Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/172

168 Boston, that it was thought necessary to banish a man, because he did not believe in original sin. In 1639, a fast was appointed, "To deplore the prevalence of the small-pox, the wont of zoal in the professors of religion, and the general decay of piety." "The church of God had not been long in this wilderness," thus complains a minister, one hundred and fifty years ago, "before the dragon cast forth several floods to devour it ; but not the least of these floods was one of the Antinomian and familistical heresies." "It is incredible what alienations of mind, and what a very calenture the devil raised in the country upon this odd occasion." "The sectaries" "began usually to seduce women into their notions, and by these women, like their first mother, they soon hooked in the husband; also." So, in 1637, the synod of Cambridge was convened, to despatch "The apostate serpent:" one woman was duly convicted of holding "about thirty monstrous opinions," and subsequently, by the civil authorities, banished from the colony. The synod, after much time was "spent in ventilation, and emptying of private passions, condemned eighty-two opinions, then prevalent in the colony, as erroneous, and decided to " refer doubts to be resolved by the great God." Even in 1636, John Wilson lamented "the dark and distracted condition of the churches of New England."

"The good old times," when piety was in a thriving state, and the churches successful and contented, lay as far behind the "Famous Johns," as it now does behind their successors in office and lamentation. Then, as now, the complaint had the same foundation: ministers and other good men could not see that new piety will not be put into the old forms, neither the old forms of thought nor the old forms of action. In the days of Wilson, Cotton,