on be checked by the thought of the little progress which has been
made in the last two hundred years, towards solving the same problem.
The origin of evil, the ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin
and do evil, the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral
world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries to us as
to them. If we have constructed or adopted a more comfortable theology,
it is probably because we are less logical than they. It is perhaps
because we have forgotten or refused to look at some things at which
they did not blink.

Then, too, the Lord was abroad in those days. Their thoughts were deeply
tinged by the semi-pagan views with which the authors of both the Old
and New Testaments were imbued. When the thunder crashed, it was the
voice of an angry God that spoke. When the lightning flashed, it was the
gleam of His angry eye. Benjamin Franklin was then but a year old, and
electricity had not become the packhorse of the world. The smiles and
frowns of nature in all her varying moods through all the days and
seasons, which we ascribe to the operations of law, were to them the
visible tokens of the wrath or favor of the Almighty. On December 11th,
1719, for the first time in the history of the Colony, the northern
lights were seen here. They shone with the greatest brilliancy. The
consternation they caused was fearful. The people had never heard of
such a phenomenon. They considered it the opening scene of the day of
judgment. All amusements were given up, all business was forsaken, and
sleep itself was interrupted for days. Again, on the 29th of October,
1727, a mighty earthquake occurred, which shook with tremendous violence
the whole Atlantic seaboard. The people here believed that the Lord was
about to swallow them up in His fierce anger. The women throughout New
England immediately discontinued the wearing of hoop skirts then
recently come into fashion, believing that the earthquake was the sign
of the Lord's displeasure at the sinful innovation.

Hardly had the first settlers here begun to build permanent homes for
the living, when they were called upon to provide resting places for the
dead. The first person to be buried in yonder burying ground was a
child, a girl, Mary, the daughter of Benjamin Bostwick. The next was
John Noble, the first settler, and the first Town Clerk. He died August
17th, 1714. The town formally laid out the burying ground in 1716.
Within