Sunday Services in "The Coffin"

"At least one meeting house in New England earned the name 'The Coffin' because its unpainted clapboards reportedly turned black under the effect of weathering." (55) --Peter Benes, "Sky Colors and Scattered Clouds: The Decorative and Architectural Painting of New England Meeting Houses, 1738-1834" in Peter Benes, ed. New England Meeting House and Church: 1630-1850

Appearing in a much happier color,
Colonial Meeting House, Cohasset, Mass.
(From: Wikimedia)

Picture in your mind a rural New England landscape with a church. Your mind is probably picturing that church with white paint. Mine does, anyway. But your mind's eye in that case would only be accounting for church decor from the 1830s onwards. The white color is a product of the Greek Revival architectural movement that arrived in New England around that time. Prior to this decade, New England meeting houses and churches could be seen in an amazing variety of colors in addition to white. The most popular paints for these public buildings in the 18th century were, in order of popularity: 1) yellow or light yellow, 2) white, 3) gray, 4) blue, 5) red, 6) orange, and 7) green. As unappealing as a black colored meeting house called "The Coffin" seems today, it must have had an even greater affective impact in a time when so many other churches were painted in brighter, happier colors.

Benes does not mention where this meeting house called "The Coffin" was located, so we don't know much about the theology of the preaching that was done there. However, consider the possibility of walking into "The Coffin" on a Sunday morning and hearing a sermon such as Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"!

This World is One Big Heape of Dung

The historian Edmund Morgan describes a conversation between Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop and Roger Williams, the separatist and future resident of Providence, Rhode Island (after being banned from Massachusetts).

"[Roger Williams] did indeed think that the Lord had forsaken New England for failing to separate her churches wholly from the filthiness of English corruption. And to [John] Winthrop he offered the very advice that Winthrop could least willingly listen to. Where Winthrop had urged him to pause and consider whether everyone was wrong but him, he replied with an invitation to join him in splendid isolation: 'Abstract yourself,' he urged, 'with a holy violence from the Dung heape of this Earth.' Williams would not learn the lesson which Winthrop had taught himself so painfully before he left England, that there was no escape from the dung heap of this earth; and that those who sought one or thought they had found it acted with an unholy, not a holy, violence."

Roger Williams (From: Wikimedia)

Morgan explains a series of stages Williams passed through to purify himself by associating only with other righteous people. The final stage was Williams' conclusion that "he could not conscientiously have communion with anyone but his wife... He had effectively demonstrated the proposition to himself as he withdrew successively from the Church of England, from the churches of Massachusetts, and finally from everyone but his wife. What he saw at last was what Winthrop had tried to point out to him, that he was seeking an unattainable goal, that there was no escape from the dung heap of this earth."

After reaching this conclusion, Williams progressed to a radically new position of extreme tolerance. Or, as Morgan tells us, "since he could not escape the dung heap, he would embrace it."

Why did I share this with you? Because I am fascinated by the metaphor of this world as a heap of dung. No other reason (besides the fact that I enjoy early New England history)!

--quotes are taken from Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, pp. 120-131

An Alcoholic Cod

"During Prohibition, fishermen, like everyone else, had to find ways to supplement their meager income. One way for a lobsterman to do so was to turn to a bit of low-level rum-running. The lobsterman would place orders in notes in his traps and then retrieve the traps a day or two later. In them he found, in place of the notes, peculiar lobsters... in the shape of bottles of booze...

Atlantic Cod (From: Wikipedia)

In July 1929 three Isleboro [Maine] fisherman, in outer Penobscot Bay, pulled in a seventy-pound cod. When dressing it, they found a sealed full-size bottle of bootleg whiskey in its gut. Cod are notorious for swallowing anything within reach--and this bottle, no doubt, was pitched overboard by a rumrunner being pursued, perhaps even a rum-running lobsterman." (230) --Matthew P. Mayo, Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England 

How to Detect Pregnancy in 18th Century America

Dr. George DeBenneville
(From: U.S. National Library of Medicine)

"In describing the symptoms of pregnancy to his married daughter, Harriet, the eminent Dr. George DeBenneville [a respected American doctor] never mentioned the cessation of menstruation, listing instead 'coldness of the outward parts,' that 'the Belly waxeth very flat,' that 'the Veins of the eyes are clearly seen,' and, finally, the appearance of a 'small living creature' in urine that had been stored for thirteen days." (201) --Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans

Say "Justification by Faith", or I Pull Your Beard!

