New England -- Religious life and customs; New England -- Social life and customs -- To 1775; Sunday
In Andover, Judge Phillips left in his will a silver flagon to the church
as an expression of interest and hope that the "laudable practice of
reading between services may be continued so long as even a small number
shall be disposed to attend the exercise." Mr. Abbott left another silver
flagon to the Andover Church to encourage reading between services; though
how this piece of plate encouraged personally, since neither the deacons
nor the boys got it as a prize, cannot be precisely understood. The
noon-house in Andover was a large building with a great chimney and open
fireplace at either end. It has always seemed to me a piece of gratuitous
posthumous cruelty in Judge Phillips and Mr. Abbott to try to cheat those
Andover boys of their noon-time rest and relaxation, and to expect them,
wriggling and twisting with repressed vitality, to listen to a long extra
sermon, read perhaps by some unskilled reader, or explained by some
incapable expounder. The Sabbath-school did not then exist, and was not in
general favor until the noon-houses had begun to disappear. The Reverend
Jedediah Morse, father of the inventor of the electric telegraph, was
almost the first New England clergyman who approved of Sabbath-schools and
established them in his parish. In Salem they were opened in 1808, and the
scholars came at half-past six on Sunday mornings. Fancy the chill and
gloom of the unheated, ill-lighted churches at that hour on winter
mornings. The "Salem Gazette" openly characterized Sunday-schools, when
first suggested, as profanations of the Sabbath, and for years they were
not allowed in many Congregational churches. When the Sabbath-schools
were universally established, and thus the attention and interest of the
children was gained during the noon interval (the time the schools were
usually held in country churches), and when each family sat in its own pew,
and thus the boys were separated, and each under his parents' guardianship,
the "wretched boys" of the Puritan Sabbath disappeared, and well-behaved,
quiet, orderly boys were seen instead in the New England churches.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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