John Wilson, for thirty-five years pastor of the first church organized in Boston, considered poetry a part of his ministry and had so ready a faculty for putting his devout thoughts into verse that he sent poems to "All Persons, in All Places, on All Occasions." According to his son, his occasional religious verse would have made "a large Folio," had it been collected. The few of his Latin and English poems that he had published during his life or that have otherwise survived can be found in Kenneth B. Murdock's collection Handkerchiefs from Paul, Being Pious and Consolatory Verse of Puritan Massachusetts (1927). This couplet about Job, from the poem Wilson wrote to one of his daughters on the death of her firstborn, exemplifies the nature of his poetical talent: "[Job's] Life was only given him for a Prey / Yet all his Troubles were to Heaven the way...