The history of the New-England churches presents no epoch more melancholy, distressful, and stormy than the first, and none more united, prosperous, or commendable than the second period in the annals of the Salem Village church.

The contrast between the fortunes and fates of the ministers of these two periods is worthy of being stated in detail.

James Bayley began to preach at the Village at the formation of the society, when he was quite a young man, within three years from receiving his degree at Harvard College.  After about seven years, during which he buried his wife and three children, and encountered a bitter and turbulent opposition,—­so far as we can see, most causeless and unreasonable,—­he relinquished the ministry altogether, and spent the residue of his life in another profession elsewhere.

The ministry of George Burroughs, at the Village, lasted about two years.  The violence of both parties to the controversy by which the parish had been rent was concentrated upon his innocent and unsheltered head.  He was, at a public assembly of his people, in his own meeting-house, arrested, and taken out in the custody of the marshal of the county, a prisoner for a debt incurred to meet the expenses of his wife’s recent funeral, of an amount less than the salary then due him, and which, in point of fact, he had paid at the time by an order upon the parish treasurer.  From such outrageous ill-treatment, he escaped by resigning his ministry.  He was followed to his retreat in a remote settlement, and while engaged there, a laborious, self-sacrificing, and devoted minister, was, by the malignity of his enemies at the Village, suddenly seized, all unconscious of having wronged a human creature, snatched from the table where he was taking his frugal meal in his humble home, torn from his helpless family, hurried up to the Village; overwhelmed in a storm of falsehood, rage, and folly; loaded with irons, immured in a dungeon, carried to the place of execution, consigned to the death of a felon; and his uncoffined remains thrown among the clefts of the rocks of Witch Hill, and left but half buried,—­for a crime of which he was as innocent as the unborn child.

Deodat Lawson, a great scholar and great preacher, after a two years’ trial, and having buried his wife and daughter at the Village, abandoned the attempt to quell the storm of passion there.  He found another settlement on the other side of Massachusetts Bay, which he left without taking leave, and was never heard of more by his people.  Eight years afterwards, he re-appeared in the reprint, at London, of his famous Salem Village sermon, and then vanished for ever from sight.  A cloud of impenetrable darkness envelopes his name at that point.  Of his fate nothing is known, except that it was an “unhappy” one.