It is not necessary here to indicate the titles, contents, and authors of the several publications, preserved in our cabinets of relics, which contributed either to the dissension or to the pacification of the sometimes eccentric and heated, and of the always scrupulous, earnest, and independent parties in this work of ecclesiastical reconstruction. They have been so faithfully, admirably, and impartially digested by Dr. Dexter in the eighth of the lectures in his Congregationalism, as to present to the reader a full and intelligent view of the whole subject in its development and its results, while relieving him of what save to the fewest possible of historical students would be a repelling task. If, however, zeal or curiosity should dispose any one to peer through those dried and withered relics of the old polemics of a generation that drew its honey from the rocks, he will find much occasion to respect the acuteness and the persistency of men who, having taken the interests of their creed and piety into their own hands, determined to build on what was to them the only sure foundation. That foundation was “the Word.” If the Scriptures, as their prelatical foes insisted, were not intended to afford, and would not afford, a complete pattern of a method of institution and government of a Christian Church, the reader of those patiently wrought tractates will often be amazed as he notes how rich and fertile, how apt and facile, the contents of the sacred books were found to be, in furnishing the requisite material for argument and authority.
A controversial discussion was opened in 1861 by Hon. D. A. White, of Salem, by the publication of his New England Congregationalism in its Origin and Purity, illustrated by the Foundation and Early Records of the First Church in Salem, and Various Discussions pertaining to the Subject. To this work Rev. J. B. Felt, in the same year, made an answer: Reply to the New England Congregationalism of Hon. D. A. White. The principal interest of the matter of these two publications consists in their arguments upon the question whether Congregationalism as a system of polity in the constitution and government of churches carries with it, as an essential organic part, the doctrinal creed held by those who first adopted it. Dr. Dexter offers some suggestions on this point, arguing that the creed of the first Congregationalists belongs continuously to their system of polity. Of course, only constructive and inferential arguments can be brought to bear on this point. As we have seen, from the first manifestations of Nonconformity and Dissent in England, doctrinal themes did not at all enter into the controversy, it being taken for granted that there was accord upon them. But there certainly is no absolute, vital connection between a form of polity and a doctrinal system. There have come to be very many organizations and fellowships among Protestants which are substantially Congregational in their order, while widely diverse in their creeds.
In 1862, Mr. Felt published The Ecclesiastical History of New England.
Very full and curiously interesting information about the principles, persons, and events connecting the Puritan controversy in the Old World with the settlement of New England, may be found in the now well-nigh innumerable volumes containing the history of our oldest towns and churches. In their earlier pages or chapters these histories find the town and the church a common theme. Grateful occasions have been found in commemorations of bi-centennial or longer periods, from the settlement of municipalities or the foundation of parishes, to review the past, and to trace in the old land the men who brought here in their exile, for free and successful enjoyment, principles for which they had there suffered. The history of the Reformation and of Nonconformity might indeed be largely written from the pamphlets and the volumes called out by these local commemorations, so numerous during the last decade of years. Traces of matter of a similar character may also be found in the personal and historical references, in text or note, of the first volume of the Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Harvard University, by John Langdon Sibley. In connection with the public and formal observance of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the First Church of Boston,—in the fifth in order of the edifices in which it had worshipped,—a son of the present pastor (the seventeenth in the line of succession) prepared and published a work with the following title: History of the First Church in Boston. 1630-1880. By Arthur B. Ellis. With an Introduction by George E. Ellis. Illustrated. Boston, 1881. Pages lxxxviii + 356.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PILGRIM CHURCH AND PLYMOUTH COLONY.
BY FRANKLIN B. DEXTER,