comfortable than the narrow seat of the "pue." The general court of Massachusetts passed a law requiring all inn-keepers within a mile of any meeting house to clear their houses "during the hours of the exercise." "Thus," Mr. Field says wittily, "the townsmen were frozen out of the tavern to be frozen in the meeting house." Our ancestors had no reverence for a church save as a literal meeting house, and it was not unusual to transform the house of God into a tavern. The Great House at Charlestown, Massachusetts, the official residence of Governor Winthrop, became a meeting house in 1633, and then a tavern, the Three Cranes, kept by Robert Leary and his descendants for many years. It was destroyed in June, 1775, in the burning of the town.

The first revenue relinquished by the West India Company to the town of New Amsterdam was the excise on wine, beer, and spirits, and the sole condition made by Stuyvesant on its surrender was as to its application, that the salaries of the Dominies should be paid from it. For a year beginning November, 1661, the burghers of Esopus paid a tax on liquor, the proceeds of which were used to build a parsonage for the minister. St. Philip's church in Charleston, South Carolina, was originally built by a tax of two pence a gallon on spirits imported in 1670. Between 1743 and 1750 the public revenues of South Carolina were all raised by three per cent duties on liquors, wines, sugar, molasses, slaves, and imported dry-goods, and produced about forty-five hundred pounds, of which one thousand pounds were devoted to paying the salaries of ten ministers. The dedication of St. Michael's church in Charleston, South Carolina, was followed by a great dinner, at which a large amount of liquor was consumed.

Under such circumstances it could not be expected that the clergy would be much troubled with scruples on the use of liquor, and the evidence is that they were not. We must bear in mind that the use of liquors was universal in those days. "Ordination Day" was almost as great a day for the tavern as for the meeting house. The visiting ministers who came to assist at the religious service of ordination of a new minister were usually entertained at the tavern. Often a specially good beer was brewed called "ordination beer," and in Connecticut an "ordination ball" was given at the tavern—this with the sanction of the parsons. The bills for entertaining the visitors for the dinner and lodging at the local taverns are in many cases preserved. One of the most characteristic was at a Hartford ordination. It runs: