Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/496

488 his thoughts to march in the regular platoon and file of a properly written sermon. It is told of him, that, moved by the admiration of his people for the calm and orderly performances of one of his neighboring brethren of the name of Emerson, he resolved to write a sermon in the same style. After the usual introductory services, he began to read his performance, but soon grew weary, stumbled disconsolately, and at last stopped, exclaiming,— "Emerson must be Emerson, and Moody must be Moody! I feel as if I had my head in a bag ! You call Moody a rambling preacher;—it is true enough; but his preaching will do to catch rambling sinners, and you are all runaways from the Lord."

His clerical brethren at a meeting of the Association once undertook to call him to account for his odd expressions and back-handed strokes. He stepped into his study and produced a record of some twenty or thirty cases of conversions which had resulted from some of his exceptional sayings. As he read them over with the dates, they looked at each other with surprise, and one of them very sensibly remarked, "If the Lord owns Father Moody’s oddities, we must let him take his own way."

His son, Joseph Moody, furnished the original incident which Hawthorne has so exquisitely worked up in his story of "The Minister’s Black Veil." Being of a singularly nervous and melancholic temperament, he actually for many years shrouded his face with a black handkerchief. When reading a sermon he would lift this, but stood with his back to the audience so that his face was concealed,—all which appears to have been accepted by his people with sacred simplicity. He was known in the neighborhood by the name of Handkerchief Moody.

It is recorded also of the venerable and eccentric Father Mills, of Torringford, that, on the death of his much beloved wife, be was greatly exercised as to how a minister who always dressed in black could sufficiently express his devotion and respect for the departed by any outward change of dress. At last he settled the question to his own satisfaction, by substituting for his white wig a black silk pocket-handkerchief, with which head-dress he officiated in all simplicity during the usual term of mourning.

We think it one result of their great freedom from any strait-laced conventional ideas, that no point of character is more frequently noticed in the subjects of these sketches than wit and humor. New England ministers never held it a sin to laugh; if they did, some of them had a great deal to answer for; for they could scarce open their months without dropping some provocation to a smile. An ecclesiastical meeting was always a merry season; for there never were wanting quaint images, humorous anecdotes, and sharp flashes of wit, and even the driest and most metaphysical points of doctrine were often lit up and illuminated by these corruscations.

A panel taken out of the house of the Rev. John Lowell, of Newbury, is still preserved, representing the common style of an ecclesiastical meeting in those days. The divines, each in full wig and gown, are seated around a table, smoking their pipes, and above is the well-known inscription: In necessariis, Unitas: in non necessariis, Libertas: in utrisque Charitas.

In that delightfully naïve and simple journal of the Rev. Thomas Smith, the first minister settled in Portland, Maine, in the year 1725, we find the following entries.

"July 4, 1763. Mr. Brooks was ordained. A multitude of people from my parish. A decent solemnity."

"January 16, 1765. Mr. Foxcroft was ordained at New Gloucester. We had a pleasant journey home. Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry. A jolly ordination. We lost sight of decorum."

This Mr. L., by the by, who was so alert on this occasion, it appears by a note, was Stephen Longfellow, the great-grandfather of the poet. Those who enjoy the poet's acquaintance will probably