Fancy the chill and
gloom of the unheated, ill-lighted churches at that hour on winter
mornings. The "Salem Gazette" openly characterized Sunday-schools, when
first suggested, as profanations of the Sabbath, and for years they were
not allowed in many Congregational churches. When the Sabbath-schools
were universally established, and thus the attention and interest of the
children was gained during the noon interval (the time the schools were
usually held in country churches), and when each family sat in its own pew,
and thus the boys were separated, and each under his parents' guardianship,
the "wretched boys" of the Puritan Sabbath disappeared, and well-behaved,
quiet, orderly boys were seen instead in the New England churches.
This fashion of sermon-reading at the nooning happily did not obtain in
all parts of New England. In many villages the meetings in the society
noon-houses were to the townspeople what a Sunday newspaper is to Sunday
readers now-a-days, an advertisement and exposition of all the news of the
past week, and also a suggestion of events to come. At noon they discussed
and wondered at the announcements and publishings which were tacked on
the door of the meeting-house or the notices that had been read from the
pulpit. The men talked in loud voices of the points of the sermon, of the
doctrines of predestination pedobaptism and antipedobaptism, of original
sin, and that most fascinating mystery, the unpardonable sin, and in lower
voices of wolf and bear killing, of the town-meeting, the taxes, the crops
and cattle; and they examined with keen interest one another's horses,
and many a sly bargain in horse-flesh or exchange of cows and pigs was
suggested, bargained over, and clinched in the "Sabba'-day house.
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