officer, from the governor to the constables, but also every minister, is appointed as well as paid by the people, and faction and superstition are established. The clergy, lawyers, and merchants or traders, are the three efficient parties which guide the helm of the government. Of these, the most powerful is the clergy, and, when no combinations are formed against them, they may be said to rule the whole province; for they lead the women captive, and the women the men; but when the clergy differ with the lawyers and merchants, the popular tide turns. In like manner, when the clergy and lawyers contend with the merchants, it turns against these; and is the same when the clergy and merchants unite against the lawyers. This fluctuation of power gives a strange appearance to the body politic at large. In Hertford, perhaps, the clergy and merchants are agreed, and prevail; in Weathersfield, the clergy and lawyers; in Middletown, the lawyers and merchants; and so on, again and again, throughout the colony. Thus the General Assembly becomes an assembly of contending factions, whose different interests and pursuits it is generally found necessary mutually to consult in order to produce a sufficient coalition to proceed on the business of the State.—Vos ipsos pseudo-patres patriæ, veluti in speculo aspicite?—Sometimes, in quarrels between the merchants and lawyers of a particular parish, the minister is allowed to stand neuter; but, for the most part, he is obliged to declare on the one side or the other; he then, remembering from whence he gets his bread, espouses that which appears to be the strongest, whether it be right or wrong, and his declaration never fails to turn the adverse party.—En rabies
vulgi!—I must beg leave to refer my readers to their own reflections upon such a system of government as I have here sketched out.
The historians of New-England boast much of the happiness all parties there enjoy in not being subject, as in England, to sacramental test by way of qualification for preferment in the State; on which account, with peculiar propriety, it might be called a free country. The truth is, there never has been occasion for such a test-act. The Assemblies never appointed any, because the magistrates are annually chosen by the people, of whom the far greater part are church members; and this church-membership, in its consequences, destroys all liberty in a communicant, who is necessitated to swear to promote the interests of that church he is a member of, and is duly informed by the minister what that interest is. The minister is the eye of conscience to all freemen in his parish, and tells them that they will perjure themselves if they give their votes to an episcopalian, or any person who is not a member of the Church of the Sober Dissenters. Those freemen dare not go counter to the minister’s dictate, any more than a true Mussulman dare violate the sacred law of Mahomet. What need, then, is there of a civil test, when a religious test operates much more powerfully, and will ever keep Churchmen, Separatists, Quakers, Baptists, and other denominations from governmental employments in Connecticut, and confine them to the Old and New Lights; whilst the test act in England prevents no dissenter from holding any civil or military commission whatsoever? Upon this subject Mr. Neal has exerted himself in so signal a manner, that he ought
to be styled the Champion of New-England. He represents that there were two State factions in New-England: the one out of place he calls spies and malcontents, chiefly because they had no share in the government. He adds, p. 615: “I can assure the world that religion is no part of the quarrel; for there is no sacramental test for preferment in the State.”--Many people in New-England have not been able to assign a reason for Mr. Neal’s choosing to hide one truth by telling another, viz. that there was no statute in New-England to oblige a man to receive the sacrament among the Sober Dissenters as a qualification for civil office. This assertion is really true; and when Mr. Neal speaks a truth, he, above all men, ought to have credit for it. But Mr. Neal well knew it to be the truth, also, that no man could be chosen a corporal in the train-band unless he was a member of the Church of the Sober Dissenters, because then every voter was subject to a religious test of the Synod or Consociation. Mr. Neal, indeed, seems to think that a civil test is heresy itself, but that a religious test is liberty, is gospel, and renders “all parties of christians in New-England easy—a happy people.” The reason, however, of his muffling truth with truth, was, he wrote for the Old Lights and against the New Lights for hire; the New Lights being the minority, and out of place in the State. Those two sects differed about the coercive power of the civil magistrate. The Old Lights held that the civil magistrate was a creature framed on purpose to support ecclesiastical censure with the sword of severity; but the New Lights maintained that the magistrate had no power or right to concern himself with
Church excommunication, and that excommunication was all the punishment any one could undergo in this world, according to the rules of the Gospel. These were, and always have been, two great articles of faith in New-England; nevertheless, Mr. Neal says he can assure the world that “religion is no part of the quarrel.” I hope Mr. Neal did not mean to quibble, as the New-Englanders generally do, by Jesuitism, viz. that religion is peaceable and admits not of quarrels; and yet, if he did not, he meant not a full representation of the matter, for he well knew that the difference in respect to the intent and power of the magistrates was a religious point, and formed the partition wall between the Old and New Lights. The civilians and magistrates were too wise to countenance the New Lights, who promised little good to them; while the Old Lights gave them a power of punishing, even unto death, those whom they had anathematized, and who would not submit to their censures by penitence and confession. The Old Lights, in short, supported the practice of the inquisitors of Spain and Archbishop Laud—the ostensible occasion of their ancestors flying from England to the wilderness of America.
