I.

The New England Meeting-House.



When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord's
Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong
and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every
Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they
worshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.

As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,
the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein for
the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton
Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply
such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the
Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as
bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the
Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.

The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for these
houses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of that
theocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New England
to create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slow
or indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 that
a meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if the
people failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,
and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of members
necessary to establish a separate church was very distinctly given in the