"
We read that the daily vocation of Thomas Shepard, the first pastor at
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was, to quote Mather's noble phrase, "_A
Trembling Walk with God_" He speaks of the choleric disposition of Thomas
Hooker, the great Hartford clergyman, and says it was "useful unto him,"
because "he had ordinarily as much government of his choler as a man has of
a mastiff dog in a chain; he 'could let out his dog, and pull in his dog,
as he pleased.'" Some of Mather's prose causes modern readers to wonder if
he was not a humorist. He says that a fire in the college buildings in some
mysterious way influenced the President of Harvard to shorten one of his
long prayers, and gravely adds, "that if the devotions had held three
minutes longer, the Colledge had been irrecoverably laid in ashes." One
does not feel sure that Mather saw the humor in this demonstration of
practical religion. It is also doubtful whether he is intentionally
humorous in his most fantastic prose, such, for instance, as his likening
the Rev. Mr. Partridge to the bird of that name, who, because he "had no
defence neither of beak nor claw," took "a flight over the ocean" to escape
his ecclesiastical hunters, and finally "took wing to become a bird of
paradise, along with the winged seraphim of heaven.
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