Maine, all Congregational. In Rhode Island there were two or three Baptist churches, and some motley communities without definite organizations. The predominant, almost the entire organized religious. life of New England, was still Puritan Congregationalism.

CHAPTER XI.

CONFLICTING TENDENCIES IN CHURCH GOVERNMENT.

HE closing years of the seventeenth century and

THE

the first decade of the eighteenth witnessed the development of conflicting tendencies in church government, whose influences extended through the whole of the latter century and beyond it. Many of the churches, especially in the frontier settlements, were small in numbers, weakened by poverty and the Indian wars. They could not have continued to exist without financial aid. The Massachusetts Legislature became in a sense a home missionary society. Between 1693 and 1710 more than fifty applications for help were made to it from these feeble churches, and granted by appropriations from the public treasury. Earnest efforts were made to strengthen these churches by a closer union of their pastors; and the natural tendency was to increase the power of the ministers and the organizations formed by them over the churches. Besides the inroads of Episcopacy, lax tendencies developing with respect to terms of admission to membership, the participation in church government of those not admitted to full communion, the weakening of the influence of ministers in the civil government, and increasing restlessness under their efforts to guide spiritual and social affairs were occasions of alarm to many who feared in these movements

the decline of the power of the churches and of vital godliness.

Those most zealous to maintain the old order of things turned to ministerial organizations as a means of quickening the life of the churches and establishing their authority more firmly. One of these, the Ministers' Convention, had existed from the beginning of the Massachusetts colony. It had held annual sessions in connection with the opening of the general court in May. Its advice had often been asked by the court on important matters. The ministers of the

other colonies had followed its example by meeting also in connection with the sessions of the general courts. After a time it became the custom to have a sermon preached to the convention annually, the day after the election of the governor by the lower house, in the presence of the governor and the legislature. This convention was not a synod, and did not claim to be an authoritative body, but it discussed matters most prominent in the churches and in the moral concerns of the commonwealth. Cotton Mather, in his "Magnalia," written in 1698, says that in its meetings "every pastor that meets with singular difficulties has opportunity to bring them under consideration. But the question most usually now considered is, 'What may be further proposed for the preserving and promoting of true piety in the land?'"

Other gatherings of ministers had been regularly held in the early history of Massachusetts. There was a regular fortnightly meeting of this sort in Boston and vicinity as early as 1633. But it met with some. opposition through fear that it might grow into a

presbytery, and it appears after some years to have

ceased. Thomas Shepard of Cambridge in 1672 said that he remembered such meetings in his childhood. John Wise in 1710 declared that thirty years before that time there were no such meetings. But in the autumn of 1690 an association was organized of the ministers in the neighborhood of Boston. It was the first permanent district association, and seems to have been begun by Charles Morton, minister of Charlestown. It was modeled after a similar body which had arisen in county Cornwall, England, in 1655, but which was shortlived. Its meetings were held on Monday mornings at Harvard College once in six weeks or oftener. Other associations appear to have been early formed in Essex County, in the neighborhoods of Weymouth and Sherburne, and in Bristol County.

These associations, especially the one at Cambridge, seem to have been one means of developing the tendencies of two conflicting parties, each of which led the churches in different directions further away from the earlier Congregationalism. The conservative party sought to restrain the independence of the local churches and of individual ministers by the influence. of ministerial, and a little later by church, associations. They aimed to do this by making, through these associations, declarations of the will of the churches, by limiting the choice of pastors to such persons as met their approval, and by guarding against the organi zation of new churches which would favor loose ways. As Harvard College was the source from which most of the ministers were expected to come, it seemed to them especially important to guard it against false teaching and undesirable teachers.

Cotton Mather gives a long list of the topics discussed by the Cambridge association, which indicates the direction of its interests and its purposes. Among them were these: who chooses a minister; powers of ministers in their churches; rights of a minister to officiate in a church not his own; resignation of ministry; inquiries by pastors into scandals; use of instrumental music and of ceremonies in public worship; relations of church discipline to civil conviction; powers of councils. The drift of the association toward assuming authority over churches is indicated by its deliverances, of which the following are illustrations:

Synods, duly composed of messengers chosen by those whom they are to represent, and proceeding with a due regard unto the will of God in His Word, are to be reverenced, as determining the mind of the Holy Spirit concerning things necessary to be received and practiced in order to the edification of the churches. therein represented."

"Synods, being of Apostolical example, recommended, as a necessary ordinance, it is but reasonable, that their judgment be acknowledged as decisive, in the affairs for which they are ordained.”

These deliverances referred, so far as form is concerned, to occasional gatherings, now called ecclesiasti

cal councils.

The leaders of the conservative party were the Mathers, father and son. With them were James Allen, pastor of the First Church, Boston, John Higginson and Nicholas Noyes of Salem, William Hubbard of Ipswich, and several others, mostly of the older ministers. To these men were opposed a party, mainly