We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address

The Sabbath in Puritan New England

by

Alice Morse Earle

Seventh Edition

To the Memory of my Mother.

Contents.

1. The New England Meeting-House
2. The Church Militant
3. By Drum and Horn and Shell
4. The Old-Fashioned Pews
5. Seating the Meeting
6. The Tithingman and the Sleepers
7. The Length of the Service
8. The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House
9. The Noon-House
10. The Deacon's Office
11. The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims
12. The Bay Psalm-Book
13. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms
14. Other Old Psalm-Books
15. The Church Music
16. The Interruptions of the Services
17. The Observance of the Day
18. The Authority of the Church and the Ministers
19. The Ordination of the Minister
20. The Ministers
21. The Ministers' Pay
22. The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit
23. The Early Congregations

The Sabbath in Puritan New England.

I

The New England Meeting-House.

When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord'sDay meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strongand comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, everySunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it theyworshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.

As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein forthe public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. CottonMather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to applysuch a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in thePuritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was asbitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling theSabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.

The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for thesehouses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of thattheocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New Englandto create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slowor indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 thata meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if thepeople failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of membersnecessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in thePlatform of Church Discipline: "A church ought not to be of greater numberthan can ordinarilie meet convenientlie in one place, nor ordinarilie