The domine did not have everything his own way on Sundays, for the Director drowned his vociferations by ordering the beating of drums and firing of cannon outside the church during services; and denounced the sermons in picturesque language as “the rattling of old wives’ stories drawn out from a distaff.” The Labadist travellers thus described the Albany domine:-- “We went to church in the morning [April 28, 1680], and heard Domine Schaets preach, who, although he is a poor old ignorant person, and besides is not of good life, yet had to give utterance to his passion, having for his text ‘Whatever is taken upon us,’ etc., at which many of his auditors, who knew us better, were not well pleased, and in order to show their condemnation of it, laughed and derided him, which we corrected.” In turn the Lutheran minister was dubbed by the Dutch domines “a rolling, rollicking, unseemly carl, more inclined to pore over the wine-kan than to look into the Bible.” And we all know what both Lutherans and Dutch thought of the Quaker preachers; so all denominations appear equally rude. The salaries of the ministers were liberal even in early days; that of Domine Megapolensis (the second minister sent to New Netherland) was, I think, a very fair one. He agreed to remain in the colony six years, and was given free passage for himself and family to the new world; an outfit of three hundred guilders; a salary of three hundred guilders a year for three years, and five hundred annually during the three remaining years; and an annual tithe of thirty schepels of wheat and two firkins of butter. If he died before the term expired, his wife was to have a pension of a hundred guilders a year for the unexpired term. The first revenue relinquished by the West India Company to the town of New Amsterdam was the “tapster’s excise,”--the excise on wine, beer, and spirits,--and the sole condition made by Stuyvesant on its surrender, as to its application, was that the salaries of the two domines should be paid from it. As time passed on, firewood became one of the minister’s perquisites, in addition to his salary, sixty or seventy loads a season. We find the Schenectady congregation having a “bee” to gather in the domine’s wood; and the Consistory supplied plentiful wine, rum, and beer as a treat for the “bee.” What Cotton Mather called the “angelical conjunction” of piety and physic sometimes was found in the person of the ministers of the Dutch Reformed church, but not so constantly as among the Puritan ministers. Domine Rubel, sent out by the Classis of Amsterdam, was settled over the churches in Kings County. He was more devoted to the preparation of quack medicines than to the saving of souls. One of his advertisements of March 28, 1778, reads thus:--