One of the duties of the office of President of this Society, to which you did me the honor to elect me for the year that has just closed, is to give an annual address. Its theme is, fortunately for the speaker, almost of necessity prescribed by the purposes of the Society and the nature of the office to which your kindness has chosen me, and he deems it, therefore, no less his duty than his privilege to bring before you in rapid survey, and in brief and inadequate outline, indeed, the principal events of the year which has elapsed since the last meeting of this Society, in so far as they relate themselves to its purpose, viz., the cultivation of church history.

The present tendency toward centralization among Congregationalists and Baptists is one of the prominent phenomena of contemporary American Church History. It deserves recognition as a sign of the times; it is for historians to find its place in the continuity of historical development. The records of its latest phases are hardly yet in print; its beginnings are several centuries old.

I have been requested by our honored secretary to prepare a paper on "Recent Researches in Holland and the Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York." This request has been made, no doubt, because volumes five and six of these ecclesiastical records have just been issued, thus completing the work. These six volumes represent the results of the labor of many years. Permit first a brief preliminary statement of the origin of the enterprise.

Till within recent years, when a modern growth of church music, of responsive readings, and of other so-called “enrichments,” has affected their services, the non-liturgical churches of America have followed an essentially rigid form of public worship. That form still constitutes the underlying framework of their services, whatever modifications in its proportion and arrangement have been introduced. Strongly repudiating any liturgical forms throughout most of their American history, these churches have been tenacious as to the sequence and the general proportion of the elements of public worship. Their much-prized freedom has not been a freedom in practice in this regard. As constituted within the recollection of all here present, and as to be found widely in contemporary experience, the substantially unvarying service of the House of God began with a brief invocation, followed by the reading of the Bible, to which a hymn succeeded, to be followed by the “long prayer” of general supplication and thanksgiving. At its conclusion the sermon was preached. That ended, a brief prayer was offered, a second hymn was sung, and the congregation was dismissed with the benediction. Not infrequently the order of the prayer and hymn following the sermon was reversed; but the essential sequence and proportion of the service were seldom otherwise varied. Such rigidity and uniformity must have its historic reasons; and the purpose of this brief paper is to set forth the more important steps by which our typical form of public worship came to be what it is.