congregation will pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a
Scriptural discourse,--like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all
backbone and a great deal of that. It may be some very special and
famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is preaching on "The Morning
Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy Winds"; or it may
be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson of
some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking
and partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton
Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a
thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra,"--consisting of seven
separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from
Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural philosophy.
Just as he has proclaimed, "In the thunder there is the voice of the
glorious God," a messenger comes hastening in, as in the Book of Job, to
tell him that his own house has just been struck, and though no person
is hurt, yet the house hath been much torn and filled with the
lightnings. With what joy and power he instantly wields above his
audience this providential surplus of excitement, reminding one
irresistibly of some scientific lecturer who has nearly blown himself up
by his own experiments, and proceeds beaming with fresh confidence, the
full power of his compound being incontestably shown. Rising with the
emergency, he tells them grandly, that, as he once had in his house a
magnet which the thunder changed instantly from north to south, so it
were well if the next bolt could change their stubborn souls from Satan
to God. But afterward he is compelled to own that Satan also is
sometimes permitted to have a hand in the thunder, which is the reason
why it breaks oftener on churches than on any other buildings; and again
he admits, pensively, at last, that churches and ministers' houses have
undoubtedly the larger share.