attention is awake through these long services, till, as the day declines, they retire to their dwellings, and close the Sabbath with family worship and the catechising of their children. I seem to hear the utterance of their piety in that old stave of Sternhold and Hopkins: "Go walke about all Syon hill, yea round about her go; And tell the towres that thereupon are builded on a roe: For this God is our God, forevermore is hee; Yea and unto the death also, our guider shall he be." Thus the years went on, each year bringing its changes, its hopes, its disappointments and sorrows; till those who came hither in the prime of life, had grown gray and feeble, or were seen no more. Meanwhile one spot behind the meeting house, marked with a few rude monumental stones, was becoming continually more and more sacred to the affections of the people. One and another, with whom they had often walked to the house of God,-one and another whose faith had dared the sea, and whose constancy had triumphed over the temptations of the wilderness, had there been gathered to the congregation of the dead. There slept the pious Edward Tench and his wife, who dying within a few months after their arrival here, had committed their only child to God and to the Church, "by faith, giving commandment" concerning the child, that it should not "go back to the country from which they had come forth."* There one of the first graves was made for the widow of that Francis Higginson who was the first minister of Salem, and who dying just after his settlement there, had left her with eight young children to the protection of a covenant God. There, after the lapse of some twenty years from the beginning, when many of the loved and honored among them had rested from their labors, the dust of Allerton, one of the most distinguished of the * See Appendix No. VII. Kingsley, Hist. Disc. 55, 102. Isaac Allerton was the fifth of the signers of the celebrated civil compact of Nov. 11, 1620. He was a principal man in the Plymouth Colony, and was Pilgrims of the May Flower, was laid among the fathers of New Haven. And every new mound that was erected there, fastened some survivor to the soil, by a new tie of sacred affection. Who, when he thinks of dying, would not rather die where he may be buried among the graves of his kindred. When the emigrant turns his face towards some new country, it is painful to leave the familiar walks, the haunts of childhood, the old homestead, but more painful still to leave the sanctuary and the burial place. Those little graves, which the mother visits so often, weeping,—that green mound, which covers the dust of a parent or a brother,—that blossoming shrub, which sheds its annual fragrance round a sister's resting place-every thing here is holy to the eye of affection. Such considerations, doubtless, had an influence in determining the colonists of New Haven, once and again, during the period of their deepest depression, not to abandon the settlement. When the plan of removing to Delaware Bay was seriously agitated; when their friend Cromwell proposed to them a home in Jamaica; when he offered them a place with many privileges in Ireland; it was not a mere calculation of interest, certainly,-far less was it a mere deficiency of the spirit of enterprise,-that prevented the removal. It was in part the force of affection, a natural sentiment of attachment to the soil that had been hallowed by labor and peril, by hope and disappointment, by happiness and grief, by having been the birth place of their children, and by embosoming the ashes of their friends. He who has no such attachment to the soil on which he lives and has his home, lacks one of the better elements of human nature. This is one ingredient of the complicated sentiment which we call love of country. one year deputy governor there. He was a merchant, and deserves a monument as the father of the commerce of New England. Owing to some cause, not now to be explained,—perhaps an attachment to Roger Williams,—he left Plymouth, about the year 1633, and established himself at Marblehead, then a part of Salem. Afterwards he resided at the Manhadoes. In the year 1647, we find him an inhabitant of New Haven; and here he died in 1659.— III, Mass. Hist. Coll. vii, 243. What New Englander is he who does not love the soil of New England, and take pleasure in the stones and dust thereof? To us these mountains are dear, these rushing streams, these rocks and valleys-dear by all the associations of ancient devotion and valor, or of living affection and enjoyment, that cluster around each spot, adorning the rude forms of nature with invisible beauty. The graves of the fathers are among us: our sanctuaries, our seats of legislation and of justice, our schools, our very dwellings are their monument. The land itself that spreads its green sod over their dust,-this land of their hardships and perils, now covered with civilization, filled with wealth, and decorated with multiplying works of art, is their mausoleum. Never may their graves be found among a people disowning their spirit, or dishonoring their memory. DISCOURSE IV. SPECIMENS OF PURITAN MINISTERS IN THE NEW HAVEN COLONY. PRUDDEN, SHERMAN, JAMES, EATON, HOOKE. HEB. xiii, 7, 8.- *** Whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation; Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever. I PROCEED now to give some notices of the lives and characters of a few among the founders of this religious society; so far as distinct memorials of them can be gathered from various records and historical documents. Five ministers of the gospel, educated at the English Universities, were in the company which came from Boston to Quinnipiack in 1638;-two of whom, the Rev. Peter Prudden and the Rev. John Sherman, went to Milford; the other three, the Rev. Thomas James, the Rev. Samuel Eaton, and the Rev. John Davenport, remained here. Though it does not pertain to the design of these discourses to speak particularly of the first two, it will not be improper to bestow a few words upon each of them. Mr. PRUDDEN came from England with Mr. Davenport in 1637, having previously labored with great success in his native country, and being followed by a company of people from Herefordshire, and the adjoining parts of Wales, who expected still to enjoy his ministry. He was ordained pastor of the Church in Milford in 1640,-the ordination being performed at New Haven, and continued in that office till his death, in 1656. Cotton Mather testifies concerning him, that "besides his other excellent qualities, he was noted for a singular faculty to sweeten, compose, and qualify exasperated spirits, and stop or heal all contentions:-whence it was that his town of Milford enjoyed peace with truth all his days, notwithstanding some dispositions to variance which afterwards broke out." Hubbard gives us the additional information, that "he had a better faculty than many of his coat to accommodate himself to the difficult circumstances of the country, so as to provide comfortably for his numerous family, yet without indecent distractions from his study." All accounts unite in describing him as distinguished by fervor and power in the pulpit.* Mr. SHERMAN, though regularly educated at the University of Cambridge, and distinguished for his proficiency, had taken no degree, his conscience refusing a compliance with the conditions of graduation. He came to this country in 1634, and was among the first settlers of Watertown in Massachusetts, where he preached his first sermon. Coming with the company who founded this new colony, he united with the Church in Milford, and at the organization of that Church was chosen teacher. This call he declined; and after a few years residence in the New Haven colony, preaching occasionally-and sometimes serving the public as a member of the General Court for the jurisdiction, he returned to Watertown, and became pastor of the Church there. He was, for his day, a great master of mathematical and astronomical science, which he occasionally employed in making the calculations for a Christian Almanack. As a preacher, he was much admired for "a natural and not affected loftiness of style, which with an easy fluency bespangled his discourses with such glittering figures of oratory, as caused his ablest hearers to call him a second Isaiah,-the honey dropping and golden mouthed preacher." As the chief officer of a Church, he was distinguished by his "wisdom and kindness." He died in 1685, in the seventy second year of his age, having been, in two marriages, the father of twenty six children.† For his second wife he married a young lady of noble extraction,-granddaughter of the earl of Rivers,-who, being a ward of Governor Hopkins, lived here before her marriage in * Hubbard, 328. Magnalia, III, 93. Trumbull, I, 294. Farmer, Genealogical Register. t Six of these children were by the first marriage, twenty by the second. |