On every Sunday afternoon the Word of God and its sustaining
cushion had to be removed to the safe shelter of a neighboring farmhouse or
tavern, to prevent total annihilation by these Puritanical, Bible-loving
squirrels.
The pulpits were often pretentious, even in the plain and undecorated
meeting-houses, and were usually high desks, to which a narrow flight of
stairs led. In the churches of the third stage of architecture, these
stairs were often inclosed in a towering hexagonal mahogany structure,
which was ornamented with pillars and panels. Into this the minister
walked, closed the door behind him, and invisibly ascended the stairs;
while the children counted the seconds from the time he closed the door
until his head appeared through the trap-door at the top of the pulpit. The
form known as a tub-pulpit was very popular in the larger churches. The
pulpit of one old, unpainted church retained until the middle of this
century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring
eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the
great, all-seeing eye of God.
As the ceiling and rafters were so open and reverberating, it was generally
thought imperative to hang above the pulpit a great sounding-board, which
threatened the minister like a giant extinguisher, and was really as devoid
of utility as it was curious in ornamentation, "reflecting most part an
empty ineffectual sound.
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