The lesson of his repentance is farther reaching than he
dreamed, when the story of his confession can so move and affect this
nineteenth-century generation, and fill more than one soul with a nobler
idea of the Puritan nature, and with a higher and fuller conception of the
absolute truth of the Puritan Christianity.
Some very prosaic and earthly interruptions to the church services are
recorded as being made, and possibly by the church-members themselves. In
one church, in 1661, a fine of five shillings was imposed on any one "who
shot off a gun or led a horse into the meeting-house." These seem to me
quite as unseemly, irreverent, and disagreeable disturbances as shouting
out, Quaker-fashion, "Parson, your sermon is too long;" but possibly the
house of God was turned into a stable on week-days, not on the Sabbath.
In many parishes church-attendants were fined who brought their "doggs"
into the meeting-house. Dogs swarmed in the colony, for they had been
imported from England, "sufficient mastive dogs, hounds and beagles," and
also Irish wolf-hounds; and they caused an interruption in one afternoon
service by chasing into the meeting-house one of those pungently offensive,
though harmless, animals that abounded even in the earliest colonial
days, and whose mephitic odor, in this case, had power to scatter the
congregation as effectively as would have a score of armed Indian braves.
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