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prayer, preparatory to their entering into a church covenant, which, on the 28th of June, they solemnly ratified and signed in the following terms :

66 THE COVENANT.

"It is manifest by God's word, that God alwaies was pleased to walk in a way of covenant with his people, he promising to be their God, and they promising to be his people, separated from the world and the pollutions thereof, as may appear, Deut. xxix. 10, 11, &c.; Isaiah lvi. 3, &c.; Acts v. 13, 14. We, therefore, whose names are underwritten, being desirous, in the feare of God, to worship and serve him, according to his revealed will, doe freely, solemnely, and jointly, covenant with the Lord, in the presence of his saints and angels,

"1. That we will for euer acknowledge and auouch God for our God, in Jesus Christ.

2. That we will alwaies indeauour, through the grace of God assisting us, to walke in all his waies and ordinances, according to his written word, which is the only sufficient rule of good life for every man; neither will we suffer ourselves to be polluted by any sinful waies, either publike or priuate, but abstaine from the very appearance of euil, giuing no offence to the Jew, or Gentile, or churches of Christ. "3. That we will in all loue, improue our communion as brethren, by watching ouer one another, and as neede shall be counsel, admonish, reproue, comfort, relieue, assist, and beare with one another, humbly submitting ourselues to the gouernment of Christ in his churches.

"4. Lastly we doe not promise these things in our own, but in Christ's strength: neither doe we confine ourselues to the words of this couenant, but shall at all times account it our duty to embrace any further light or trueth, which shall be reuealed to us out of God's word.

"William Bridge, Samuel Alexander, John Leverington, Christopher Steygold, James Gedny, Samuel Clarke, William Starfe, William Officiall, John Eyre, Francis Olley, John Balderstone.

"Note. At this time, Daniel Bradford was absent, being employed in the army, and William Officiall having expressed his desires to the brethren, joyned in the worke."

By the spring of 1644, they found how difficult their united communion was, and therefore the brethren resident in Norwich wrote a tender and most reasonable letter to their "dear brethren and companions in suffering, both in our own and a stranger land," in which they thus state their position: "You (our brethren of Yarmouth) conceive. yourselves cast into a settled condition by God's providence, and we the brethren of Norwich are stayed here by the liberty and opportunity presented to us by God's providence, and concurring with our former engagements and principles mutually laid by yourselves and us. From which two ariseth a necessitated (yet most afflictive) condition of separating us from you, whose presence and communion, under God, was ever the comfort of our lives; and what throbbings of heart such a separation maketh between us, we leave to yourselves to judge, who (it may be) have as deep, if not a deeper affectionate share in it than ourselves. But we desire to learn to submit to the will of God with

you." The letter from the brethren at Yarmouth reciprocated all their expressions of affection and regret, and consented to their enjoying an Independent church organisation.

Mr. William Bridge became pastor of the church at Yarmouth; and the brethren at Norwich, on the 26th of July, 1647, unanimously elected Mr. Timothy Armitage to preside over them in the Lord, which he continued to do with great usefulness, till his lamented decease in December, 1655.

"Many were their hardships, and strenuous the opposition they encountered. But they were not left without a reward. They were permitted to behold, even during their lifetime, a bright promise of a future day. William Bridge and his fellow-sufferers lived to see the execrable Book of Sports burned by the common hangman. They witnessed the impeachment and imprisonment of Bishop Wren, who, in his time, was brought to account for unwarrantable severities in his diocese." They saw the hoary Archbishop Laud, who, for more than forty years, had laboured to extinguish religious liberty in England, brought to the block; and they beheld what afforded them unmixed delight, extension of that system of church polity which they sincerely loved. "Before the year 1652, the churches at Walpole, Bury, Wrentham, and Woodbridge, had been founded. Between 1652 and 1653, messengers were sent from Norwich to settle churches at Wymondham, North Walsham, Guestwick, Tunstead, Stalham and Ingham, Edgefield, Godwick, and Bradfield. Soon after, churches were settled at Denton, Wattisfield, and in other towns, so that the word of God had free course, and was glorified.'”* But here we must close our remarks for the present, reserving, till another opportunity, some curious documentary illustrations of their social influence anterior to the Restoration.

