polity, from the English established church out of which they had
originally come. With the English Puritan they were one in faith,
while they differed little from him in theories of church government,
though much in practice. In America, the Plymouth colonists at once
set up the same church polity as in Leyden, one from which, as has
been shown, many of the English Puritans would have borrowed the
features of a converted or covenant membership and of local
self-government, or at least some measure of it. Eight years were to
elapse before the great Puritan exodus began. In those eight years
both parties, through the discipline of time, were to be brought still
nearer to a common standard of church life. When the vanguard of the
Puritans reached the Massachusetts shore, the Plymouth church stood
ready to extend the right hand of fellowship. How it did so, and how
it impressed itself upon the church life in the three colonies of
Massachusetts, New Haven, and Connecticut, is a part of the story of
the earliest period of colonial Congregationalism.


FOOTNOTES:

[a] "Our pious Ancestors transported themselves with regard unto
Church Order and Discipline, not with respect to the Fundamentals in
Doctrine."--Richard Mather, _Attestation to the Ratio
Disciplina_, p. 10.

"The issue on which the Pilgrims and Puritans alike left sweet fields
and comfortable homes and settled ways of the land of their birth for
this raw wilderness, was primarily an issue of politics rather than of
the substance of religious life."--G. L. Walker, _Some Aspects of
Religious Life in New England_, p. 19.