Peter Thacher succeeded Mr. Torrey in the year of the latter’s death, and continued in his ministry eleven years; being followed, in 1719, by Thomas Paine, whose connection with the church continued until dissolved, at his own request, in 1734. He then retired to Boston, where he ended his life, and his body was brought back to Weymouth for burial beside his children. He was the father and the grandfather of those Robert Treat Paines, the line of which is continued to the present day. In 1734 the Rev. William Smith was settled as the eighth successive pastor of the first church, and so continued for forty-nine years, and until after the close of the colonial period. Mr. Smith was beloved and respected through his long ministry by his people, but to posterity he is chiefly known as the father of her who proved to be the most famous child of Weymouth. The familiar anecdote of Parson Smith’s sermons on the marriages of his two daughters does not need to be repeated here.[89] Whether the good old pastor did or did not prepare the wedding discourse for Abigail’s benefit from so very unsavory a text as that “John came neither eating nor drinking, and men say he hath a devil,” we cannot now tell; the anecdote rests on tradition alone. Let us hope, however, that he did, for he lived to see his daughter’s choice justified in the eyes of the most doubting of his parishioners; though he had himself already been thirteen years in his grave when, on the 8th of February, 1797, that daughter wrote to her husband in these solemn words, breathing the full spirit of the dead divine: “You have this day to declare yourself head of a nation. ‘And now, O Lord, my God, thou hast made thy servant ruler over the people. Give unto him an understanding heart, that he may know how to go out and come in before this great people; that he may discern between good and bad. For who is able to judge this thy so great a people?’... My thoughts and my meditation are with you, though personally absent; and my petitions to Heaven are, that ‘the things which make for peace may not be hidden from your eyes.’”[90]