*We have been much indebted in the compilation of this article to two highly interesting publications of the Rev. Andrew Reed, B.A. the able and devoted pastor of the church assembling in the Old Meeting House, Norwich. The first, "A Sketch of the History of the Church," assembling there, and prefixed to his ordination service in 1841, and the second, "Congregationalism in Norwich Two Hundred Years ago. Two discourses delivered on the occasion of the Second Centenary at the Old Meeting House, Norwich, on Lord's-day, February 27, 1842." The documents and citations not otherwise acknowledged have been borrowed from these pages; and it is to us we confess not a little refreshing to find in one of our younger ministers such devotedness to the memories and principles of the Congregational confessors of the seventeenth century.-EDITOR.

WHAT ARE MINISTERS TO DO IN THE GREAT
CONTROVERSY OF THE AGE?

[We transcribe the following seasonable article from the pages of a highly respectable periodical, published at New Haven, by our Congregational brethren of New England, and entitled The NEW ENGLANDER; and we take this opportunity to say, that it is well adapted for circulation amongst intelligent readers in this country.-EDITOR.]

THERE are abundant indications that the great controversy of the age, perhaps the final controversy before the conversion of the world, is to be that between a formal and a spiritual religion; between the elements of Popery and the elements of Protestantism. These two systems have been brought of late into frequent and vigorous collision. Truths long since thought to be settled are again called in question; principles on which the faith of successive generations has reposed, are by turns assailed and undermined. We are beginning to discover that the Reformation was not so thorough, nor so generally successful as we have hitherto supposed; and that instead of resting among the spoils of victory, we must gird ourselves for battle.

The sturdy strokes of Luther, indeed, broke the right arm of the papacy in Europe, and drove Leo the Magnificent, humbled and vanquished, from the field. But the papacy, though wounded, did not die. Blows and wounds seemed only to arouse it from the indolence consequent upon a long and quiet supremacy, and to stimulate it to the defence of its prescriptive rights; or if these should be no longer tenable, to inflame it with a zeal for new acquisitions. The "mother of harlots," driven from sanctuaries which she had defiled through ages of darkness, went forth to cover the earth with her Cerberean offspring.

The Roman pontiffs, finding that their dominion in Europe was waning before the rising sun of liberty and truth, turned to other quarters of the globe, and endeavoured, by the propagation of the "Catholic faith" among the heathen, to compensate for its declension throughout Christendom. Nor was the craft of Satan at all inadequate to the emergency. Embroiling the Reformers in disputes concerning minute points of faith, diverting their minds from the spread of the truth to the formation of creeds and sectarian systems of theology, he at the same time infused into the Romish church the spirit of propagandism, and in the person of a Spanish knight, raised up a new order of zealots to revive the dying hierarchy, and make its name and power co-extensive with the world. The Society of Jesus" were the first missionaries of modern times; and while the Reformers were exhausting their resources upon Germany, France, and Britain, the Jesuits were employing their casuistry, their cunning,

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their wealth, and their power, in persuading or coercing the "infidels" of Africa, America, and India, into submission to the papal see. Xavier, the apostle and saint," penetrated to the farthest Indies, planted "the church" in the empire of Japan, and died whilst on his way to mark the "celestials" themselves with the sign of the cross. Thus it was that the great battle of the Reformation ended.

