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Often a square pew was built for the singers, and in the centre of this enclosure was a table, on which were laid, when at rest, the psalm-books. When they sang, the choir thus formed a hollow square, as does any determined band, for strength. One other seat in the old Puritan meeting-house, a seat of gloom, still throws its darksome shadow down through the years, the stool of repentance.
There was no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books, and Testaments which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of patient and persistent handling.
When we entered, the church was full even to crowding, the men seated on one side, and the women on the other; they almost all had psalm-books lying before them; the most profound stillness reigned in the assembly. Near the pulpit, which Wilson mounted, was placed a bench for Messrs. Bennet and Tyrman, on which I also took my seat.
But when groups of settlers who were neighbors and friends in their old homes came to America and formed little segregated communities by themselves, there is no doubt that they sung for a time from the psalm-books that they brought with them. Some of the Huguenots became members of the Puritan churches in America, others were Episcopalians.
An outcast of the outcasts he must be, was the common conviction. A hymn was to be sung, all sitting, to open the meeting. Little Elsa went round with the "psalm-books" in a basket, and began with Johanson, who took one as he was requested. The pastor began, and the young voices joined him.
The people had lost their pastors; they had not the guidance of sober and intelligent persons; and they were left merely to pray and to suffer. The terrible raid of the priests against the Protestant books had even deprived most of the Huguenots of their Bibles and psalm-books, so that they were in a great measure left to profit by their own light, such as it was.
The pocket psalm-book of Gabriel Bernon, the builder of the old French Fort at Oxford, is one of Marot and Beza's Version, and is still preserved and owned by one of his descendants; other New England families of French lineage cherish as precious relics the French psalm-books of their Huguenot ancestors.
He walked forward and back with great success twice, thrice, but when turning for a fourth tour he suddenly lost his balance, and over he went with a resounding crash hats, psalm-books, heavy bench, and all.
On the surface there were certain differences between the Canterbury colonists and those of Otago, which local feeling intensified in a manner always paltry, though sometimes amusing. When the stiff-backed Free-Churchmen who were to colonize Otago gathered on board the emigrant ship which was to take them across the seas, they opened their psalm-books.
and after singing that line through heard the second line, "Keep silence, but speak out." Many new psalm-books appeared about the time of the Revolutionary War, and many church petitions have been preserved asking permission to use the new and more melodious psalm and hymn books.
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