colonies, and ultimately their federal union and independence; constant in advocacy of those principles which have prevailed of liberty for all men and their equality as citizens; steadfast in its adherence to the authority of the Holy Scriptures and to the evangelical doctrines revealed in them, while affording to every one freedom of conscience in interpreting the Scriptures; earnest in its missionary spirit, and prompt to adapt itself to the changing conditions and needs of the people. We have found that the most recent growth of Congregationalism has been the most rapid. Its churches, educational institutions, missionary enterprises and organized bodies of churches are established on a substantial, enduring basis. In its faith it is in harmony with the prevailing religious belief of the people. In its democratic polity it is in harmony with our principles of free government. Congregationalism has larger opportunities and more encouraging prospects than ever before in its history. May it fulfill worthily its mission to spread the gospel brought from Heaven by our Lord and Saviour Christ, and to maintain the liberty under beneficent laws which has been dearly bought and must always be vigilantly defended.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE

CONGREGATIONALISM IN THE NORTHWEST.

(By Rev. Joseph E. Roy, D. D.)

HE Northwest Territory, named by the ordinance of 1787, was that part of our new wild domain. lying between the Ohio and the Mississippi and reaching to the Lakes. In due time it was carved into its five grand commonwealths. Subsequent acquisitions have pushed that Northwest on over the Rocky Mountains, introducing into our family of States a dozen. others, leaving Alaska now as our only Northwestern Territory.

Congregationalism was the first Protestant religious system to break over into that original Northwest. Indeed it led over the first colony, having practically secured in the ordinance itself that provision whereby freedom and education were made the inheritance not only of our great interior, but of the belt across the continent. Manasseh Cutler, LL. D., a Congregational pastor in Massachusetts, was a director and the agent of the Ohio Company, which was composed of Revolutionary officers and soldiers who proposed to make a settlement over there, accepting a million and a half acres of land in payment for their military services. But they would not go unless freedom and the means of education were provided for the entire territory. Dr. Cutler, representing the company, spent

the winter of 1787 in New York during the session of Congress that passed the ordinance, and through Nathan Dane was largely instrumental in securing in it the provision for freedom and education. Thomas Jefferson was not a member of that Congress, being abroad on public duty; but he had previously proposed a prohibition of slavery within that territory after the year 1800. Manasseh Cutler and Winthrop Sargent as agents made the contract with the Board of the Treasury for the United States. Before the colony left in the spring of 1788 the directors had named their town Marietta after the Queen of France, and had taken measures to provide for teaching and for preaching in their settlement. Among the members of the corporation were several Congregational clergymen. One of these was Daniel Breck, who on visiting the colony as early as July of 1788 preached four or five Sundays and thus inaugurated public worship in the Northwest Territory. Other occasional supplies were soon followed by the pastorate of Daniel Story, a Dartmouth man, an uncle of the eminent jurist Joseph Story. Dr. Cutler had sent on the young pastor. He had written to General Putnam that he had requested the treasurer, Colonel Platt, to forward the sum that had been raised for the support of preachers and schoolmasters; and by the last of August he was on the ground himself preaching on the text: "For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles"; and saying, “We this day literally see the fulfillment of the prophecy of our text."

But, on account of the Indian wars, in which, at an expense of thirty thousand dollars, the colonists had built and held their forts against the combined forces

of twenty-one tribes of savages backed by British emissaries, the Congregational church was not organized until 1796. Of the thirty-two charter members all but one had been members of such churches in New England. As early as 1797 the Muskingum Academy

was started, and David Putnam, a grandson of MajorGeneral Israel Putnam, was the first teacher. Then in due time came on Marietta College to be a fountain of learning and of religion in all that region, as well as a gracious influence on the Virginia side of the Ohio.

Congregationalism at the birth of the century also passed over into this Promised Land along with the

Connecticut Land Company and the multitude of her people, among whom were many whose homes had been burned out during the Revolution and to whom the State had allotted lands in the Western Reserve, which embraced the ten counties and four fractional counties in the northeast corner of Ohio. This tract Connecticut had reserved in her cession to the Federal government of her belt across the continent as granted by her original charter. The portion sold to the company brought one million two hundred thousand dol lars, which sum was put into a school fund for the children. The Congregational Missionary Society of Connecticut, organized in 1798, followed into this wilderness her children who had exiled themselves from their New England homes. It was just about this time, 1801, that the Presbyterian General Assembly and the General Association of Connecticut entered into the Plan of Union, described in Chapter XVII.an arrangement which, though devised in the spirit of fellowship, became a process for building up Presbyterianism out of Congregational material. This new Connecticut went on receiving her people, her ideas, her church life, her ministers, from the old State, and the Missionary Society of the old State went on mothering them for a quarter of a century, until the new National Society taking them up, in 1826, in its first report set forth a whole synod of Presbyterian churches, eighty-seven of them, already gathered there and served by forty-two so-called Presbyterian ministers, almost all of whom had been Congregationalists and missionaries of the Connecticut Society-and all this under the Plan of Union! In 1835 Rev. Ansel R. Clark found one hundred and sixty of these ministers. The nativity of