Sabbath in Puritan New England

								


Produced by Distributed Proofreaders

PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar and
spelling from that old time, the word "their" is spelled as "thier" 17 times.
It has been left there as "thier".

THE SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND
by
Alice Morse Earle
Seventh Edition

To the Memory of my Mother.

Contents.

     I.  The New England Meeting-House

    II.  The Church Militant

   III.  By Drum and Horn and Shell

    IV.  The Old-Fashioned Pews

     V.  Seating the Meeting

    VI.  The Tithingman and the Sleepers

   VII.  The Length of the Service
VIII.  The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House

    IX.  The Noon-House

     X.  The Deacon's Office

    XI.  The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims

   XII.  The Bay Psalm-Book
XIII.  Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms

   XIV.  Other Old Psalm-Books

    XV.  The Church Music

   XVI.  The Interruptions of the Services
XVII.  The Observance of the Day
XVIII.  The Authority of the Church and the Ministers

   XIX.  The Ordination of the Minister

    XX.  The Ministers

   XXI.  The Ministers' Pay
XXII.  The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit
XXIII.  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's
Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong
and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every
Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they
worshipped 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 for
the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton
Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply
such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the
Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as
bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the
Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.
The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these
houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that
theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England
to create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slow
or indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 that
a meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if the
people 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 members
necessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in the
Platform of Church Discipline: "A church ought not to be of greater number