"On Sabbath day he went his way,
As he was used to do,
God's house unto, that they might know
What he had for to show;

God's holy will he must fulfil,
For it was his desire
For to declare a sermon rare
Concerning Madam Fryer."

The practice of wedding discourses was handed down into the last
century, and sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into rather
startling levities. For instance, when Parson Smith's daughter Mary was
to marry young Mr. Cranch,--(what graceful productions of pen and pencil
have come to this generation from the posterity of that union!)--the
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