number of young men into the ministry, { and some 140 or 150 are at this moment pursuing their theological studies at them, under the instruction of able professors. The clergy of the Episcopal Church in America, like those of the Established Church in England, are divided into two classes, one called "high church" and the other "low." Sometimes these parties are called "evangelical" and "non-evangelical," but not with accuracy, for not a few of the high-churchmen, that is, men charged with carrying their preference for Episcopacy to an extravagant length, are entirely evangelical in their doctrines and preaching. But a part of these highchurchmen are not considered evangelical -not so much because of what they do preach, as because of what they do not preach. Their sermons are of too negative a character; an efficacy unknown to the Scriptures is ascribed to ceremonies and forms; neither are the sinner's sin and danger as fully and earnestly set forth as they should be, nor is the glorious sufficiency of Christ unfolded, and salvation by faith alone fully and clearly presented. Their preaching, consequently, does not reach the hearts of their hearers as does that of their evangelical brethren, nor does it lead the members of their churches to renounce the "world, its pomps and its vanities," to as great an extent as they should do. Yet they are not to be classed with the fox-hunting, theatre-going, ballfrequenting, and card-playing clergy of some other countries. They are an infinitely better class of men and ministers.

As for the Puseyite or Tractarian doc trines, or whatever they may be called, three, or perhaps four, of the high-church bishops are supposed to have embraced them, or at least to be favourable to them, as understood in Americà. But there is not one who adopts the notions recently put forth by the "British Critic," the advocate of this party in England, and but one who has ever declined the name of Protestant. Among the inferior clergy it has been feared that these sentiments have made considerable progress; but those whose situation enables them to judge with a good deal of accuracy, say that it is much less than has been supposed. Among the laity there is scarcely any sympathy with these semi-popish doctrines, and I cannot believe that they will make much way in the country at large.

The prospects of the Episcopal Church in the United States are certainly very encouraging. The friend of a learned and able ministry, to form which she has founded colleges and theological institutions,* she sees among her clergy not a few men of the highest distinction for talents, for learning, for eloquence, and for piety and zeal. A large number of the most respectable people in all parts of the country are among her friends and her members, especially in the cities and large towns. Under such circumstances, if she be true to herself and her proper interests, with God's blessing she cannot but continue to prosper and extend her borders.

CHAPTER III.

THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCHES.

THE faith of the Congregational churches of America is common to the evangelical churches of both hemispheres, but their organization and discipline are, to a considerable extent, peculiar to themselves. A large and most respectable body of dissenters in Great Britain, formerly known as Independents, have of late preferred the name of Congregational, but the differences between American Congregationalism and that which bears the same name in England are, in some respects, highly important. Some of these differences, as well as the points of agreement, will appear in the statements which follow.

I know not the comparative numbers of the evangelical and non-evangelical clergy, but infer, from the statements of the Rev. Dr. Tyng,* in his speech in London before the Church Missionary Society, in May, 1842, that they are in the proportion of about two thirds of the former to one third of the latter. Of the twenty-three bishops, fourteen or fifteen are considered, I believe, entirely evangelical, while seven or eight cannot properly be placed in that category. But all are laboriously occupied in their official work; and I believe it would be difficult to find an Episcopal body of equal number, in any other country, surpassing them in talents, zeal, and piety. To be a bishop with us is quite a different thing from holding that office where bishops live in palaces and have princely revenues. Our bishops are frequently parish New-England is the principal seat of the priests also, and can find time to visit their Congregational churches in America. This diocesses only by employing an assistant is the region which the Puritans planted preacher, or rector, to fill their places in the first half of the seventeenth centuwhen they are engaged in their visitations. ry; and here they have left upon the strucTheir revenues do not much exceed, in some instances do not equal, those of many of their clergy.

