doctrine that “once distilled as the dew and the rain.” While some had “censured” Noyes for being “backward to have a colleague,” his only intent, the sermon affirmed, had been to safeguard his congregation. “I must tell you he knew not where to find one he could safely leave his poor flock with,” Mather advised, and it was only the deceased minister’s “lenity, patience and charity” that had “let the sparks die, which … some men had blown up to a dangerous flame.” After the death of the righteous, Saybrook’s minister warned, sometimes “great disorders follow in towns, churches, state & families.”
Lyme’s Ecclesiastical Society moved quickly to secure a successor. Two months after Noyes’s death, it invited Jonathan Parsons, a recent Yale graduate studying theology in his native Springfield with Rev. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), “as a probationer for settlement.” It voted three months later to “continue Mr. Parsons in the work of the ministry” and allocated the “just sum” of six shillings to Renold Marvin (1669–1737) “for his service in bringing Mr. Parsons, the present minister, into the Society.” Surviving documents do not reveal whether the Society sought a successor whose beliefs departed from those of Moses Noyes, but Jonathan Parsons later made the difference explicit. “In that day, he wrote, “I was greatly in love with Arminian principles.”
To secure the candidate’s acceptance, the Society offered a generous settlement. It agreed to pay the new minister’s salary either in money or in “wheat at seven shillings per bushel, or rye at five shillings per bushel, and Indian corn at four shillings per bushel, pork at five pence per pound, beef at three pence per pound.” When the Society unanimously confirmed the choice of Mr. Parsons “for the settled minister and pastor” in August 1730, it allocated a parcel of fourteen acres “with the house erected thereon,” along with the income from the parsonage farm and a yearly salary of £100, for as long as the minister remained single. The previous month Parsons, age twenty-four, had sent a second courtship letter to his mentor’s sister Hannah Edwards (1713–1773) in Springfield, who declined his request.
In a eulogy for Lyme’s long-serving first minister, Rev. Azariah Mather warned that sparks of contention smoldering in the parish could soon burst into flame.
On a “fair, cold, and windy day” in March 1731, New London farmer and justice of the peace Joshua Hempstead (1678–1758) noted in his diary that he “went to the ordination of Mr. Jonathan Parsons in Lyme first Society.” The minister later explained that he had “refused to take the oversight of the church” for seven months while struggling with doubts about the validity of “Presbyterian” ordination. When those uncertainties had not resolved on the eve of his ordination, he made clear that he would not be guided by the Saybrook Platform but would take only “the general platform of the Gospel for [his] rule.” Church records note that ministers from New London, Killingworth, and Saybrook’s newly separated west parish conducted the ordination of Moses Noyes’s successor. Rev. Azariah Mather, who had delivered the ordination sermon in Lyme’s north society for Rev. George Beckwith two years earlier, did not participate.
Over almost four decades Joshua Hempstead chronicled his activities in a diary that includes vivid details about weather conditions, farm labor, marriages, church services, and court decisions in New London and the surrounding region.
CHAPTER TEN
Confessions
Continuing records of Lyme’s first church start in 1731 when Rev. Jonathan Parsons began documenting meetings and keeping detailed lists of baptisms, admissions, and dismissals. The record book opens with a sequence of confessions.
April 4th James Beckwith, son; made a confession for his sin of drunkenness, whereupon he was received into the charity of said church and to all the privileges of it.
Tho. Huddson made confession for his sin of drunkenness … and unbridled feelings, which satisfied the church.
April 11th Jn Alger made confession for his sin of fornication which put him into charity.
June 6th Widow Deborah Mather confessed her sin, in declaring herself guilty of the sin of fornication, which established her in the charity of the church.
An almost indecipherable notebook stitched with string lists two baptisms, a marriage, and an “owning of the covenant” in Lyme in 1724, but no other records from Moses Noyes’s ministry survive. The sturdily bound ledger that today preserves an account of church meetings, said to be “a true copy of the old record,” begins in April 1731 and opens with a list of confessions. Acknowledgments of drunkenness, “rash speaking,” and fornication all found acceptance by “the first assembly of Christians, in Lyme.” Even the confession of blacksmith Zechariah Sill (1717–1783) for “giving way to passion, evil speaking, and intemperate drinking” was duly accepted by church brethren. The conduct of David Deming, a Harvard-educated minister who moved to Lyme in retirement, required fuller consideration.
The town had employed Mr. Deming, age fifty-four, as a schoolmaster, and in 1734 the Ecclesiastical Society’s treasury paid him “twenty shillings and two pence for his assistance in preaching for time past.” Later that year he faced criminal charges in the New London County Court following reports of his “lascivious carriage” with Elizabeth Greenfield (1723–1814), age ten, which included “exposing her most private parts.” Accusations surfaced after a neighbor, alerted that Mr. Deming’s conduct with schoolchildren was “unsuitable,” observed him dismiss other students and call Elizabeth back inside. Susannah Loveland (1715–1752) testified that the schoolmaster stood the child on a desk, raised her clothes, and placed his hand on her “privates.” As word spread and parents withdrew their children from school, Deming claimed he thought Elizabeth was afflicted with worms and had stroked her belly so the worms would fall out.
The parsonage of Rev. Jonathan Parsons, much altered after his son Marshfield Parsons added a rear ell for a coaching inn and Deacon Daniel Noyes later built a two-story front addition, stood a mile west of the hillside meetinghouse on the road to the ferry.
The former minister pleaded not guilty at a court hearing in January 1735/6 when bond for a trial appearance was set at £50. Later that month the church suspended him from communion and appointed a committee to “wait upon and address Mr. David Deming of said Lyme, in the name of said Church, and persuade and urge him to offer some reflections upon himself for his conduct respecting Elisabeth Greenfield, daughter of Archibald Greenfield (1692–1769), about whom there has been much discourse.”
The letter of confession was entered in church records. “My conduct has been very grievous to my good brethren, of this and some other churches,” the confession stated. “I do solemnly reflect upon myself with sorrow … and heartily ask their charity and the charity of you all, as well as of all other churches, and also I ask your prayers that I might in whatever state or employment I engage—be more careful to allow the doctrine of God my Saviour, by a good and unspotted life and conversation.” The case finally resolved two years later after Elizabeth reversed her prior statement that Deming had three times touched her private parts and claimed instead that Susannah Loveland’s testimony
