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Stower, Richard. A History of the First Parish Church of Scituate, Massachusetts: Its Life & Times, Scituate, MA: Converpage, nd
Page 51 - . . . The purpose of the Plymouth colony . . . was singular. It was an "experiment in Christian living." The Pilgrims came to New England to carry on their lives as the first Christians did. To be sure, the Pilgrims who came on the Mayflower and those who followed them to Plymouth sought a better life and economic [page 52] self-sufficiency. Still, no one can deny that the driving force for the emigration to the New World was "English Puritanism desiring to realize itself." They sought to restore the primitive, apostolic church "pure and unspotted by human accretions or inventions." . . .
The Pilgrims were following their theology that people by mutual consent "combine together" to form a governmental structure which gives its due to King James but nevertheless [page 53] exacts "laws . . . for the general good of the colony . . . " Thus, the Pilgrims expanded their view of their congregations toward a view of government.
Forty-one adult men of the original Plymouth settlers signed this understanding on November 11, 1620, and it provided a first step toward setting up a government that could claim legitimate authority over the conduct of Colony inhabitants. [William Bradford & Richard Warren were signers] . . .
Stower, Richard. A History of the First Parish Church of Scituate, Massachusetts: Its Life & Times, Scituate, MA: Converpage, nd
Page 1 - On January 18, 1634 a small group of people huddled together near the warm hearth in a simple house along the edge of Scituate Harbor and to the north of the cold brook, the Satuit, that gave the town its Wampanoag name. The house belonged to James Cudworth, a salter, and with him that evening were his wife, Mary, his friend, Timothy Hatherly, and several others who assembled there for a very serious purpose: to gather the first church in the town. Leading them in prayer was the Rev. John Lothrop, newly arrived from London, by way of Boston. Thus was assembled the First Church of Scituate, a settlement in the Plymouth Colony of the Pilgrims.
The Rev. Samuel Deane, in his History of Scituate, Massachusetts (1831) wrote, "Few subjects are more agreeable (at least to many minds) than that of contemplaing the characters of the men who first broke the soil which we now cultivate, and few things can more excite the imagination, than to muse upon the st where hey lighted their domestic fires, or to walk over the green turf that covers their remains."
Page 4 - In order to appreciate the early history of the Scituate church we must understand the historical context in which it came to be gathered, first led by the Rev. Henry Jacob in the Southwark borough of London in 1616 and later by his successor, the Rev. John Lothrop, in Scituate in 1634. This means we must start in sixteenth century England with the rise of the Puritan movement; then to the split between