The founding of the Theological Seminary of this Church, at the city of New-York, was greatly promoted by the princely gift of 60,000 dollars (above * Dr. Tyng is one of the most distinguished of the £12,000) by a Mr. Jacob Sherred. Such beneficence Episcopal ministers in the United States.

deserves to be most gratefully commemorated.

ture and institutions of society, and upon pelled to flee from their native country, the opinions and manners of the people, embarking by stealth and at night as fugithe deepest impression of their peculiar tives from justice, as we have related in character. In all these states, with the detail elsewhere.* But those bodies of exception of Rhode Island, the Congrega- emigrants, far more numerous and far bettionalists are more numerous than any ter prepared and furnished, which, from other sect, and in Massachusetts and Con- 1628 onward, planted Salem and Boston, necticut they are probably more numerous Hartford, and New-Haven- the emigrathan all others united. ting Puritans, who were the actual foundOut of New-England the Congregation- ers of New-England, and whose character alists have never been zealous to propa- gave direction to its destiny-were men gate their own peculiar forms and institu- who considered themselves as belonging tions. Of the vast multitudes of emigrants to the Church of England till their emifrom New-England into other states, the gration into the American wilderness disgreat majority have chosen to unite with solved the tie. They were Puritans in churches of the Presbyterian connexion England, it is true, but the Puritans were rather than to maintain their own peculi- a party within the Church contending for arities at the expense of increased division a purer and more thorough renovation, and in the household of faith. In so doing, not a dissenting body, with institutions of they have followed the advice and fallen their own, out of the Church. The minisin with the arrangements of the associated ters who accompanied the Puritan emibodies of Congregational pastors in New- grants, or, rather, who led them into the England. Yet in the States of New-York, wilderness, and who were the first pastors Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and the Territories of the churches in New-England, were, beof Wisconsin and Iowa, many congrega- fore their emigration, almost without_extions retain the forms of administration ception, ministers of the Church of Engwhich have descended to them from the land, educated at the universities, episcoNew-England fathers, and refuse to come pally ordained, regularly inducted into livinto connexion with any of the Presbyte-ings; Nonconformists, it is true, as refurian judicatories Since the recent division in the Presbyterian Church, the number of such congregations is increasing.

sing to wear the white surplice, to baptize with the sign of the cross, or to use other ceremonies which seemed to them superThe whole number of Congregational stitious, but yet exercising their ministry churches in the United States is probably as well as they could under many disabilinot far from 1500, of which more than 1000 ties and annoyances. Cotton and Wilson, are in New-England. The number of min- of Boston, Hooker and Stone, of Hartford, isters is about 1350, and the members or Davenport and Hooke, of New-Havencommunicants may be stated at 180,000. not to extend the catalogue-were all benThis estimate does not include those ficed clergymen before their emigration. churches originally or nominally Congre- These men having emigrated to what were gational, which have rejected what are then called "the ends of the earth," and called the doctrines of the Reformation. supposing that their expatriation had made These churches are better known by their them free from that ecclesiastical bondage distinctive title, Unitarian. The churches to which they had been "subjected unwillof this description are nearly all in Massa-ingly," set themselves to study, with their chusetts; a few are in Maine, two or three in New-Hampshire, one or more in Vermont, as many in Rhode Island, and one, in a state of suspended animation, in Connecticut. Out of New-England there are perhaps from six to ten churches of the same kind, differing very little in their principles, or in their forms, from the Unitarians of England.

The "Pilgrims," as they are called-the little band of exiles who, having fled from England into Holland, afterward, in 1620, migrated from Holland to America, and formed at Plymouth the first settlement in New-England-were separatists from the Church of England,* and for the crime of attempting to set up religious institutions not established by law, they were com

* In what sense they were Separatists the reader will have perceived from what was said in chapter iv. of book ii. He will also perceive in what sense they were not Separatists.

Bibles in their hands, the Scriptural model of church order and discipline, and to form their churches after the pattern thus discovered. The result was Congregationalism-a system which differed as much from Brownism on the one hand, as it did from Presbyterianism on the other. After the Puritans in America had set up their church order, the Puritans in England, having become a majority in Parliament, attempted to reduce the Established Church of that nation to the Presbyterian form; and it was not till a still later period that Congregationalism, or, as it was more generally called there, Independency, began to make a figure under the favour of Cromwell.

