tten
at Nashville, Tennessee, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, by the Reverend
Hubert Parsons of the Methodist Episcopal Church (South), showing that
negroes were in a like predicament. But a more notable instance of the
danger of a specialty is the Reverend Cotton Mather, who investigated the
subject of witchcraft and issued a modest brochure incorporating his views
on the subject. He succeeded in convincing at least one man of its verity,
and that man was himself, and thus immortality was given to the town of
Salem, which, otherwise, would have no claim on us for remembrance, save
that Hawthorne was once a clerk in its custom-house.

A very slight study of Colonial history will show any student that, for
two centuries, the ministers in New England occupied very much the same
position in society that the priest did during the Middle Ages. As the
monks kept learning from dying off the face of the earth, so did the
ministers of the New World preserve culture from passing into
forgetfulness. Very seldom, indeed, were books to be found in a community
except at the minister's. And during the Seventeenth Century, and well
into the Eighteenth, he combined in himself the offices of doctor, lawyer,
preacher and teacher. Mr. Lowell has said: "I can not remember when there
was not one or more students in my father's household, and others still
who came at regular intervals to recite. And this was the usual custom. It
was the minister who fitted boys for college, and no youth was ever sent
away to school until he had been drilled by the local clergyman."

And it must further be noted that genealogical tables show that very
nearly all of the eminent men of New England were sons of ministers, or of
an ancestry where ministers' names are seen at frequent intervals. As an
intellectual and moral force, the minister has now but a rudiment of the
power he once exercised. The tendency to specialize all art and all
knowledge has to a degree shorn him of his strength. And to such an extent
is this true, that within forty years it has passed into a common proverb
that the sons of clergymen are rascals, whereas in Colonial days the
highest recommendation a youth could carry was that he was the son of a
minister.

The Reverend John Hancock, grandfather of John Hancock the patriot, was
for more than half a century the minister of Lexington, Massachusetts. I
say "the minister," because there was only one: the keen competition of
sect that estab