Popery, driven in part from the field which she had held for centuries, sought to retrieve her honour aud fortune in distant climes; while Protestantism busied herself in securing her conquests, or in preparing for future wars. The two systems indeed were still antagonistic; they often came into fierce and bloody conflict; but as the temporal power of the pope declined, their collisions became less frequent, till each occupied its own field with little molestation from the other. Protestantism, however, has continued to increase in resources and strength, and to become more and more active in the spread of her principles. The missionary fire has been gradually kindled in her bosom. A zeal less frantic, and more pure than that of Xavier and Loyola, now animates her sons in a far holier cause; and they have gone forth at length to do what the Reformers left unattempted, what Romanism has attempted in vain,-to evangelise the world. This stupendous undertaking has stirred up afresh the jealousy and rivalry of the Romish church; and thus the two systems are brought to confront each other more distinctly and more universally, than at any period since the Reformation. The Protestant missionary finds himself everywhere by the side of the Jesuit; the preacher is called to encounter the priest. The "two editions" of Christianity must be presented to the heathen side by side, that they may choose not only between paganism and the Gospel, but between the religion of Christ and the religion of Rome. The attentive reader of our missionary journals cannot have failed to mark how uniformly within the last few years evangelical missionaries in every quarter have complained of the interference of the emissaries of the papal church with their labours, by falsehood and intrigue, by bribery and corruption, by denunciation and even violence, sanctioned in some instances by the authority of a great and formidable nation, which seems anxious to atone for the expulsion of the Jesuits from her own soil, by introducing them among converted savages at the point of the bayonet.

Besides all this, those who are labouring in faith and hope to infuse the life of the Gospel into the dead mass of formalism bearing the name of Christianity in the east, are often thwarted in their endeavours, by the insidious calumnies of a class of men claiming to be the ambassadors of the true church of Christ, who represent them as schismatics and virtual impostors, and who give the right hand of fellowship to the ignorant and superstitious prelates of a degenerate hierarchy, rather than to their own countrymen and brethren in the

Lord. Facts such as these lead us to the painful conclusion, that even out of the Romish church, there are those who would sustain and propagate, in preference to the pure and simple doctrines of the Gospel, that formalism, that system of "church principles," which has the essential characteristics of Romanism. The interest of this class of persons in Mar Yohannan,* for example, turned altogether upon the question whether he was a genuine bishop, whether his Persian cloak was an apostolic vestment, and whether his church regarded the sacred number three in the orders of her ministry. Instead of inquiring of him, "What is the condition of your people in that land of heathens? Is there a church there? Are there good men? Are there tokens of the influence of the Holy Spirit? What is the state of knowledge and instruction? What are the morals?"-questions which Christian benevolence would have been forward to suggest; their first and invariable inquiry was, "How many orders have you?" If the bishop answered Three, the word operated as a charm to allay their anxiety; it not only made them sure of his salvation, but gave them new assurance of their own. Thenceforth nothing could disturb their peace, or awaken their solicitude, in respect to the Nestorians, but the thought that that simple and grateful people, through their intercourse with "separatists," might learn to value the Gospel more than their hierarchy; a living, spiritual faith in Christ, more than a "valid ministry and ordinances." Indeed, it seems to have been seriously apprehended, that the offence which they had already committed against the church, in allowing the Presbyterians to hold an ordination in one of their consecrated places, would be sufficient to consign the entire people to "uncovenanted mercy." ‡

While formalism is thus coming into collision with an evangelical faith upon missionary ground, it is entrenching itself more strongly in Christendom. Popery, deeming centuries of exile from her ancient seats at Canterbury, Oxford, and Westminster, a sufficient penance for her past indiscretions, is attempting to regain possession of the soil of England. She looks upon the abbeys, the minsters, the cathedrals which, notwithstanding the shocks of successive revolutions, remain

* Mar Yohannan is a bishop of the Nestorian Christians, who was deputed by his brethren to visit the United States to thank the churches for having sent missionaries, and request them to send more. The Episcopalians in America were all upon the qui vive on the arrival of the Asiatic bishop amongst them, and sought to make his presence subserve their denominational opinions. One good clergyman discoursed on the resemblance between Mar Yohannan's cloak and the Episcopal robe. But unfortunately he only wore the common Persian cloak, as used alike by all sects and classes in Persia; nothing in his dress, but his cap, being peculiar and distinctive of his ministerial office.-EDITOR.

† Mar Yohannan's letter, in Mr. Perkins' Residence in Persia, p. 365. See N. Y. Churchman, of Nov. 12, 1842.

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