The method of using the church covenant among the early American Congregationalists is indicated in their denial: "That we make a vocall Church Oath or Covenant, the essentiall forme of a Church, when as wee frequently acknowledge that this Covenant which constituteth a Church, is either implicite or explicite;" ("A Defence of the Answer made unto the Nine Questions or Positions," etc., 1645, Preface, p. 13.) and in the statement of the English Puritans that "there would not be such long narrations, of every one severally as now are used, when men do enter into Church-Covenant, when each one makes a good long speech, in the profession of his Faith and Repentance."-"An Apologie of the Churches in New-England for Church-Covenant," etc., London, 1643, p. 29.

A clear description of the manner in which early Congregational covenants were used in New England is given in a book entitled "A Brief Narration of the Practices of the Churches in New-England, in their solemne Worship of God. London; 1647." It reads as follows:

After this [i. e., individual "confession of faith" and "declaration of... effectual calling"], they enter into a sacred and solemne Covenant, engagement, profession (call it what you please) whereby they protest and promise (by the help of Christ) to walk together as becomes a Church of God, in all duties of holinesse before the Lord, and in all brotherly love and faithfulnesse to each other, according unto God, withall producing their Covenant, agreed on before amonst themselves, then read it before the Assembly, and then either subscribe their hands to it, or testifie by word of mouth their agreement thereto.

VIII. THE HALF-WAY COVENANT

An interesting, and in some respects unfortunate, development of the church covenant Idea, was the Half-Way Covenant, which became popular throughout New England, beginning about the middle of the seventeenth century. The second generation of New England inhabitants had lost much of the piety and fervor which characterized the first founders. There were, of course, many faithful men and women, and there were some who were outwardly immoral and irreligious, but between these two was a third class, composed of men and women who had been baptized and reared in the Christian faith and who were generally people of blameless lives, but who could not claim the religious experiences by which their fathers believed themselves to have passed from death unto life. The first question which perplexed the leaders of the churches was whether these people should be admitted to the Lord's Supper; and the second was whether their children were fit subjects for baptism? There was much discussion of these questions, but it came to be held that these men and women were members of the church by reason of their baptism, and capable of transmitting membership by baptism to their children, but that they themselves were not in full communion. This result was reached, first by the Ministerial Convention of 1657, and afterward by the Synod of 1662. It came about gradually and not without opposition and prolonged discussion. That it seemed to meet a need of the time and that in some cases it produced gratifying results we are not left to doubt. The history of the movement can but impress the thoughtful reader with the genuine Christian earnestness of the men who devised this unhappy compromise, while it shows

the inevitable evil attending a half-way acceptance of the Gospel. Of the conditions which gave rise to the Half-Way Covenant, Dr. Bacon wrote:

"A conflict seemed to be growing more serious with the lapse of every year, between two ideals, both dear to the Puritan heart: the purity of the church, as consisting of "visible saints and their children," and the parish system by which the whole population of the several towns should be held under the tutelage of the churches. The growing danger was seriously felt by both parties. The churches and pastors saw the increasing number of those who failed to pass the accepted criteria of membership, and were in danger of drifting afar from any relation to the church; and on the other hand those who had been baptized into the church, who held and cherished the truth that had been taught them, and whose lives were without reproach, but who were unable to testify to the conscious experience of a spiritual change from death to life, found not only themselves debarred from the communion, but their children excluded from baptism as aliens and "strangers from the covenants of the promise." The situation was growing each year more tense, and there were tendencies in two opposite directions towards a solution of it. One was towards the severely logical individualism of the Baptists, which had no place for infant baptism or infant church-membership. The other was towards "the parish way," or the Presbyterian way, according to which the baptized children of the parish, arriving at years of discretion and being without reproach, were to be welcomed to the Lord's table. That the accepted criterion of fitness for church-membership was fallacious, that strictly applied, it would have excluded from communion the foremost theologian and saint of the contemporary Puritan party, Richard Baxter was not going to be made entirely clear to their successors until six generations afterwards (1847) by Horace Bushnell in his treatise of 'Christian Nurture.'

"The divergence of opinion and of practice was so great and so manifestly increasing as to call for action on the part of the colonial legislatures-always prone to an exorbitant sense of their responsibility in spiritual matters. In 1657 the Massachusetts General Court, moved thereto by Connecticut, invited a conference of leading pastors who, gathering at Boston to the number of seventeen, gave counsel decidedly in favor of a more relaxed rule than that of the Founders. But this was far from appeasing the controversy. The sincere and painful anxiety of such venerated men as Davenport and Charles Chauncy prevailed with many others against any abatement of the conditions of membership in the church. A true synod, including not ministers only but "messengers of the churches," was summoned to meet at Boston in 1662, and the number in attendance-more than seventy-was proof of the gravity of the question at issue. After protracted and earnest discussion, by a great majority but in face of an earnest protest from some of the best men, the main question before the synod was thus resolved:

"Church-members who were admitted in minority, understanding the doctrine of faith and publicly professing their assent thereto; not scandalous in life, and solemnly owning the covenant before the church, wherein they give up themselves and their children to the Lord and subject themselves to the government of Christ in the church, their children are to be baptized."

"It was an illogical compromise between irreconcilable principles. It came, indeed, into general use in New England, but never with universal consent. Instead of ending controversy, it intensified it, giving rise to a copious polemical literature. In conspicuous instances, as in Hartford and in Boston, it rent churches asunder. From New Haven the great and good Davenport, foreseeing the ruin about to befall his cherished ideals through the merger of that little republic with Connecticut, left behind him the fair plain that was dearer to his heart than native land, exclaiming "in New Haven

colony Christ's interest is miserably lost," and went to assume, in his old age, the pastoral office in the First Church in Boston, from which many members had withdrawn to practise the less rigid system in the Third Boston Church-the 'Old South.' The 'Half-Way Covenant' continued in general use for nearly a century, until it melted away in the fervent heat of the Great Awakening,' or withered under the rigors of the Edwardean theology.-Bacon pp. 76-80.

Not every Congregational church employed the Half-Way Covenant. Individual pastors prepared them and used them, sometimes with and sometimes without the formal authority of the local church. One of the best examples quoted by Dr. Dexter in his Congregationalism as seen in its Literature" (page 476) as having been used probably by the old North Church in Boston, the church of the Mathers, is as follows:

You now from your heart professing a serious belief to the Christian religion, as it has been generally declared and embraced by the faithful in this place, do here give up yourself to God in Christ; promising with his help to endeavor, to walk according to the rules of that holy religion, all your days; choosing of God as your best good, and your last end, and Christ as the Prophet, and Priest, and the king of your soul forever. You do therefore submit unto the laws of his kingdom, as they are administered in this church of his; and you will also carefully and sincerely labour after those more positive and increased evidences of regeneration, which may further encourage you to seek an admission unto the table of the Lord.

Two other examples of Half-Way covenants are that of the Salem church, preserved in the Direction of 1665, and that used by the First Church in Hartford in 1696. The texts of these covenants are as follows:

The Salem Half-Way Covenant.

I do heartily take and avouch this one God who is made known to us in the Scripture, by the Name of God the Father, and God the Son even Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Ghost to be my God, according to the tenour of the Covenant of Grace; wherein he hath promised to be a God to the Faithfull and their seed after them in their Generations, and taketh them to be his People, and therefore