The Council of Trent (From: Wikipedia)

At the Catholic Church's Council of Trent around 1545: "After passing various reform decrees on preaching, catechetical instruction, privileges of mendicants and indulgences, the council took up the thorny question of justification. Discussion was postponed for some months out of consideration for the emperor, who feared it might irritate the Protestants, and only gave his consent to it in the hope that some ambiguous form acceptable to that party, might be found. How deeply the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very bosom of the church was revealed by the storminess of the debate. The passions of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the consideration of a fundamental article of their faith that in the course of disputation they accused one another of conduct unbecoming to Christians, taunted one another with plebeian origin and tore hair from one another's beards." (297) --Preserved Smith, Reformation in Europe

"Direct Revelation" Says: No Immaculate Conception

"Berne [Switzerland] was the theater of one of the most reverberating scandals enacted by the contemporary church. A passionately contested theological issue of the day was whether the Virgin had been immaculately conceived. This was denied by the Dominicans and asserted by the Franciscans. Some of the Dominicans of the friary at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair was to have a direct revelation. For their fraudulent purposes they conspired with John Jetzer, a lay brother admitted in 1506, who died after 1520. Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an imposter, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, bringing the Virgin on the stage and making her give details of her conception sufficiently gross to show that it took place in the ordinary, and not in the immaculate, manner. When the fraud was at last discovered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans involved were burnt at the stake." (121) --Preserved Smith, Reformation in Europe

Financing Salvation in the Early 16th Century

"One of the richest sources of ecclesiastical revenue was the sale of indulgences, or the remission by the pope of the temporal penalties of sin, both penance in this life and the pains of purgatory. The practice of giving these pardons first arose as a means of assuring heaven to those warriors who fell fighting the infidel. In 1300 Boniface VIII granted a plenary indulgence to all who made the pilgrimage to the jubilee at Rome, and the golden harvest reaped on this occasion induced his successors to take the same means of imparting spiritual graces to the faithful at frequent intervals. In the fourteenth century the pardons were extended to all who contributed a sum of money to a pious purpose, whether they came to Rome or not, and, as the agents who were sent out to distribute these pardons were also given power to confess and absolve, the papal letters were naturally regarded as no less than tickets of admission to heaven. In the thirteenth century the theologians had discovered that there was at the disposal of the church and her head an abundant 'treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints,' which might be applied vicariously to anyone by the pope. In the fifteenth century the claimed power to free living men from purgatory was extended to the dead, and this soon became one of the most profitable branches of the 'holy trade.'

The Pope as the Antichrist, signing and selling
indulgences, from Luther's 1521 Pasional
Christi und Antichristi,
by Lucas Cranach the Elder (From: Wikipedia)

The means of obtaining indulgences varied. Sometimes they were granted to those who made a pilgrimage or who would read a pious book. Sometimes they were used to raise money for some public work, a hospital or a bridge. But more and more they became an ordinary means for raising revenue for the curia. How thoroughly commercialized the business of selling grace and remission of the penalties of sin had become is shown by the fact that the agents of the pope were often bankers who organized the sales on purely business lines in return for a percentage of the net receipts plus the indirect profits accruing to those who handle large sums. Of the net receipts the financiers usually got about ten percent; an equal amount was given to the emperor or other civil ruler for permitting the pardoners to enter his territory, commissions were also paid to the local bishop and clergy, and of course the pedlars of the pardons received a proportion of the profits in order to stimulate their zeal. On the average from thirty to forty-five percent of the gross receipts were turned into the Roman treasury." (29-30) --Preserved Smith, Reformation in Europe