Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[209] “one who deserves to marry a priest” ; and one of the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is this old gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an “ingenious child,” as lie calls her, whom his parish thought by no means a model for her sex, but from whom it finally took three days of solitary fasting and prayer to wean him.

He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat strangely. Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard at Cambridge, as aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow “on the general recommendation of her,” and the college students were greatly delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, in 1691, wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have seen in manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,--one of which treats of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care. She having children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of his own children “out of the way,” if necessary,--a hint which becomes formidable when one remembers that he was the author of that once famous theological poem, “The day of doom,” in which he relentingly assigned to infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, “the easiest room in hell.” But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as if he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little heart-shaped locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart and “Thine forever.”

Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister. First came a “young brood” of heretics to torment him. Gorton's followers were exasperating enough; they had to be confined in irons separately,