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usual in church history, and especially in the history of the American church, is entitled to some study. 1. It is to be explained in part, but not altogether, by the high motive of a willingness to sacrifice personal preferences, habits, and convictions of judgment, on matters not of primary importance, to the greater general good of the community. 2. The Presbyterian polity is the logical expression of that Nationalist principle which was cherished by many of the Puritan fathers, which contended at the birth of New England with the mere Independency of the Pilgrims, and which found an imperfect embodiment in the platforms of Cambridge and Saybrook. The New England fathers in general, before their views suffered a sea-change in the course of their migrations, were Episcopalians and Presbyterians rather than Congregationalists; and if, in the course of this history, we shall find many in their later generations conforming to a mitigated form of the Westminster polity, or to a liberalized and Americanized Episcopal Church, instead of finding this to be a degeneration, we shall do well to ask whether it is not rather a reversion to type. 3. Those who grow up in a solidly united Christian community are in a fair way to be trained in the simplicity of the gospel, and not in any specialties of controversy with contending or competing sects. Members of the parish churches of New England going west had an advantage above most others, in that they could go simply as representatives of the church of Christ, and not of a sect of the church, or of one side of some controversy in which they had never had occasion to interest themselves. 4. The principle of congregational independency, not so much inculcated as acted on in New England, carries with it the corollary that a congregation may be Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Methodist, if it judges best, without thereby giving the individual Christian any justification for secession or schism. 5. The change, in the westward movement of Christian civilization, from the congregational order to the classical, coincides with the change in the frame of civil polity from town government to county government. In the beginning the civil state in New England was framed after the model of the church.[138:1] It is in accordance with the common course of church history that when the people were transported from the midst of pure democracies to the midst of representative republics their church ins
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