“Besides the physical evils with which they were beset, they had spiritual troubles also. They fully believed in witchcraft, as did all their contemporaries, in a personal Devil who was busily plotting the ruin of their souls, in an everlasting hell of literal fire and brimstone, and in a divine election, by which most of them had been irrevocably doomed from before the creation of the world to eternal perdition, from which nothing which they could do, or were willing to do, could help to rescue them. The great object of life to them, therefore, was to try to find out what their future state would be. Said one of their preachers: ‘It is tough work and a wonderful hard matter to be saved. ’Tis a thousand to one, if ever thou be one of that small number whom God hath picked out to escape this wrath to come.’ That we may get a touch of reality from those far-off days, let me quote to you a few lines from the saintly Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut and long the model for her preachers:
“ ‘Suppose any soul here present were to behold the damned in hell, and if the Lord should give thee a peephole into hell, that thou didst see the horror of those damned souls, and thy heart begins to shake in consideration thereof; then propound this to thy own heart, what pains the damned in hell do endure for sin, and thy heart will shake and quake at it. The least sin that thou ever didst commit, though thou makest a light matter of it, is a greater evil than the pains of the damned in hell, setting aside their sins. All the torments in hell are not so great an evil as the least sin is; men begin to shrink at this, and loathe to go down to hell and be in endless torment.’
“The only test which they were taught to apply to ascertain whether they were predestined to suffer or escape this fearful doom was in their ability and willingness to conform their wills to the will of God as revealed in the Bible. According as they succeeded in this, they had a reasonable assurance as to their fate, though no wile of the Devil was more frequent than to falsely persuade men that their prospects were favorable. To study the Scriptures day and night to ascertain the will of God, and to struggle without ceasing to conform their wills to his as therein revealed, was therefore the great object of existence for them, not that they could thereby alter in the least their future state, but that they might, if possible, find out what it was likely to be.
“Should this recital of their beliefs provoke a smile, our amusement will soon be checked by the thought of the little progress which has been made in the last two hundred years towards solving the same problems. The origin of evil, the ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin and do evil, the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries to us as to them. If we have constructed or adopted a more comfortable theology, it is probably because we are less logical than they. It is perhaps because we have forgotten or refused to look at some things at which they did not blink.
“Then, too, the Lord was abroad in those days. Their thoughts were deeply tinged by the semi-pagan views with which the authors of both the Old and New Testaments were imbued. When the thunder crashed, it was the voice of an angry God that spoke. When the lightning flashed, it was the gleam of His angry eye. Benjamin Franklin was then but a year old, and electricity had not become the packhorse of the world. The smiles and frowns of nature in all her varying moods through all the days and seasons, which we ascribe to the operations of law, were to them the visible tokens of the wrath or favor of the Almighty. On December 11, 1719, for the first time in the history of the Colony, the northern lights were seen here. They shone with the greatest brilliancy. The consternation they caused was fearful. The people had never heard of such a phenomenon. They considered it the opening scene of the Day of Judgment. All amusement was given up, all business was forsaken, and sleep itself was interrupted for days. Again, on the twenty-ninth of October, 1727, a mighty earthquake occurred, which shook with tremendous violence the whole Atlantic seaboard. The people here believed that the Lord was about to swallow them up in His fierce anger. The women throughout New England immediately discontinued the wearing of hoop skirts, then recently come into fashion, believing that the earthquake was the sign of the Lord’s displeasure at the sinful innovation.
“Hardly had the first settlers here begun to build permanent homes for the living when they were called upon to provide resting places for the dead. The first person to be buried in yonder burying ground was a child, a girl, Mary, the daughter of Benjamin Bostwick. The next was John Noble, the first settler and the first Town Clerk. He died August 17, 1714. The town formally laid out the burying ground in 1716. Within fifty years three hundred had gone to rest there.
“There were no religious exercises at the funerals, neither singing, praying, preaching, nor reading of the Scriptures. This was by way of revolt from former superstitious practices. The friends gathered, condoled with the afflicted ones, sat around a while, and then the corpse was taken to the burying ground. After that the party returned to the house of the deceased, where much eating and drinking was indulged in, and, if the weather permitted, outdoor games and horse races were in order. The next Sabbath an appropriate funeral sermon was preached. A bereaved husband or wife usually soon married again.
“The meeting-house was never heated, but the people, summoned by drum beat, attended it every Sabbath, morning and afternoon, even in the severest weather, although no Sabbath Day house was erected here until 1745.
“The sacramental bread often froze upon the communion plate, as did the ink in the minister’s study. The people worked their minister very hard, as was the case in all early New England communities. They went to church not so much because they had to as because they wanted to. Church-going was their principal recreation. They demanded long prayers and two long sermons each Sabbath from their minister, usually on doctrinal points, which they acutely criticised. Services began at nine o’clock in the forenoon and continued until five in the afternoon, with an hour’s intermission. Soldiers, fully armed, were always in attendance throughout the services ready to repel any attack upon the settlement. It should be added, however, that with all their strictness in Sabbath-keeping and catechising, in family and church discipline, there was great license in those days in speech and manner, much hard drinking, and rude merry-making, due to their rough form of living. They were not what they wanted to be, nor what a loyal posterity perhaps longs to believe them. They had red blood in their veins. They were among the most enterprising men of their generation. They were backwoodsmen, the vanguard of that wonderful race which in two hundred years pushed westward the frontier from this place to the Pacific, fighting with man and beast the whole way, and sowed the land with vigorous sons and daughters.
“The congregational singing in those days must have been an interesting performance. When the first settlers came to New England from the old country, they brought with them a few tunes, to which they sang all the psalms and hymns.