Provided always that nothing herein shall be intended or construed to hinder or prevent any society or church that is or shall be allowed by the laws of this government, who soberly differ or dissent from the united churches hereby established, from exercising worship and discipline in their own way, and according to their conscience. [64]
The purport of this proviso was to safeguard churches which had been approved according to the standards formerly set up by the Court, and also to prevent the Act of Establishment from seeming to contradict a "Toleration Act for sober dissenters" from the colony church that had been passed at the preceding May session. Out of this proviso grew a misunderstanding in the Norwich church, which happens also to furnish a typical illustration of the difficulties sometimes encountered in trying to collect a minister's salary.
When Mr. Woodward, pastor of the Norwich church, read the act establishing the Saybrook Platform, he omitted the proviso. The Norwich deputies, who had been present at the passage of the act, immediately informed the people of the provision which the Court had made for the continuance of those churches of which it had previously approved and which might be reluctant to adopt the stricter terms of the new system, at least until their value had been demonstrated. For this behavior, the deputies were censured by the pastor and by the majority of the church, who sided with him. Thereupon, the minority withdrew and for three months worshiped apart. Then the breach was healed, though seeds of discord remained. By 1714, six years later, they had germinated and had attained such development that it was very difficult to collect the minister's salary. In Norwich, as elsewhere, there had formerly been a custom of collecting the ministerial rates together with those of the county. This custom had arisen because of difficulty in collecting the former, and in 1708 [65] this practice was legalized, provided that in each case the minister made formal application to have his rates thus collected. In the year 1714 and the following year the General Court was obliged to issue a special order commanding the town of Norwich to fulfill its agreement with their minister and to pay his salary in full. The second year, the Court added the injunction that the money should be collected by the constables. But at the session following the order, the Norwich deputies informed the Court that, owing to differences existing among their townsmen, they had not seen fit to urge its commands upon their people. Upon learning that Mr. Woodward's family were actually suffering, the Court appointed a date, and ordered the Norwich constables to produce at the time set a receipt, signed by Mr. Woodward, and showing that his salary had been paid in full. If the receipt was not forthcoming at the appointed time, the secretary of the colony was empowered to issue, upon application, a warrant to distrain all or any unpaid portion of the minister's salary from the constables, and, also, any additional costs. This legislation seems to have had due effect, though feeling ran so high that, in the following year, it was decided to divide the church. When the two parishes were formed, Mr. Woodward retired, and the life of the divided church was continued under new ministers.
From the adoption of the Saybrook Platform, the Connecticut churches were for many years preeminently Presbyterian in character. The terms Congregational and Presbyterian were often used interchangeably. As late as 1799, the Hartford North Association, speaking of the Connecticut churches, declared them "to contain the essentials of the Church of Scotland or Presbyterian Church in America." The General Association in 1805 affirmed that "The Saybrook Platform is the constitution of the Presbyterian Church in Connecticut." Whether called by the one name or the other, Presbyterianized Congregationalism was the firmly established state religion, for under the Saybrook system the local independence of the churches was largely sacrificed. The system further exalted the eldership and the pastoral power. It replaced the sympathetic help and advisory assistance of neighboring churches by organized associations and by the authority of councils.
In the new system the ecclesiastical machinery which, at first, brought peace and order, soon developed into a barren autonomy and gave rise to rigid formalism in religion, with its consequent baneful results upon the spiritual and moral character of the people. The Established Church had attained the height of its security and power, with exclusive privileges conferred by the legislature. That body had turned over to the "government within a government" the whole control of the church and of the religious life of the colony, and had endowed it with ecclesiastical councils which rapidly developed into ecclesiastical courts.
"There was no formal coercive power; but the public provision for the minister's support, and the withdrawal of it from recalcitrant members formed a coercive power of no mean efficiency." [66]
FOOTNOTES:
[a] The charter for the college, together with an annual grant of three hundred dollars, was granted in 1701. None but ministers were to be trustees.
The Hartford North Association in 1799 gave "information to all whom it may concern that the Constitution of the Churches in the State of Connecticut, founded on the common usage and confession of faith, Heads of Agreement, Articles of discipline adopted at the earliest period of the settlement of the State, is not Congregational, but contains the essentials of the Church of Scotland, or Presbyterian Church in America, particularly, as it gives a decisive power to Ecclesiastical Councils and a Consociation consisting of Ministers and Messengers, or lay representatives, from the churches, is possessed of substantially the same authority as a Presbytery." The fifteen ministers at this meeting of the Hartford North Association declared that there were in the state not more than ten or twelve Congregational churches, and that the majority were not, and never had been, constituted according to the Cambridge Platform, though they might, "loosely and vaguely, though improperly," be "termed Congregational Churches."—See MS. Records. Also G. L. Walker, First Church in Hartford, p. 358.