JAMES J. TRACY. (Read before the Massachusetts Sons of American Revolution, 1904.) A BIT OF CHURCH HISTORY It is a subject of hope that someone—perhaps he is already cooing in his cradle and smiling in response to the wondering faces that bend over him—will be inspired to embody in imperishable epic, the adventurous deeds of the Puritan and Pilgrim Fathers in the New World. He must be a child of the Muses. He must have insight to sound the deeper currents of human motive and action, the instinct for dramatic situations, a feeling for the concrete in choice and act, and for the individual man. When that epic appears some cantos of it will relate to the settlements of the Connecticut valley, and among these old Windsor, to the ancient church in which place this brief article relates. We are fortunate in having a memoir of Captain Roger Clapp, a young man of the company, written expressly for his own descendants, with glowing religious purpose, but in more than one particular illuminating upon the history and spirit of that early enterprise. Mr. Clapp’s own case is a fine exhibition of the process of selection and unification by which a party was made up of such as were fitted to undertake together the peculiar task of making a new community in the wilderness. One would readily guess that the relations of the individuals of such a company must be somewhat other than those secured by formal agreements and contracts on paper. They must be bound together by the finest of affinities, by mutual esteem, by the strength of commanding leadership. Add to this, of course, a rugged sense of the call and providence of God. Something of this sort would be essential to business success, not to say social happiness in the communal life of a new settlement; and if what Mr. Clapp says of himself is at all representative, such was actually the case. When a youth, evidently wishing to be self-supporting, he asked leave of his father to live “abroad,” and went to live on trial, three miles from Exeter (England). In his own language: “We went every Lord’s-Day into the City, where were many famous preachers of the Word of God. I then took such a liking unto the Revd. Mr. John Warham, that I did desire to live near him: So I removed (with my Father’s consent) into the city, and lived with one Mr. Mossiour, as famous a Family for Religion as ever I knew; ... I never so much as heard of New England until I heard of many godly Persons that were going there, and that Mr. Warham was to go also.”