may be clearly understood by a generation that has been born into a very different order of things, it will be necessary to go back and study a third element in the situation, that had been introduced through the incorporation of Pittsfield as a town, which had occurred two years before, in 1761. In the act of incorporation it was explicitly provided that "no inhabitant or proprietor, excepting the original sixty settling-lot proprietors, or those holding under them, should be obliged to pay any part of the charges towards building a meeting-house, settling the first minister, or the other charges which the said original settling proprietors were obliged to perform, either according to the tenor of their grant, or by any agreement made among themselves."
Dr. Joseph P. Thompson says, in his "Church and State in the United States": "By the study of the New Testament the Separatists in England came to the discovery that the primitive Church was simply a company or society of believers in Christ, that it had no connection with the State, and no bishop or hierarchy, but was a brotherhood in which all were equals; that it consisted of those who were spiritually renewed though faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and who evinced that faith by godly lives"; and he continues: "As the Plymouth colonists were all of one faith, and were, in fact, members of one church, they naturally made provision for the support of religion from the public treasury, and as the colony extended they ordered that churches should be built and maintained in every town at public cost." They required, also, that a "freeman" or voter in town meeting should be of good personal character and "orthodox in the fundamentals of religion." They were still hampered by the notion that the State should provide for the maintenance of religion, and should punish blasphemy, profaneness, Sabbath breaking, and heresy as crimes. Says the Pittsfield historian: "It was the province of the church to select the minister; of the town, if it approved, to ratify the choice and fix the salary; and of the proprietors of the sixty lots to provide the 'settlement' or outfit of the pastor elect."
On the same day on which the church decided to call Mr. Allen, the town unanimously concurred in the choice, and "resolved to tender to Mr. Allen a salary of £60 per annum, to be increased £5 yearly, until it should reach £80," which was then to become his stated stipend. Church and town having thus done their duty, the proprietors, on the same day, voted him £90 in three annual installments of £30 each, "to enable him to settle himself among them." The addition of forty cords of wood was granted, and formed a regular item in town meeting for many years, till, finally, it was commuted for an allowance of money.
Mr. Allen was ordained on the 18th of April, 1764, and though the meeting-house was far from finished, thirty-one members were added to the church in the first year of his ministry. Now the people began to turn their thoughts to more comfortable arrangements for hearing, and in the month following the ordination, Col. Williams got the privilege of building a pew on lot sixteen, in the ground plan, for the use of himself and family, but on the condition that he should relinquish it to the town, if on the completion of the house it did not fall to