PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar andspelling from that old time, the word "their" is spelled as "thier" 17 times.It has been left there as "thier".
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When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord'sDay meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strongand comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, everySunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it theyworshipped until they built for themselves a meeting-house in 1648.
As soon as each successive outlying settlement was located and established,the new community built a house for the purpose of assembling therein forthe public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. CottonMather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to applysuch a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in thePuritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was asbitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling theSabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.
The settlers were eager and glad to build their meeting-houses; for thesehouses of God were to them the visible sign of the establishment of thattheocracy which they had left their fair homes and had come to New Englandto create and perpetuate. But lest some future settlements should be slowor indifferent about doing their duty promptly, it was enacted in 1675 thata meeting-house should be erected in every town in the colony; and if thepeople failed to do so at once, the magistrates were empowered to build it,and to charge the cost of its erection to the town. The number of members