He proceeds to argue that every one has an equal right to choose his religion, since each one must answer at God's judgment seat for his own choice and his life's acts. Consequently, there is no warrant for the making of religious laws and the laying of ecclesiastical taxes. With this premise, it followed that the Baptist exemption act of 1729 was defective and unjust, in that it demanded certificates; and from this time there began a steadily increasing opposition to the giving of these papers. Backus objected to the certificates upon several grounds, chief of which were:—
(1) Because the very nature of such a practice implies an acknowledgement that the civil power has right to set one religious sect up above another…. It is a tacit allowance that they have the right to make laws about such things which we believe in our own conscience they have not.
(2) The scheme we oppose tends to destroy the purity and life of religion.
(3) The custom which they want us to countenance is very hurtful to civil society…. What a temptation then does it not lay for men to contract guilt when temporal advantages are annexed to one persuasion and disadvantages laid upon another? i.e., in plain terms, how does it tend to lying hypocrisy and lying? [159]
In all his writings this man pleads the cause of religious liberty, and, whenever possible, he emphasizes the likeness of the struggle of the dissenters for freedom of conscience to that of the colonists for civil liberty, and argues the injustice of wresting thousands of dollars from the Baptists for the support of a religion to them distasteful, while they exert themselves to the utmost to win political freedom for all; "with what heart can we support the struggle?"
Two remarkable little books of some eighty or ninety pages that were issued from the Boston press in 1772 require a word of notice because of their hearty welcome. Two editions were called for within the year, and more than a thousand copies of the second were bespoken before it went to press. They had originally been put forth, the first in 1707, "The Churches Quarrel Espoused: or a Reply In Satyre to certain Proposals made, etc." (the Massachusetts "Proposals of 1705"), and the second in 1717, "A Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches, Drawn from Antiquity; Light of Nature; Holy Scripture; the Noble Nature; and from the Dignity Divine Providence has put upon it." In 1772 their author, the Rev. John Wise, a former pastor of the church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, had been dead for over forty years. In his day, he had regarded the "Proposals" as treasonable to the ancient polity of Congregationalism, and had attacked what he considered their assumptions, absurdities, and inherent tyranny. His books were forceful in their own day, serving the churches, persuading those of Massachusetts to hold to the more democratic system of the Cambridge Platform, and largely affecting the character of the later polity of the New England churches. The suffering colonist of 1772, smarting under English misrule, turned to the vigorous, clear, and convincing pages wherein John Wise set forth the natural rights of men, the quality of political obligation, the relative merits of government, whether monarchies, aristocracies, or democracies, and the well developed concept that civil government should be founded upon a belief in human equality. In his second attempt to defend the Cambridge Platform, Wise had advanced to the proposition that "Democracy is Christ's government in Church and State." [160]
Such expositions as these, and those in Isaac Backus's "The Exact Limits between Civil and Ecclesiastical Government," published in 1777, and in his "Government and Liberty described," of 1778, together with the discussion prevalent at the time, and with the logic of the Revolutionary events, opened the mind of the people to a clearer conception of liberty of conscience, though their practical application of the notion was deferred. For many years longer, persons had to be content with a toleration that was of itself a contradiction to religious liberty. Yet in May, 1777, such toleration was broadened by the "Act for exempting those Persons in this State, commonly styled Separates from Taxes for the Support of the established Ministry and building and repairing Meeting Houses," on condition that they should annually lodge with the clerk of the Established Society, wherein they lived, a certificate, vouching for their attendance upon and support of their own form of worship. Said certificate was to be signed by the minister, elder, or deacon of the church which "they ordinarily did attend." [161]
Israel Holly's "An Appeal to the Impartial, or the Censured Memorial made Public, that it may speak for itself. To which is added a few Brief Remarks upon a Late Act of the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut, entitled an 'Act for Exempting those Persons in this State Commonly styled Separates, from Taxes for the Support of the Established Ministry &c.'" gave in full an "Appeal" of eleven Separatist churches to the General Assembly in May, 1770. That body would not suffer the petition to be read through, stopping the reader in the midst, while some of its members went so far as to declare that "all, who had signed it, ought to be sent for to make answer to the Court for their action." But the majority of the legislature were not so intolerant, so that during the session the act above mentioned was passed. Holly, in his book, includes with the "Appeal" a severe criticism of the new law, and, in quoting the petition, he gives a full explanation of its text as well as the comments of the Assembly upon it and their objections to parts of it. When recounting the long struggle for toleration and in detail the persecutions of the Suffield Separatists, Holly dwells upon the fact that before the recent legislation of the Assembly, the spirit of fair dealing had in some communities influenced the members of the Establishment in their treatment of the Separatists. Holly also enlarges upon the inconsistency between demanding freedom in temporal affairs from Great Britain and refusing it in spiritual ones to fellow-citizens. The "Censured Memorial" closes [162] with an expressed determination on the part of the Separatists to appeal to tte Continental Congress if the state continue to refuse to do them justice. Holly, remarking upon the act of 1777, expresses great dissatisfaction with it as falling short of the liberty desired, and, particularly, with its retention of the certificate clause.
Such continued agitation of the rights of individuals and of churches eventually created a broader public opinion, one that, permeating the Establishment itself, tended to make its ministers resent any great exercise of authority on the part of those among them who clung to the strong Presbyterian construction of the Saybrook Articles. Communications upon the subject of religious liberty were to be found in many of the newspapers. Two governors of Connecticut wrote pamphlets that tended to weaken the hold of the Saybrook Platform over the people. Governor Wolcott in 1761 wrote against it, and in 1765 Governor Fitch (anonymously) explained away its authoritative interpretation. The term "Presbyterian" came to be applied more frequently to the conservative churches of the Establishment, and "Congregational" to those wherein the New Light ideas prevailed. Some years later, while the two terms were still used interchangeably, the term "Congregational" rose in favor, and, after the Revolution, included even the few Separatist churches. As for the latter, they had by 1770 concluded that with reference "to our Baptist brethren we are free to hold occasional communion with such as are regular churches and … make the Christian profession and acknowledge us to be baptized." [163] For some years these two religious parties attempted to unite in associations, but finding that they disagreed too much on the question of baptism, they mutually decided to give up the attempt, and separated with the greatest respect and good will toward each other. In 1783, the Presbyterians refused to meet the Separatists in the attempt to devise some plan of union between them, but did advance to the concession "to admit Separatists to Ordination with the greatest care." [164] The Presbyterians were beginning to realize that if the Saybrook Platform was to govern the churches of the Establishment, its old judicial interpretation must give way. An example of the revolt to be anticipated, if such interpretation were insisted upon, followed the attempt by the Consociation of Windham in 1780 to discipline Isaac Foster, a Presbyterian minister, for "sundry doctrines looked upon as dangerous and contrary to the gospel;" [ac] and a similar attempt to reprove Mr. Sage of West Simsbury drew forth such stirring retorts from Isaac Foster and from Dan Foster, minister of Windsor (who defended Mr. Sage), that church after church promptly renounced the Saybrook Platform. These churches agreed with Isaac Foster in his declaration of the absolute independence of each church and that—
no clergyman or number of clergymen or ecclesiastical council of whatever denomination have right to make religious creeds, canons or articles of faith and impose them upon any man or church on earth requiring subscription to them…. A church should be the sole judge of its pastor's teachings so long as he teaches nothing expressly contrary to the Bible. … The Consociation has no right to pretend that it is a divinely instituted assembly with the Saybrook Platform for its charter, imposing a tyranny more intolerable on the people than that from which they are trying to free themselves. [165]