was enforced by law.1

tion to attend public worship.

This was no local peculiarity. It

Legal obliga- was law in England. It was law in Virginia, and had been so before New England had an English inhabitant.2 In its theory the theory of a right to control the individual, not only for his neighbor's protection, but for his own improvement—it was law after the universal traditions of Christendom. But, if the New-England founders had not been familiarized with it by example, it may well be supposed that they would have originated it for reasons of their own. The sense of a right to be exempt from public coercion takes different forms at different periods.3 The democratic people of New England, in recent times, have supposed it to be no invasion of the citizen's liberty to require him to submit his children to instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, to the end that they may not grow up to be incapable and shiftless, chargeable and troublesome.* And on similar grounds, their predecessors in the primitive age considered it to be conducive to the public good, and unobjectionable to the individual, that he should be saved from the misery to himself, and the mischievousness to his neighbors, of ignorance respecting morals and religion. A godless population is a population ungovernable except by a despotism. To be capable of lasting liberty, a people must be religious. It is vital to free

1 Mass. Rec., I. 140. This legisla tion of Massachusetts was imitated in the other Colonies, probably as soon as occasion arose for it. (See Brigham, Compact, &c., 93; Conn. Rec., I. 524.) * In 1610, every colonist of Virginia was obliged to attend church twice every Sunday, "upon pain, for the first fault, to lose their provision and allowance for the whole week following; for the second, to lose said allowance and also to be whipped; and for the third, to suffer death." (Force, Histori

cal Tracts, III. (ii) 11; comp. Hening, Statutes at Large, I. 123, 144, 261.)

3 A feudal baron would have deemed it altogether reasonable to burn a doubter of the real presence in the eucharist, but would have resented to the death any compulsion to have his children taught to read.

"Thanks to St. Bothan, son of mine,
Save Gawain, ne'er could pen a line;
So sware I "

4 General Statutes of Massachusetts, Chap. XLI. § 1.

government, that they who are to sustain and enjoy it should have a sense of the government of God.

Neither devout worshippers nor virtuous citizens can be made by law. But that proposition scarcely warrants an inference that the law can do nothing, or can do nothing without overbalancing disadvantages, towards bringing the citizen within the reach of influences helpful to his becoming devout and virtuous. And supposing law to be impotent for such purposes, still, before the colonization of New England, the experiment had not been made under circumstances of any good promise; experiments for such an object were well worth the making; and if anywhere there could be hope of their succeeding, it would be in a community so small, that every neighbor might be a guardian of every other, and that the edicts. of law and the persuasions of Christianity might be aided by seasonable counsel and contagious example. The early law-makers in this country had had sad occasion to know, that a false and ineffective religion depraves the morals of a people, and sows the seeds of public wretchedness. Believing that in the Gospel which had so ennobled themselves there resided a power to render the same good office to all whom it addressed, they naturally esteemed it an act of duty and of kindness to take care that all should have the benefit of its ministrations. If the policy of their descendants in compelling the attendance of children at day-schools is less questionable, certainly the aim was not more elevated. If the doctrine be good, that the state cannot bear to have grossly ignorant citizens, it is hard to deny plausibility to the opinion that it was for the safety of the state that every citizen should be addressed every week with invitations to lead a religious life.1

1 "Profane swearing, drunkenness, and beggars are but rare in the compass of this patent," wrote Lechford in 1641 (Plaine Dealing, 29). Drunk

enness and beggars are without doubt nuisances in a community; and, if religious instruction will abate them, it serves a purpose of the commonwealth,

Organization

of

churches.

The religious objects of the colonists claimed attention immediately after their arrival. The planters at Plymouth had no new scheme of church order to devise. Theirs was the scheme of the English Independents, already put in practice and amended by themseparate selves at Scrooby and at Leyden. It was imitated in Massachusetts by Skelton and Higginson, was adopted by the immigrants of the following year, and was carried to Connecticut and New Haven by the founders of those Colonies. A church was a company of believers, associated together by a mutual covenant to maintain and share Christian worship and ordinances, and to watch over each other's spiritual condition. The covenants — remarkably free, in the earliest times, from statements of doctrine-were what their name imports: they were mutual engagements, " in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according as He was pleased to reveal himself in his blessed word of truth.”1 A church, it was held, "ought not to be of greater number than may ordinarily meet together conveniently in one place, nor ordinarily fewer than may conveniently

to say nothing of higher purposes. ·
"One may live there from year to
year, and not see a drunkard, hear an
oath, or meet a beggar.” "As Ireland
will not brook venomous beasts, so will
not that land vile persons and loose
livers." (New England's First Fruits.)
"I thank God I have lived in a
Colony [Massachusetts] of many thou-
sand English almost these twelve years;
am held a very sociable man; yet I
may considerately say, I never heard
but one oath sworn, nor never saw one
man drunk, nor ever heard of three
women adulteresses, in all this time,
that I can call to mind." (Simple Cob-
ler of Aggawam, &c., by Theodore de la
Guard, 67. The last part of the author's
pseudonyme represents the surname of
the author of the Body of Liberties;

and the Greek compound Theodore is similar in construction and equivalent in sense to the Hebrew name Nathaniel. Aggawam was the Indian name of Ipswich, where Ward lived.)