Thus it appears that Congregationalism in America, instead of being an offset from that in England, is the parent stock. No

* See book ii., chap. i.

Congregational church in England, it is believed, dates its existence so far back as the Act of Uniformity in 1662; but many of the New-England churches have records of more than 200 years.

order of New-England, in a Latin epistle to Apollonius, a Dutch minister, who, in the name of the divines of Zealand, had written to America for information on that subject. In 1648, a synod of pastors and It may also be remarked that American churches, called together at Cambridge (a Congregationalists are not "dissenters," town near Boston) by the invitation of the and never were. In New-England the civil authorities of Massachusetts, drew. Congregational churches were for a long up a scheme of church discipline, which, time the ecclesiastical establishment of the from the place at which the synod met, country, as much as the Presbyterian was called the " Cambridge Platform." Church is now in Scotland. The whole This platform, however, though highly apeconomy of the civil state was arranged proved at the time, and still quoted with with reference to the welfare of these great deference, was never an authoritachurches; for the state existed, and the tive rule; and at this day some of its princountry had been redeemed from the wil- ciples have become entirely obsolete. In derness, for this very purpose. At first no 1708, a synod, or council, representing the dissenting assembly, not even if adopting pastors and churches of Connecticut, was the ritual and order of the Church of Eng-assembled at Saybrook by the invitation of land, was tolerated. Afterward dissenters the Legislature of that colony. By this of various names were permitted to wor- Connecticut synod a system was formed, ship as they pleased, and were not only differing in some respects from the Camreleased from the obligation to contribute bridge Platform, and designed to supply towards the support of the established re- what was deemed the deficiencies of that ligion, but so incorporated by law that each older system. The Saybrook Platform congregation was empowered to tax its was adopted by the churches of Connectiown members for the support of its own cut, and was for many years in that colony religious ministrations. But still, till the a sort of standard recognised by law. Its *principle was adopted that the support of application was gradually modified, and its religion is not among the duties of civil stringency relaxed or increased by various government, the Congregationalists main- local rules and usages, and by successive tained this precedence-that every man acts of the Legislature; and at the present who did not prefer to contribute to the sup-time this Platform alone is a very inadeport of public worship in some other form, quate account of the ecclesiastical order was liable to be taxed as a Congregation-of Connecticut. alist. Thus, though some of the members of one denomination in New-England sometimes affect to speak of the Congregationalists around them as "dissenters," those who do so only expose themselves to ridicule. Every man sees that if there is such a thing as "dissent" in New-England, the Episcopalians, with the Baptists and the Methodists, and all the other sects who have at different times separated themselves from the ecclesiastical order originally established on the soil, and still flourishing there, are the dissenters.

The following outline, it is believed, will give the reader some idea of the system of New-England Congregationalism as it is at this day.

1. The Congregational system recognises no church as an organized body politic, other than a congregation of believers statedly assembling for worship and religious communion. It falls back upon the original meaning of the Greek word έkλnoia, and of the Latin cœtus.

Popery claims that all Christians constitute one visible, organized body, having its officers, its centre, and its head on earth. The first reformers seem to have supposed that each national church has its own independent existence, and is to be considered as one organic body, which has somewhere within itself, in the clergy, or in the people, or in the civil government of the nation, a power to regulate and govern all the parts. Congregationalism rejects both the universal church of the Papists, and the national churches which the Reformation established in England, in Scotland, in certain States of Germany and Switzerland, and attempted to establish in France.

The Congregationalists differ from most other communions, in that they have no common authoritative standards of Faith and Order, other than the Holy Scriptures. Yet their system is well known among themselves, and from the beginning they have spared no reasonable pains to make it known to others. John Cotton, the first teacher of the first church in Boston, was the author of a book on "the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven," published as early as 1644, which, in its time, was highly esteemed, not only as a controversial defence of Congregationalism, but also as a practical exposition of its principles. John Hence the name Congregational. Each Norton, too, teacher of the church in Ips- congregation of believers is a church; and wich, and afterward settled in Boston, exists not as a subordinate part, or as gave to the Reformed churches of Europe under the sovereignty of a national church, in 1646 a full account of the ecclesiastical | nor as a part, or under the sovereignty of

