ILLUSTRATIONS. THE COMPACT IN THE CABIN OF THE "MAYFLOWER ST. ALBAN'S HALL, OXFORD (PENRY'S COLLEGE).. LEYDEN... THE EMBARKATION AT DELFT-HAVEN........... Frontispiece. Faces p. 156 66 202 233 286 O God! beneath Thy guiding hand, Our exiled fathers crossed the sea And when they trod the wintry strand, With prayer and psalm they worshiped Thee. Thou heard'st, well pleased, the song, the prayer-- The memory of that holy hour. What change! through pathless wilds no more Came with those exiles o'er the waves; And here Thy name, O God of love, Their children's children shall adore, Till these eternal hills remove, And spring adorns the earth no more. THE GENESIS OF THE NEW ENGLAND CHURCHES. CHAPTER I. WHAT WAS IN THE BEGINNING. In the beginning, Christianity was simply Gospel. Ecclesiastical organization was not the cause, but the effect of life. Churches were constituted by the spontaneous association of believers. Individuals and families, drawn toward each other by their common trust in Jesus the Christ, and their common interest in the good news concerning the kingdom of God, became a community united, not by external bonds, but by the vital force of distinctive ideas and principles. New affections became the bond of a new brotherhood, and the new brotherhood, with its mutual duties and united responsibilities, became an organized society. The ecclesiastical polity of the apostles was simple-a living growth, not an artificial construction. How was it at Jerusalem? A few persons-about one hundred and twenty in all-after the ascension of their Lord, were in the practice of assembling in an upper room, which seems to have been the head-quarters of the eleven who had been nearest to him, and whom the others recognized as leaders. These persons were Jews, whose distinction from their countrymen was that, having been followers of Jesus B before his ignominious death, they had not lost their confidence in him; but, in the face of an immense and triumphant majority, believed that though he had been rejected by the priests and rulers of the nation, and crucified by the Roman power, he was the Messiah risen from the dead, and invested with all authority on earth and in heaven. Waiting for some new manifestation of his glory, they "continued with one accord in prayer and supplication "-not those of the sterner sex only, as if they were planning a revolutionary movement in the state, or were setting up a new school in philosophy, but the men "with the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren." Thus they were unconsciously forming that new commonwealth of men and women, and of households, united by personal attachment to Jesus, and living in the atmosphere of worship—that commonwealth of faith and love which was to realize in its future all the promise of a new earth encircled by new heavens. At first the few disciples seem not to have thought much about how their society should be organized and its affairs administered, their minds being otherwise occupied. The earliest appearance of any thing like organization among them is when it seemed necessary that one of them should be designated and recognized as an apostle in the place that had been made vacant by the defection and death of Judas. On that occasion the whole proceeding, though essentially theocratic in its spirit, was democratic in its form. It seems to have been doubtful which of the two brethren toward whom the minds of the assembly had been turned was best qualified for the work of an apostle. An expedient was resorted to, which, had the assembly been unanimous concerning the superior fitness of either candidate, would have been preposterous. The question whether Barsabas or Matthias should be "numbered with the eleven apostles" was decided by lot, religiously, and with prayer that thus God's will might be manifested. The religious use of the lot for the decision of doubtful questions was customary among the Jews from the earliest period of their history, but no other instance of it appears in the New Testament. On the fiftieth day after that Passover at which Christ was crucified, the new dispensation which had been prepared in his life and death, and completed in his resurrection and ascension, was publicly introduced by the manifestation of a special divine presence, the promised Holy Spirit illuminating and guiding the apostles. Suddenly the one hundred and twenty became three thousand. Of this growing multitude it is said that "they continued in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread and in prayers." In other words, the "three thousand souls" were bound together by their constant attendance on the apostles' teaching, and their sympathy of thought and feeling with the movement which those witnesses for Christ were leading; they had a certain distinctive practice of breaking bread together, as if they were all one family, and they continually prayed together. Their new ideas and new sympathies and hopes were a bond of union; and though not yet separated from the Jewish people, nor anticipating such a separation, they were beginning to be a distinct community with a life of their own a community almost unorganized, so far as the record shows, and yet distinct in the midst of the Jewish nation, like that nation in the midst of the Roman Empire. A new and unique commonwealth had begun to live, and must needs grow into some organized form according to its nature. How, then, shall the new community be organized? What officers and functionaries shall it have? How shall it be governed? The silence of the record seems to show that the apostles, busy with their work of teaching, daily repeating to the thousands of new disciples the remembered words of their Master, telling as eye-witnesses the story of Jesus from his baptism to his ascension, and preaching the good news of the kingdom, gave themselves little concern beforehand about the organization of the community which was coming into existence as the result of their testimony con |