Produced by Distributed Proofreaders PG Editor's Note: In addition to various other variations of grammar and spelling from that old time, the word "their" is spelled as "thier" 17 times. It has been left there as "thier". THE SABBATH IN PURITAN NEW ENGLAND by Alice Morse Earle Seventh Edition To the Memory of my Mother. Contents. I. The New England Meeting-House II. The Church Militant III. By Drum and Horn and Shell IV. The Old-Fashioned Pews V. Seating the Meeting VI. The Tithingman and the Sleepers VII. The Length of the Service VIII. The Icy Temperature of the Meeting-House IX. The Noon-House X. The Deacon's Office XI. The Psalm-Book of the Pilgrims XII. The Bay Psalm-Book XIII. Sternhold and Hopkins' Version of the Psalms XIV. Other Old Psalm-Books XV. The Church Music XVI. The Interruptions of the Services XVII. The Observance of the Day XVIII. The Authority of the Church and the Ministers XIX. The Ordination of the Minister XX. The Ministers XXI. The Ministers' Pay XXII. The Plain-Speaking Puritan Pulpit XXIII. The Early Congregations The Sabbath in Puritan New England. I. The New England Meeting-House. When the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth they at once assigned a Lord's Day meeting-place for the Separatist church,--"a timber fort both strong and comely, with flat roof and battlements;" and to this fort, every Sunday, the men and women walked reverently, three in a row, and in it they worshipped 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 for the public worship of God; this house was called a meeting-house. Cotton Mather said distinctly that he "found no just ground in Scripture to apply such a trope as church to a house for public assembly." The church, in the Puritan's way of thinking, worshipped in the meeting-house, and he was as bitterly opposed to calling this edifice a church as he was to calling the Sabbath Sunday. His favorite term for that day was the Lord's Day.