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 priests also, and can find time to visit their dioceses only by employing an assistant preacher, or rector, to fill their places when they are engaged in their visitations. Their revenues do not much exceed, in some instances do not equal, those of many of their clergy.

As for the Puseyite or Tractarian doctrines, 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 favorable to them, as understood in America. But there is not one who adopts the extreme views put forth of late years by some advocates 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 this progress is much smaller than has been supposed. Among the laity there is scarcely any sympathy with these semi-popish doctrines, and I can not believe that they will make much advance 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, 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 can not 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.

* 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 by a Mr. Jacob Sherred. Such beneficence deserves to be gratefully commemorated.

A large and most respectable body of dissenters in Great Bri merly known as Independents, have of late preferred the Congregational, but the differences between American Cong alism and that which bears the same name in England are, respects, highly important. Some of these differences, as we points of agreement, will appear in the statements that follow

New England is the principal seat of the Congregational in America. This is the region which the Puritans plante first half of the seventeenth century; and here they have 1 the structure and institutions of society, and upon the opin manners of the people, the deepest impression of their pecul acter. In all these States, with the exception of Rhode Isl Congregationalists are more numerous than any other sect Massachusetts and Connecticut they are probably more n than all the others united.

Out of New England the Congregationalists have not un been zealous to propagate their own peculiar forms and inst Of the vast multitudes of emigrants from New England in States, the great majority have chosen to unite with churche Presbyterian connection, rather than to maintain their own p ties at the expense of increased division in the household of f so doing, they have followed the advice and fallen in with rangements of the associated bodies of Congregational pa New England. Yet in the States of New York, Ohio, M Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and California, many congregation the forms of administration which have descended to them New England fathers, and do not come into connection wit the Presbyterian judicatories. Since the division in the Pres Church in 1838, the number of such congregations is increas

The whole number of Congregational churches in the States is probably not far from two thousand four hundred a of which more than one thousand two hundred are in New 1 The number of ministers is two thousand three hundred and seven, of whom one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight tors, and the members or communicants may be stated at t dred and ten thousand. This estimate does not include those originally or nominally Congregational, which have rejected called the doctrines of the Reformation. These churches a known by their distinctive title, Unitarian. The churches o scription are nearly all in Massachusetts; a few are in Maine three in New Hampshire, one or more in Vermont, as many i Island, and one, in a state of suspended animation, in Con Out of New England there are perhaps fifteen to twenty chu

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 compelled to flee from their native country, embarking by stealth and at night as fugitives from justice, as we have related in detail elsewhere. But those bodies of emigrants far more numerous and far better prepared and furnished, which, from 1628 onward, planted Salem and Boston, Hartford, and New Haven-the emigrating Puritans, who were the actual founders of New England, and whose character gave direction to its destiny— were men who considered themselves as belonging to the Church of England till their emigration into the American wilderness dissolved the tie. They were Puritans in England, it is true, but the Puritans were a party within the Church contending for a purer and more thorough renovation, and not a dissenting body, with institutions of their own, and separated from the Church. The ministers who accompanied the Puritan emigrants, or, rather, who led them into the wilderness, and who were the first pastors of the churches in New England, were, before their emigration, almost without exception, ministers of the Church of England, educated at the universities, episcopally ordained, regularly inducted into livings; Nonconformists, it is true, as refusing to wear the white surplice, to use the sign of the cross in baptism, or other ceremonies which seemed to them superstitious, but yet exercising their ministry as well as they could under many disabilities and annoyances. Cotton and Wilson, of Boston; Hooker and Stone, of Hartford; Davenport and Hooke, of New Haven-not to extend the catalogue-were all beneficed clergymen before their emigration. These men having emigrated to what were then called "the ends of the earth," and supposing that their expatriation had made them free from that ecclesiastical bondage to which they had been "subjected unwillingly," set themselves to study, with their 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

* 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.

† See book ii., chap. i.

did from Presbyterianism on the other. After the Puritans in ica had set up their church-order, the Puritans in England, become a majority in Parliament, attempted to reduce the lished Church of that nation to the Presbyterian form; and not till a still later period that Congregationalism, or, as it wa generally called there, Independency, began to make a figure the favor of Cromwell.

Thus it appears that Congregationalism in America, inst being an offshoot from that in England, is the parent stoc Congregational church in England, it is believed, dates its ex so far back as the Act of Uniformity in 1662; but many of th England churches have records of more than two hundred ye

It may also be remarked that American Congregationalists 66 dissenters," ," nor were they ever such. In New England t gregational churches were for a long time the ecclesiastical es ment of the country, as much as the Presbyterian Church is Scotland. The whole cconomy of the civil State was arrang reference to the welfare of these churches; for the State exist the country had been redeemed from the wilderness, for th purpose. At first no dissenting assembly, not even if adopti ritual and order of the Church of England, was tolerated. ward dissenters of various names were permitted to worship pleased, and were not only released from the obligation to con toward the support of the established religion, but were so i rated by law that each congregation was empowered to tax members for the support of its own religious ministrations. E until the principle was adopted that the support of religion among the duties of the civil government, the Congregati maintained this precedence-that every man who did not p contribute to the support of public worship in some other for liable to be taxed as a Congregationalist. Thus, though som members of one denomination in New England occasionally a speak of the Congregationalists around them as "dissenters who do so only expose themselves to ridicule. Every man se if there be such a thing as "dissent" in New England, the Ej ians, with the Baptists and the Methodists, and all the oth who have at different times separated themselves from the e tical order originally established on the soil, and still flourishin are the dissenters.

The Congregationalists differ from most other communions they have no common authoritative standards of faith and other than the Holy Scriptures. Yet their system is well among themselves, and from the beginning they have spared

sonable 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 Norton, too, teacher of the church in Ipswich, and afterward settled in Boston, gave to the Reformed Churches of Europe, in 1646, a full account of the ecclesiastical 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 churches, called together at Cambridge (a town near Boston) by the invitation of the civil authorities of Massachusetts, drew up a scheme of church discipline, which, from the place at which the synod met, was called the "Cambridge Platform." This platform, however, though highly approved at the time, and still quoted with great deference, was never an authoritative rule; and at this day some of its principles have become entirely obsolete. In 1708, a synod, or council, representing the pastors and churches of Connecticut, was assembled at Saybrook by the invitation of the Legislature of that colony. By this Connecticut synod a system was formed, differing in some respects from the Cambridge Platform, and designed to supply what were deemed the deficiencies of that older system. The Saybrook Platform was adopted by the churches of Connecticut, and was for many years in that colony a sort of standard recognized by law. Its application was gradually modified, and its stringency relaxed or increased by various local rules and usages, and by successive acts of the Legislature; and at the present time this platform alone is a very inadequate account of the ecclesiastical order of Connecticut.

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 recognizes 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 meeting of the Greek word èxxiŋola, 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