This 'Pilgrim' emigration, as it was called, was Separatist, and Plymouth Colony numbered only about three hundred in population by the close of its first decade. It would have amounted to little had it not been unexpectedly and greatly reinforced. The policy of Charles I. impelled English Puritans to seek new homes across the ocean, and the result was the estab lishment of a Puritan colony at Salem in 1628. Acquaintance with the Plymouth Separatists brought recognition of the large similarity of their views, and when a church was formed at Salem, in 1629, it was organized on the Congre gational model. The example thus set was fol lowed in the formation of the succeeding Sla.Na ehusetts churches. The flood tide of Puritan immigration ran strong till the political situa tion altered in England in 1640: a ml it brought to New England such men as John Winthrop in 1630, Rev. John Eliot in 1631, Rev. John Cot ton in 1633, and lrev. Richard Slather in 1635, giving to Massachusetts a strong and numerous Congregational population. Slightly divergent views regarding the extent of the franehiAe, com bined with an ardent desire to secure a fertile territory, and more personal motives, led emi grants from Massachusetts under Rev. Thomas Hooker and John Haynes, to settle in Connecti cut in 1634-36: and in 1638 company, under Rev. John Davenport Theopbilus Eaton, founded New Haven. In 1643 the four Congregational colonies united in a confederacy for mutual protection.
The settlement of New England was followed by a time of planting and developing institu tions. The right to vote was restricted in :Massa chusetts to church members from 1631 to 1664, and in New Haven from 1639 to 1665. No such limitation ever obtained in Plymouth or Con necticut colonies. Schools received the early attention of the settlers, and the founding of Harvard in 1636, followed by the establishment of Vale in 1701. bore witness to the desire for a learned ministry always characteristic of Congregationalism, and were evidences of that int-erest in education which marks the denomina tion to the present day. Coug.ragalional polity was expounded in treatises by Cotton, Hooker, and Slather, and authoritatively defined by the Cambridge Synod in 1648. Missionary labors among the Indians, begun in 1646 by John Eliot in Newton, Mass., and by Thomas Mayhew on :Martha's Vineyard, were considerably successful, resulting, by 1674, in six churches, and bring ing about 4000 savages in some measure at least under the influence of the Gospel, though these results were robbed of permanence by the dying of the Indian race. The chief intellectual monu ment of this missionary activity is Eliot's Indian version of the Bible of 1663. The most impor tant internal discussion of seventeenth-century New England Congregationalism was that re garding the 'Half-Way Covenant'—the question being whether persons who had themselves been baptized in infancy because of their parents' church-membership. could in turn bring their own children to baptism when they themselves were subjects of no conscious regenerative change. The decision of a meeting of Massachu
setts and Connecticut ministers at Boston in 1657. and of a convention of the Massachusetts churches in 1662, was that such baptized, but not consciously regenerate, parents could bring their children to baptism and transmit the church status they themselves possessed, hut could not come to the Lord's Table or vote in church affairs. Hence the nickname 'half-way.' Though never universally adopted, the Half-Way Covenant was practiced by most New England churches till about the opening decade of the nineteenth century.
Though the majority of the Puritan party in England remained Presbyterian during the seventeenth century and controlled the West minster Assembly, English Congregationalism had five sturdy champions in that convention; and in the army, as well as among the people as a whole, it grew in favor as the struggle against the King continued. Under the sym pathetic rule of Cromwell it reached its widest extension in seventeenth-century England. After the Restoration it. suffered the disabilities inn posed on Dissenters in general, until partially relieved by the Toleration Act of 1680. Yet, in spite of the labors of such men as Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge, and the founding of 'academies' for ministerial as well as general training, the course of English Congregation alism in the eighteenth century, like the religious life of England as a whole, was one of spiritual decline, until awakened by the new spiritual impulse that came forth from the great Wesleyan revival. Quickened thus, the Congregational churches of England grew in numbers through out the latter half of the eighteenth century, awakened to fresh zeal for missionary service at home. and a new interest in missions abroad, and because increasingly conscious of their de nominational unity and desirous that that unity should find expression.
in America, the latter half of the seventeenth and the three opening decades of the eighteenth century saw a steady decline of the spiritual en thusiasm in which the churches of New England had been planted. New England life grew pro vincial in every respect. From this state of relative decadence the churches of New England were powerfully aroused by a series of `revivals' beginning at .Northampton, Mass., under the ministry of Jonathan Edwards in 1734 and ex tending throughout New England in 1740-42, in eonnection with a visit of Rev. George White held. The movement, known as the 'Great Awak ening,' stirred the spiritual life of the churches profoundly. but was so accompanied by physical demonstrations and other evidences of excitement as to lead to much division of judgment as to its merits. Partly owing to this division, and partly in consequence of the distraction accom panying the struggle for the politPeal possession of Canada and for American independence, the 'Great Awakening' was followed by a period of comparative religious inactivity, lasting till about 1790.