the pulpit. What felt like ingratitude to one party felt like extortion to the other.
The spirited Salem potter who had queried Burroughs deplored the fact that the minister delivered what he liked, for which the community paid. The reverse was also true. Parishioners contributed whatever was on hand, which could mean a barrel of oysters, a bushel of peas, a poundof linen, a beehive. * Congregants paid in labor as well, planting a minister’s beans or slaughtering his cow. This rather blurred the lines of command, terrifically distinct though they appeared to some. “Are you, sir, the parson who serves here?” asked a visitor to nearby Rowley. “I am, sir, the parson who rules here” came the reply. While the community rose when the minister entered the meetinghouse, where his family occupied a special pew, while farmers felt intimidated by their learned minister, it was unclear who precisely worked for whom. As a modern scholar put it, there was some confusion as to whether the pastor was the congregation’s employee, spiritual companion, or representative from “some nebulous and distant ecclesiastical galaxy.”
While railing against the barbarous starving of clergymen, Cotton Mather had to admit that—in his plea for their maintenance—he artfully included passages “that might render the ministers themselves more deserving persons than, it may be, some of them are.” Even with a surfeit of pastors, a great deal of mediocre preaching went on. So did a lot of sleeping in the pews. The Puritan was intensely alert, preternaturally attentive, neurotically vigilant about the state of his soul. He was not invariably so at meeting. Some would “sit and sleep under the best preaching in the world,” clucked Increase Mather. Doubtless someone slumbered through that 1682 sermon too. (In fairness there may have been no better place to rest for a New England farmer, who had few opportunities to do so.) Mary Rowlandson, whose account of her 1675 Indian captivity electrified New England, occasionally nodded off during her husband’s preaching.
Two months into his tenure Samuel Parris complained of the inertia of his parishioners, senseless before him. He chided them for “useless whispering, much less nodding and napping.” While he noted the“unnecessary gazing to and fro,” he made no mention of the walnuts that flew from the galleries; the antics on the stairs; the spitting, laughing, flirting, and whittling; the elbows in the ribs and the knees in backs and the occasional punch in the nose; the woman who installed herself in her neighbor’s lap when the neighbor refused to make room for her in the pew. The New England meetinghouse was a decorous but lively place; that spring, Martha Carrier roughly jostled a twelve-year-old girl there mid-psalm. It was at meeting that you learned why your sister’s eyes were puffy from crying, that a pirate had been captured, a lion killed in Andover. The sermon, the centerpiece of the week, represented its social and spiritual touchstone. The sole regular means of shared communication, it served educational and journalistic purposes as well. Over the course of a lifetime, the average New England churchgoer absorbed some fifteen thousand hours of sermons. Seldom if ever had so many people literally been on the same page. Many took notes. Others discussed those homilies for days afterward. Bits and pieces of Parris’s addresses from the pulpit would surface in the weeks to come; the audience was listening. Attention was not always so rapt, however, that when your neighbor yawned in the next pew, you failed to notice the devil’s mark under his tongue.
SAMUEL PARRIS PREACHED his first Salem sermon in November 1689. He came to the village with little pastoral experience. Born in 1653 in England, he spent his youth largely in Barbados, where his family flourished as merchant-planters. While the ministry may once have been Parris’s profession of choice—he attended Harvard
The spirited Salem potter who had queried Burroughs deplored the fact that the minister delivered what he liked, for which the community paid. The reverse was also true. Parishioners contributed whatever was on hand, which could mean a barrel of oysters, a bushel of peas, a poundof linen, a beehive. * Congregants paid in labor as well, planting a minister’s beans or slaughtering his cow. This rather blurred the lines of command, terrifically distinct though they appeared to some. “Are you, sir, the parson who serves here?” asked a visitor to nearby Rowley. “I am, sir, the parson who rules here” came the reply. While the community rose when the minister entered the meetinghouse, where his family occupied a special pew, while farmers felt intimidated by their learned minister, it was unclear who precisely worked for whom. As a modern scholar put it, there was some confusion as to whether the pastor was the congregation’s employee, spiritual companion, or representative from “some nebulous and distant ecclesiastical galaxy.”
While railing against the barbarous starving of clergymen, Cotton Mather had to admit that—in his plea for their maintenance—he artfully included passages “that might render the ministers themselves more deserving persons than, it may be, some of them are.” Even with a surfeit of pastors, a great deal of mediocre preaching went on. So did a lot of sleeping in the pews. The Puritan was intensely alert, preternaturally attentive, neurotically vigilant about the state of his soul. He was not invariably so at meeting. Some would “sit and sleep under the best preaching in the world,” clucked Increase Mather. Doubtless someone slumbered through that 1682 sermon too. (In fairness there may have been no better place to rest for a New England farmer, who had few opportunities to do so.) Mary Rowlandson, whose account of her 1675 Indian captivity electrified New England, occasionally nodded off during her husband’s preaching.
Two months into his tenure Samuel Parris complained of the inertia of his parishioners, senseless before him. He chided them for “useless whispering, much less nodding and napping.” While he noted the“unnecessary gazing to and fro,” he made no mention of the walnuts that flew from the galleries; the antics on the stairs; the spitting, laughing, flirting, and whittling; the elbows in the ribs and the knees in backs and the occasional punch in the nose; the woman who installed herself in her neighbor’s lap when the neighbor refused to make room for her in the pew. The New England meetinghouse was a decorous but lively place; that spring, Martha Carrier roughly jostled a twelve-year-old girl there mid-psalm. It was at meeting that you learned why your sister’s eyes were puffy from crying, that a pirate had been captured, a lion killed in Andover. The sermon, the centerpiece of the week, represented its social and spiritual touchstone. The sole regular means of shared communication, it served educational and journalistic purposes as well. Over the course of a lifetime, the average New England churchgoer absorbed some fifteen thousand hours of sermons. Seldom if ever had so many people literally been on the same page. Many took notes. Others discussed those homilies for days afterward. Bits and pieces of Parris’s addresses from the pulpit would surface in the weeks to come; the audience was listening. Attention was not always so rapt, however, that when your neighbor yawned in the next pew, you failed to notice the devil’s mark under his tongue.
SAMUEL PARRIS PREACHED his first Salem sermon in November 1689. He came to the village with little pastoral experience. Born in 1653 in England, he spent his youth largely in Barbados, where his family flourished as merchant-planters. While the ministry may once have been Parris’s profession of choice—he attended Harvard
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