Sunday was not observed with as much rigidity in New Netherland as in New England, but strict rules and laws were made for enforcing quiet during service-time. Fishing, gathering berries or nuts, playing in the streets, working, going on pleasure trips, all were forbidden. On Long Island shooting of wild fowl, carting of grain, travelling for pleasure, all were punished. In Revolutionary times a cage was set up in City Hall Park, near the present New York Post-office, in which boys were confined who did not properly regard the Sabbath.
Before the Dutch settlers had any churches or domines, as they called their ministers, they had krankbesoeckers, or visitors of the sick, who read sermons to an assembled congregation every Sunday. The first church at Albany was much like the Plymouth fort, simply a blockhouse with loop-holes through which guns could be fired. The roof was mounted with three cannon. It had a seat for the magistrates and one for the deacons, and a handsome octagonal pulpit which had been sent from Holland, and which still exists. The edifice had a chandelier and candle sconces and two low galleries. The first church in New Amsterdam was of stone, and was seventy-two feet long.
A favorite form of the Dutch churches was six or eight sided, with a high pyramidal roof, topped with a belfry and a weather-vane. Usually the windows were so small and of glass so opaque that the church was very dark. A few of the churches were poorly heated with high stoves perched up on pillars, the Albany and Schenectady churches among them, but all the women carried foot-stoves, and some of the men carried muffs.
Almost as important as the domine was the voorleezer or chorister, who was also generally the bell-ringer, sexton, grave-digger, funeral inviter, schoolmaster, and sometimes town clerk. He "tuned the psalm"; turned the hour-glass; gave out the psalms on a hanging board to the congregation; read the Bible; gave up notices to the domine by sticking the papers in the end of a cleft stick and holding it up to the high pulpit.
The deacons had control of all the church money. In the middle of the sermon they collected contributions by passing sacjes. These were small cloth or velvet bags hung on the end of a pole six or eight feet long. A French traveller told that the Dutch deacons passed round "the old square hat of the preacher" on the end of a stick for the contributions. Usually there was a little bell on the sacje which rung when a coin was dropped in.
In many Dutch churches the men sat in a row of pews around the wall while the women were seated on chairs in the centre of the church. There were also a few benches or pews for persons of special dignity, or for the minister's wife.
There were many other colonists of other religious faiths: the Roman Catholics in Maryland and the extreme Southern colonies; the Quakers in Pennsylvania; the Baptists in Rhode Island; the Huguenots, Lutherans, Moravians; but all enjoined an orderly observance of the Sabbath day. And it may be counted as one of the great blessings of the settlement of America, one of the most ennobling conditions of its colonization, that it was made at a time when the deepest religious feeling prevailed throughout Europe, when devotion to some religion was found in every one, when the Bible was a newly found and deeply loved treasure; when the very differences of religious belief and the formation of new sects made each cling more lovingly and more earnestly to his own faith.
CHAPTER XVI
COLONIAL NEIGHBORLINESS
If the first foundation of New England's strength and growth was godliness, its next was neighborliness, and a firm rock it proved to build upon. It may seem anomalous to assert that while there was in olden times infinitely greater independence in each household than at present, yet there was also greater interdependence with surrounding households.
It is curious to see how completely social ethics and relations have changed since olden days. Aid in our families in times of stress and need is not given to us now by kindly neighbors as of yore; we have well-arranged systems by which we can buy all that assistance, and pay for it, not with affectionate regard, but with current coin. The colonist turned to any and all who lived around him, and never turned in vain for help in sickness, or at the time of death of members of his household; for friendly advice; for culinary aids to a halting appetite; for the preparation for feasting an exceptional number of persons; in short, in any unusual emergency, as well as in frequent every-day coöperation in log-rolling, stone-piling, stump-pulling, wall-building, house-raising, etc.,—all the hard and exhausting labor on the farm.