P

an organized universal church, but substantively and independently.

of Baptism and the Lord's Supper. Thus it was intended that each church should have within itself a presbytery, or clerical body, perpetuating itself by the ordination of those who should be elected to fill successive vacancies. This plan, however, soon fell into disuse; and now, except in the rare cases of colleagues in office, all the powers and duties of the eldership devolve upon one whose ordinary official title is pastor. The office of deacons, of whom there are from two to six in each church, is to serve at the Lord's Table, and to re

Other religious communions in America are organized under the form of national churches, and are named accordingly. Thus we have "the Presbyterian Church in the United States," ""the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States," "the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States;" but no intelligent person ever speaks of the Congregational Church in the United States, or of the American Congregational Church. Congregationalists always speak of the churches of America, or of New-Eng-ceive, keep, and apply the contributions land, or of Massachusetts, except when, in which the church makes at each commucourtesy to other denominations, they use nion for the expenses of the Table, and for their forms of speech in speaking of them the poor among its own members. Oriand of their affairs. In like manner, the ginally, the deacons, as in the primitive Apostles speak of the churches of Mace- churches, received on each Lord's Day the donia, Galatia, or Judea, but never of contributions of the whole congregation, Church national or Church provincial. which were applied by them for the sup2. A church exists by the consent, ex-port of the ministers, and for all other ecpressed or implied, of its members to walk clesiastical uses. But at an early period together in obedience to the principles of other arrangements were adopted, as more the Gospel, and the institutions of Christ. convenient. In other words, a church does not derive its existence and rights from some charter conceded to it by another church, or by some higher ecclesiastical judicatory. When any competent number of believers meet together in the name of Christ, and agree, either expressly or by some implication, to commune together statedly in Christian worship, and in the observance of Christ's ordinances, and to perform towards each other the mutual duties of such Christian fellowship, Christ himself is present with them (Matt., xviii., 20), and they receive from Him all the powers and privileges which belong to a church of Christ. At the orderly formation of a church, the neighbouring churches are ordinarily invited to be present by their pastors and delegates, as witnesses of the Faith and Order of those engaged in the transaction, and that they may extend the "right hand of fellowship," recognising the new church as one of the sisterhood of churches. The neglect of this, though it might be deemed a breach of courtesy and order, would not, of itself, so vitiate the proceedings as to prevent the new church from being recognised ultimately by the churches of the neighbourhood.

4. Admission to membership in the church takes place as follows. The person desiring to unite himself with the church makes known his wishes to the pastor. The pastor (or in some churches the pastor and deacons, or in others, the pastor and a committee appointed for the purpose), having conversed with the candidate, and having obtained by conversation and inquiry satisfactory evidence of his having that spiritual renovation-that inward living piety which is considered as the condition of membership, he is publicly proposed in the congregation, on the Lord's Day, as a candidate, so that if there be any objection in any quarter, it may be seasonably made known. One, two, three, or four weeks afterward, according to the particular rule or usage of the church, a vote of the "brotherhood" (or male members) is taken on thequestion, "Shall this person be admitted to membership in the church ?" After this, the candidate appears before the congregation, and gives his assent to a formal profession of the Christian faith read to him by the pastor, and to a form of covenant, by which he engages to give himself up to God as a child and servant, and to Christ as a redeemed sinner, and binds himself to the church conscientiously to perform all the duties of Christian communion and brotherhood.

3. The officers of a church are of two sorts-elders and deacons. When the Congregational churches of New-England were first organized, two centuries ago, the plan 5. The censures of the church are prowas that each church should have two or nounced by the pastor in accordance with a more elders-one a pastor-another char- previous vote or determination of the brothged with similar duties under the title of a erhood. The directions given by Christ in teacher-the third ordained to his office regard to the treatment of an offending like the other two, a ruling elder, who, brother (Matt., xviii., 15-17) are, in most with his colleagues, presided over the dis- churches, literally and directly adhered to cipline and order of the church, but took in all cases. First, one brother alone conno part in the official authoritative preach-fers with the brother offending or supposed ing of the word, or in the administration to offend, and this is the first admonition.

