same placed on the church door, or on
a "publishing post"--in short, they were "valled." Yet in the early days
of the colonies the all-powerful minister could not perform the marriage
ceremony--a magistrate, a captain, any man of dignity in the community
could be authorized to marry Puritan lovers, save the parson. Not till
the beginning of the eighteenth century did the Puritan minister assume
the function of solemnizing marriages. Gov. Bellingham married himself
to Penelope Pelham when he was a short time a widower and forty-nine
years old, and his bride but twenty-two. When he was "brought up" for
this irregularity he arrogantly and monopolizingly persisted in
remaining on the bench to try his own case. "Disorderly marriages" were
punished in many towns; doubtless many of them were between Quakers.
Some couples were fined every month until they were properly married. A
very trying and unregenerate reprobate in New London persisted that he
would "take up" with a woman in the town and make her his wife without
any legal or religious ceremony. This was a great scandal to the whole
community. A pious magistrate met the ungodly couple on the street and
sternly reproved them thus: "John Rogers, do you persist in calling this
woman, a servant, so much younger than yourself, your wife?"

"Yes, I do," violently answered John.

"And do you, Mary, wish such an old man as this to be your husband?"

"Indeed I do," she answered.

"Then," said the governor, coldly, "by the laws of God and this
commonwealth, I as a magistrate pronounce you man and wife."

"Ah! Gurdon, Gurdon," said the groom, married legally in spite of
himself, "thee's a cunning fellow."

There is one peculiarity of the marriages of the first century and a
half of colonial and provincial life which should be noted--the vast
number of unions between the members of the families of Puritan
ministers. It seemed to be a law of social ethics that the sons of
ministers should marry the daughters of ministers. The new pastor
frequently married the daughter of his predecessor in the parish,
sometimes the widow--a most thrifty settling of pastoral affairs. A
study of the Cotton, Stoddard, Eliot, Williams, Edwards, Chauncey,
Bulkeley, and Wigglesworth families, and, above all, of the Mather
family, will show mutual kinship among the ministers, as well as mutual
religious thought.

Richard Mather took for his second wife the widow of John Cotton. Their
children, Incre