American vessels which are in these days found shooting over every sea, lie anchored in the distance. Here, along the margin of a creek, are a few tents, and some two or three rude huts, with the boxes and luggage that were landed yesterday, piled up around them; and here and there a little column of smoke, going up in the still morning air, shows that the inmates are in motion. Yet all is quiet; though the sun is up, there is no appearance of labor or business; for it is the Sabbath. By and by the stillness is broken by the beating of a drum; and from the tents and from the vessels, a congregation comes gathering around a spreading oak. The aged and the honored are seated near the ministers; the younger, and those of inferior condition, find their places farther back; for the defense of all, there are men in armor, each with his heavy unwieldy gun, and one and another with a smoking matchlock. What a congregation is this, to be gathered in the wilds of New England. Here are men and women who have been accustomed to the luxuries of wealth in a metropolis, and to the refinements of a court. Here are ministers who have disputed in the universities, and preached under Gothic arches in London. These men and women have come into a wilderness, to face new dangers, to encounter new temptations. They look to God; and words of solemn prayer go up, responding to the murmurs of the woods and of the waves. They look to God whose mercy and faithfulness have brought them to their land of promise, and for the first time since the creation, the echoes of these hills and waters are wakened by the voice of praise. The word of God is opened; and their faith and hope are strengthened for the conflicts before them, by contemplating the conflict and the victory of Him, who, in all things the example of his people, was once, like them, "led forth by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil.”*

Mr. Davenport's sermon on the first Sabbath after the landing, was from Matt. iv, 1," on the temptation in the wilderness." Kingsley, 80.

Of the many Puritans who came to New England at its first planting, none, save the Pilgrims of Plymouth, had renounced the Church of England, or separated themselves from its communion. None, save those of Plymouth, came with their ecclesiastical institutions already organized. The Church of which Robinson was pastor, and Brewster ruling elder, was formed in England, on the principle of separating from the establishment, and renouncing all connection with it; and when they came to America, they came as Englishmen indeed, loving their native country, but not as sustaining any relation to the Church of England, from which they had long before come out to be separate. The others, however, those of Salem and Boston, those of Connecticut, and those of New Haven, while they "came over with a professed intention of practising church reformation,"-came not as separatists; they disavowed such an imputation as slanderous; they declared that "they did not separate from the Church of England, nor from the ordinances of God there, but only from the corruptions and disorders there." In England, the difference between the separatists and the non-conformists was a difference of no trivial moment. The practical question upon which they were divided, was a question involving great principles. To the separatist, the mere non-conformist was one who had communion with idolatry, and with a systematized usurpation of the rights of Jesus Christ as head of the Church. To the non-conformist, the separatist was one who divided the body of Christ, and tore himself away not only from that which was corrupt and disorderly in the Church, but from the Church itself, and from the ordinances there. And when men who suffer in the same cause, are divided in respect to the great practical principles by which that cause is to be promoted, the division cuts to the quick, and often produces the most painful and lasting alienations. But in the free air of New England, the division between the separatist and the non-conformist was at an end. The Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Salem greeted each other with a cordial welcome, and forgot

that there had ever been a difference between them. They all felt, whether upon the Bay or upon the River, whether at Plymouth or at New Haven, that they had come into the same wilderness, in the face of the same dangers, for the same high end, "freedom to worship God"-freedom to build the house of God according to the pattern of God's word. And here by their united prayers, by their free and strenuous investigations and their harmonious counsels, by their manly toils, and their magnanimous self-denials, under a sense of great responsibility to God for his honor and for the welfare. of other generations, they framed a system of ecclesiastical order, and a system of civil government, each perfectly congenial to the other, and each without a parallel or a model, save the pattern which God showed them in the mount, as they communed with the Spirit of his wisdom recorded in his word.

Thus it was that New England was planted. Thus it was that this Church was placed here in the wilderness. The planting of North America upon merely mercenary and selfish principles had been attempted once and again, and had failed. Our fathers and predecessors came under the influence of higher motives, and of a holier inspiration. They came, actuated by a great and sublime idea,-an idea from the word and mind of God,-an idea that made them courageous to attempt, wise to plan, strong to suffer, and dauntless to persevere. Their souls were exalted to a perception of the grandeur of their undertaking and of the vast results that were suspended on its success. They were inspired by a living sympathy with the designs of that Almighty providence, which led them into this boundless wilderness, that for them the wilderness and the solitary place might be glad, and the desert rejoice abundantly with joy and singing. Thus they could write upon their banner those words of Puritan faith and devotion, "He who transplanted us, sustains us." Whoever looks upon the armorial bearings of Connecticut, the three vines which God brought out of Egypt and planted, for which he prepared room, before which he cast

out the heathen, which he caused to take deep root, till they sent out their boughs to the river and their branches to the sea, and till the hills were covered with their shadow, and their boughs were like the cedars of God,-whoever reads that simple yet inspiring motto, brighter from age to age with glorious remembrances,―may see for what ends, in what spirit, and by whose power and guidance, our fathers came into this wilderness.*

Let their spirit be ours. Woe to that man who amid the memorials, and enjoying the fruits of their toils and sufferings, breathing the air every murmur of which seems to whisper their reverend names-woe to the man who amid their altars and upon their graves, forsakes their God-rejects their Saviour and recreant to their principles, lives only to himself instead of living for God, for posterity, and for the world.

* I know not to whom we are indebted for the exquisite device and motto of the arms of Connecticut; but in the absence of evidence it is not unnatural to suppose that the three vines-alluding to those three independent settlements, the river towns, the Saybrook fort, and the New Haven jurisdictionand the motto, Qui transtulit sustinet, are a specimen of the good taste of Governor Winthrop, whose diplomatic skill and personal favor with Charles II, obtained the free charter of 1662; and whose wisdom and popularity, united so happily, under that charter, a people otherwise greatly divided.

DISCOURSE II.

THE FOUNDATIONS LAID IN CHURCH AND COMMONWEALTH.FORMED IN MR. NEWMAN'S BARN.-THE PU

CONSTITUTION

RITANS.

PROV. ix. 1.-Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.

THE first settlers of New England generally came hither, not for the improvement of their outward condition and the increase of their estates, not for the sake of putting in practice any abstract theory of human rights or of civil government, not even for mere liberty of conscience, but for the one great purpose of extending the kingdom of God, and promoting their welfare, and the welfare of their posterity, and the welfare of the world, by planting Christian institutions, in the purest and simplest form, upon this virgin soil. It was this purpose, which gave to their enterprise its character of heroic dignity. It was from this high purpose, that they derived the resolution which carried the enterprise through all its discouragements, and the faith which ensured its success. It was this one great purpose of theirs, which determined the form, the spirit, and the working of their civil institutions. They had seen, in their native country, the entire subjection of the Church to the supreme power of the civil state; reformation beginning, and ending, according to the caprices of the hereditary sovereign; the Church neither purified from superstition, ignorance, and scandal, nor permitted to purify itself; ambitious, time-serving, tyrannical men, the minions of the court, appointed to high places of prelacy; and faithful, skillful, and laborious preachers of the Word of God, silenced, imprisoned, and deprived of all means of subsistence, according to the interests and aims of him, or her, who by the law of inheritance, happened to be at the head of the kingdom. All this seemed to them not only preposterous,