p. 306 | A LESSON FROM THE PAST by D. E. Lindsay

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 14, 1901

A LESSON FROM THE PAST

By D. E. Lindsay

D. E. LINDSAY

My mind has reverted of late to the time “when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth, and at once assigned a Lord’s day meeting-place for the Separatist Church,”—“a timber fort both strong and comely, with flat roof and battlements;” and to this fort, every Sunday, the “men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they worshiped.” The favorite term for Sunday was Lord’s day. Great pride was taken in having their houses “daubed and whitened over workmanlike.” While the spirit of humility prevailed, their houses of worship were builded in the valleys, but as pride came in, they exalted themselves upon the hilltops, until John Eliot, climbing a hill, leaning upon the arm of a friend, remarked: “This is very like the way to heaven; ’tis uphill. The Lord by His grace fetch us up.”

In those Puritan days, for which some are now longing, “each citizen was forced by law to take part in or contribute to raising the meeting-hows,” some supplying “nayles,” others logs, lumber, horses’ and men’s labor, and “a levie was always made for rum and cacks” (cakes). For windows, they had oiled paper. The windows had no shutters, and the houses no stoves.

“The old house of Puritanic wood, Through whose unpainted windows streamed, On seats as primitive and rude As Jacob’s pillow when he dreamed, The white and undiluted day.”

The marks of these staid worshipers were not all obliterated in my own boyhood days, when my father, then a missionary, went from town to town in old Massachusetts. At the first the trees were cut a distance from the house of worship, to guard against the attack of the savages; but as the settlements became stronger, the trees were allowed to grow, until darkness reigned within. A good old parson, thus gloomily surrounded, gave out for his text, “Why do the wicked live?” and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed, abruptly, “I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great hemlock tree back of the pulpit window.”

On the doors of meeting-houses were nailed notices of “prohibitions from selling guns and powder to the Indians, notices of town meetings, intentions of marriages, copies of the laws against Sabbath-breaking, messages from the Quakers, warnings of bandoos, etc. On the meeting-house green stood the Puritanical instruments of punishment, the stocks, the whipping-post, pillory, and cage.” Church and State had never been severed since the flight from fatherland. Oftentime the “powder closite” was found in the steeple or “in the beams of the roof;” and although in some towns they would not allow the smoking of tobacco upon the streets, yet their greed for gain led them to store tobacco in the church loft to cure, that they might sell it to the “ungodly Dutch.”

Pride soon led to the painting of their houses in gaudy colors; for the Pomfret meeting-house was painted a bright yellow, Brooklyn church, orange, with an “electaric rod,” and it was declared to be the “newest, biggest, and yallowest” in the country.

Internally the houses of worship were very plain, the pulpit being most pretentious, often like a swallow’s nest on the wall, with a narrow flight of stairs. One pulpit had for its principal decoration “an enormous, carefully painted eye, a terribly suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great, all-seeing eye of God.”

The people usually went armed to meeting; “and to sanctify the Sunday gun-loading, they were expressly forbidden to fire off their charges at any object on that day, save an Indian or a wolfe.”

“So once, for fear of Indian beating, Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting,— Each man equipped on Sunday morn, With psalm book, shot, and powderhorn, And looked in form, as all must grant, Like the ancient, true church militant.”

While much time might be spent and much be written of many interesting things of Puritan days, I wish most to speak of Puritanic Sunday observance. By the examination of the records, we find that “a wicked fisherman was fined for catching eels on Sunday; two lovers, John and Sarah, tried for sitting together under an apple-tree on ye Lord’s day.” A man was sharply whipped for shooting a fowl on Sunday; another for carrying a grist of flour home on that day; the miller was also fined for allowing him to have it. A woman was fined ten shillings for wringing clothes, and a man “for writing a note about common business on the Lord’s day, at least in the evening too soon.”

Fines, imprisonments, etc., were imposed for “gathering peas,” “driving the cow too far,” “raking hay,” “pulling apples,” and the ridiculousness of it all met the climax in fining a soldier forty shillings for “wetting a piece of an old hat to put in his shoe,” to protect his foot,—unless the setting of Captain Kimble in the stocks for two hours, for kissing his wife publicly, could be more so, the captain having just returned from a three-years’ voyage. In Vermont the laws declared that “whoever was guilty of any rude, profane, or unlawful conduct on the Lord’s day, in word or action, by clamorous discourses, shouting, hallooing, screaming, running, riding, dancing, jumping, was to be fined forty shilling, and whipped upon the naked back, not to exceed ten stripes.” “Profanation of the Lord’s day shall be punished by fine, imprisonment, or corporeal punishment; and if proudly and with a high hand against the authority of God—with death.” Not content with strict observance of Sunday, the Puritans included Saturday evening in their holy day.

Illustrative of the gloomy Puritan Sunday observance, John Norton describes the keeping of the day by John Cotton, grandfather of Cotton Mather: “He began the Sabbath at evening; therefore then performed family duty after supper, being longer in exposition, after which he catechised his children and servants, and then returned to his study. The morning following, family worship being ended, he retired into his study until the bell called him away. Upon his return from meeting, he returned again to his study (the place of his labor and prayer) unto his private devotion; where, having a small repast carried him up for his dinner, he continued until the tolling of the bell. The public service being over, he withdrew for a space to his pre-mentioned oratory, for his sacred addresses to God, as in the forenoon, then came down, repeated

the sermon in the family, prayed, after supper sang a psalm, and toward bedtime, betaking himself again to his study, he closed the day with prayer.”

The sermons were sometimes “three hours long.” Just imagine with what interest those Puritan boys and servants would listen the second time to a sermon to which the tithing man could not induce them to listen patiently at the first, with the fear of his wand before them.

While we admire the zeal of our Puritan ancestors, yet we feel that much of their religion was of the pharisaic kind, which would lead an ox to water on the Sabbath, but would not loose a daughter of Abraham from physical infirmity on that day,—which would rob widows’ houses, and then for a pretense make long prayers,—and so, now, while we admire the zeal of our latter-day Sunday observance agitators, judging them by their many public utterances, we fear that should they succeed in uniting the Church and the State to the extent they desire, the same intolerant spirit—the spirit of the dragon—would be manifest.

Why not allow God to have His own, and render to Cæsar that which is his? Why not let the State pursue its legitimate calling, and allow God to govern His own moral kingdom? Why not take the Sabbath God has given us, and call it a delight, rather than take a spurious day, the mark of the man of sin, and force it upon the consciences of others? Why not allow our fathers, with their crude ideas and cruder laws, to rest in the memory of the past, while we press forward in the message for our generation? Why shall we become the children of Hagar when we may be the seed of Abraham? Why seek to enslave our fellows in their consciences, instead of following the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus?

Evidently all this Sunday agitation is born from beneath, and is but a fulfillment of prophecy, and to the children of light an evidence of the soon coming of our King and His everlasting reign with his saints.

Patience, brethren, patience! The patience of the saints is demanded. The harvest is not far away. The crown will soon be given.