settlers of Salem and Plymouth. On the voyage over, sickness, due to
the unwholesome salt in which some of their provisions had been
packed, broke out among the Salem colonists, and continuing in the
settlement, forced Endicott to send to Plymouth for Dr. Samuel
Fuller, deacon in the church there. He was skilled both in medicine
and in church-lore, for he had also been one of the two deacons in the
church during its Leyden days. He worked among the disabled at Salem,
and, later, among the sick colonists at Boston, paving the way for a
better understanding and closer friendship with the Plymouth
settlers. There had been a tendency to look upon these earlier
colonists as extremists. Their enemies in derision called them
"Brownists." They did in truth cling most firmly to Browne's doctrine
that the civil magistrate had no control over the church of Christ. In
their opinion, the function of the civil power in any union of church
and state was limited to upholding the spiritual power by approving
the church's discipline, since that had for its object the moral
welfare of the people. As Endicott and Fuller talked together of all
that in their hearts they both desired for the church of the future,
they realized that they agreed on many points. The Plymouth church
had been virtually under the sole rule of its elder, William Brewster,
during the greater part of its life in America, for its aged pastor
had died before he could rejoin his flock. Such government had tended
to modify the early insistence upon the principle that the power of
the church was "above that of its officers." This doctrine was
associated in men's minds more with Robert Browne, who had originated
it, than with Henry Barrowe, who had modified it, and it was towards
Barrowism that the larger body of Puritans were drawn.

The Salem people, in their isolation three thousand miles from the
home-land, felt the necessity of some form of church organization. As