed by older persons he must respond with a bow. He was to bow as he entered and left the school, and to every man and woman, old or young, rich or poor, black or white, whom he met on the road. Special punishment was visited on him if he failed to show respect for the aged, the poor, the colored, or to any persons whatever whom God had visited with infirmities."
All children in godly households were taught personal consideration of the old and afflicted, a consideration which lasted till our present days of organized charities. As a lesson of patience and kindness, read Mrs. Silsbee's account of the blind piano tuner in Salem. He was employed in many households and ever treated with marked attention. His tuning instrument had to be placed for him on each piano-screw by some member of the family. He was paid, given cake and wine, then humored by being given a tangled skein of silk to unravel and thus show his dexterity, and finally led tenderly home.
Sir Francis Doyle says, "It is the intention of the Almighty that there should exist for a certain time between childhood and manhood, the natural production known as a boy." This natural production existed two centuries ago as well as to-day. Though children were certainly subdued and silent in the presence of older folk, still they were boys and girls, not machine-like models of perfection. We know of their turbulence in church; and boys in colonial days robbed orchards, and played ball in the streets, and tore down gates, and frightened horses, and threw stones with as much vim and violence as if they had been born in the nineteenth century. Mather, in his Vindication of New England, referring to the charge of injuring King's Chapel, shows us Boston schoolboys in much the same mischief that schoolboys have been in since:—
"All the mischief done is the breaking of a few Quarels of Glass by idle Boys, who if discover'd had been chastis'd by their own Parents. They have built their Chapel in a Publick burying place, next adjoining a great Free School, where the Boyes (having gotten to play) may, some by Accident, some in Frolick, and some perhaps in Revenge for disturbing their Relatives' Graves by the Foundation of that Building, have broken a few Quarels of the Windows."
Children did not always pose either as models of decorum or propriety in their relations with each other. In a little book called The Village School, we read of their beating and kicking each other, and that there was one bleeding nose. Worse yet, when the girls went forth to gather "daisies and butter-flowers," the ungallant boys kicked the girls "to make them pipe."
CHAPTER XII
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND TRAINING
Puritanism is not of the Nineteenth Century, but of the Seventeenth, the grand unintelligibility for us lies there. The Fast Day Sermons, in spite of printers, are all grown dumb. In long rows of dumpy little quartos they indeed stand here bodily before us; by human volition they can be read, but not by any human memory remembered. The Age of the Puritans is not extinct only and gone away from us, but it is as if fallen beyond the capabilities of memory itself; it is grown what we may call incredible. Its earnest Purport awakens now no resonance in our frivolous hearts, ... the sound of it has become tedious as a tale of past stupidities.
—Oliver Cromwell's Life and Letters. Thomas Carlyle, 1845.