Scarcely one of the early Puritan ministers was free from the sad shadow of doubt and fear. No "rose-pink or dirty-drab views of humanity" were theirs; all was inky-black. And it is impossible to express the gloom and the depression of spirit which fall on one now, after these centuries of prosperous and cheerful years, when one considers thoughtfully the deep and despairing agony of mind endured by these good, brave, steadfast, godly Puritan ministers. Read, for instance, the sentences from the diary of the Rev. John Baily, or of Nathaniel Mather, as given by Cotton Mather in his "Magnalia." Mather says that poor, sad, heart-sick Baily was filled with "desponding jealousies," "disconsolate uneasinesses," gloomy fears, and thinks the words from his diary "may be profitable to some discouraged minds." Profitable! Ah, no; far from it! The overwhelming blackness of despair, the woful doubts and fears about destruction and utter annihilation which he felt so deeply and so continually, fall in a heavy, impenetrable cloud upon us as we read, until we feel that we too are in the "Suburbs of hell" and are "eternally damned."
But in succeeding years they were not always gloomy and not always staid, as we know from the stories of the cheerful parties at ordination-times; and I doubt not the reverend Assembly of Elders at Cambridge enjoyed to the full degree the twelve gallons of sack and six gallons of white wine sent to them by the Court as a testimony of deep respect. And the group of clergymen who were painted over the mantelpiece of Parson Lowell, of Newbury, must have been far from gloom, as the punch-bowl and drinking-cups and tobacco and pipes would testify, and their cheerful motto likewise: "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." And the Rev. Mr. ---- no, I will not tell his name--kept an account with one Jerome Ripley, a storekeeper, and on one page of this account-book, containing thirty-nine entries, twenty-one were for New England rum. It somewhat lessens in our notions the personal responsibility, or the personal potatory capability of the parson, to discover that there was an ordination in town during that rum-paged week, and that the visiting ministers probably drank the greater portion of Jerome Ripley's liquor. But I wish the store-keeper had--to save this parson's reputation among succeeding generations--called and entered the rum as hay, or tea, or nails, or anything innocent and virtuous and clerical. When we read of all these doings and drinkings of the old New England ministers,--"if ancient tales say true, nor wrong these ancient men"--we feel that we cannot so fiercely resent nor wonder at the degrading coupling in Byron's sneering lines:--
