of carrying the gospel of Christ into these foreign parts, amongst those people that as yet have had no knowledge nor taste of God, as also to procure unto themselves and others a quiet and comfortable habitation, were amongst other things the inducements unto the undertakers of the enterprise." And the compact on board the May Flower opens with the assurance and continues for the furtherance, of their great undertaking "for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith, and honor of their king and country, to plant the first colony." And the schedule of reasons and considerations for their colonizing, given at the close of the same volume of the journal in 1621, reads thus: "seeing we daily pray for the conversion of the heathens, we must consider whether there be not some ordinary means and course for us to take to convert them, or whether prayer for them be only referred to God's extraordinary work from heaven. Now it seemeth unto me that we ought also to endeavour and use the means to convert them; and the means cannot be used, unless we go to them or they come to us. To us they cannot come; our land is full. To them we may go, their land is empty."

Now to these proofs let there be added Gov. Bradford's declaration among the reasons of the Pilgrims for leaving the Old World, of "a great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the Kingdom of Christ in these remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but as stepping stones unto others for performing of so great a work."

Hutchinson might well say in his History of Massachusetts, "whether Britain would have had any colonies in America, if religion had not been the grand inducement, is doubtful." Every attempt to plant settlements in New England from ordinary and secular motives had failed. God would have one spot in the world peopled from a

sense of duty, and a supreme regard, not to pounds and shillings, but to his glory. He would have one spot where a race should reside, whose fear towards God should not be taught by the precept of man; that mean, craven, slavish tetter of iniquity and bigotry, with which, just then, almost the whole world was crusted.

One of their reasons for breaking out from that crust was that they might keep God's Sabbath, not man's, and keep it through the fear of God, not by the precept of man, either in books of sports or ceremonial rubrics. The Sabbath was sadly and generally profaned in Holland, while they dwelt, and the inefficacy of all their efforts to stop that profanation, with the pernicious effect of such examples upon their children, were strong inducements moving them to the determination of a settlement in the New World. Mr. Winslow details, among other considerations impelling them to that step, the painful discovery "how little good we did, or were like to do, to the Dutch in reforming the Sabbath, how unable there to give such education to our children as we ourselves had received." With such convictions and such motives, amidst all these estrangements from the comforts and privileges of their native, and afterwards adopted land, how powerfully and sustainingly would some of the promises of God come to their case and meet their souls! "If thou turn away the foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my Holy Day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the Holy of the Lord, honorable; and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob, thy Father; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

Surely, they would say, when this promise as a flame of fire shone before them, though Abraham be ignorant of us,

and Israel acknowledge us not, yet will God fulfil unto us this covenant. "And the sons of the stranger that join themselves to the Lord to serve him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the Sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant, even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer.”

CHAPTER XIV.

THE FIRST NEW ENGLAND MEETING-HOUSE.

JOYFUL in my House of Prayer! In all places where I record my name, I will come unto thee and bless thee! And in his Living Temple God records his name; and where two or three are gathered in that name, there is his House of Prayer. What a marvellous transfiguration from the local into the universal, from the earthly and formal into the spiritual, from altars into hearts, took place when He came, in whom types and shadows, vails and engravings in stone, and the places and the ceremonies of priestly authority and sanctity, were done away, and the ministration of the Spirit for the glory of the Lord was set open in renewed hearts, changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord!

In four verses in the New Testament, the power passes from the Temple and the Priesthood, and is enshrined wherever there are humble, believing, praying souls, be it in Cathedrals or Conventicles, in large upper rooms in Judea beset by spies and persecutors of Church and State, or in the cottages and hiding places of the Pilgrims in England, for whom the prison and the scaffold were prepared and destined; or in their log houses in the wilderness, where, as free as the birds of the air, regardless of human interdictions, they could worship God.

"Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith unto her, woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”

How beautiful, how solemn, how glorious, how simple is this designation! Spirit and Truth, that is God's Temple, that is God's House of Prayer, and the proofs of a place in it, the presence of living worshippers, are the epistles of Christ, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart. Such was the first sanctuary in 1620 in New England. The groves there were God's first external temples, under the roof of Heaven. By their watch-fires on the land, and in their open shallop on the sea, our Fathers worshipped; and in the cabin of the May Flower, and in all their perilous expeditions, before yet the foundation of a hut was laid. It was not the temple first, the consecrated temple, and the heart afterwards, but the heart first and the temple afterwards.

We love that old-fashioned, Pilgrim, New-England designation of the Meeting-house. It seems to carry us back to a time, when to have a meeting of any kind, was to worship God; where the people were all Christians, and their meetings for devotion were so much the habit, the joy, and the main business of life, as to Christianize even the generic idea of a public assembly. The Sabbath meetings of our fathers began in the first dwelling-house; where the first household prayer ascended to God, there also did the colonists gather for their Sabbath and social services. Just so, of a long time, did Christ's early churches gather together and worship in Jerusalem, in Antioch, in Ephesus,