“The Enforcement of Mosaic Law

To Be Square with the Sun at Noon, STAND STILL and Consider the Wonderous Work of God

The center of attention in a Calvinist meetinghouse was the pulpit from which the minister preached. New England historian Alice Morse Earle remembered that “the pulpit of one old unpainted church retained until the middle of this [nineteenth] century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great all-seeing eye of God.”

Outside, the walls were rough unpainted clapboards. On them were nailed the bounty-heads of wolves with dark crimson bloodstains below. The doors were covered with tattered scraps of faded paper which told of intended marriages, provincial proclamations, sales of property, and sometimes rude insults in which one disgruntled townsman denounced another.

Inside, most meetinghouses had no ornaments except that terrible staring eye—no paint, no curtains, no plaster, no pictures, no lights—nothing to distract the congregation from the spoken word.

Frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like a field of crickets.

Sometimes they dressed in rags and smeared streaks of dirt upon their faces to deepen their humiliation. Occasionally, they were compelled literally to crawl before the congregation.

The meetinghouses of New England were often set high on a commanding hilltop. Roxbury’s aged minister John Eliot was heard to say as he climbed meetinghouse hill on the arm of a townsman, “This is very like the way to heaven; ‘tis uphill.

This Ritual of Worship Became a Powerful Instrument

At the end of a New England service a psalm was sung, if singing is the word to describe the strange cacophony that rose from a Puritan congregation. Here again, the emphasis was on words rather than music. The psalm would be begun with a line by a member of the congregation. Then each individual “took the run of the tune” without common tempo, pitch or scale. One observer wrote in 1720, “ … everyone sang as best pleased himself.” Another described the effect as a “horrid medley of confused and disorderly noises.” Strangers were astounded by the noise, which carried miles across the quiet countryside. But New Englanders were deeply moved by this “rote singing” as it was called, and strenuously resisted efforts to improve it. The result was a major controversy in the eighteenth century between what was called “rote singing” and “note singing.”

Much later, Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that “the rude and primitive singing in our old meeting house always excited me powerfully. It brought over me, like a presence, the sense of the infinite and the eternal, the yearning and the fear and the desire of the poor finite being, as if walking on air, with the final words of the psalm floating like an illuminated cloud around me.

Afterwards, how ghostly and supernatural the stillness of the whole house and village outside the meeting-house used to appear to me, how loudly the clock ticked and the flies buzzed down the window-pane, and how I listened in the breathless stillness to the distant wind, the solemn tones of the cattle in the field, and then to the monotone of the lamp burning, and then again to the closing echoes of that cold, distant wind.””