Your evidence is written and from an English source. The New England Puritans left a consistent testimony to their beliefs in the physical meetinghouses. Please explain to me why none of these meetinghouses dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were constructed without any means of artificial heating. Was this some sort of oversight or could it possibly have emanated from a theological view?
It has to do with the impracticality of heating a meetinghouse at the time. The Puritan churches weren't the only ones without built in heating in the 17th and 18th centuries. And Medieval churches also did not have any built in heat. This is because the technology to heat a large open space like a church or meetinghouse did not exist. There were a few churches or meetinghouses in early New England that had fireplaces and chimneys, but these were inefficient and rare. Fireplaces were poor sources of heat, and could only provide a minimal amount of warmth to small rooms at the most. Samuel Sewall recorded that his ink froze while sitting next to a fireplace in his house during the cold New England winters. People in the past were just used to being cold in winter. The only practical way to keep warm in church at the time, beside wearing lots of warm clothes, was to bring foot stoves with you which was a common practice. But it could also be dangerous, sometimes forgotten foot stoves left in church could cause fires, and so were sometimes forbidden. For those who traveled greater distances to church from the surrounding countryside there were sometimes "Sabbath day houses" built near the church which had small common rooms with a fireplace to nap, eat, and keep warm between services. When cast iron stoves were later invented, they did not become common in the British colonies until well into the 18th century. In the mid to late 18th century we find the first New England churches installing expensive cast iron stoves, about the same time they are starting to show up in houses. But stoves too had their problems, they were ungainly, the stove pipes leaked smoke and soot, and the heat they gave off was sometimes said to cause headaches and cause some women to faint. It was not until relatively recently that we've had reliable technology to comfortably heat our buildings and churches. So the reasons the Puritans didn't construct their meetinghouses with artificial heating has more to do with a lack of heating technology, than any theological reason.
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