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Updated: June 26, 2025
It was needful for the rich and for the poor, for the ignorant and for the learned, for church-members, for those who were "well-wishers" but not "professors," and for hardened sinners, for everybody in fact: and if any class or condition of human creatures were omitted in the exhaustive analysis, the preacher led us to apprehend that he was only holding them in reserve, and that presently he would include them in the warm and triumphant application of his subject.
To each one was also given an ingenious pocket mirror in which could be seen, at any time, the inconsistencies of church-members. I saw throngs of people circling the top of the tower, and many evil agents busily engaged in the interest of their master. There had just come from the King's Highway a group of church-members upon whom the scenery had a doleful effect.
At the second session of the special court five women were tried and convicted. The others were easily disposed of; but in the case of Rebecca Nurse, one of Parris' church-members, a woman hitherto of unimpeachable character, the jury at first gave a verdict of acquittal. At the announcement of this verdict "the afflicted" raised a great clamor.
Now there was a difference between a play party and a kissing party or kissing bee, as we used to call it. The play party was quite respectable, and could be indulged in by church-members. In it the people taking part sang airs each with its own words, and moved about in step to the music. The absence of the fiddle and the "calling off" and the name of dancing took the curse off.
By the law requiring freemen to be church-members the elders meant to grasp the key to the suffrage, but experience soon proved that more stringent regulation was needed.
We used to be taught, she said, that church-members had higher things to think of, that their thoughts ought to be fixed on something better, and that they ought to restrain the vanity and worldliness of children and young people; but now, she says, even before a girl is born, dress is the one thing needful, the great thing to be thought of; and so, in every step of the way upward, her little shoes, and her little bonnets, and her little dresses, and her corals and her ribbons, are constantly being discussed in her presence, as the one all-important object of life.
The church scandals multiply in spite of pastors and people, and the workingmen decline to show themselves at places of worship, although the number of places of worship and of church-members steadily increases. We are sorry not to notice in any of the discussions on the subject a more frank and searching examination of the reason why religion does not act more powerfully as a rule of conduct.
Why sane people, often church-members respectably connected, will subject themselves to this sort of treatment, be wet to the skin, bruised by the rocks, and flung about among the bushes and dead wood until the most necessary part of their apparel hangs in shreds, is one of the delightful mysteries of these woods.
The trouble about the sincerity was, that those same persons were not unaware of certain sneering remarks that were being made, to the effect that if church-members could go to parties when there were meetings at their own church, they could surely be excused from the meetings; and they could not have been utterly ignorant of the verse that read plainly, "Let not your good be evil spoken of."
And by that time most of their old neighbors and fellow church-members had gone too some southward, some northward, some heavenward.
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