LOOKING BACK AT THE PURITANS' painful decision to abandon their home-
land for the uncertainty of a New World, Cambridge pastor Thomas Shepard and
Dedham pastor John Allin singled out church government as the primary consider-
ation for churchgoers and ministers alike. "Popish" practices in the Church of En-
gland had grown to such "an intolerable height," they recalled, that "the consciences
of God's saints and servants . . . could no longer bear them." The mere "hope" of
"enjoying Christ in his ordinances" persuaded thousands of dissenters to "forsake
dearest relations, parents, brethren, sisters, Christian friends and aquaintances, over-
look the dangers of the vast seas, the thought whereof was a terror to many," and
"go into a wilderness where we could forecast nothing but care and temptation."
Echoing the ministers' sentiments, the layman pe praised his "wonderous"
God for prevailing upon the first planters to "remove themselves, and their Wives
and Children, from their Native Country, and to leave their gallant Scituations there,
to come into this Wilderness, to set up the pure Worship of God here!" ¹

According to these founders, in short, the Puritans left their country not to pur-
sue their own system of economics, politics, or even theology. They ventured to
Massachusetts to establish and practice a "purified" system of church discipline, a
system stripped of all Catholic ceremonies and "humane inventions," and ordered
instead entirely according to the "perfect" model contained in the Bible.

While later historians have identified a host of other motives for migration, church
government would nonetheless be of transcendent importance in New England. As
historians from Perry Miller to Avihu Zakai have observed, the founders regarded
their New World venture as a sacred mission in the course of providential history,
and the establishment of Congregational churches represented the central means
toward the completion of their larger goal of world redemption. ² As John Cotton,
the "teacher" of the First Church of Boston later observed, the creation of a pure
system of worship represented a duty and a privilege that would stand as nothing
less than the crowning achievement and culmination of the Reformation:

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