When they sang they stood up, and bawled and
fugued in each other's faces. Often a square pew was built for the singers,
and in the centre of this enclosure was a table, on which were laid, when
at rest, the psalm-books. When they sang, the choir thus formed a hollow
square, as does any determined band, for strength.
One other seat in the old Puritan meeting-house, a seat of gloom,
still throws its darksome shadow down through the years,--the stool of
repentance. "Barbarous and cruel punishments" were forbidden by the
statutes of the new colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking,
sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat,
crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long
Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled
and godly congregation, and the cold rebuke of the pious minister's averted
face; bearing on the poor sinful head a deep-branding paper inscribed in
"Capitall Letters" with the name of some dark or mysterious crime, or
wearing on the sleeve some strange and dread symbol, or on the breast a
scarlet letter.
Let us thank God that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures--so
degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,--these foul,
in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never
frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long time.
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