Court. You must have a rule for it, or else you cannot do it in faith. Yet you have a plain rule against it,—‘I suffer not a woman to teach.’ (I. Tim. ii. 12.)
Mrs. H. That is meant of teaching men.”
(Weld’s Short Story, pp. 34-5.) See also the version to the same effect in Hutchinson’s Massachusetts, vol. ii. pp. 484-7.
[540] Supra, [262], note 3, and [306], note 3. The effect such a statement as that in the text would have upon Archbishop Laud is apparent. The real practice of the early New England churches in the matter of ordination can be found in the Plaine Dealing, pp. 13, 16, 17.
[541] “There hath been some difference about jurisdictions, or cognizance of causes: Some have held that, in causes betweene brethren of the Church, the matter should be first told the Church, before they goe to the civill Magistrate, because all causes in difference doe amount, one way or other, to a matter of offence; and that all criminall matters concerning Church members, should be first heard by the Church. But these opinionists are held, by the wiser sort, not to know the dangerous issues and consequences of such tenets.” (Plaine Dealing, p. 34.)
[542] There was no minister at Plymouth in the spring of 1628, when Morton was there. William Brewster was the ruling elder in the church and officiated in its pulpit, where, from the beginning, he had “taught twice every sabbath, and that both powerfully and profitably, to the great contentment of the hearers, and their comfortable edification.” (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 467; Bradford, pp. 187-8.) In the summer of 1628, but after Morton had been sent to England, Allerton brought over Mr. Rogers as a preacher, who soon proved to be “crased in his braine” (Bradford, p. 243), and the next season was sent home. In the autumn, apparently, of 1629, and while Morton may have been at Plymouth at Allerton’s house (Ib. p. 253), before his final return to Mount Wollaston, the Rev. Ralfe Smith, who had come over with Skelton and Higginson in the previous June (Young’s Chron. of Mass., p. 151), was found at Nantasket and brought down to Plymouth. (Bradford, p. 263.) He was not, however, chosen into the ministry there until a later time. (Ib.) It is unlikely that Morton here refers to Plymouth personages. He was at Salem in 1629 (Supra, [306]), and in Boston, where as a prisoner he was undoubtedly made regularly to attend divine service, from early September to the end of December, 1630. (Supra, [45]; Young’s Chron. of Mass., p. 321.) At Salem he had come in contact with Skelton and Higginson; and it has been seen (Supra, [300], note 1) that he probably knew something of Francis Bright of Charlestown. The only other ministers then in the colony were John Warham and John Maverick at Dorchester, George Phillips at Watertown, and John Wilson at Boston.
[543] It is scarcely necessary to point out that the three following pages are largely the fruit of Morton’s imaginative powers, and were intended for the special edification of Archbishop Laud. As Plymouth was much less well supplied with preachers than the towns of the Massachusetts colony, it is altogether probable—as Dr. John Eliot surmised, in his review of the New Canaan, in the Monthly Anthology for July, 1810—the allusions to the church-practises in this chapter found their largest basis of fact in incidents which Morton had been a witness of in the Plymouth meeting-house. It is safe to add, however, that he could have had no agreeable recollections of the meeting-houses at Boston and Charlestown.
[544] Oliver Le Daim, barber of Louis XI., created by him Comte de Meulan, and sent in 1477 on a confidential mission to Mary of Burgundy at Ghent. The account of his experiences is to be found in the Memoires de Commines, L. v. ch. xiv.
[546] I am indebted to Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public Library, for the following explanation of this, to me, very perplexing allusion: “Nic, or, more correctly, nick,—namely, ‘a raised or indented bottom in a beer-can, by which the customers were cheated, the nick below and the froth above filling up part of the measure.’ I take this definition from Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English. That the expression was a common one the following quotations prove:—