Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899: Volume LIV, No. 5, March 1899 — John Shaqi
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899: Volume LIV, No. 5, March 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899: Volume LIV, No. 5, March 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
A parallel evolution takes place in church government. Where an
organized settlement is made on political principles, congregations
carry their minister with them, or rather the ministers carry their
congregations. Where the colony is normally founded and grows up as
the mother country grew, the first ministers, like the first preachers
of Christianity itself, are often laymen. In an interior county of
Virginia Morris read every Lord's day to his neighbors from the
writings of Luther and Bunyan, and a meeting house was at length built
for him; it is a typical instance of the beginnings of most churches.
The part of laymen remains long prominent in colonies. The Anglican
lay reader is everywhere a feature of colonial church life. In the
more flexible churches a storekeeper or retired sea captain will read
Spurgeon's sermons or preach excellent sermons of his own in an Otago
village or the Australian bush. Where missionaries have been sent out
to convert the heathen in a country afterward colonized, many of them
remain as ministers, as did Augustin and his monks in England. The
Presbyterian catechist likewise becomes a settled minister. Others
arrive. Men of independent character, like Dr. Lang, of Sydney,
resolve not to wait for any dead man's shoes in the kirk, but sail
beyond the seas to colonies where there is no minister of their own
denomination. Heretics, incompatibles, men who have failed, men whose
health has given way, emigrate in increasing numbers. Still, the
supply is long deficient. Clergymen were scarce in New York. A bounty
was offered to immigrants in Virginia. Six years after the
establishment of the Church of England in North Carolina there was
only one clergyman in the country. The few there are repeat the
history of the first Christian bishops and the early English monks in
serving a circuit of two, three, or more churches. The state comes to
the rescue by providing for their support. In England contributions
were at first voluntary; by the eighth century tithes were levied,
folk-land was granted, and private endowments were made. Just so was
the Church of England established and endowed in New York, Virginia,
and North Carolina; in Maryland a poll tax of forty pounds of tobacco
was levied for its support. In Connecticut and Massachusetts a church
was set up in each parish on Congregationalist principles by a vote of
the people, who elected the minister and voted his salary. So
uncertain was the tenure that in several States even the Anglican
minister was hired from year to year; and quite lately an Anglican
church in a British colony engaged its incumbent, as it might have
engaged its organist, for a term. In 1791 the Church of England in
Canada was partially established, and its clergy endowed with grants
of land. The Australasian colonies have pursued a very various policy.
By the Constitution Act of 1791 one seventh of the ungranted lands in
New South Wales was set apart for the support of a Protestant clergy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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