These things done, a deacon says impressively, “Brethren, now there is time for contribution; wherefore, as God hath prospered you, so freely offer.”  Then the people in the galleries come down and march two abreast, “up one ile and down the other,” passing before the desk, where in a long “pue” sit the elders and deacons.  One of these holds a moneybox, into which the worshippers put their offerings, usually varying from one to five shillings, according to their ability and good-will.  Some give paper pledges instead; and others give other valuables, such as “a fair gilt cup, with a cover,” for the communion-service.  Then comes a psalm, read, line after line, by some one appointed, out of the “Bay Psalm-Book,” and sung by the people.  These psalms are sung regularly through, four every Sunday, and some ten tunes compose the whole vocal range of the congregation.  Then come the words, “Blessed are they who hear the word of the Lord and keep it,” and then the benediction.

And then the reverend divine descends from his desk and walks down the aisle, bowing gravely right and left to his people, not one of whom stirs till the minister has gone out; and then the assembly disperses, each to his own home, unless it be some who have come from a distance, and stay to eat their cold pork and peas in the meeting-house.

Roll aside the panorama of the three-hours’ Sunday service of two centuries ago, lest that which was not called wearisome in the passing prove wearisome in the delineation now.  It needed all this accumulation of small details to show how widely the externals of New-England church-going have changed since those early days.  But what must have been the daily life of that Puritan minister for whom this exhausting service was but one portion of the task of life!  Truly, they were “pious and painful preachers” then, as I have read upon a stone in the old Watertown graveyard;—­“princely preachers” Cotton Mather calls them.  He relates that Mr. Cotton, in addition to preaching on Sunday and holding his ordinary lecture every Thursday, preached thrice a week besides, on Wednesday and Thursday early in the morning, and on Saturday afternoon.  He also held a daily lecture in his house, which was at last abandoned as being too much thronged, and frequent occasional days occurred, when he would spend six hours “in the word and in prayer.”  On his voyage to this country, he being accompanied by two other ministers, they commonly had three sermons a day,—­one after every meal.  He was “an universal scholar and a walking library,”—­he studied twelve hours a day, and said he liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep.

A fearful rate of labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous life.  It seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have survived to write four thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the Reverend John Mitchell was called “a truly aged young man” at thirty,—­especially when we consider that he was successor at Cambridge to “the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing Mr. Shepard,” in continuance of whose labors he kept a monthly lecture, “wherein he largely handled man’s misery by sin and made a most entertaining exposition of the Book of Genesis.”