Then, if satisfaction has not been obtained, the same brother takes with him one or two others, and the effort is repeated: this is the second admonition. If this effort is ineffectual, the whole case is reported to the church, i. e., the brotherhood; and if the church do not obtain satisfaction, in other words, if they find him guilty of the offence alleged against him, and do not find him at the same time penitent and ready to confess his fault, they, as a body, admonish him, and wait for his repentance. If he refuses to hear the church, that is, if the admonition, after due forbearance, is unsuccessful, the brethren by a vote exclude him from their fellowship, and the pastor, as Christ's minister, pronounces a public sentence of excommunication.

In some churches a public and notorious scandal is sometimes taken up by the church as a body, without waiting for the first and second admonition in private. Yet, in such cases, the church commonly acts by a committee, who follow the method just described; first one, and next two or more confer with the offender privately, and then they report to the church what they have done, and with what success.

ing a tax upon the estates of its members, in which last case the funds raised can be applied only to the current expenses of the society. It enters into a civil contract with the pastor, and becomes bound in law to render him for his services such compensation as is agreed on between him and them.

A stranger may not easily understand the difference between the church and the society, and the relations of each to the other, without some farther explanation. The church, then, is designed to be a purely spiritual body. The society is a secular body. The church consists only of such as profess to have some experience of spiritual religion. The society consists of all who are willing to unite in the support of public worship-it being understood. only, that no person can thrust himself into its ranks, and obtain a voice in the administration of its affairs, without the express or implied consent of those who are already members. The church watches over the deportment of its members, they being all bound to help each other in the duties of the Christian life; and on proper occasions it censures or absolves from censure those under its care. The society has Some churches have a "standing com- nothing to do with church censures. mittee," who, with the pastor, prepare all the church belong the ordinances of Bapbusiness of this nature for the action of the tism and the Lord's Supper. The society church. Every complaint or accusation has no concern with the administration of against a brother is brought first to this either ordinance. The church has no propcommittee, and an attempt is made by them erty except its records, and its sacramentto adjust the difficulty, and to remove the al vessels, and the eleemosynary contrioffence without bringing the matter to the butions received and dispensed by its deachurch. If that attempt is unsuccessful, the cons. The society is a body incorporated committee, having investigated the case, by law for the purpose of holding and manhaving heard the parties and the witnesses, aging any property necessary for the supreport to the church the facts of the case, port of public worship, or designated by with their own opinion as to what ought to donors for that use. The church has its be done. The committee are never invest-pastor and deacons, and sometimes its comed with the power of inflicting any church

censures.

To

mittees, for the management of particular departments of the church business. The society has its clerk, its treasurer, and its prudential committee, elected every year; and the pastor of the church is also the minister and religious teacher of the society; and every family of the congregation is considered as belonging to his charge.

6. The arrangements among the Congregationalists of New-England for the support of public worship are in some points peculiar. The church, of which we have thus far spoken exclusively, is entirely a spiritual association. But it exists in an amicable connexion with a civil corporation called the parish, or the ecclesiastical The great advantage of this part of the society, which includes the congregation at system is, that it gives to every member large, or, more accurately, those adult mem- of the congregation an interest in its prosbers of the congregation who consent to be perity, and a voice in the management of a civil society for the support of public wor- its affairs, while at the same time it gives ship. This civil corporation is the propri- to the church every desirable facility for etor of the house of worship, of the par- keeping itself pure in doctrine and in pracsonage,* if there be one, and sometimes of tice. There is nothing to secularize the other endowments, consisting of gifts and church; no temptation to admit irreligious legacies which have from time to time been or unconverted men as members for the made for the uses for which the society ex- sake of causing them to take an interest ists. It can raise funds either by volunta- in the support of public worship; and no ry subscription, or by the sale or rent of the temptation inducing such men to seek adpews in its house of worship, or by assess-mission to the church. The pastor and * Or manse, as it is more commonly called in the place of worship are as much theirs as if they were communicants.

Scotland.