failed to carry the whole of his flock along with him. Owing to declining health he resigned his pastorate in October, 1753, having exactly two months before recorded the following case of discipline:—

“August 22, 1753. Ebenezer Adams was Suspended from the Communion of the Church for the false, abusive and scandalous stories that his Unbridled Tongue had spread against the Pastor, and refusing to make a proper Confession of his monstrous wickedness.”

The other of these two records bears date almost exactly twenty years later, and was doubtless made because of the preceding entry. It is very brief, and as follows:—

“November 3, 1773. The Church made choice of Ebenezer Adams for deacon, in the place of deacon Palmer, who resigned the stated exercise of his office.”

After 1741, therefore, the only records of the North Precinct church are those contained in the book kept by the successive precinct clerks, which has often been consulted, but never copied. None of the entries in it relate to cases of discipline or to matters spiritual, they being almost exclusively prudential in character. No record is made of births, baptisms, deaths or marriages, which were still for several years to come noted in the small volume from which I have quoted. Accordingly the Braintree North Precinct records after Mr. Hancock’s ministry are of far inferior interest, though as the volume containing them from 1709 to 1766 distinctly belongs to what are known as “ancient records,” and as such is liable at any time to be lost or destroyed, I have caused a copy of it to be made, and have deposited it for safe keeping in the library of this Society. An examination of this volume only very occasionally brings to light anything which is of more than local interest, or which has a bearing on the social or religious conditions of the last century, though here and there something is found which constitutes an exception to this rule. Such, for instance, is the following entry in the record of the proceedings of a Precinct meeting held on the 19th of July, 1731, to take measures for properly noticing the completion of the new meeting-house then being built:—

“After a considerable debate with respect to the raising of the new meeting-house, &c., the Question was put whether the committee should provide Bred Cheap Sugar Rum Sider and Bear &c. for the Raising of said Meeting House at the Cost of the Precinct. It passed in the affirmative.”

I have been unable to discover any subsequent detailed statement of expenses incurred and disbursements made under the authority conferred by this vote. Such a document might be interesting. Two years before, when in 1729 the Rev. Mr. Jackson was ordained as pastor of the church of Woburn, among the items of expense were four, aggregating the sum of £23 1s., representing the purchase of “6 Barrels and one half of Cyder, 28 Gallons of Wine, 2 Gallons of Brandy and four of Rum, Loaf Sugar, Lime Juice, and Pipes,” all, it is to be presumed, consumed at the time and on the spot.

It has of course been noticed that a large proportion of the entries I have quoted relate to discipline administered in cases of fornication, in many of which confession is made by husband and wife, and is of acts committed before marriage. The experience of Braintree in this respect was in no way peculiar among the Massachusetts towns of the last century. While examining the Braintree records I incidentally came across a singular and conclusive bit of unpublished documentary evidence on this point in the records of the church of Groton; for, casually mentioning one day in the rooms of the Society the Braintree records to our librarian, Dr. S. A. Green, he informed me that the similar records of the Groton church were in his possession, and he kindly put them at my disposal. Though covering a later period (1765-1803) than the portion of the Braintree church records from which the extracts contained in this paper have been made, the Groton records supplement and explain the Braintree records to a very remarkable degree. In the latter there is no vote or other entry showing the church rule or usage which led to these post-nuptial confessions of ante-marital relations; but in the Groton records I find the following among the preliminary votes passed at the time of signing the church covenant, regulating the admission of members to full communion:—

“June 1, 1765. The church then voted with regard to Baptizing children of persons newly married, That those parents that have not a child till seven yearly months after Marriage are subjects of our Christian Charity, and (if in a judgment of Charity otherwise qualified) shall have the privilege of Baptism for their Infants without being questioned as to their Honesty.”

This rule prevailed in the Groton church for nearly forty years, until in January, 1803, it was brought up again for consideration by an article in the warrant calling a church meeting “to see if the church will reconsider and annul the rule established by former vote and usage of the church requiring an acknowledgment before the congregation of those persons who have had a child within less time than seven yearly months after marriage as a term of their having baptism for their children.”

The compelling cause to the confessions referred to was therefore the parents’ desire to secure baptism for their offspring during a period when baptism was believed to be essential to salvation, with the Calvinistic hell as an alternative. The constant and not infrequently cruel use made by the church and the clergy of the parental fear of infant damnation—the belief “that Millions of Infants are tortured in Hell to all Eternity for a Sin that was committed thousands of Years before they were born”—is matter of common knowledge. Not only did it compel young married men and women to shameful public confessions of the kind which has been described, but it was at times arbitrarily used by some ministers in a way which is at once ludicrous and, now, hard to understand. Certain of them, for instance, refused to baptize infants born on the Sabbath, there being an ancient superstition to the effect that a child born on the Sabbath was also conceived on the Sabbath; a superstition presumably the basis on which was founded the provision of the apocryphal Blue Laws of Connecticut,—

“Whose rule the nuptial kiss restrains
On Sabbath day, in legal chains”;[8]

and there is one well-authenticated case of a Massachusetts clergyman whose practice it was thus to refuse to baptize Sabbath-born babes, who in passage of time had twins born to him on a Lord’s day. He publicly confessed his error, and in due time administered the rite to his children.[9]

With the church refusing baptism on the one side, and with an eternity of torment for unbaptized infants on the other, some definite line had to be drawn. This was effected through what was known as “the seven months’ rule”; and the penalty for its violation, enforced and made effective by the refusal of the rites of baptism, was a public confession. Under the operation of “the seven months’ rule” the records of the Groton church show that out of two hundred persons owning the baptismal covenant in that church during the fourteen years between 1761 and 1775 no less than sixty-six confessed to fornication before marriage.