Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

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[223] hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty laid up against them, but not one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored the tongues of others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues with a bar of gold,--as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to do, and not African tribes alone.

There was such th absolute righteousness among them, that to this day every man of New England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous habit they accumulated. And, on the other hand, every man of the many who still stand ready to indorse everything signed by a D. D. -without even adding the commercial E. E., for Errors Excepted — is in part the victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there was a kind of democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no separate clerical class, and the “elder” was only the highest officer of his own church. Each religious society could choose and ordain its own minister, or dispense with all ordaining services at will, without the slightest aid or hindrance from council or consociation. So the stern theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology of the pews; the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were recognized as spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the men of their time, whatever they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when asked about the priests' money, said, that, if they were really the leaders of the people, they could not have too much payment,--or too little, if it were otherwise. I believe that on these conditions the Puritan ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year,with a discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads and musket-balls. What they took in musket-balls they