Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[219] a barber previously, and who knew no Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,--for (as he indignantly asserts) “there were eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in one very short note I received from him.” This doubtful personage copied his sermons from a volume by his namesake, Dr. Samuel Bolton,--“Sam the doctor and Sam the dunce,” Mather calls them. Finally, “this eminent worthy stranger,” Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled with his parish for their slow payments, and “flew out like a Dragon, spitting this among other fire at them: ‘I see, no longer pipe, no longer dance,’ --so that they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had never seen him.” Then “the guilty fellow, having bubbled the silly neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a sudden was gone,” and Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to have been the worst penalty the man suffered.

It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan ministers, lest the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and have no tithingman to take his part. But however it may be with the regular standards of theology of that period, every one could find a sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies. Eighty-two “pestilent heresies” were counted as having already sprung up in 1637; others say one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept Rhode Island for what housekeepers call an “odd drawer,” into which to crowd all these eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened to lose his religious opinion, he might be sure to find it again at some village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists; thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that extraordinary woman, who divided the