[62] Separatists or Separates were the names by which those were commonly designated who withdrew from the orthodox churches on account of the controversies occasioned by the Great Awakening. See Blake, S. Leroy, The Separates or Strict Congregationalists of New England, Boston, 1902, pp. 17 et seq.
[63] Hovey, A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Rev. Isaac Backus, p. 171.
[64] Backus, History of New England, vol. ii, pp. 96 et seq. Backus himself suffered imprisonment under this act. See ibid., p. 109.
[65] Greene, The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut, pp. 235 et seq. The process of absorption referred to had much to do with the breaking up of the Separatist movement. Few of these congregations continued to exist until the struggle for religious freedom was fully won. Other contributory causes in the breaking up of the movement were the poverty of the members of these congregations, the difficulties they experienced in securing pastoral care, and the dissensions that arose among them in the exercise of their boasted rights of private judgment, public exhortation, and the interpretation of the Scriptures.
[66] Backus, History of New England, vol. ii, pp. 140 et seq.
[67] Backus, op. cit., p. 141.
[68] Ibid.
[69] Cf. Minutes of the Warren Association for 1769, quoted by Burrage, History of the Baptists in New England, pp. 108 et seq. Cf. the following, taken from a statement and appeal to Baptists, in the Boston Evening Post, Aug. 20, 1770: “To the Baptists in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who are, or have been, oppressed in any way on a religious account. It would be needless to tell you that you have long felt the effects of the laws by which the religion of the government in which you live is established. Your purses have felt the burden of ministerial rates; and when these would not satisfy your enemies, your property hath been taken from you and sold for less than half its value…. You will therefore readily hear and attend when you are desired to collect your cases of suffering, and have them well attested; such as, the taxes you have paid to build meeting-houses, to settle ministers and support them, with all the time, money and labor you have lost in waiting on courts, feeing lawyers, &c.; and bring or send such cases to the Baptist Association to be held at Bellingham; when measures will be resolutely adopted for obtaining redress from another quarter than that to which repeated application hath been made unsuccessfully. Nay, complaints, however just and grievous, hath been treated with indifference, and scarcely, if at all credited”. (Quoted by Backus, History of New England, vol. ii, p. 155.)
[70] Backus, History of New England, vol. ii, pp. 156 et seq.
[71] This standing committee of the Warren Association is itself a token of the strengthened purpose of the Baptists.