New England and the Bavarian Illuminati

by Vernon Stauffer

A further provision of the act denied to Baptist ministers and their parishioners the right of furnishing the required certificates unless three other Baptist churches previously should have certified that the persons granting the certificates were regarded as members of that body.[58] To make the situation more galling, if that were possible, certificates so obtained had to be lodged annually with the town clerk before the time to pay the rates arrived.

From every point of view this legislation was objectionable to the Baptists. Their protest was instant and vigorous.[59] It was decided to send one of their number as agent to England, to carry their case before the government of the mother country.[60] A sharp remonstrance, so plain in its language that its signers came very near being taken into custody, was drawn up and presented to the General Court at Boston.[61] But great as was the sense of injustice under which the Baptists smarted, the operations of the act appear to have been most severe in the case of those who had drawn off from the orthodox churches on account of the disturbances created by the Great Awakening. The position of these Separatists[62] was peculiarly vulnerable. Baptist leaders found themselves embarrassed when called upon to certify to the Baptist affiliations of the Separatists; such a distasteful judgment of the motives and scruples of others was to be avoided wherever possible.[63] On the other hand, if the Separatists sought to set up churches and establish ministers of their own, they were confronted by the fact that a second Congregational church could not be formed in a parish without legislative permission, and the orthodox party usually showed itself capable of forestalling all such sanction on the part of the state. It was left, therefore, to the Separatists either for conscience’ sake to bear the double burden of taxation,[64] or to seek a permanent religious home in one of the recognized dissenting bodies.[65]

Five years later, when the exemption law of 1752 expired and with it the exemption laws that previously had been passed for the relief of the Quakers, a new law was enacted governing both sects.[66] Henceforth a Baptist who desired exemption must have his name upon a list to be presented annually to the assessor and signed by the minister and three principal members of the Baptist congregation to which the applicant belonged, with the accompanying certification that the applicant was recognized as a conscientious and faithful Baptist. Quakers were placed under the same regulations. For thirteen years this law was in operation, with manifold instances of distress resulting, particularly in the case of Baptists.[67] Through difficulty in obtaining the certificates, goods were seized, expensive and otherwise irritating court trials were held, and not a few victims, either because of poverty or on account of conscientious scruples, found their way to prison. In some instances, despite the fact that the certificates were duly obtained and presented, they were waved aside and the payment of the tax required or the process of distraint invoked.[68] It is little wonder that the feeling in the minds and hearts of New England Baptists that there was a spirit of iniquity back of the oppressive measures of the Standing Order, came to have all the significance of a settled conviction.[69]

Further modifications in the exemption laws, made in 1770, were so slight, leaving as they did the certificate principle practically untouched,[70] that Baptist opposition was aroused even more deeply and the determination struck deeper root to push the battle for religious freedom to a decision. The times also were propitious. The near approach of the Revolutionary struggle focused attention upon the subject of tyranny and caused acts of oppression, whether civil or ecclesiastical in character, to stand out in a new relief before the eye of the public. That dissenters were quick to see the bearing of political events will appear from the following pithy comments in the address which the Committee of Grievances[71] drew up late in 1774 and presented to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts:

It seems that the two main rights which all America are contending for at this time, are,—Not to be taxed where they are not represented, and—To have their causes tried by unbiased judges. And the Baptist churches in this province as heartily unite with their countrymen in this cause, as any denomination in the land; and are as ready to exert all their abilities to defend it. Yet only because they have thought it to be their duty to claim an equal title to these rights with their neighbors, they have repeatedly been accused of evil attempts against the general welfare of the colony; therefore, we have thought it expedient to lay a brief statement of the case before this assembly…. Great complaints have been made about a tax which the British parliament laid upon paper; but you require a paper tax of us annually. That which has made the greatest noise, is the tax of three pence a pound upon tea; but your law of last June laid a tax of the same sum every year upon the Baptists in each parish, as they would expect to defend themselves against a greater one…. All America is alarmed at the tea tax; though, if they please, they can avoid it by not buying tea; but we have no such liberty. We must either pay the little tax, or else your people appear even in this time of extremity determined to lay the great one upon us. But these lines are to let you know, that we are determined not to pay either of them; not only upon your principle of not being taxed where we are not represented, but also because we dare not render homage to any earthly power, which I and many of my brethren are fully convinced belongs only to God. We can not give the certificates you require, without implicitly allowing to men that authority which we believe in our conscience belongs only to God. Here, therefore, we claim charter rights, liberty of conscience.[72]

