MOIR

F

APPLETON WHITE.

CIES WALKER, D.O

and j

this emutry fide Nord Bk Cun',, hself first it Ipswich, after a'... hy st Have". He was present celal of #9 la- mentioned town fr

- appears as one of the grantees **aved of sul caring date Nov. 15. 1612. i, desec

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r posterity, coppeled by marriag
og families in New England, ouder
day for character and infl,

ane, a sketch of whose life we are al

leve, in the th generation. jj.

ted Lizeth (Haynes; Wilte, pigally of

i Tel moved to Methmon about fous faire his birth, why took place June 7, 1776. He was the eleventă, a & tapily of senteen cldren, six of whom were by a former mother, and men of wom livel to love thes of th

ither was a farmer in easy ci Fand hospi

read re ses p'at`ye c the Nev ry genachon of that t.. His house at od 1 P. ir .inly ly equidisent from the Mins. the Spicket on the north. Is farm. "eatp

ing from river to river, consisted of nearly three hundred acres; presenting a great variety of rural scenery, and affording more than usual opportunity for rural sports. All is now changed; for this part of Methuen has become the centre of the new manufacturing city of Lawrence. But we speak of things as they were, when the subject of this Memoir was growing up into life. In a manuscript account of his early days, prepared by himself some years before his death, for the use of his children, he says of this period,

66

Perhaps there were never more circumstances combined to make a happy boyhood from external nature than I enjoyed; and the freedom allowed me by my parents, especially on Sundays, before and after public worship, to ramble over the fields, added to the pleasures they were calculated to afford. My grandfather Haynes had written against the common strict notion of the sabbath, contending that it was a sort of Jewish superstition to observe the day with such strictness.†

This narrative, from which we shall borrow largely, was written during the winter of 1836-7. It fills two hundred and fifty pages, terminating with his college life in 1797. Much of it is little more than an expansion of a journal which he seems to have kept, with more or less regularity, from his schoolboy-days.

The title of this pamphlet reads thus: "Some Farraginous Remarks upon an Act for the Due Observation of the Lord's Day. By a Lover of the Truth. Printed by E. Russell, at Concord, for J. Haynes of Haverhill. 1793." To indicate its spirit, we give a single passage: "Not many of the people know but they are keeping the Jewish sabbath still; nor do they desire to know: and it seems that the clergy does not desire that they should know. And it seems as though some of the clergy don't know it themselves, and may think that ignorance is the best mother of devotion, and brings to them the most gain: and the people seem to be afraid that they shall know more than their teachers; and, when any one attempts to inform them, they are offended. So, it seems, these remarks can't be popular."- p. 18. The following is from a manuscript note by Judge White: "Upon the passage of the act of the General Court respecting the sabbath, in 1792, my grandfather, then almost eighty years old, was greatly excited, and set about writing these strictures, which sufficiently show his views on the subject. I was then just entering college; and well remember, that, upon my frequent visits to him, the burden of his conversation was about the 'pharisaical General Court,' as proved by their notions of the sabbath, -a Jewish sabbath, as he maintained." He speaks of him, in the same note, as "a venerable and excellent relative; a man of great integrity and benevolence."

This Joseph Haynes was a malleus hereticorum in his way. Nearly forty years before, he had written against his own minister, the Rev. Samuel Bacheller, and his clerical abetters, a bulky pamphlet, entitled "A Discourse in order to confute the Heresy delivered, and much contended for, in the West Parish in Haverhill, and countenanced by many of the Ministers of the Neighboring Parishes; viz., that the

My father and mother partook of his sentiments, and held us to nothing more on the sabbath than reading the Bible and going to meeting, with ample indulgence between whiles to walk over the farm, pick berries, look after birds' nests, and the like; but amusements, such as fishing, &c., and work of all kinds, were not allowed. This early indulgence on the sabbath is probably the reason of the delight which has ever been associated in my mind with this sacred day, - a day which has always been the most interesting to me of the whole week."

That his Sunday duty, so far as it consisted in reading the Bible, was never neglected, appears from the same authority:

"I remember I had read the whole Bible through in course before I was eight, and three times before I was fourteen, besides different portions of it numberless times more. I have still a lively remembrance of the fascination and tears with which I perused, over and over, the affecting story of Joseph and his brethren, and the narrative of our Lord's trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, as well as some other parts of the sacred histories in the Old and New Testament. This familiarity with the Scriptures, especially the Gospels, in my early days, however crude some of my notions were, I have ever considered as having a most propitious influence upon my whole life. It is remarkable how little my impressions, as then received, of Jesus and his disciples, have been changed by subsequent reading and reflection. Their images as then stamped upon my mind, and the most interesting associations then formed, still remain without material alteration."

Other causes were, however, at work to make religion a source of one of the greatest of his youthful troubles. His father and mother were strict Baptists, and also "New Lights," as the followers of Whitefield were then called.

Blood and Water which came from Christ when the Soldier pierced his Side, his Laying in his Grave, and his Resurrection, was no part of Redemption, and that his Laying in the Grave was no part of his Humiliation." An answer by one of the ministers led to a rejoinder by Haynes, another pamphlet of eighty-two pages. What a question to break up the peace of a country congregation! what a satire on much which passes for theological controversy!

Mr. Haynes, in his last days, was a Baptist. Though without any grammatical learning, as his writings show, he was evidently a shrewd, sincere, and fearless man, and quite a reader and thinker.