" The Gortonians, the Foxians, and Hutchinsonians, the Anabaptists, the
Six Principle Baptists, the Church of England, apparently all the followers
of the eighty-two "pestilent heresies" so sadly enumerated and so bitterly
hated and "cast out to Satan" by the Massachusetts Puritan divines,--all
the excommunicants and exiles found in Rhode Island a home and
friends--other friends than the Devil to whom they had been consigned.
Though the early Puritan ministers had such powerful influence in every
other respect, they were not permitted to perform the marriage-service
nor to raise their voices in prayer or exhortation at a funeral. Sewall
jealously notes when the English burial-service began to be read at
burials, saying, "the office for Burial is a Lying very bad office makes no
difference between the precious and the vile." The office of marriage was
denied the parson, and was generally relegated to the magistrate. In this,
Governor Bradford states, they followed "ye laudable custome of ye Low
Countries." Not rulers and magistrates only were empowered to perform the
marriage ceremony; squires, tavern-keepers, captains, various authorized
persons might wed Puritan lovers; any man of dignity or prominence in the
community could apparently receive authority to perform that office except
the otherwise all-powerful parson.
As years rolled on, though the New Englanders still felt great reverence
and pride for their church and its ordinances, the minister was no longer
the just man made perfect, the oracle of divine will.
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