constant attendant upon the Sabbath services, were great incentives to intellectual activity. The sermons. of the time were deep and carefully elaborated. Dealing with argumentative and doctrinal themes, they dragged their inexorable length through two and even three hours. Often the preacher gave a series of sermons on some particular topic, carefully impressing it, point by point, upon his hearers after the manner of a professor of divinity in a college. The people listened. eagerly. Mather, in his life of the Elder Winthrop, records that "such was his attention and such his retention in hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had heard in the congregation." Those with less trusty memories came to church with note books, and gathered, like a class in divinity, the important points brought out by the preacher.
The age was an argumentative one. Fierce theological battles were waging on all sides. The men of New England had taken a bold and radical step before the eyes of the world, and they held themselves ready to defend their creed with all the logic and argument at their command. Under such church discipline they gained the weapons most needed. Thus were cultivated those powers of attention, of close and consecutive reasoning, which in after years reached their fullest development in Edwards and Franklin.
Metaphysics and theological argument are not literature, yet they gave to the builders of New England an intellectuality that soon made possible purely literary work.
