Though the calamity cast an additional aspect of seriousness over a
character that was already more than chastened by the subtleties of
sectarian doctrines, he was not of a nature to be unmanned by any
vicissitude of human fortune. He lived on, useful and unbending in his
habits, a pillar of strength in the way of wisdom and courage to the
immediate neighborhood among whom he resided, but reluctant from temper,
and from a disposition which had been shadowed by withered happiness, to
enact that part in the public affairs of the little state, to which his
comparative wealth and previous habits might well have entitled him to
aspire. He gave his son such an education as his own resources and those
of the infant colony of Massachusetts afforded, and, by a sort of delusive
piety, into whose merits we have no desire to look, he thought he had also
furnished a commendable evidence of his own desperate resignation to the
will of Providence, in causing him to be publicly christened by the name
of Content. His own baptismal appellation was Mark; as indeed had been
that of most of his ancestors, for two or three centuries.
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