trying entrance at best, through succeeding
the beloved Joseph Sewall, who had preached to Old South listeners
for fifty-six years. He came to town a stranger. When, a month
later, Governor Hutchinson issued his annual Thanksgiving
Proclamation, there was placed therein an "exceptionable clause"
that was very offensive to Boston patriots, relating to the
continuance of civil and religious liberties. It had always been the
custom to have the Proclamation read by the ministers in the Boston
churches for the two Sundays previous to Thanksgiving Day, but the
ruling governor very cannily managed to get two Boston clergymen to
read his proclamation the third Sunday before the appointed day,
when all the church members, being unsuspectingly present, had to
listen to the unwelcome words. One of these clerical instruments of
gubernatorial diplomacy and craft was John Bacon. Samuel Adams wrote
bitterly of him, saying, "He performed this servile task a week
before the time, when the people were not aware of it." The _Boston
Gazette_ of November 11 commented severely on Mr. Bacon's action,
and many of his congregation were disgusted with him, and remained
after the service to talk the Proclamation and their unfortunate new
minister over.

It might have been offered, one might think, as some excuse, that he
had so recently come from Maryland, and was probably unacquainted
with the intenseness of Massachusetts politics; and that he had also
been a somewhat busy and preoccupied man during his six weeks'
presence in Boston, for he had been marrying a wife,--or rather a
widow. In the _Boston Evening Post_ of November 11, 1771, I read
this notice: "Married, the Rev'd John Bacon to Mrs. Elizabeth
Cummings, daughter of Ezekiel Goldthwait, Esq."

He retained his pastorate, however, in spite of his early mistake,
through anxious tea-party excitement and forlorn war-threatened
days, till 1775, with but scant popularity and slight happiness,
with bitter differences of opinion with his people over atonement
and imputation, and that ever-present stumbling-block to New England
divines,--baptism under the Half Covenant,--till he was asked to
resign.

Nor did he get on over smoothly with his fellow minister, John Hunt.
In a curious poem of the day, called "Boston Ministers" (which is
reprinted in the _New England Historical and Genealogical Register_
of April, 1859), th