Truly, it is a perilous thing to attend public worship in such
reverential days. However, it is equally dangerous to stay at home;
there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any one
unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the
stocks or in the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together.
But we must give our attention to the sermon. It is what the
congregation will pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a
Scriptural discourse,--like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all
backbone and a great deal of that. It may be some very special and
famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is preaching on "The Morning
Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy Winds"; or it may
be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson of
some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking
and partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton
Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a
thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra,"--consisting of seven
separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from
Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural philosophy.
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