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Updated: May 7, 2025
As a rule he walked to church between his father and his mother, like a little child, although he was now a tall lad of sixteen, but to-day he was sent back for a psalm-book, forgotten in the hurry of their early start. When he set out again the rest of the village folk were all in the meeting-house.
Blythe to unite with his household in prayer and praise requesting that the last hymn in the beautiful collection of sacred lyrics attached to our national psalmody, might be sung. My father's pulpit psalm-book was brought to Mr. Blythe. It is now before me, and I transcribe, from its page, with a vivid recollection of the scene now referred to, one of the solemn stanzas of that touching anthem:
So it chanced that, in the flutter of the moment when the last psalm was given out, and Torrance was reading the verse, and the leaves of every psalm-book in church were rustling under busy fingers, two stealthy glances were sent out like antennæ among the pews and on the indifferent and absorbed occupants, and drew timidly nearer to the straight line between Archie and Christina.
Love and music were ever close companions; and the singing-school that safety-valve of young New England life had not then been established or even thought of, and I doubt not many a warm and far from Puritanical love-glance was cast from the "doves-eyes" across the "alley" of the old meeting-house at Cicely as she sung. But Cicely vas not young when she last used the old psalm-book.
The old merchant used to rise at all hours in the morning, and spend the early summer mornings on Arthur's Seat with his Psalm-book in his hand, and the winter mornings at his shop fire, reading translations from the Continental Reformers, comparing them with his Bible, singing Psalms by himself and offering prayer.
She flung herself prone upon the bed, and lay there, holding the psalm-book in her hands for hours, for the more part in a mere stupor of unconsenting pleasure and unreasoning fear. The fear was superstitious; there came up again and again in her memory Dandie's ill-omened words, and a hundred grisly and black tales out of the immediate neighbourhood read her a commentary on their force.
It was thoroughly sacked; every portable article of value, linen, plate, money, furniture, was carried off, the pictures and objects of art destroyed, the house gutted from top to bottom. A thousand spectators were looking on placidly at the work of destruction as they returned from church, many of them with Bible and Psalm-book in their hands.
"Yes, we shall have to stay here all night, if we wait for that book to burn up," said Master Herrick. "Now if it had been a Bible, or a Psalm-book, it would have been consumed by this time." "My father told me," said one of the crowd, "that they were once six weeks trying to burn up some witch's book in Holland, and then had to tear each leaf separately before they could burn it."
I had made a discovery concerning this fellow which afforded me much amusement: coming on him suddenly, I found him deeply engaged on a Puritan Psalm-book, sighing and casting up his eyes to heaven in a ludicrous excess of glum-faced piety.
Parson Judson, of Taunton, was so lazy that he used to preach while sitting down in the pulpit; and was so contemptibly fond of comfort that he would on summer Sundays give out to the sweltering members of his congregation the longest psalm in the psalm-book, and then desert them piously perspiring and fuguing and lie under a tree enjoying the cool outdoor breezes until the long psalm was ended, escaping thus not only the heat but the singing; and when we consider the quantity and quality of both, and that he condemned his good people to an extra amount of each, it seems a piece of clerical inhumanity that would be hard to equal.
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