and Sabbath services began to be held there, which the Charlestown brethren attended. The new settlement was called Boston, from the Lincolnshire town in England which had been the home of some of the settlers.

Boston was not at first fixed on for the capital. A town was laid out for that purpose where Cambridge now is, and it was named Newtown. The governor began to build there. Deputy Governor Dudley

finished his house at Newtown and removed to it with his family, But the finger of destiny was pointing all the time to Boston as the metropolis of New England, and the governing powers finally acknowledged the fact. In the autumn of 1631 Governor Winthrop fixed his residence in Boston, and the work of building up the town was vigorously carried on.

During the three years following the arrival of Governor Winthrop and his large company in Massachusetts Bay the immigrants were few. Sad reports of the mortality that prevailed that first autumn, and evil reports from those who had gone back to England in discouragement, or had been sent home because of misdemeanors, kept back immigration. In 1631 only about ninety persons arrived, and the next year only about two hundred and fifty. This was to the advantage of the new colony, which needed time for its citizens to become acquainted with one another and with their new surroundings and to settle the affairs. of government by themselves.

For about two years the Charlestown people went across the river to Boston to attend public worship. But in the autumn of 1632 enough people had arrived to warrant a new organization. The church at Boston

formally dismissed thirty-five of its members who lived in Charlestown, and these persons organized themselves into a church, November 23 of that year. They elected and installed Thomas James as their pastor, who had arrived from England a short time before, and not long after appointed a ruling elder and two deacons.

By the end of the year 1632, just twelve years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, seven churches had planted themselves around Massachusetts Bay, while to the church of Plymouth two others had been added in that colony, at Marshfield and Scituate. These seven churches were organized in the following order: Salem, 1629; Dorchester, Boston (at Charlestown) and Watertown, 1630; Lynn, Roxbury and Charlestown, 1632. Under the leadership of an admirable governor, with statesmanlike associates, the foundations of a body politic had been securely laid. With unstinted self-sacrifice, high religious aims, a profound faith in God, these families in the wilderness had begun to feel the influences of civil and religious freedom in a community generally united in belief and purpose, and to mold. the state in accordance with those influences. Already the great Republic was born; and although almost a century and a half was to pass away before it would attain to its majority, it was even then settled that the twin forces of government would be free churches on one hand, and free civil institutions on the other, mutually independent yet mutually supporting each other in their efforts to realize the divine ideal of man in society. Our fathers had to work out these ideas of government through discipline and trial. They had to learn the meaning of ecclesiastical and civil freedom

by experiment, not without mistakes, not altogether without intolerance on their part. But they wrought, perhaps, without graver errors in the light of their time than those into which their descendants have fallen, and with a prophetic purpose which has been nobly realized and for which we owe them a great debt.

CHAPTER VI.

THE

EARLY AMERICAN CONGREGATIONALISM.

HE first churches formed by the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had, as we have seen, no intention of separating themselves from the Church of England. Their pastors and teachers did not in general renounce their Episcopal ordination. They meant only to free themselves from the corruptions of the church which had persecuted them, and caused them to leave their homes to found a nation in the wilderness of the New World.

But the principles which controlled these Puritans, separated from the immediate domination of the English church and state, would inevitably issue in Congregational churches and a republican government. Those seven churches which had been formed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony before the spring of 1633, as well as the three which had been planted in the Plymouth Colony, were in effect independent. Each had originated in a voluntary covenant, had chosen and placed in office its own officers and was administering its own affairs. They had, however, united with one another in mutual councils. We are now to trace the working out of these ideas of the sufficiency of the local church and of the union of such churches in fellowship, without authority over one another, till the polity they represented came to be known as American Congregationalism. The providential guidance