But Mr. Neal contented not himself with one mistake; he added, “that the people of New-England are a dutiful and loyal people.” They never merited this character, and they always had too much honesty and religion to claim it. From the first they have uniformly declared, in Church and State, that America is a new world, subject to the people residing in it, and that none but enemies of the country would appeal from their courts to the King in Council. They never have
prayed for any earthly king by name. They have always called themselves republicans, and enemies to kingly government, to temporal and spiritual lords. They hate the idea of a Parliament, consisting of King, Lords, and Commons; they declare that the three branches should be but one, the king having only a single vote with the other members. Upon this point they have always quarrelled with the governors. They never have admitted one law of England to be in force among them till passed by their assemblies. They have sent agents to fight against the kings of England. They deny the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, which extends over America by a royal patent. They hold Jesus to be the only King, whom if they love and obey they will not submit, because they have not submitted, to the laws of the King of Great Britain.
Mr. Neal, furthermore, professes his want of conception why the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts should send missionaries into New-England, when Oliver Cromwell had, in 1640, instituted a society to propagate christian knowledge there. Mr. Neal might have learnt the cause of this phenomenon from the charter granted to the first-mentioned society by King William III., who was a friend to civil and christian liberty, and who endeavoured to suppress the intolerable persecutions in his days prevailing in New-England. But, besides, Mr. Neal could not but know that there were many Churchmen in New-England desirous of the use of the liturgy and discipline of the English Church; and for what reason should they not have ministers of their own persuasion, as well as the sober and conscientious dissenters? I hope my
readers will not think me a partial advocate for the Church of England, which, perhaps, has lost the opportunity of civilizing, christianizing, and moderating the burning zeal of the dissenters of New-England, who were honest in their religion merely by the sinful omission of not sending a bishop to that country, who would have effected greater things among them than an army of 50,000 men. I avow myself to be liberal-minded towards all sects and parties; and, if I had power, I would convert all sorts of ministers into popes, cardinals, prelates, dominies, potent presbyters, and rich Quakers, that the world might be excused from hearing again of preaching, defamation, insurrections, and spiritual jurisdictions, which result more from pride, poverty, avarice, and ambition, than the love of peace and christianity.
It has been said by the deists, and other politicians, that ministers, by preaching, have done more hurt than good in the christian world. If the idea will hold in any part it will be in New-England, where each sect preaches, for Gospel, policy and defamation of its neighbour; whence the lower classes think that christianity consists in defending their own peculiar Church and modes, and subverting those of others, at any rate; while the higher ranks value religion and the Gospel as laws of a foreign country, and the merchants powwowers, subtle, cruel, and greedy of riches and dominion over all people. For this reason the savages have taken an aversion to the protestant religion, and they say they would rather follow Hobbomockow and the Roman priests than New-England christians, who persecute one another, and killed their ancestors with a pocky Gospel.