VI. CHURCH AND COMMUNITY COVENANTS

The church covenant idea was not simply popular in New England, it became the distinguishing characteristic of its life and organization. Originally intended as a basis for churches, it came in time to be used for the organization of towns. A notable instance is that of Guilford, Conn., established in 1639. The covenant was signed on shipboard before the colonists reached New England and was signed by twenty-five colonists. Doubtless this method would have become still more general had it not been that in 1631 the Massachusetts General Court prescribed that the franchise should be limited to church members. As therefore the church organization and the town organization were virtually identical there was seldom need of a separate covenant for the town and the Guilford covenant stands as a notable example of the application of the church covenant idea to town organization. The covenant is as follows:

We whose names are hereunder written, intending by God's gracious permission to plant ourselves in New England, and, if it may be, in the southerly part about Quinnipiack, we do faithfully promise each to each, for ourselves and our families, and those that belong to us, that we will, the Lord assisting us, sit down and join ourselves together in one entire plantation, and to be helpful each to the other in any common work, according to every man's ability, and as need shall require; As for our gathering together in a church way, and the choice of officers and members to be joined together in that way, we do refer ourselves until such time as it shall please God to settle us in our plantation.-Rev. J. B. Felt, in "Ecclesiastical History of New England," Vol. 1, pp. 406, 407.

Another, and important instance of the covenant used as the basis of organization both for community and church, was that of New Haven. Led by Davenport and Eaton, the foundScripture holds forth." "During these toilsome first months

ers had arrived at "their desired haven" in the early spring of 1638, but not until fourteen months later, after much prayer, study and discussion, did they consider the business fully mature for action. Soon after their landing they had made a provisional "plantation covenant" mutually pledging themselves to be governed in their future action relating either to the church or to the civil order, "by those rules which the of the new plantation," says Bacon, "while their views of polity in church and state were so deliberately canvassed, they were not without organization. The town was 'cast into several private meetings wherein they that dwelt most together gave their accounts one to another of God's gracious work upon them, and prayed together, and conferred to mutual edification, and had knowledge one of another.'" When at last they were assembled in Mr. Newman's barn the solemnities of the day were introduced by a sermon from Davenport on this text, "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars." By common consent it was agreed "that twelve men be chosen, that their fitness for the foundation-work may be tried;" and "that it be in the power of these twelve to choose out of themselves seven that shall be most approved of the major part, to begin the church." It was the 14th of June, 1639, when "the seven pillars" were hewn out. By covenant among themselves, and by receiving others into the same compact, it was held that a church was constituted on the 22d of August. "With one accord they accepted so much of the Separatist polity as to hold that the church existed by virtue of a mutual agreement (either tacit or expressed) among certain individual believers that they would be a church. It is easy to believe that the example and argument of the Plymouth Separatists had less to do in bringing them to this position, than the exigencies of the situation. To the extreme tenets of the extreme Separatists, renouncing fellowship with faithful ministers and worshippers in the

Church of England, the churches of New England generally gave no adhesion."-Bacon: Congregationalists, p. 51.

The most notable example of the use of the covenant idea in secular organization is afforded us in the relation of the Pilgrim covenant itself to that of the Mayflower Compact. That is, indeed, one of the notable incidents of modern history. The new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica tells that Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the Pilgrim monument in Provincetown, on August 7, 1907, and that somebody dedicated it three years later, but entirely forgets that it was William H. Taft who delivered the principal address on the day of dedication. We have been reading the addresses of both presidents, the one which President Taft addressed to the people who heard him, and the one which President Roosevelt addressed to Wall Street, and those of the eminent speakers who were with them on both occasions. All were addresses of note; and the one by Senator Lodge on the first occasionfor he was the one man who spoke on both occasions-was a notable interpretation of the Mayflower compact. But of them all on both days, only one address, that by President Eliot, caught the historic setting of the Mayflower compact.

President Roosevelt, as everybody knows, mixed up the Pilgrims and the Puritans, and then proceeded to hit the big corporations with a big stick. To this day they remember the Provincetown address. What he said about the corporations does not now concern us. What he said about the Puritans, whom he supposed landed at Provincetown, was this:

"We have gained a joy of living which the puritan had not and which it is a good thing for every people to have and to develop. Let us see to it that we do not lose what is more important still, that we do not lose the Puritan's iron sense of duty, his unbending, unflinching will to do the right as it was given him to see the light."

President Taft was more cautious and said nothing that disturbed business. He delivered a short and graceful address, in which he said:

"Other efforts had been made on the New England coast to found colonies for profit before this. But theirs was the first attempt by men seeking political and religious independence to secure an asylum in America where they might escape the fussy, meddling, narrow and tyrannical restraints imposed by the first of the Stuarts. Out of the logic of their intellectual processes there came ultimately religious freedom, while in their energy and intensity of their religious faith they uncomplainingly met the hardships that were inevitable in their search for liberty."

Ambassador James Bryce spoke appreciatively of America's heritage from the Pilgrims, and said:

"It was their loyalty to truth and to duty that moved them to quit their English homes and friends and face the rigors of a winter far harsher than their own in an untrodden land where enemies lurked in trackless forests. Faith and duty when wedded to courage, for without courage they avail little, are the most solid basis on which the greatness of a nation can rest."

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge delivered a really able address on the first occasion, and one of considerable value on the second. He had some difficulty in keeping out of his own way, but the two speeches were thoroughly worthy of the occasions on which they were delivered. In the first of them he spoke with fine penetration of the principles of the Mayflower Compact:

"All the men signed the compact. The compact did not establish representative government. That was to come later, and was something familiar to all Englishmen. It was not the beginning of representative government on this continent; that had taken place the year before, when the Virginia burg

esses were summoned by the Governor in accordance with the terms of a charter prepared in England. The men in the Mayflower were called to their task by no governor, and their compact was not drawn in England, but here. It was the voluntary and original act of those who signed it, and it embodied two great principles or ideas. The first was that the people themselves joined in making the compact each with the other. The second principle was that this agreement thus made was the organic law or constitution, to be changed only in great stress and after submission to the entire body politic and with the utmost precaution. The force and worth of this great conception have been attested since by almost countless constitutions of governments, both at home and abroad. Under that theory of government we have preserved the sober liberty, freedom and ordered liberty which have been the glory of the Republic. The little company of the Mayflower, pathetic in their weakness and suffering, imposing and triumphant in what they did, has belonged to the ages these many years. The work they wrought has endured, and we would not barter their inheritance for the heritage of kings. But that which was greatest in their work was the conception of the organic law embodied in the compact, a conception full of wisdom and patience, prefiguring a commonwealth in which order and progress were to go hand in hand.”

But for a real interpretation of the religious history lying back of the compact, it remained for President Eliot to refer to that, and to trace the evolution of the compact from the earlier covenant to the church. He said:

"In the cabin of the Mayflower, on the 21st day of November, 1620, all the adult males of the company signed a compact by which they set up a government which did not derive its powers, like all previous colonies, from a sovereign or parent state, but rested on the consent of those to be governed and on manhood suffrage. The act was apparently unpremeditated, and the language of the compact was direct and