1 The covenant of the First Church of Salem contains no statement of doctrine (Upham's Second Century Lecture, &c., 67), nor that of the First Church of Boston (Drake, History of Boston, 93), nor that of the Second Church of Boston (Robbins, History of the Second Church, 209). I do not remember a material deviation from this catholic character in any of a considerable number of early covenants which have come under my eye. See, to this effect, the "Declaration of the General Court," in Hutch. Col., 215.

carry on church work."1 Persons so pledged and associated were church-members; and they, and no others, were entitled to come to the Lord's Supper, and to present their children for baptism. Each church was an independent body, competent to elect and ordain its officers; to admit, govern, censure, and expel its members; and to do all other things properly pertaining to ecclesiastical order. A church fully furnished had a pastor and a teacher, whose duty it was to preach and to administer the ordinances, the distinctive function of the former being private and public exhortation, of the latter doctrinal and Scriptural explanation. Each church had also one or more "ruling elders," who shared with the "teaching elders" the province of discipline; and deacons, who had the charge of prudential concerns and of providing for the poor. But the office of ruling elder was not uniformly kept up; the offices of pastor and of teacher were not long discriminated from each other, and the practice of

3

1 Platform of Church Discipline, of repression, even in persons more Chap. III. § 4. creditably circumstanced.

To these was added in theory the office of deaconess (Platform of Church Discipline, Chap. VII. § 7), though I have not met with an instance of its actual institution in New England. At Amsterdam the English congregation of Ainsworth and Johnson had an ancient widow for a deaconess, who did service many years, though she was sixty years of age when she was chosen." (Bradford, in Young, Pilgrims, 455.)

66

2 "The excommunicate is held as an heathen and publican. Yet it hath been declared at Boston in divers cases, that children may eat with their parents excommunicate; that an elected magistrate excommunicate may hold his place, though it were better another were chosen [comp. Cotton's letter to Lord Say and Sele, in Hutchinson, I. 438]; that the excommunicate person may come and hear the word, and be present at prayer, so that he give not public offence by taking up an eminent As early as 1640, the church of place in the assembly. But at New Watertown ordained a second pastor, Haven, where Master Davenport is while it had no teacher; but in this, pastor, the excommunicate is held out says Winthrop (II. 18), they differed of the meeting, at the door, if he will "from the practice of the other churchhear, in frost, snow, and rain" (Lech- es, as also they did in their privacy, not ford, 13); —an eagerness for the word giving notice thereof to the neighborwhich one does not always see now-a- ing churches, nor to the Magistrates, as days to call for such strong measures the common practice was."

maintaining two preachers in each church, often departed from in the early times, went gradually into general disuse. The ruling elders and deacons, as well as the teaching elders, were consecrated to their trusts with religious solemnities.

At the time of the confederation there were nearly eighty ministers' in New England, or one minisMinisters. ter to about three hundred of the population. These were generally men who had been trained in the best learning of the time, as well as educated for vigorous action in the stern school of those persecutions which had driven them from their home. As many as half of the number are known to have been graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, the greater part being of the latter University. Some, prominent in their sect, had been sharers in the counsels and the conflicts of the Puritan leaders in England, of Leighton and Hildersham, of Preston and Twisse. Not seldom they were men of good property. The consideration in which some were held was the greater on account of their being highly connected.3 At first, ministers were provided for by voluntary con

1 When in this work "ministers" of religion are spoken of, teaching elders (pastors and teachers) are intended. They are generally called elders by the early writers. But this term, in this sense, is not familiar to modern ears, and it is equivocal as belonging also to an inferior rank in church office.

Holmes (I. 266) places the number at seventy-seven in 1642.-Mr. Savage says (Winthrop, I. 265) that in 1638 "there were probably forty or fifty sons of the University of Cambridge in Old England-one for every two hundred or two hundred and fifty inhabitantsdwelling in the few villages of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The sons of Oxford were not few." And again: "If we include the clergy, who surely

had as good a share of letters as their brethren educated at the same Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, there were in New England, at any time between 1630 and 1690, as many sons of those two famous nurseries of learning as would be found in a proportionate number of their fellow-subjects in the mother country." (Ibid., 145; comp. II. 331.)

3 Mr. Whiting, of Lynn, had married a daughter of Oliver St. John. The wife of Mr. Sherman, of Watertown, is said by Mather (Magnalia, Book IV. Chap. XXIX. § 11) to have been a granddaughter of Earl Rivers. The father of Wilson, of Boston, was an eminent church dignitary, and his mother was the primate's niece.