1848.] Piscataqua Association of Ministers. 403 selves with the secret assurance that it would not take place till after their death! As if this very event of their death were comparatively of no account! As if this very event were not, to them, the great consummation and conflagration of all things! In view of the certainty and the swiftness of the coming of that event to every man, ought not every one to take to himself a meaning from those words, "The time is at hand. He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still"? What an impressive and awakening idea is here suggested of the importance of the present and passing moments! It is as if it were said, - The time is so short and swift, that, unless men do what they have to do now, they must go as they are. How true it is, that " now is the accepted time"! Let such be the burden of the Revelation of St. John, the burden of that whole Scripture which it so beautifully and solemnly closes. C. T. B. ART. VI. THE PISCATAQUA ASSOCIATION OF MIN ISTERS.* WITH the constant accumulation of (so called) new literature, the periodical that would assume the office of a retrospective review can do so only by ignoring the present; for it would be as idle to wait for a pause in the torrent-like issues of the press, as it was for sop's clown to tarry on the bank till the river had run by. But the publications named below recall the memory of a cluster of distinguished and venerable men, of whose worth and services we would make some inadequate record before the generation that knew them has wholly passed away. Probably the Piscataqua Association of Ministers at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century comprised more men of eminence in the pulpit, in council, and in the various walks of private duty, than any other similar association in the coun 1. Prayer-Book, for the Use of Families; prepared by the Association of Ministers on Piscataqua River, and recommended by them as an Assistant to the Social Devotions of Families. Portsmouth. 1799. 12mo. pp. 72. 2. The Piscataqua Evangelical Magazine for 1805. Portsmouth. 8vo. pp. 240. try. They were almost all of them picked men, such as, in the process of absorption and centralization which drains our rural districts of talent as well as wealth, in favor of the great cities, would now be found only in metropolitan parishes. They were sufficient, each of himself, to give a name and a character to the town which enjoyed his services, and to attract to his parsonage the frequent society of many of the best and most distinguished men in every walk of life. We have ample manuscript materials for the biography of one of the circle, and shall append to our sketch of his life brief notices of several of his contemporaries in the same neighbourhood. In the historical pictures of the battle of Bunker's Hill, there is the figure of a clergyman in bands, and with the usual insignia of his sacred office. The person thus represented was the Rev. Samuel McClintock, D. D., of Greenland, N. H. He was born in Medford, Mass., in 1732. His father was one of the Scotch Irish whom manifold oppression had made twice exiles, and who have given race and name to not a few of the best families in New England. He was graduated at Princeton, in 1751, and was immediately invited by President Burr to a tutorship in his Alma Mater, which he declined, from an unwillingness to postpone his entrance on the profession to which he had consecrated himself from his early boyhood. In 1756 he was ordained at Greenland, a small and obscure country village, to which his chief attraction at first was the unanimous and earnest wish of the people that he should become their pastor; for he was among the most popular divines of his day, and had frequent intimations, both before his settlement and through the earlier half of his ministry, that situations offering much greater worldly advantages were at his disposal. We have before us two of his printed and the few that remain of his no less than three thousand manuscript sermons, and have been surprised, not only by their general soundness of thought and purity of style, but by their freedom from the lumbering subdivisions, improvement, and application, then almost universal, and their near approach to the simpler models of our own day. A sermon of his, published at a time when an unprecedented drought, a fatal epidemic, and the prospect of war with France, conspired to make the hearts of the people heavy, maintains the thesis, that any direct infliction of Providence is preferable to those 1848.] Rev. Dr. McClintock. 405 judgments in which God makes the wrath of man his sword, with an affluence and brilliancy of argument and illustration, and a freedom from all theological technicalities, which we had supposed hardly compatible with the rigid pulpit formalism of our elder divines. His ministry lasted forty-eight years, during which period the last Sunday of his life was the only one on which he was disabled for the performance of his usual public duties. His compensation was three hundred dollars a year, together with the use of a parsonage, and a farm so small as to preclude the employment of much labor other than his own, and that of the numerous "servants born in his house." On this scanty stipend he reared a family of sixteen children, maintained in full the external proprieties of his station in dress and housekeeping, and exercised an unstinted hospitality, his house lying on the great thoroughfare of Eastern travel, and his professional reputation and his social endowments furnishing either a cause or a pretence for travellers who could proffer the remotest claim upon his notice to make his house their inn. To meet these demands, which with clergymen of the old school stood on the same footing with debts of honor, his strictly personal and domestic expenses were, of course, brought within the narrowest possible limits. The cow, not without large aid from the unfailing well, stood chief foster-mother to the