on the society is indicated by the peremptory
terms of a resolution adopted in 1710: "That a stop be put to the
sending any more missionaries among Christians, except to such places
whose ministers are, or shall be, dead or removed" (_ibid._, p. 69). A
good resolution, but not well kept.

[81:1] Corwin, p. 207. Undue stress should not be laid upon this formal
fact. The early New England colleges were primarily and mainly
theological seminaries and training-schools for the ministry. Their
professors were all theological professors. It is stated in Dwight's
"Life of Edwards" that James Pierpont, of New Haven, Edwards's
father-in-law, who died in 1714, lectured to the students of Yale
College, as professor of moral philosophy.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PLANTING OF THE CHURCH IN NEW ENGLAND--PILGRIM AND PURITAN.

The attitude of the Church of England Puritans toward the Separatists
from that church was the attitude of the earnest, patient, hopeful
reformer toiling for the removal of public abuses, toward the restless
"come-outer" who quits the conflict in despair of succeeding, and,
"without tarrying for any," sets up his little model of good order
outside. Such defection seemed to them not only of the nature of a
military desertion and a weakening of the right side, but also an
implied assertion of superior righteousness which provoked invidious
comparison and mutual irritation of feeling. The comparison must not be
pressed too far if we cite in illustration the feeling of the great mass
of earnest, practical antislavery men in the American conflict with
slavery toward the faction of "come-outer" abolitionists, who,
despairing of success within the church and the state, seceded from
both, thenceforth predicting failure for every practical enterprise of
reform on the part of their former workfellows, and at every defeat
chuckling, "I told you so."

If we should compare the English Separatist of the seventeenth century
with this American Separatist of the nineteenth, we should be in still
greater danger of misleading. Certainly there were those among the
Separatists from the Church of England who, in the violence of their
alienation and the bitterness of their sufferings, did not refrain from
sour and acrid censoriousness toward the men who were nearest them in
religious conviction and pursuing like ends by another course. One does
not read far in the history of New England without encountering
reformers of this ext