And the Puritans relished their sermons, which were masterful like themselves. Dogma and denunciation were dear to their souls, and they could bear an intolerable deal of both. An hour-glass stood on the preacher’s desk, and youthful eyes strayed wistfully to the slender thread of sand. But if the discourse continued after the last grain had run out, a tithingman who sat by the desk turned the glass, and the congregation settled down for a fresh hearing. A three-hour sermon was a possibility in those iron days, while an eloquent parson, like Samuel Torrey of Weymouth, could and did pray for two hours at a stretch. The Reverend John Cotton, grandfather of the redoubtable Cotton Mather, and the only minister in Boston who was acknowledged by Anne Hutchinson to possess the mysterious “seal of the Spirit,” had a reprehensible habit of preaching for two hours on Sunday in the meeting-house (his family and servants of course attending), and at night, after supper, repeating this sermon to the sleepy household who had heard it in the morning. For a hundred and fifty years the New England churches were unheated, and every effort to erect stoves was vigorously opposed. This at least could not have been a reaction against Popery, inasmuch as the churches of Catholic Christendom were at that time equally cold. That the descendants of men who tore the noble old organs out of English cathedrals, and sold them for scrap metal, should have been chary of accepting even a “pitch-pipe” to start their unmelodious singing was natural enough; but stoves played no part in the service. The congregations must have been either impervious to discomfort, or very much afraid of fires. The South Church of Boston was first heated in the winter of 1783. There was much criticism of such indulgence, and the “Evening Post,” January 25th, burst into denunciatory verse: “Extinct the sacred fires of love, Our zeal grown cold and dead; In the house of God we fix a stove To warm us in their stead.”