As the event proved, the Revolutionary period brought little legislative relief to dissenters in Massachusetts. Wherever the distractions of the war did not interrupt the ordinary course of ecclesiastical affairs, the state church continued to assert its time-honored prerogatives. The new constitution of the commonwealth which was adopted in 1780 gave conclusive proof that the Standing Order still had the situation well in hand. That instrument contained a bill of rights which reaffirmed the authority of the legislature to authorize and require the various towns and parishes “to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God”;[73] affirmed also that the legislature had authority to enjoin attendance upon public worship; that towns and parishes were to have the right to elect their ministers and make contracts with them for their support; and that moneys, in the form of rates paid by the people in the support of public worship, were to be applied according to the preference of the rate-payer, “provided, there be any [minister] on whose instructions he attends”; otherwise the minister selected by the town or parish was to receive the benefit of the tax.[74] There is no difficulty in discerning here the outlines of the old ideal of a state church. The day of deliverance for dissent was not yet.[75]

What did take place during the Revolutionary period to promote the cause of religious freedom and to hasten the day of its triumph was the publication of various pamphlets and treatises devoted to the cause of toleration or championing the closely allied cause of democracy in church and state.[76] Several of these[77] were from the pen of the indomitable Isaac Backus, whose unwearied advocacy of the rights of the individual conscience was exceeded by none. The likeness of the struggle which dissenters were making for freedom of conscience to that which the colonists were making for civil liberty was a favorite notion of this doughty penman; and such an argument presented when the imaginations of his countrymen were stirred by the political situation, could not fail of its appeal. Three years before the war broke out, in his Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Backus had drawn for the benefit of the public a sharp distinction between the spheres of ecclesiastical and civil governments. The former was armed only with light and truth, and was commissioned to “pull down the strongholds of iniquity,” to gather into Christ’s church those who were willing to be governed by His teachings, and to exclude those who would not be so governed; while the latter “is armed with the sword to guard the peace and to punish those who violate the same.”[78] In his Government and Liberty Described, and Ecclesiastical Tyranny Exposed, published in 1778, he attacked the notion of men “assuming a power to govern religion, instead of being governed by it,” and asserted that the essence of true religion is a voluntary obedience to God.[79] Here was strong meat for a people for whom the word freedom was rapidly coming to have an enlarged signification.

The most convincing exposition of the democratic tendencies of the age came from another quarter, and in a sense belonged to the past. Spurred by the fact that at the beginning of the century a resolute effort had been made, both in Massachusetts and Connecticut, to obtain more compact and rigid ecclesiastical control,[80] the Reverend John Wise, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1710 had issued a satirical tract entitled, The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused, and later, in 1717, a more serious production entitled, A Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches. In 1772 a new edition of these tracts, published by subscription, came from the Boston press.[81] The enduring quality of the task Wise had performed is shown by the fact that, while these two slight volumes had been conceived as a protest against the encroachments of ecclesiastical tyranny in the first two decades of the century, they now, a half-century later, served equally well to voice the deep passions and impulses of a people who for the moment were engrossed in the concerns of civil government.[82] Wise rejected the ideals of monarchy and aristocracy for the church, and took his stand upon the proposition that democracy alone stands the test of reason and revelation.[83] Of all systems, democracy alone cherishes the precious interests of man’s original liberty and equality. It alone serves effectually to restrain the disposition to prey and embezzle, and to keep the administration of government firmly fixed upon the main point, “the peculiar good and benefit of the whole.” “It is as plain as daylight, there are no species of government like a democracy to attain this end.”[84]

Such literary assaults upon the usurpations of government, upon the violation of individual rights, and upon obstructions erected in the path of democracy, were frontal. As has been said, they were also happily timed. The oppressed would have to content themselves a little longer with a type of toleration which seemed but the shadow of genuine freedom; but the broad dissemination of such principles as those proclaimed by Backus and Wise had had the effect of altering appreciably the spirit of the times.