Read Online The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff - Free Book Online Page A

have the affairs of the ministry and of a farm to manage together,” lamented one Massachusetts minister.Parris—who speculated in real estate and came late in life to tending his own fields—could only have felt similarly. The pastoral work alone was arduous and endless. “Now of all the churches under heaven there are none that expect so much variety of service from their pastors as those of New England,” wailed Cotton Mather, who did not thrill to the pastoral visit. Parris called on parishioners to inquire after religious instruction at home. He served as scribe, judge, counselor, confidant. He kept fasts and performed baptisms, arranged lectures and conferred with neighboring congregations. He comforted the sick and the bereaved, which over the summer of 1689 included four families who had lost sons to Indian attacks. Marblehead’s minister calculated that he went eight years at one stretch without so much as a half a day off. There was cause to be bone-tired under the best of circumstances, which Parris’s were not. Already primed for affront, he came increasingly to harp on Christ’s wounds and bruises. Well before the pitiless winter of 1692, he sounded better suited to a calamity than a ministry.
    In addition to all else came the family devotions that had landed Bayley in such trouble. Morning and evening, Parris prayed and read Scripture with his household, including his slaves, their souls his charge as well. He gathered the family before the hearth for the singing of psalms and in weekly catechism. Many ministers’ children heard a preview on Saturday evening of the next day’s sermon; the Sabbath ended with a digest of the day’s service. Parris reinforced basic principles, stressing covenant obligations. Man was born in sin and embarked on a pilgrimage toward grace. A spiritual war was afoot, separating the godly from the damned. Church sacraments were paramount. Puritan parenting constituted a full-time activity; Mather was forever devising exercises for his sons and daughters. While Parris was less creative, he paid close attention to his children’s education, indistinguishable from their spiritual welfare. Well before the girls began to tense and twitch, their souls were closely monitored, daily palpated; the state of New England’s young qualified as something of a preoccupation. Parris devoutly hoped that all of his parishioners were so vigilant. He feared they were not. Hetook up the popular refrain that family order was disintegrating; what was the matter with kids today? At a Cambridge ministers’ meeting he led a charge to see what could be done.
    Five years older than her husband, a member of Boston’s First Church before her marriage, surrounded by five Putnam wives in her Salem pew, Elizabeth Parris would have shared in those tasks. She was expected to be constant in her devotions and compassionate toward the neighbors. Her obligations increased after the distractions of 1692; under any circumstances, she would have read and discussed the Bible with the parsonage children, whose education fell to her and whom she taught to read. Basic literacy was a New England requirement, thanks to the 1647 statute establishing schools, to which Massachusetts owes its educational eminence. That law too amounted to a defensive measure. It was understood that the “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, [was] to keep men from knowledge of the Scriptures.” The point was to outwit him, to stave off demonic ambush; even in the midst of an arctic New England winter, his hot breath could be felt on the cheek. The Salem town father who had not taught his children to read found a notice posted on the meetinghouse door offering them as servants to someone who would. And while basic literacy was a requirement, it was hardly a sufficiency. One future minister made his way three times through the Bible before he turned six. It was not unusual to have done so a dozen times before adolescence or be able