father permitted the saintly maiden to decide on her own text for the
sermon, and she meekly selected, "Mary hath chosen the better part,
which shall not be taken away from her," and the discourse was duly
pronounced. But when her wild young sister Abby was bent on marrying a
certain Squire Adams, called John, whom her father disliked and would
not even invite to dinner, she boldly suggested for _her_ text, "John
came, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he hath a
devil." But no sermon stands recorded under this prefix, though Abby
lived to be the wife of one President of the United States and mother of
another.

The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. "New England being
a country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably
enwrapped in theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest
themselves in politics." Indeed, for many years they virtually
controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could
vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and
imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by
permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their
orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not
democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit
government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their
first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,--that
is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was
afterwards rebuked in England as "fanatical and absurd." But the
government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered
by theological controversy.

In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as
late as 1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon,
on the day appointed by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for
the direction of the town in the work before them." They wrote
state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at town-meetings. At
the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson, minister
of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for
his candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from
among the boughs. Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which
still ornaments the Common; but one sees no chips of that other old
block a