A Book and an Act of Parliament, 1649

In 1649, a book and an act of parliament had a significant impact on the spread of the gospel in New England. Today, Stephen Nichols tells us about these two important contributions that occurred in the same year.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. It’s July, and I was thinking back to another July, the July of 1649. In that year, there was a book published and there was an act of Parliament. Let’s first talk about the book’s author. The book’s author was Edward Winslow. He was born in 1595 in Old England. He immigrated to New England, and then later in life he’d go back to Old England, and he died there in 1655. Now, he was not just any old immigrant, he was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact. That’s right, one of the original members of the Plymouth Colony, and he was also an historian. Alongside William Bradford, he, too, chronicled the pilgrims in his 1624 book titled Good News from New England, or as the longer title has it, A True Relation of Things very Remarkable at the Plantation of Plymouth in New England Showing the Wondrous Providence and Goodness of God in their Preservation and Continuance being Delivered from many Apparent Deaths and Dangers.

Well, in addition to being an historian, he was also an active explorer. He established posts throughout Maine and up and down the Connecticut River. He served as a default minister, and he served three one-year terms as the colony’s governor. In 1649, he published one of his other books. It was titled The Glorious Progress of the Gospel Among the Indians in New England, and that summer in July of 1649, that book led to the founding of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. There was also an act passed in Parliament, under Oliver Cromwell’s Parliament, on July 27th, 1649, that allowed for money to be raised in England for the work of evangelization in New England among the Native Americans. This society operated mostly in New England and also a bit in Virginia and New Hampshire. After the Revolutionary War and America’s independence, the society shifted its focus to Canada, primarily in New Brunswick and onto the other territories in the British Empire.

The society opened schools and planted churches, and in one case sponsored a Bible translation, and that is John Elliot’s Bible. I stopped by the Rare Book Room over at Reformation Bible College on my way to the studio to record this, and I grabbed off of our shelves, a book that has a single leaf from Elliot’s Bible. This Bible was published in 1663, and this leaf is Hosea chapter four and chapter five. Elliot’s Bible was published in the Algonquin language, and it was part of those efforts to spread the gospel among the Native Americans. The society was actually founded for the purpose of “the dissemination of Christian knowledge and the means of religious instruction among all those in their country who were destitute of this.” The early missionaries include John Elliot, Eleazor Wheelock, John Sergeant, Gideon Hawley, John Cotton. Even Jonathan Edwards was one of the missionaries for the society when he went out to Stockbridge and did the work there among the Mohicans and the Mohawks and the Stockbridge Native Americans.

And Edward’s son, Jonathan Edwards Jr. was also one of the society’s missionaries. In fact, when he was just a young teenager and living there at Stockbridge, he went with John Brainerd deep into the mountains of New York to take the gospel to Native Americans. Of course, John Brainerd was the brother of David Brainerd, and he was a missionary for 30 years with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Many of these missionaries lived among these Native American nations or tribes. They would learn the language. They formed alphabets and wrote grammar books and preached in the language of the Native Americans. In fact, Jonathan Edwards Jr. wrote a grammar of the Mohican language. Well, circling back to Edward Winslow and his book that started it all. In Plymouth by 1670, that’s 21 years after he published the book and after the founding of the society, there were 24 churches for the Native Americans in Plymouth Colony. Well, that’s a book and an act of Parliament from 1649. And I’m Steve Nichols, and thanks for joining us for 5 Minutes in Church History.