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Alice Morse Earle
Sabbath in Puritan New England
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664617613
Table of Contents
The New England Meeting-House.
The Tithingman and the Sleepers.
The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House.
The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims.
Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms.
The Interruptions of the Services.
The Authority of the Church and the Ministers.
The Ordination of the Minister.
The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit.
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