The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted down to a later period.  “In half a century,” said the venerable Dr. Porter of Conway, New Hampshire, in 1822, “there will be no Pagans, Jews, Mohammedans, Unitarians, or Methodists.”  The half-century has more than elapsed, and the prediction seems to stand in need of an extension, like many other prophetic utterances.

The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggy-browed old minister of Medford, that he had expressed his belief that not more than one soul in two thousand would be saved.  Seeing a knot of his parishioners in debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and was told that they were questioning which of the Medford people was the elected one, the population being just two thousand, and that opinion was divided whether it would be the minister or one of his deacons.  The story may or may not be literally true, but it illustrates the popular belief of those days, that the clergyman saw a good deal farther into the councils of the Almighty than his successors could claim the power of doing.

The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind the varied accomplishments of some of the New England clergy.  The face of the Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years’ experience of eternity.  The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription:  “Ezroe Stiles, 1766.  Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth.”  Both were noted scholars and philosophers.  The hand-lens before me was imported, with other philosophical instruments, by the Reverend John Prince of Salem, an earlier student of science in the town since distinguished by the labors of the Essex Institute.  Jeremy Belknap holds an honored place in that unpretending row of local historians.  And in the pages of his “History of New Hampshire” may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable man, in many respects, among all the older clergymen preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in state and national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a Territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to him.  This manifold individual was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts,—­the Reverend Manasseh Cutler.  These reminiscences from surrounding objects came up unexpectedly, of themselves:  and have a right here, as showing how wide is the range of intelligence in the clerical body thus accidentally represented in a single library making no special pretensions.