The first tavern at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was kept by a deacon of the church, afterwards, steward of Harvard college; and the relation of tavern and meeting house did not end with their simultaneous establishment, but they continued the most friendly neighbors. Licenses to keep houses of entertainment were granted with the condition that the tavern must be near the meeting-house—a keen contrast to our present laws prohibiting the sale of liquor within a certain distance of a church. Those who know the oldtime meeting house can fully comprehend the desire of the colonists to have a tavern near at hand, especially during the winter services. Through autumn rains and winter frosts and snows the poorly built meeting house stood unheated, growing more damp, more icy, more deadly, with each succeeding week. Women cowered shivering, half-frozen, over the feeble heat of a metal footstove as the long services dragged on and the few coals became ashes. Men stamped their feet and swung their arms in the vain effort to warm the blood. Gladly and cheerfully did the whole crowd troop from the gloomy meeting house to the cheerful tavern to thaw out before the afternoon service, and to warm up before the ride or walk home in the late afternoon. It was a scandal in many a town that godly church members took too freely of tavern cheer at the nooning; the only wonder is that the entire congregation did not succumb in a body to the potent flip and toddy of the tavern-keeper. In mid-summer the hot sun beat down on the meeting house roof, and the burning rays poured in the unshaded windows. The tap-room of the tavern and the green trees in its dooryard offered a pleasant shade to tired church-goers, and its well sweep afforded a grateful drink to those who turned not to the tap-room. There are ever back-sliders in every church community; many walked into the ordinary door instead of up the church alley. The chimney seat of the inn was more comfortable than the narrow seat of the "pue." The general court of Massachusetts passed a law requiring all inn-keepers within a mile of any meeting house to clear their houses "during the hours of the exercise." "Thus," Mr. Field says wittily, "the townsmen were frozen out of the tavern to be frozen in the meeting house." Our ancestors had no reverence for a church save as a literal meeting house, and it was not unusual to transform the house of God into a tavern. The Great House at Charlestown, Massachusetts, the official residence of Governor Winthrop, became a meeting house in 1633, and then a tavern, the Three Cranes, kept by Robert Leary and his descendants for many years. It was destroyed in June, 1775, in the burning of the town.

The first revenue relinquished by the West India Company to the town of New Amsterdam was the excise on wine, beer, and spirits, and the sole condition made by Stuyvesant on its surrender was as to its application, that the salaries of the Dominies should be paid from it. For a year beginning November, 1661, the burghers of Esopus paid a tax on liquor, the proceeds of which were used to build a parsonage for the minister. St. Philip's church in Charleston, South Carolina, was originally built by a tax of two pence a gallon on spirits imported in 1670. Between 1743 and 1750 the public revenues of South Carolina were all raised by three per cent duties on liquors, wines, sugar, molasses, slaves, and imported dry-goods, and produced about forty-five hundred pounds, of which one thousand pounds were devoted to paying the salaries of ten ministers. The dedication of St. Michael's church in Charleston, South Carolina, was followed by a great dinner, at which a large amount of liquor was consumed.

Under such circumstances it could not be expected that the clergy would be much troubled with scruples on the use of liquor, and the evidence is that they were not. We must bear in mind that the use of liquors was universal in those days. "Ordination Day" was almost as great a day for the tavern as for the meeting house. The visiting ministers who came to assist at the religious service of ordination of a new minister were usually entertained at the tavern. Often a specially good beer was brewed called "ordination beer," and in Connecticut an "ordination ball" was given at the tavern—this with the sanction of the parsons. The bills for entertaining the visitors for the dinner and lodging at the local taverns are in many cases preserved. One of the most characteristic was at a Hartford ordination. It runs:

The bill is endorsed with unconscious humor, "This is all paid for except the Minister's Rum." Here is another ordination bill:

When the fathers met in synod at Cambridge in 1648, there was a liquor bill in connection with the expense of the meeting. At the ordination of Edwin Jackson in Woburn, 1729, the town paid for six and one-half barrels of cider, 25 gallons of wine, 2 gallons of brandy, 4 gallons of rum.

In the South the clergy were addicted to horse racing, gambling, and drunken revels. One of them was for many years president of a Jockey Club. They encouraged among the people the celebration of the sacrament of baptism with music and dancing in which the clergymen took part, a custom which shows signs of returning in England. One fought a duel in a churchyard, another thrashed his vestry. One parson preached in his stocking feet, one in his study coat, and one ran a distillery. Many of them were appointed by the British government and by the Bishop of London and they were affected by the irreligious listlessness and low moral tone of the English church in the eighteenth century.

Alexander Graydon tells us that in his early days any jockeying, fiddling, wine-bibbing clergyman not over-scrupulous about stealing sermons was currently known as "a Maryland Parson." The Maryland clergy are said to have been more vicious than those of Virginia. They raced horses, hunted foxes, drank, gambled, joined in every amusement of the planters and would extort marriage fees from the poor by breaking off in the middle of the service and refusing to go on until paid.

One Dr. Beatty was acting as chaplain to an army of five hundred men led by Franklin to defend the frontier against the French and Indians after the burning of the Moravian mission at Gnadenhutten, Pennsylvania. "Dr. Beatty complained to me," says Franklin, "that the men did not generally attend his prayers and exhortations. When they were enlisted, they were promised, besides hay and provisions, a gill of rum a day, which was punctually served out to them, half in the morning, and the other half in the evening; and I observed they were as punctual in attending to receiving it; upon which I said to Mr. Beatty, 'It is perhaps below the dignity of your profession to act as steward of the rum, but if you were to deal it out, and only just after prayers you would have them all about you.'" The shrewd suggestion was adopted by Dr. Beatty, and the philosophic Franklin says "Never were prayers more generally and punctually attended; so that I thought this method preferable to the punishment inflicted by some military laws for non-attendance at divine service."

This chapter may well be concluded with the famous and oft quoted letter of Cotton Mather to John Higginson:

"September ye 15, 1682.

"To ye Aged and Beloved Mr. John Higginson:

"There is now at sea a ship called the Welcome, which has on board an hundred or more of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is the chief scamp, at the head of them.

"The general court has accordingly given secret orders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the brig Porpoise, to waylay the said Welcome, slyly, as near the Cape of Cod as may be, and make captive the said Penn and his ungodly crew, so that the Lord may be glorified, and not mocked on the soil of this new country with the heathen worship of these people. Much spoil can be made by selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar, and we shall not only do the Lord great service by punishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for his minister and people.

"Master Huscott feels hopeful, and I will set down the news when the ship comes back.

"Yours in ye bowels of Christ,
"Cotton Mather."