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