66 CENTENNIAL HISTORY
only had a relish for strong meat, they were able to digest it, even under the most unfavorable circumstances. You have heard how the congregation to which the celebrated Dr. Emmons ministered, as recently as 1800, used to sit for two hours, through summer heat or winter cold, listening with profound attention while he read to them, from small sheets of paper, held in his hand, some acute and abstruse discussion in metaphysical theology. It is an extraordinary spectacle ; yet through the eighteenth century something like this might have been seen in any New England meeting-house on any Sabbath of the year. For the New England people had immense faith in the church, the Sabbath, the Bible and the sanctuary, and accepted the strong sermon and the long services as a matter of course, a privilege rather than a burden. No man fancied, as so many do now, that when he went to meeting he was doing somebody a favor ; the motive was love to God, or else fear of the magistrate. And, as Bushnell puts it, in "The Age of Homespun," "nothing is dull that has the matter in it ; nothing long that has not exhausted the matter. If the minister speaks in his great coat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howling blasts of winter blow in across the assembly fresh streams of ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none the less content, if only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard and, as some would say, stolid faces great thoughts are brewing, and these keep them warm. Free will, fixed fate, fore-knowledge absolute, trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity,-give them anything high enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will be climbing sturdily into it ; and if they go away having something to think of, they have had a good day… O, these royal men of homespun, how great a thing to them was religion !" The weight of these discourses it has seemed to foreign critics "impossible for any, the most cultivated audience in the world, to have supported." But it was not too heavy for those staunch New England intellects to bear, or to profit by. "These Sabbath sermons," says Elliott, "sharpened the intellect and led to infinite talk and discussion. Tedi-