It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added that they were often the wits and humorists of their localities.  Mather Byles’s facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences.  But these were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles.  True humor is an outgrowth of character.  It is never found in greater perfection than in old clergymen and old college professors.  Dr. Sprague’s “Annals of the American Pulpit” tells many stories of our old ministers as good as Dean Ramsay’s “Scottish Reminiscences.”  He has not recorded the following, which is to be found in Miss Larned’s excellent and most interesting History of Windham County, Connecticut.  The Reverend Josiah Dwight was the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700.  He was not old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers.  The “sensational” pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the drollery of its expressions.  A specimen or two may dispose the reader to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of mind.  “If unconverted men ever got to heaven,” he said, “they would feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak.”  Some of his ministerial associates took offence at his eccentricities, and called on a visit of admonition to the offending clergyman.  “Mr. Dwight received their reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his faults, and promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks for the brotherly visit and admonition, ’hoped that they might so hitch their horses on earth that they should never kick in the stables of everlasting salvation.’”

It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old ministers in one’s veins.  An English bishop proclaimed the fact before an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not ashamed to say that he had a son who was a doctor.  Very kind that was in the bishop, and very proud his medical audience must have felt.  Perhaps he was not ashamed of the Gospel of Luke, “the beloved physician,” or even of the teachings which came from the lips of one who was a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter.  So a New-Englander, even if he were a bishop, need not be ashamed to say that he consented to have an ancestor who was a minister.  On the contrary, he has a right to be grateful for a probable inheritance of good instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a library where he bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father’s or grandfather’s folios.  What are the names of ministers’ sons which most readily occur to our memory as illustrating these advantages?  Edward Everett, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth, James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton, were all ministers’ boys.  John Lothrop Motley was the grandson of the clergyman after whom he was named.  George Ticknor was next door to such a descent, for his father was a deacon.  This is a group which it did not take a long or a wide search to bring together.