Progress or Regress: You Decide.

Here's an interesting quote from the late professor George P. Fisher from article he wrote on, "The Elements of Puritanism." In the introduction to his essay, Fisher describes the sadness an early New England Puritan would feel over the changes that took place in his worship within a hundred years of his own day.

"If a Connecticut or Massachusetts Puritan of the first age of New England were to revisit the places where he once dwelt, he would be not a little amazed, and—supposing him to retain his former opinions— not in the least gratified at the ecclesiastical changes which would first meet his eye. He would experience the same feeling of surprise and regret almost everywhere among the ancient abodes of Puritanism, in the Old World and the New.

"In the room of the plain meeting-house, whose architecture was conformed to no historic model, although possessed of a certain dignity and comeliness of its own, he would find his descendants, in most of the large and in not a few of the smaller towns, gathering within the walls of a Gothic structure, mediaeval in its forms and associations. Raising his eyes to the spire, he would be astonished at beholding a cross on its summit, restored to the place whence he had indignantly dislodged it. Entering, with a frown, within the arched door, he would find the interior illuminated with mingled colors, transmitted through stained glass, resembling that which his contemporaries broke out of the window of Canterbury Minster and St. Paul's, in the days of the Civil War. If it were Sabbath, and the hour of worship, he would not have time to soothe the feeling excited by this transformation of a Puritan conventicle before his ears would be offended with the sound of instrumental music, and he would descry the organ, which he had excluded from the sanctuary, reinstated in its old place of honor. According to the unpublished diary of the late President Stiles, of Yale College, the first organ ever introduced into a Nonconformist congregation in England or America was placed in a Congregationalist meeting-house in Providence, in 1770. It was a wonder and a scandal unto many. One had been used before at Princeton College, but not in the Sunday services; and the misgivings occasioned there by the use of it in college prayers had caused it, Dr. Stiles informs us, to be laid aside.

"A few years ago, I visited the old church at Zurich where Zwingle preached, the edifice from which, having the same opinion on the matter of church music as the Puritans, he had, notwithstanding his fondness for the musical art, and his skill in it, expelled the organ ; and there I found the organ again in its place, and was told by the sexton that it had been brought in only a fortnight before, after three centuries of exile, the way for its return having been paved by a previous use of a melodeon. The same retrogression in this particular takes place generally, though in some localities more tardily than in others. Hardly more than a score of years have passed since an organ was allowed in the First church in New Haven—the church founded by John Davenport.

"Returning to our Puritan visitor to the Congregational and Presbyterian churches of the present day, we observe that his grief and astonishment would only have begun on the discovery of the mutations which have been just described. His displeasure, if he were a Massachusetts Puritan of the early day, would be excited at hearing the Scriptures read by the minister without comment, a practice which in his time was regarded as reprehensible. And this displeasure would be aggravated on hearing the minister read, and the people or a choir sing, hymns by uninspired authors. He might, in some congregations, hear the Lord's Prayer repeated in concert, the responsive reading of the Psalms, and other liturgical exercises which he had been wont to regard with reprobation. If favored with an invitation to a wedding, he would experience a pang, if not retire in disgust, at seeing the ring placed on the bride's finger. The participation of a minister in the ceremony might itself be offensive to him, since marriage in the old Puritan colony was by the civil magistrate exclusively. So a religious service at a funeral, and especially at a grave, would strike him as a revival of a dangerous custom, a custom adapted to encourage superstition—which the Puritan community had, therefore, sternly discarded. If emotions of sorrow and condemnation would arise in his mind in view of these innovations, what would be his impressions on seeing his descendants engage in the celebration of Christmas, in the commemoration of Easter, and even in delivering and hearing Lenten lectures for their spiritual edification ?"