A young minister, who had made himself conspicuous for a severe and denunciatory style of preaching, came to him one day to inquire why he did not have more success.  “Why, man,” said the Doctor, “can’t you take a lesson of the fisherman?  How do you go to work, if you want to catch a trout?  You get a little hook and a fine line, you bait it carefully and throw it in as gently as possible, and then you sit and wait and humor your fish till you can get him ashore.  Now you get a great cod-hook and rope-line, and thrash it into the water, and bawl out, ’Bite or be damned!’”

The Doctor himself gained such a reputation as an expert spiritual fisherman, that some of his parishioners, like experienced old trout, played shy of his hook, though never so skilfully baited.

“Why, Mr. A.,” he said to an old farmer in his neighborhood, “they tell me you are an Atheist.  Don’t you believe in the being of a God?”

“No!” said the man.

“But, Mr. A., let’s look into this.  You believe that the world around us exists from some cause?”

“No, I don’t!”

“Well, then, at any rate, you believe in your own existence?”

“No, I don’t!”

“What! not believe that you exist yourself?”

“I tell you what, Doctor,” said the man, “I a’n’t going to be twitched up by any of your syllogisms, and so I tell you I don’t believe anything,—­and I’m not going to believe anything!”

A collection of the table-talk of the clergy whose lives are sketched in Dr. Sprague’s volumes would be a rare fund of humor, shrewdness, genius, and originality.  We must say, however, that as nothing is so difficult as to collect these sparkling emanations of conversation, the written record which this work presents falls far below that traditional one which floated about us in our earlier years.  So much in wit and humor depends on the electric flash, the relation of the idea to the attendant circumstances, that people often remember only how they have laughed, and can no more reproduce the expression than they can daguerreotype the heat-lightning of a July night.

The doctrine that a minister is to maintain some ethereal, unearthly station, where, wrapt in divine contemplation, he is to regard with indifference the actual struggles and realities of life, is a sickly species of sentimentalism, the growth of modern refinement, and altogether too moonshiny to have been comprehended by our stout-hearted and very practical fathers.  With all their excellences, they had nothing sentimental about them; they were bent on reducing all things to practical, manageable realities.  They would not hear of churches, but called them meeting-houses; they would not be called clergymen, but ministers or servants,—­thereby signifying their calling to real, tangible work among real men and things.

As we have already said, in the beginnings of New England, the Church and State were identical, and the clergy ex officio the main counsellors and directors of the Commonwealth; and when this especial prerogative was relinquished, they naturally retained something of the bent it had given them.