younger members of the household. The errant goose equipped them for their first experiments in penmanship. As fast as garments waxed old, they were rejuvenated in contracted forms for younger and less fastidious wearers. And of the application of the same rigid economy to the father's own habits his manuscripts bear conclusive testimony, the dozen sermons in our hands hardly covering the paper which we have sometimes devoted to a single discourse. But there was one point on which he was strenuous in effort and in sacrifice, the education of his children. Through his influence, there was sustained in his parish for many years a permanent school, of a grade corresponding to those elsewhere found only in our populous and compact towns. The teacher was commonly a recent graduate from the University, of worth and promise, attracted to this obscure field of labor by the opportunity which it afforded of familiar intercourse with one so much revered and beloved. Among the young men who in this relation accounted themselves under great obligations to him for VOL. XLIV. —4TH S. VOL. IX. NO. III. 36 counsel, example, and influence, were Dr. Belknap and Bishop Parker. Dr. McClintock was regarded among the churches in his vicinity as preeminent for practical wisdom. Difficult ques tions of advice, cases of casuistry, conscientious scruples, were referred to him as an umpire; and, from the confidence that seems to have been reposed in him in those regards, his decisions must have generally justified themselves to the conscience and the experience of those whom they most intimately concerned. We should be disposed to form the same conclusion from the only one of his numerous written decisions of this kind which has fallen into our hands. The case was one of morbid conscientiousness on the part of a clergyman second in reputation to none in the country. He opened his heart to Dr. McClintock as to the Christian brother better able than any other to stand to him in his Master's stead, and the answer certainly could not be surpassed in faithfulness, tenderness, sound ethical reasoning, and mature religious wisdom. He was also noted for his promptness and pungency in rebuke. Cheerful in his habits of intercourse, and fond of wit and humor when within the bounds of decency and reverence, he had no tolerance for levity or profaneness. One day, overhearing an oath from a man of some distinction, whom he had heard a little while before declaiming against religious ostentation, he said to him, — "What! after what you said the other evening, do I hear you of all men making a parade of piety, and putting up your prayers at the corners of the streets?", Dr. McClintock, in common with the clergy of New England generally, took a deep interest in the war of the Revolution, and repeatedly served as chaplain to portions of the New Hampshire troops. He had four sons actively engaged in the war. Three of them died before the establishment of peace; the other still lives, in his eighty-seventh year, in unabated vigor of body and mind, and in the full enjoyment of those resources of Christian faith and hope which embalm the heart in perpetual youth. Except repeated bereavements, which were sustained with the most edifying submission, the only ripple in the smooth current of Dr. McClintock's life was a theological controversy with the Rev. J. C. Ogden, an Episcopal clergyman in Portsmouth, in 1787. Bishop Seabury, in his sermon at the ordination of Mr. Ogden, had broached certain 1848.] Rev. Dr. Haven. 407 prelatical notions as to the Apostolic Succession, and the exclusive sanctity of the ritual and administration of his own church, which now are too common to awaken surprise, and too manifestly baseless to admit of a serious counter-argument, but which were then novel and alarming in a region where Episcopacy had long made itself, not repulsive by the arrogance, but amiable by the catholic spirit and the venerable piety of its only clerical representative. Dr. McClintock, in a letter to Mr. Ogden, meekly but firmly contended against the sentiments and postulates of the Bishop's sermon. His argument was met by an angry rejoinder, and when the correspondence reached the public through the press, the scales of victory inclined so manifestly against prelacy, as to dislodge its impetuous advocate from the confidence of his own parishioners, and to lead ultimately to his forcible ejection when he attempted to retain possession of the church in opposition to their unanimous vote. At the annual Fast in 1804, Dr. McClintock preached as usual; but on his return to his house, told his family that he had entered the pulpit for the last time. A slight indisposition, under which he was then laboring, increased so rapidly as to terminate his life in eight days. His son and executor found among his father's papers written instructions which bade him destroy all his sermons except the few which he might wish to keep as a memorial of himself. He also requested that "his funeral might be conducted in the manner that was customary among his parishioners, without any sermon, or the parade which has commonly been the custom at the funerals of those who have sustained public characters in life," and that, should a head-stone be placed over his grave, it should be a plain one, with the following epitaph : "To the memory of Samuel McClintock, D. D., who died in the year of his age, and the year of his ministry. His body rests here in the certain hope of a resurrection to life and immortality, when Christ shall appear a second time to destroy the last enemy, death, and to consummate the great design of his mediatorial kingdom." - We shall enter into no detail of the equally uneventful, but equally faithful, devoted, and useful lives of the fraternity of pastors of which the venerable man of whom we have spoken was at the time of his decease the senior active member. A few years older, and at that time weighed down by bodily infirmity, was the Rev. Dr. Haven, of Portsmouth, who had |