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Bishop of London's commissary, all discipline from the higher authorities of the Anglican Church was removed and the granting of livings was left solely in the hand of the dissolute Frederick Lord Baltimore until 1771, when, after the death of that degenerate proprietor, the Assembly was able to pass a law subjecting the clergy to rigid scrutiny and to the imposition of punishment in case of guilt.

On the whole it is probably safe to say that there was less religious seriousness and probity of conduct among the Southern clergy and parishioners than among the parsons and people of New England. One cannot easily imagine a New England woman writing as did Mrs. Burgwin of Cape Fear: "There is a clergyman arrived from England with a mission for this parish; he came by way of Charles Town and has been in Brunswick these three weeks. No compliment to his parishioners; but he is to exhibit here next Sunday. His size is said to be surprisingly long, I hope he is good in proportion.

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Sermons occupied a less conspicuous place in the Anglican service than in those of other denominations. The lay reader did not preach, and the sermons of the ordained clergyman were not often more than fifteen or twenty minutes in length.

They seem to have been carefully prepared and many are spoken of in terms of high approval; they dwelt, however, less upon the infirmities of the flesh and more upon the abiding grace of God and the duties and functions of the Church. They were therefore rarely denunciatory or threatening but partook of the character of learned essays, frequently pedantic and overladen with classical allusions or quotations from the theological treatises written by the clergy in England. Not only were sermons provided for by will, as in the North, but they were also preached before the House of Burgesses in Virginia — which unlike most legislative bodies in the colonies had its chaplain-before Masonic lodges, and to the militia on Muster Day. Thomas Bray, commissary for Maryland, had many sermons printed, and the Reverend Thomas Bacon, to whom Maryland owes the earliest collection of her laws, printed four sermons preached in St. Peter's Church, Talbot County, two to "black slaves" and two for the benefit of a charitable school in the county. But the number of printed sermons in the South was not nearly as large as in the North.

It was not only in matters of ritual and vestments that the Anglican churches differed from

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those of nearly all the other denominations. While New England was engaging in a bitter controversy over the introduction of musical instruments into its public worship as well as what was styled the new way of singing by note instead of by rote, the leading Anglican churches were adding richness and beauty to their services by the use of organs and the employment of trained organists from England. The first organ used for religious purposes in the colonies was that bequeathed by Thomas Brattle, of Boston, to the Congregational Church of Brattle Square in 1713. But, as that society "did not think it proper to use the same in the public worship of God," the organ, according to the terms of the will, went to King's Chapel, where it was thankfully received. This instrument, after a new organ had been purchased for King's Chapel in 1756, was transferred to Newburyport and finally to Portsmouth, where it is still preserved. In 1728 subscriptions were invited for a small organ to be placed in Christ Church, Philadelphia, but probably the purchase was never made, though it is known that both Christ Church

The Reverend Joseph Green of Salem was in Boston on May 29. 1711, and while there heard an organ played. The instrument was undoubtedly that of Brattle. Essex Institute, Historical Col lections, vol. x, p. 90.

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and St. Peter's in that city had organs before the Revolution. Bishop Berkeley gave an organ to Trinity Church, Newport, as early as 1730, and six years later an organist "who plays exceedingly fine thereon" arrived and entered upon his work. The organ loft in Christ Church, Cambridge, was a very fine specimen of Georgian correctness and grace, superior in its beauty to anything of its kind in the colonies at that time. The first organ in the South was installed in 1752 in Bruton Church, Williamsburg, and Peter Pelham, Jr., whose father married as his second wife the mother of Copley the painter, was the first organist. All the organs used in colonial times, however, were very small, light in tone, and deficient in pipes.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE PROBLEM OF LABOR

THE problem of obtaining labor in a frontier country where agriculture is the main pursuit was, in colonial days as at the present, a difficult one, for the employer could not go into a labor market and hire what he pleased, since a labor market did not exist For this reason labor was always scarce in America during this early period, and all sorts of ways had to be contrived to meet the demand for "help," particularly in the Middle and Northern colonies. The farmers, who constituted the bulk of the population, solved the problem in part by doing their own work with the assistance of their wives and children and such men as could be hired for the busy seasons of planting and harvesting. Such hired help was usually obtained in the neighborhood and was paid in many ways—in money, food, clothing, return labor, and orders on the country store. It was never very steady nor

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